BRICKS HAVE BRICKED THE GAME

[Niteshade]

before bricks we had concrete. now the devs claim it was to hard to maintain concrete because you had to get lime stone going and then rock or slag. personalty i set up with slag. plentiful resource. once you got a system up and running you were good to look away, now lets take brick. needs dirt to make. nope dirt while plentiful needs constant attention. dirt mining after scraping the top off in a short matter of time ends up being stone mine. in short if your going to keep bricks in play make a new resource a proper one clay mines. or just drop it altogether. as brick making stands right now it is to attention demanding.

[Captain of Industry devs]

Thanks for the feedback. Bricks are mostly intended as an early game replacement of concrete. Once you unlock concrete, you are to free make Construction Parts only from concrete and forget about bricks.

Concrete had many issues that we explained in the news post[www.captain-of-industry.com]. Experienced players like you had no issues with making concrete from slag, but many less experienced players were completely stuck since they were making iron from scrap and there was no slag until all scrap was processed - but they could not process scrap because CP production was stuck on missing concrete.

I bet that you could get to concrete without ever manufacturing bricks or mining dirt. There are plenty of bricks in the radio tower to disassemble.

Also, slag was meant to be a waste product, especially in early game. It is intended that not all materials are immediately useful. Slag can be used to make ramps to other platforms or make straight coasts for future shipyards.

[Niteshade]

yeah i just wanted to try the new construction line. the model was really nice but as i stated already more work than useful. as for the slag funny thing i do use it for all you mentioned plus the concrete.

[Peter34]

I never found it difficult to make Concrete, but it was a rather elaborate process early in the game, a bit like the 3rd type of Magic Science Potions in earlier versions of Factorio, the blue ones.

After the easy reds and greens, the original blue potions were comparatively much more elaborate to set up production for, requiring 4 fairly advanced materials to make, so at some point (0.15?) Wube changed it to be a less complex process (requiring 3 somewhat less advanced materials to make), but adding additional potion colours.

It's the same here. The complexity increase curve has become less steep.

[mgg1959]

TRue, brick must have another way that don't need to mine, also not all terrain have dirt, too complicated and very slow.

[Darkaiser]

TBH, as has already been stated, there are lots of bricks in the ruins to use. I set up one Brick works with a water catch (it uses so little water that rain is enough) and a Storage that holds the dirt. Once I unlocked Concrete, I set the Brick recipe as a secondary as a backup. The storage makes a convenient place to toss random dirt from excavations so I don't have to dig a big hole.

[Zero0n3]

would be nice if bricks will lead to 'brick roads' then maybe on the oil side you make 'asphalt' which can be put on top of brick roads.

Side benefit is it keeps this loop away from 'concrete' and the concept of concrete roads, though you could maybe do brick road -> concrete road -> asphalt road as an upgrade path. then maybe make asphalt roads have an 'oil maintenance' to simulate repaving.

Roads then reduce maintenance needed on vehicles. Asphalt roads reduce it the most, at the downside of using oil or some byproduct to maintain asphalt roads based on squares of asphalt
(make the asphalt maintenance exponential when a square (so 100x100 is super high, but 10x1000 is much much lower - to penalize someone trying to make an entire island of asphalt

[abattledonkey]

I started a new play through on Skull island and found the bricks to be very helpful myself. Are they necessary? obviously no, but IMO they are a nice addition to help early game progress w/o concrete bricks. Very slow in the production though.

I only mention skull island because there is a big ol pile of dirt in the starting area that can be scooped up really easy.

[mgg1959]

Originally posted by abattledonkey:

I started a new play through on Skull island and found the bricks to be very helpful myself. Are they necessary? obviously no, but IMO they are a nice addition to help early game progress w/o concrete bricks. Very slow in the production though.

I only mention skull island because there is a big ol pile of dirt in the starting area that can be scooped up really easy.

Thanks, but but that big pile of dirt is not available in other islands, just mining and find the correct place, now is more complicated

[Puls]

I'm very happy to have a use for dirt. And i like alternative reciepes, more from that !

[Stryderunknown]

I guess it would be possible to have Cosmetic additions in the future that use brick in their material list such as Brick bridges, chimneys and even outhouses.

[|tb|Brutal]

The path to concrete wasn't really that tough to deal with. How to get enough dirt to make bricks is driving me crazy.

[Peter34]

I'm not happy about the Dirt thing either, now that I've tried 4.13. Fairly little of it is generated when mining Iron Ore or Coal, and I feel like I probably have to set up 4x180 or 5x180 units of Dirt storage before it's safe to allow Dirt to be dumped.

At the same time, I can trade for Concrete with the 1st Village, but I can't use that Concrete in the recipes, until I've unlocked some fairly advanced research.

It's not a comfortable dynamic.

On top of that, the Tutorial only tells me to make one Brickworks, but that's only sufficient to feed 1 tier-1 Assembly Building making Construction Parts. Less Dirt would probably have been dumped if I had made 2 or even 3 Brickworks right away.

[Redpossum]

Originally posted by Gunslinger:

would be nice if bricks will lead to 'brick roads' then maybe on the oil side you make 'asphalt' which can be put on top of brick roads.

I could only accept that if they were yellow brick roads...

[steholliday]

Originally posted by abattledonkey:

I started a new play through on Skull island and found the bricks to be very helpful myself. Are they necessary? obviously no, but IMO they are a nice addition to help early game progress w/o concrete bricks. Very slow in the production though.

I only mention skull island because there is a big ol pile of dirt in the starting area that can be scooped up really easy.

Ah! so it is all dirt is it?
I didn't want to make an Excavator for that pile, to find out most of the mound was rock!

But yes, for experienced players, I found that Bricks did stifle my early game a bit, but also running/following the new Tutorial gameplay too. I can see that this new update would help introduce inexperienced players to an easier start, though only if dirt/mound piles were added to the Resource Map Overlay.
Trading wood for bricks was the easier way to keep up production, though I didn't recall that bit being part of a Tutorial Mission....maybe I missed it!

[sortulf]

In the previous version I would never start making concrete until I had efficient concrete - as limestone was always one of the more limited resources. That pretty much matches the new placement of concrete production. The brickworks, while rather expensive (uses a lot of dirt), does allow for alternate means of production lines, which I think is a good thing.