Factorio - a factory building game - now with Space Age expansion

[Ironmonk]

What is the limitation of railway 2.0 that makes you need mods?

1 station requesting/providing more than one item at the same time... in this case, we have requester stations with 3 items + 1 fluid and 4 items... I use Loaders at the input/output of the warehouses.

 

[Average Manatee]

I guess nests dying from this trigger the "defense" mode of the biters, making them spawn faster and attack your base? Very cool if so.

Yeah, though that probably wouldn't do much since they'd likely die only in small batches rather than all quickly like when your artillery wipes them out

Eh, not a huge fan of this, for the reasons you point out. I actually like how SE does it a lot where the early science packs are obsolete by the end, but the various "planetary sciences" start with super cheap costs (we're talking low 100s) but then scale up to 1000s. SE packs are more expensive though (and there's 4 tiers of them), so the numbers wouldn't perfectly translate.
I actually think a lot of the basic unlocks of planetary science are too expensive (5k for mech suit, really?) and that the real issue is that you barely need any after getting the basic unlocks (most of the infinite research isn't that good imo).

You can turn off the lower-tier pack scaling and only using scaling of total costs over time. So late game tech can be 10x without needing like 500 red science to unlock splitters. Personally I like the idea of needing a bit of expansion of the red and green science, though blue is something of a PITA...

I do kind of agree that some of the individual unlocks are overpriced and there should be more of them. I play on increased tech costs though and like to scale up to high production levels, and I buffer all of my science packs massively so when I finish a planet I come home to like 20,000 of each pack stockpiled.

If I play vanilla SA again, I will just move my research labs to gleba. Would actually give me an excuse to increase Nauvis throughput so I can make all the rockets necessary.

Keep in mind that the Biolabs can only exist on Nauvis. Probably because when fully modded up they pollute an assload and Nauvis is the only planet where pollution matters.

 

[Jaedar]

Yeah, though that probably wouldn't do much since they'd likely die only in small batches rather than all quickly like when your artillery wipes them out

Considering defensive mode triggers all nearby nests, you'd probably be getting "artillery waves" except a bit bigger and longer when pollution starts popping nests.

Keep in mind that the Biolabs can only exist on Nauvis. Probably because when fully modded up they pollute an assload and Nauvis is the only planet where pollution matters.

Oh, that's really lame. No way to mitigate research rot then :/

Probably because when fully modded up they pollute an assload and Nauvis is the only planet where pollution matters.

It's not like pollution matters that much when you have artillery, spidertrons and nukes.

 

[baturinsky]

I love Factorio, but it's science beakers mechanics seems weird and artificial. I guess if research can be/is (in mods) reworked to replace is with something else. Such as "make X of Y" like some researches already do.
Or "produce X of Y in minute".

 

[Jaedar]

I love Factorio, but it's science beakers mechanics seems weird and artificial. I guess if research can be/is (in mods) reworked to replace is with something else. Such as "make X of Y" like some researches already do.
Or "produce X of Y in minute".

I kinda like how SE does it (every day I turn into more of an SE shill...):
You conduct experiments that consume resources and produce data. You then crunch different types of data into research packs (which are the beaker equivalents). An example of an experiment: 1 iridium girder + 1 locomotive -> 10 impact data + 500 scrap metal + 0.5 iridium girder.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

Spoiler

Stopped rushing after 40h to take time in case I would never touch this again, feel rather lukewarm about the expansion tl:dr it plays more like a mod than I'd like which checks out since it was inspired by one, the charm of the original was how simple it is to get into and later builds never felt out of place, some builds here feel rather convoluted at times but I do understand the inevitability of an expansion and I don't know how else I'd make it either.

Images and shieet

Nauvis

I play with railworld settings so hand placed early stations with uneven throughput because it hurts to walk in the early game.

Clusterfuck of a mall

Bot factory

Not much to say except progression changes, electric furnaces and blue belts may not be worth it since vulcanus now exists and both are sort of heavy in an early 90 spm base.

Space

tried to get creative but you can't unload from cargo pods also there's really only 1 1/2 ways to build thrusters (triangle or upside triangle) rather convoluted system and limitations, I didn't have much fun building "ships" and it's my most liming factor throughout I didn't really have any space logistics, really should just build factory square and be on your way.

Vulvanus

Vulcanus is basically liquefied nauvis that's the entire setup more or less to finish the entire planet I built 4x that just to make green belts. Simple and fun planet.

Fulgora

I just solved it with bots but junk is junk and you can just feed it back in again and it won't jam can probably make a bus of junk but I didn't try, I still want to try and make quality setups here to get those mechanics down.

Gleba

Disgusting planet overall, I think it looks like shit and it's unplayable without mech armor, little ponds and cliffs everywhere, but by factorio standards it's fine the most debatable thing about it is the science end goal also being a perishable, now besides having to account for sewage in gleba you also have to do it in nauvis, the labs and even in your ships, yuck.
I think a 10k-20k research to end it would be better and you'd still have to take the eggs into account which is a much more interesting challenge.

I really like this build, it has several unnecessary stuff but I've seen it restart after backing up.

Aquilo and last ship

Nothing much to say, the heat is not enough to make it interesting bots can still do basic work I think it needs a space platform sending stuff down to give you a reason to build.

I made a real effort to try and make the "ships" interesting but there is little reason to besides hubris,again, big square and go is the way.

 

[Hellraiser]

Bros, I have made a very profound, undocumented anywhere in the game, feature discovery regarding base-wide freeze prevention on Aquilo burner inserters can't freeze, even without fuel.

 

[Average Manatee]

First good new planet mod that I've seen dropped: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/maraxsis

I like how it looks. Environment is underwater, with fluid manipulation being the focus. It's also sort of like an advanced gleba I guess, where you farm fish. Hydro plant is a +50% production structure that can build things like engines that weren't available for the foundry or EM plant before. You can salt your bioflux to make it last longer (refreshes it to 2H decay). Expand the limit of landing pads per planet. Nuclear artillery. New recipes for research that add fluids and multiply output (kind of the inverse of biolabs, this way you produce 2/4/6x as much science per cycle).

Overall pretty cool. I like how it continues the trend of adding conveniences and buffs that you'd like to use on other planets by encouraging you to go there and engage in its new mechanics.

 

[Ironmonk]

Yeah, saw that too... looks pretty interesting.

There is also a mod that add the planet in the background where you Platform/Ships are currently, kinda fall on that situation of "why did the devs didn't thought of this?"... its "Visible Planets in Space"

 

[Hellraiser]

I've managed to finish Space Age. My ship was overkill, I mean I placed 4 epic railguns and 8 rare ones on the front. I think just 4 uncommon ones would be enough even if I went to the shattered planet with that. I think using the rarer versions of gun, laser and missle turrets however is more or less mandatory for finishing the game, but maybe less so if the entire front isn't taken up by railguns like I did.

ship images

Bar some blockage issues issues it could just go on full steam ahead to the system edge at whatever the max speed was with 3 engines for this (seriously, how the fuck does the speed formula even work in this? It's not even magic vacuum drag logic, just some arbitrary curve). For promethium and the shattered planet I built in a clock circuit where pumps pumping propellant and oxydizer are off X% of the time to throttle down the speed, as it just gets overwhelmed eventually (although I think here the problem was I had to make the asteroid chunk processing more efficient and boost plate production, still made it to the 3rd shattered planet cheevo). Still promethium seems kind of pointless, the base game at least had the nuke, spidetron and the artillery upgrades locked behind post-game space science, here it's just a lab productivity increase. Where's the OP reward for the post-game challenge that would break the game if it was available any earlier? Also it is totally possible to avoid dealing with the b*ter egg headache, it seems like that together with rarity it is the new Kovarex, a production branch/chain that is fully optional and you can just ignore and not engage with it and still finish the game without much additional sweat.

I think I should have picked different resource setting at world creation, as I had to expand too little on Nauvis and Vulcanus, and deposits sizes were way too much due to the new production facilities flipping the balance. Too late did I realize I should have upgraded Nauvis production with the good tech from Fulgora and Vulcanus. Especially for chips which were always a bottleneck in the base version and the main drain of metals. Low-density structure as well.

All in all I liked that the expansion added more content to the endgame and forced me to use some things I never bother with in the base game. It certainly feel like a much more complete experience unlike the base game (although still Fulgora and Aquilo seem kind of rushed due to the lack of a "real challenge" being builder-mode puzzles), and it addressed some of the problems I had with the base game, like too little basic resource types, too few alternative recipes/sources, no way to delete unwanted items etc. Particularly regarding complex circuit setups which I only ever used for Kovarex (which by itself was entirely optional in the base game) and for burning off excess heavy/light oil into fuel cubes to prevent refinery blockage. Gleba, Fulgora and asteroids all force some use of circuits on you to make things more efficient. Nauvis doesn't really need more than belts to make the factory go brrr. Oh and the new features like automatically setting chest requests, filters or even recipes on assemblers with signals are very useful making circuit mechanics less likely to be overlooked.

I liked that I finally had a reason to use missile turrets, spidetrons, efficiency modules and some other stuff I never used. I never built any ofthose in the base game, but the spidetrons in particular is quite useful due to the remote steering and built-in radar. Make remote control and intervening if something breaks (or is in the process of being broken by b*ters or p*ntapods) much easier. Efficiency modules are apparently good on Gleba (reduce nutrient consumption I think), Aquilo and space platforms.

From a design point of view I think Gleba is the most complete and most fleshed out experience, feeling the most unique due to the whole different production chain, the spoiling mechanic, the farming mechanic and finally the pentapod menace.

Vulcanus could use some balance patch/redesign to force you to do much more worm hunting, it already throws mostly infinite free resources at you, no point in making it too easy to avoid expanding and there's no need to defend. It just feels too easy. Maybe limit sulfur field yields or something to force you to expand (maybe it was just my world gen settings).

Fulgora could really use enemies or some challenge for the later stage after you figure out how to setup production. Something like alien robots attacking your vault mining sites, which combined with the tight space of the islands and no landfill until aquilo would make for a good challenge in fitting in production and defences on a tight space.

Aquilo was a decent puzzle and I can give it a pass for not having enemies due to not being able to mine any "basic" metals on the surface already being hard enough as it is to manage with the heat and other challenges. Maybe it was just luck/the map gen seed and settings, but it would have been nice if I had to expand a lot more, I only depleted one fluoride field and Aquilo feels like the one planet where you barely make anything to export. Everywhere else I had to upscale the export, on Aquilo you only mass produce chips and the rest are expensive low volume items like Fusion reactors or Railguns, which in the end aren't consumables. Sure, there are also fusion fuel cells, but I think I would really need to do a megabase to need to mass produce and export those (and the production rate cheevos are too low to motivate me to even try to go for that).

 

[Ironmonk]

While I agree that Vulcanus is easy and Fulgora empty, can you imagine your alarm ringing from simultaneous attacks on all planets? Only Nauvis is already annoying...

There is a mod called "Fulgoran Enemies" that add flying drones and walkers enemies... I didn't try it because I think the game would become a bit overwhelming on that regard and from my understanding (I might be wrong), you can't set peaceful or no expansion separately for each planet.

 

[Average Manatee]

The best idea I have to make more than 2 planets with aggressive enemies would be to have some unique mechanic for each planet to semi-pacify the enemy. On Nauvis we can already mostly do this with efficiency modules and there's mods that add things like air scrubbers that output negative pollution. Gleba and other planets would need something similar but different enough to be interesting and which still left the enemies as able to be felt in some way.

I can imagine for Vulcanus the worms would slowly expand but you could set up a thumper to disturb the ground and attract worms to a specific kill zone of turrets.

 

[Jaedar]

On Nauvis we can already mostly do this with efficiency modules and there's mods that add things like air scrubbers that output negative pollution

Just place your walls outside the pollution cloud, then you only have to deal with biters trying to expand every 30 minutes (and I think you can block this by placing a wall or other object in every chunk?).

I think for fulgora the threat should not be enemies, but rather some environmental thing, like an oil tidal wave that shows up every x minutes requiring you to build/repair walls, or some superstorm that damages your lightning collectors if they can't discharge fast enough. Aquilo I think is fine as the planet mechanics are hostile enough. Vulcanus could have used some mechanic where the worms will try to expand their territories into that of that worms, so you have to have enough firepower to chase them away (if you kill them you will attract bigger worms from further away as there is more empty territory).

 

[Average Manatee]

Just place your walls outside the pollution cloud, then you only have to deal with biters trying to expand every 30 minutes (and I think you can block this by placing a wall or other object in every chunk?).

Well...

1. Your pollution cloud can get absolutely huge. Especially with modded biolabs, which have to be on Nauvis.
2. The expansion is every 4 minutes by default (it's a range of 4-30 mins but the rate is dictated by evolution so 30 mins is only the start of the game.
3. The "build things in every chunk" only lowers the priority if expansion happening. If/when the biters fill everything up though, there's only one place they can choose to go.

 

[Jaedar]

1. Your pollution cloud can get absolutely huge. Especially with modded biolabs, which have to be on Nauvis.

At this point you can supposedly farm trees, which reduce pollution? I haven't tried it, admittedly.

2. The expansion is every 4 minutes by default (it's a range of 4-30 mins but the rate is dictated by evolution so 30 mins is only the start of the game.
3. The "build things in every chunk" only lowers the priority if expansion happening. If/when the biters fill everything up though, there's only one place they can choose to go.

Did not know about this
Every 4 minutes is not so bad, the expansion waves are not very big. I had no walls with more than a few laser turrets in range and it held fine.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah it's not a problem, I'm not complaining about Nauvis. I'm just saying that if there's enemies on other planets there should be similar ways to not aggro a bunch of enemies. On Gleba unfortunately there's no way to avoid their form of "pollution". Well, I guess you could avoid most of it by entirely doing your iron/copper mining in orbit.

The final solution to Nauvis is always artillery. Then you don't even worry about expansion groups since they'll be expanding to areas outside the base that are quickly destroyed.

 

[Jaedar]

On Gleba unfortunately there's no way to avoid their form of "pollution". Well, I guess you could avoid most of it by entirely doing your iron/copper mining in orbit.

Yeah. I also found that gleban enemies don't expand a lot/at all, so it was pretty easy to clear out their nests preemptively. Especially if you're willing to pay the steep costs of shipping in ammo from another planet.

The final solution to Nauvis is always artillery. Then you don't even worry about expansion groups since they'll be expanding to areas outside the base that are quickly destroyed.

I never even built artillery in space age. Used a spiderbot instead. The extreme rapid fire of the missiles is pretty cool.

 

[Demo.Graph]

The final solution to Nauvis is always artillery.

Even if you don't have arty, gun+flamer wall stops anything. To make it last for an eternity*, add bots and supply trains.
I would've liked to see final solutions to be varied. E.g. it's okay to have always war on Nauvis, always peace on Vulcanus, some friendly hippy solution on Gleba, no-solution-because-lolrandom-weather on Fulgora and some automatable cyclical bullshit on Aquilo.
*That is, until your resources run out.

***

But I've thought about "the final solution" for a bit. And, gentlemen, I do have a rant to share.

I haven't really played recently, but there's something that bugs me after I've watched some discussions and videos.
The game feels unfinished and rushed even more than vanilla. Now, now, hear me out, I know that the thing is decade in development.

Vanilla always had some decline in content density closer to the endgame. What's there to do when you've launched the rocket?
Let's compare it to, say, Minecraft and DF. In both, when you've "won" the game, you still could've gone on adventure looking for rare biomes or turbo-rare drops or built cities.

Factorio has a nice, but still limited progression.
When you learn to build a megabase with direct miner-train insertions, you realize that there's a single optimal way to do it (I haven't built them, but I know how to). There's nothing left to do then. You can't build "cities" because there're not enough decoratives or interactives (because no NPCs and POIs).
If you try to have some building variety, you can build circuit area, intermediary areas, science areas, research center, mall/hub, mine, train depot. Maybe some specialized military areas. So 7-8 installation types. They're connected by trains, so their relative geometry is basically irrelevant. That's one of the reasons why all city block bases look the same.
So I feel that there's not enough sandboxing in the sandbox game, because there're no "painting" tools and clutter.
There's no possibility to build temples or random things like in Minecraft. Or spam NPCs and hunt for unique dragon's left middle toe like in DF.
You can't fool around.
And if you would, say, expand 5 thousand screens to the south, just for shits and giggles, you get an endless carpet of biter nests. Or emptyness, because there're no random interactables to look for.

The problem became much worse in expansion. In all the games I saw, bases on other planets look like functional miniaturized clones of Nauvis's base: you build it, it spams items, you get out never to return (well, maybe you come to do some troubleshooting, but its a chore). Planets feel small, not geometrically, but functionally, because there's nothing to do except farming that particular color of ore. The world isn't interactive.

The staticity of the world and its monotony is why the game feels unfinished. It's like it had frozen in perma beta and can't let it go.
Kinda sad, really.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah. I also found that gleban enemies don't expand a lot/at all, so it was pretty easy to clear out their nests preemptively. Especially if you're willing to pay the steep costs of shipping in ammo from another planet.

They definitely expand, I think exactly the same as on Nauvis. Though, their evolution only starts when you arrive and you probably pollute far less there (do spores even count as pollution?). So they'd have a much longer timer.

I never even built artillery in space age. Used a spiderbot instead. The extreme rapid fire of the missiles is pretty cool.

With the settings I run, needing larger bases delivering more science, artillery is kind of needed. But then I didn't rush Gleba.

Even if you don't have arty, gun+flamer wall stops anything. To make it last for an eternity*, add bots and supply trains.

True, but flamers are kind of annoying now since you need pumps constantly where previously you had a slow oil flow even at extreme distances and all flamers needed was a slow trickle.

I know, the answer is "just make a good universal blueprint and plop it everywhere". Its irritating to do so though, doing production blueprints is much more interesting.

I would've liked to see final solutions to be varied. E.g. it's okay to have always war on Nauvis, always peace on Vulcanus, some friendly hippy solution on Gleba, no-solution-because-lolrandom-weather on Fulgora and some automatable cyclical bullshit on Aquilo.
*That is, until your resources run out.

Hopefully a year from now we'll have a ton of mods adding new stuff. The planet system helps make for a modular game.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Factorio needs pvp

 

[Caim]

Factorio needs pvp

It already has: it is you against your autism.

And odds are stacked in favor of your autism.

 

[Average Manatee]

There is a pvp mode and there are mods to accommodate it. I don't see how it could ever really work though. The whole point of Factorio is that once an assembly line is finished and automated that you don't have to pay attention to it, but PvP means you have to constantly re-visit parts of your factory to fix problems.

The worst thing a player could do wouldn't even be to destroy your factory, just add/rotate a single belt somewhere to make your iron line clog up with copper.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

just add/rotate a single belt somewhere to make your iron line clog up with copper

You heartless sonofabitch.

 

[Demo.Graph]

Factorio needs pvp

It has one. Look for Biter Battles in lobby.
The aggro is indirect, but it's there (two teams, each team has a rocket silo in the center - lose it to die; you can sacrifice science bottles to send biter waves on enemy base / silo).
But the community there is often too edgy for Factorio, many underages who want to feel kewl.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Factorio needs pvp

It has one. Look for Biter Battles in lobby.
The aggro is indirect, but it's there (two teams, each team has a rocket silo in the center - lose it to die; you can sacrifice science bottles to send biter waves on enemy base / silo).
But the community there is often too edgy for Factorio, many underages who want to feel kewl.

I think that would be the ultimate way to do pvp, is to just make a line of automated attack vehicles or such, and have them auto retard target the enemy base.

Then it becomes a matter of who can pump out ammo and attack vehicles faster. As anyone who plays factorio knows, those resource nodes run out quickly, so it's also a matter of keeping your belts fed while establishing new resources to mine in a timely manner.