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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1483 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 3, 2025

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My honest review of the Factorio expansion, after getting through (ish) all four planets: I don't like it, and I think it doesn't really feel like Factorio except for Vulcanus.

The good stuff is that elevated rails and Vulcanus really are fun. And some of the stuff the other planets get you is fun (notably mech armor and the electromagnetic plant). Vulcanus in particular they just knocked it out of the park. Interesting new enemies, liquid metal processing is fun as hell, you have multiple (strong) ways to generate power, even the music slaps.

Unfortunately the bad stuff is... every other planet. And also quality (more on that later). Fulgora is really a pain with how cramped your builds are. Even on bigger islands there's not much room, and the need to use accumulators for lightning really cuts that space down further. Gleba combines one of the least fun things in the game (dealing with belts jamming up), and a new un-fun thing (spoiling timers) Bots at least make Gleba manageable, but trying to do a belt base is hell. Then it caps off with the extra kick in the dick that Gleba science both spoils and gives you less science per pack thanks to the timer ticking down as you transport it back to Nauvis. And it doesn't even give you a cool new building which is useful back on the main base like Fulgora or Vulcanus did. On top of all that, the enemies just aren't very interesting. They basically act like biters, except they can cross walls so you need more firepower. The spore mechanic is just pollution under a different name, so there's really nothing interesting going on there. Aquilo makes logistics much harder thanks to needing heat, and it makes bots impossible to use effectively. Not only that but you have to make shit tons of ice foundation (and import concrete) just to be able to have a half decent production setup, both of which are slow. I finally gave up on the expansion when I realized that I would need several thousand concrete+ice (above and beyond what I already did) just to make 60 SPM. Not to mention getting to the more outlying ice islands once my starter supply of lithium brine ran out. I already have spent 270 hours on this save, and I can't really see myself putting in more time to do all that, research the tech needed to get to the solar system edge, and building a ship to do it.

Quality is one of those things which seemed like it would be fun, but wound up not being fun. Just unlocking it makes the interface harder to use (I had to break my deeply ingrained habit of set recipe->hit esc when setting up new buildings), and it's such a pain in the ass the way it's all or nothing. You have to have belts carry only one quality of item or your machines will jam up constantly. Would've been much better if quality ingredients gave an increased chance at a quality result (with full quality being guaranteed as it is now).

Overall, it feels like Kovarex really loves compact belt spaghetti bases and tried to make the expansion push you in that direction as hard as possible. Aquilo is by far the worst with the bot energy usage penalty (probably unsurprising since Kovarex said in the past he regrets adding bots to the game), but three of the five new environments (Aquilo, Fulgora and space platforms) are extremely space constrained. And I just... don't like that. I like doing big, sprawling builds where I make pollution that blots out the sun and I laugh as the biters break on my defenses like waves on rock. Vulcanus is really the only planet of the four that still feels like Factorio (minus the biters part), and it's a shame.

Obviously many people do enjoy Space Age. But ultimately I realized... I just wasn't having fun any more, and haven't been for a long time. I thought about continuing just to finish the game (I am closing in on the end), but ultimately decided to not give into the sunk cost fallacy on this one. I wish that we had gotten more content like Vulcanus (which is honestly incredible, 10/10) and less of the wild divergence from the base game. But c'est la vie.

I've seen this sentiment from quite a few people and I don't really get it. Maybe Space Age isn't pushing people in the right directions or communicating clearly enough. I'm going to rebut you because I'm a fanboy with nothing better to do, but I don't mean to question your conclusion for what's best for you or call you dumb or anything. If the game isn't making you do things you enjoy then don't play it.

A lot of people say the new planets are super space constrained and you can't build big but that just... isn't true? Space platforms and ice platform are both pretty trivially cheap (especially once you are a Vulcanus enjoyer). Fulgora has infinite islands to claim whose only cost is the rail to reach them and lightning rods which are also pretty trivially cheap. Fulgora limits the max size of any one build, but most big islands are larger than the big city blocks people like to build anyway. It is true these things aren't literally free, but biters and demolishers and cliffs and lakes and lava put a cost on land that is pretty comparable. Only Fulgora constrains the shape of your factory and if you don't like it there you only need to extract holmium ore and make science.

I don't understand why people think bots are good on Gleba (or that belts are bad/hard). The fastest spoil timers are still several minutes, which means you can belt them several thousand tiles on express belts before they spoil. The only output that cares about spoilage percentage is the science which crafts twice as fast as the other new sciences for 1/4 of the "mining" area so it just doesn't matter if it is showing up at the labs at 40% freshness, just ship 2.5x as much. The real unique valuable building from Gleba is the stack inserter, which can quadruple the throughput of all of your belts which is much more game changing than the EM plant. I wasn't a huge fan of the pentapods, they're fine, but to say they didn't change things is probably a result of hyper overinvestment in military.

My first Aquilo science setup targeted 60spm and took just over 500 concrete (1/3 of a rocket load of stone brick processed through a foundry) for the main processing core and rocket silo which both sat on the starter island (so didn't need platform) and about 600 platform to train in my closest fluorine. This was all common quality machines and modules as I hadn't set up any meaningful quality processing yet. Where is all the concrete going? Also why aren't you just making more?

(The quality interface change really bugged me, the move from dropdown to radio buttons helped a lot but muscle memory is a hell of a drug. Also the mixed quality for chance of better output sounds sweet, but is a lot more complicated than people make it sound. What weight do different ingredients/qualities get? There are several different recipes with drastically different efficiencies for making the various materials so using summed ore count is awkward and overweighs processed materials because of productivity. Should I be able to consistently make good circuits from legendary copper and common iron? What I think it really needed was some sort of downgrade machine that didn't feel terribly inefficient to use so you could have your mines output a stream of common and uncommon ore which could go to their own smelting stack without dealing w

I also felt that the expansion railroaded players very hard towards the specific play styles the developers like, while the original game let the player choose between multiple viable options. For example:

  • Dealing with enemies: Pre-expansion game, there were multiple viable approaches - a belt of ammo going to a bunch of turrets, a couple layers of laser turrets, a pipe to flamethrowers, or some mix thereof were all viable strategies with advantages and disadvantages. In the expansion on Gleba, though, the 80% laser / 50% physical resistance on the stompers makes the "laser turret / gun turret perimeter" approach a lot less viable. This is clearly intended to push players towards using rocket turrets in the places they're needed, but it feels like they encouraged rocket turrets by making the other options worse rather than making rocket turrets better
  • Similarly with the asteroid resistances, seems designed to force the player to route three types of ammo, and to force them to redesign their interplanetary ship multiple times (not just "provide new tools to make a better ship" but "block progress entirely until players explore the mechanics of the new ammo type")
  • Gating cliff explosives behind Vulcanus likewise seems like an attempt to make city-block-from-the-start or main-bus-from-the-start approaches non-viable. Likewise Fulgora seems to be encouraging spaghetti by ruling out other approaches, rather than by making spaghetti approaches better, and likewise on Aquilo with the 5x energy drain for bots.

That said I did enjoy the expansion, even Gleba. There were lots of interesting mechanics, and those mechanics were pretty well designed (except maybe quality, but that one is optional anyway). But it did quite often feel that the developers were gating progress behind using the new expansion game mechanics, rather than making the mechanics available and rewarding the player for exploring them.

Dealing with enemies: Pre-expansion game, there were multiple viable approaches - a belt of ammo going to a bunch of turrets, a couple layers of laser turrets, a pipe to flamethrowers, or some mix thereof were all viable strategies with advantages and disadvantages. In the expansion on Gleba, though, the 80% laser / 50% physical resistance on the stompers makes the "laser turret / gun turret perimeter" approach a lot less viable. This is clearly intended to push players towards using rocket turrets in the places they're needed, but it feels like they encouraged rocket turrets by making the other options worse rather than making rocket turrets better

I think you being a bit too critical of Wube's design here. The basic gun/laser turrets will handle the initial enemies easily enough. Rockets, tesla turrets, flamethrowers, or some mix thereof (railguns too, but those are overkill...) are all viable to handle Gleba's enemies once evolution starts kicking in. Rockets can be researched and sourced entirely locally. Tesla turrets require the player to go to Fulgora, but trivialize Gleba's enemies. Flamethrowers are held back by the lack of oil production on Gleba, but Vulcanus's coal liquefaction combined with Gleba's coal synthesis make it viable. Or you can just ship the fuel in from another planet since flamethrowers are so frugal and enemy attacks so sporadic. And if you really want to keep using the basic laser/gun turrets, the infinite damage research for both keeps it viable though expensive. You can get sufficiently far into them to handle Gleba's enemies without ever leaving Nauvis since they don't require any other planet's science.

On top of that, Gleba's design encourages a different defensive strategy. On Nauvis, nearly everything produces pollution that aggros the biters, which expand aggressively and attack in large waves. This encourages players to build a defensive wall around the entire factory for the constant biter attacks to break against. In contrast, only harvesting produces pollen on Gleba, so most of your factory doesn't need to worry about attacks if you ensure enemies don't need to path through it to get to your farms. Your defenses can thus be focused around your farms with almost no defense needed for the rest of the factory beyond some artillery turrets to keep expansions from popping up too close.

Wube's design is thus pushing people to try something different, with multiple options unlocked or enhanced by visiting the other planets. You can still use the same defensive strategies you used on Nauvis, but there are better ones and the design rewards you for trying something new.

Oh yeah, the asteroid resistances are particularly egregious. I think the whole space platform thing could've used some more time to bake. The full cargo rockets of one thing only for automation, the lack of ability to communicate, the only one landing pad for some reason, the lack of ability to transfer items between platforms. I enjoyed Space Explorations interplanetary logistics quite a bit more.

I think you might be just wrong about the railroading on the Gleba enemies. Red ammo in gun turrets at the edge of infinite research need 25 turret x seconds to kill a big stomper. Rocket turrets need 12 turret x seconds and have over twice the footprint. Strafers and wrigglers don't have notable physical resist. Lasers have 16 turret x seconds to kill strafers which is totally respectable. Against stompers they are pretty useless but behemoth biters do the same thing to gun turrets without uranium ammo.

Oh yeah, the asteroid resistances are particularly egregious.

But make for awesome music videos.

Red ammo in gun turrets at the edge of infinite research need 25 turretseconds to kill a big stomper.

Yeah maybe that's viable. I admit I just slapped down a 1.4GW reactor and a perimeter of tesla turrets because I didn't want to deal with iron or copper production on Gleba.

I definitely appreciate your thoughts and maybe it comes of different approaches to the game. One of the neat things about Factorio is you will see two people approach the same task in vastly different ways, just based on what they intuitively came up with. So, let me elaborate my thoughts on some of your points.

I definitely don't agree that space platform is basically free; it sucks up steel like blue circuits suck up copper. Not necessarily in terms of the literal amounts, but in terms of how you go from "I have enough for everything" to "holy shit I have nowhere near enough" as soon as you start producing them. And of course it will take a shit ton of resources to get all that space platform up to orbit. Ice platforms are basically free, but both they (and space platform) are S L O W to produce even with speed modules in the machines. And given that I needed thousands of both, that's a big bottleneck. I estimated that it would take me anywhere from 20h to 40h to finish, and I expected (based on how Aquilo had gone thus far) that up to half of that would be waiting for ice platform to get made (and for concrete to arrive from Nauvis).

I also am not a city block guy (I'm a main bus guy), but I have seen some city block designs in my day and I would not say I saw even one Fulgora island which could fit one. Maybe the islands are theoretically that big if you add up all the square footage, but the thing is that Factorio builds tend to be very rectangular and islands on Fulgora just aren't. You can't exactly put a square shaped city block on an island that is L shaped, after all. Add to that the fact that you're going to need a lot of accumulators for your power needs (I literally half filled one of my biggest islands with them and it still wasn't enough to last between storms) and the islands get cramped fast.

The issue with belts on Gleba isn't how far you can carry things before spoiling (green belts kick bots' asses in that regard anyway), it's the logistics of distribution at the factory. Take for example bioflux. You need three things (jelly, mash and nutrients) at different rates. So you side load a belt with jelly and mash, have a second belt for nutrients, and run them down the side of the row of machines, with filtered splitters switching which belt carries what as you go. The basic setup you might have for coal based smelting. Except sooner or later (it's sooner), spoilage will be on one of the belts. And now your splitters all jam. And then on the output side, you are going to have the splitter which siphons spoilage off the belt jam up sooner or later (again, it's gonna be sooner) and cause the output to jam. Both of these things cause cascading spoilage all the way down the belt until finally everything spoils, it all starts to go through the spoilage filters, and things flow again (for a while). Belts are just plain really hard on Gleba. By contrast, bots never jam. If something spoils in a requester chest, they take it away. If something spoils in the machine, it gets put into an active provider chest and they take it away. Everything flows smoothly at all times, unlike with belts.

Fair enough on stack inserters. I didn't ever make them because I never needed more throughout than a green belt provides, but you're right that they are very powerful. Also I suppose the biolabs (or whatever the research building is called, I can't remember which is the production building and which is the research one) are arguably a Gleba building. And they are very good as well.

As far as enemies go, I don't think I could have any less military and live. Medium stompers (let alone big which I haven't seen) are no joke, and they generally make up half of any attack group (13% spawn chance is a lie as far as I can tell). That takes a fair amount of combined arms fire from Tesla turrets and rocket turrets (with lasers to do damage to the squishier enemies). Even with that my turrets take decent damage from every attack. But really the issue to me is that they just don't feel very different from biters. Spores are just pollution with a different color, so they feel very much like the enemies you're already used to.

I genuinely have no idea how you can do Aquilo with that little space. Like I said it took me literally thousands of tiles to give me space for:

  • Cargo landing pad
  • 200 MW of steam power via heating towers
  • The solid fuel production chain for the same
  • The oil field I started with
  • Production of perhaps 100/m ice platforms, which is both a fair few machines for a cramped planet (like 25?) and also very slow when you are consuming thousands at a crack

As I evaluated how much space I needed to produce 60 SPM, I figured I needed at least another chunk that size, not to mention the bridges out to fluorine and lithium brine patches. And not to mention rocket silos either! All of which needed to have concrete so it could support heat pipes, but that at least was being produced on Nauvis and I just needed to wait for the ship to bring batches of it (which is a slow trip). Actually building the base on Aquilo isn't that hard once you get the hang of how to leave space for heating pipes to touch everything, but getting the area to build on is torturous. You're just sitting around waiting for resources to build up so that you can actually play the game. If I had kept going I probably would've let the game run overnight just so I didn't have to wait that long for the platform+concrete I needed.

As far as quality goes I agree that it would need some thought put into it. But on the other hand, that's kinda not my problem as a player. They're the game devs, it's on them to figure out how to make it fun and not me. All I know is that quality in its current iteration is kind of a pain to deal with for the reasons I stated. Maybe my suggestion would work and maybe not, but they needed to do something different.

Album that I reference below: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fOO5Lneer9W4UiT9pn9bKf2dvob_rKjN?usp=sharing

(1) On Vulcanus, a space platform foundation literally costs about 1 calcite without any modules.

20 steel + 20 wire = 400 molten iron + 17 molten copper = 1.1 calcite

The build in the album could make my whole post game fleet of 2 freighters and high speed delivery ship, a personal cruiser and 2 legendary asteroid farms every 6 hours. If you want more than that it is tileable up to 8 times with no changes, a minor belt tweak would let you go to 16.

The rocket costs are about .2 calcite and 15 coal per platform delivered to orbit with no productivity on anything. It is a fair bit of processing sure, but not that much. To keep up with the platform build you need 1 lds foundry, 2 em plant for each circuit type and 5 rocket fuel assemblers. Without modules. Or beacons.

(2) The ice platform build generates 0.5 platform per second and takes a bit less than 180 platforms to make, so it takes about 9 minutes to self replicate. After an hour of that you'll already be getting 64 platforms per second and probably have trouble building the platform factory fast enough.

(3) I generated a Fulgora and dropped some 100x100 squares of belts. I think that is what Nailus (a popular factorio streamer) uses but I could be wrong. My train network is 64x64 tiles because I think 100 is way too large. Big square patches aren't incredibly common, but they definitely aren't rare. Fulgora does really force you to use a lot of bots or trains though.

(4) Next is a demo of a Gleba main bus style base. Produces 180spm at 98% freshness and can trivially scale until your mash fills a green belt with stack inserters (about 3600 spm). Obviously needs some more production sections for rocket parts if you don't want to import them. No circuits needed just inserter filters.

I think more could've been done to distinguish them from biters, but there is a a lot of little differences that again aren't very well communicated. Only farms produce spores, and the pentapods give no fucks about anything else you place, so your base can largely co-mingle with them while you heavily defend your farms. Also traditional pollution is free so power and production can be dirty; bring out those steel furnaces and oil refineries. Their expansion parties are always wrigglers and will only move to wetlands so you can wall with very light defenses or landfill them away from your agri towers (a lot of wetlands are entirely surrounded by highlands which don't even need that much landfill to give you free fruit forever with no defenses). Stompers will get lost if they have to travel far enough to reach artillery (strafers too but that is very late game), so artillery outposts need suprisingly little defenses once established. The enemy types are much more varied than the biters/spitters which makes the new turret prioritization much more impactful.

(5) Re Aquilo: I dunno. I guess direct insertion and beacons? I used fission which is probably about the same size as heating towers per watt, but only made like 40MW. If you have a place for things to buffer you can also babysit your other 4 bases or do some victory ship design while you wait for platforms to accumulate.

Re Quality I was more trying to communicate that I think such a system would necessarily be too complex to teach the player in a satisfying way. I agree it is kinda jank, but it also leads to some interesting decisions/math about where in the production chain to upgrade quality, which recipes to use, where to trash materials to simplify logistics and how many machines need to be processing each quality tier. I guess it is a particularly bad fit for main bus style bases because of the explosion of distinct items. Might be why you are feeling it particularly acutely.

Thanks for the pics, I think that they have clarified a couple of things that helped me realize where the difference in our experience is coming from.

  1. I didn't realize you could just have inserters grab off the end of a belt to put into a heating tower like your build is. I figured you would need to split off spoilage so as to not starve the machines along the belt, but forgot that machines which come first on the belt will get served first so you don't need to worry about "what if the heating tower consumes too much".

  2. Your Aquilo build makes a lot of use of modules and beacons, whereas I never plan a build using such. I do the math on how many buildings are needed without any additions, and only then start using modules or beacons to tweak results. That explains the vast difference in how much space we would need for two equivalent science factories.

As far as your points about Vulcanus and Fulgora go, I'll be honest I have never seen a Fulgora island as large as some of those which you were pointing out. Furthermore I build ships on Nauvis, not Vulcanus (cause Vulcanus has asteroids), so I definitely still don't think of ship size as being free. But it's true that if you use Vulcanus for parts the cost calculus changes significantly.

I really enjoyed all the planets except Aquilo, I didn't mind the slightly different manner than bases need to be constructed in due to heating requirements but the way that expanding out your heating network too fast could cause a shutdown was a source of frustration. I also wasn't the biggest fan of platform design and interplanetary logistics.

But I do empathise. Because despite Space Age stealing my soul for a couple of weeks I can't imagine myself replaying it any time soon. With biters off vanilla is practically therapeutic. Needing to be attentive to possible jams or freezes on multiple planets and paying a high cost for fucking up makes playing Space Age feel like juggling flaming swords.

Not sure how much you read or watched in terms of advice, but some of the things I picked up online definitely helped my enjoyment of the game. I was also playing with another mottizen and it helped that we had some different preferences and playstyles.

  1. Vulcanus - this was also my favorite planet. It's where I ended doing a lot of the quality stuff. It was easy enough to just make giant quality recyclers for getting legendary base metals. I love the ability to sprawl.
  2. Fulgora - this is the drone planet. Whatever kovarex previously said about drones, someone else clearly got to him and convinced him to make a planet that is perfect for drones. Drone malls are the way to go here. Or just dumping things into the logistics network. By end game we had gone through something like 20 million scrap (before counting productivity mining bonuses).
  3. Gleba - the secret here is that you just don't need many buildings period. All the recipes are so damn efficient and productive. I ended up building self sufficient tile blueprints, they'd take in just a few inputs and then produce what was needed and burn all excess biowaste. I thought I'd then need to replicate these tiles a bunch, but when I was done I realized I only needed like three of the tiles for base resources. This is also a planet that benefits from drones, and power is basically free once you unlock the burners.
  4. Aquilo was tough. Tiling builds that connected was the right approach here. Efficiency and productivity modules were very useful. There are some recipes on aquilo that you can burn the end results, it's important to just have them on a loop and things will run themselves. I never needed a ton of space or output on this planet. I was almost done with the game when I tapped a second oil field.
  5. Space - was actually the second most fun for me. I just had to embrace tossing excess crap overboard as a way to balance things. Getting used to the way space logistics worked was a little annoying, but once I had it figured out it was pretty smooth.

Haven't gone looking for tips but haven't avoided them either. I agree with your conclusion that bots help a lot on Fulgora (especially for train stations!) and Gleba. The Gleba paradigm I settled on was to have all inputs produced locally (except metals, raw fruit and bioflux). Then biolabs would have chests request 30s worth of materials + 20ish nutrients, with the chests set to trash unrequested. The output would go to a passive provider chest, with a separate output (filtered to spoilage) going to an active provider chest. The passive provider would also have an inserter placing spoilage into the active provider. With that my buildings wouldn't jam up (unlike with belts), which was worth the power cost of bots. Science packs would be about 10% spoiled by the time I made them (due to lack of ingredient freshness), but I honestly don't see how one could do better.

The 200 hour negative review.

Yeah... I had a very rough start and it took me 100 hours to even get to the expansion content. Then at first I was having a blast, and even when I got to planets I didn't like as much I wanted to try them all before passing judgement. Thus my fairly absurd playtime.

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