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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3063 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 17, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A lot of the extra content feels like being led by the nose to a specific workflow, whereas the original game was much more open. Compare all the options for handling ore vs being railroaded into one method for promethium harvesting

Prometheum is only a very tiny part of the game, really a taste of a somewhat different mechanic. Literally, you only ever see it after you get the "well done, you've beaten the game" screen.

The game isn't any less or any more open than the original Factorio.

I'd tentatively disagree with that.

I recently dipped my toes into the expansion (thanks to @Cjet for gifting it to me for a multiplayer campaign that I never really managed to join; I still feel bad about it!) and came away with the impression that its content is indeed less open-ended than what one would expect from the base game. The space layer and each of the new planets offer intentionally self-contained puzzles that each have fairly specific solutions and don't really interact a lot with each other. You can try to do it in a more interconnected fashion, but that seems more like a self-imposed challenge and doesn't seem to have any practical justification.

Or maybe the base game was never as open as I thought. Or maybe I was just led into completely incorrect expectations by the Space Exploration mod.

The mod is definitely simpler than SE, but in essence doesn't seem really dissimilar to SE, no?

I disagree thoroughly, with the caveat that I am no expert player.

SE encourages complex logistical networks between planets, and space platforms can fulfill a variety of purposes. Exploiting different planets is a matter of strategy and economics, all the time. SA encourages you to ship nothing but science, and space platforms are either just trains with one extra step, or straight-up infinite resource printers, and you only need to figure them out once to then produce them infinitely. Exploiting different planets just means solving four different puzzles, but again you only need to solve them once and it's very straightforward and that's it.

Calling SA a simpler version of SE would be much like calling four brisk 30-minute walks along a well-paved paths a simpler version of a triathlon.

SA does have more varied environments, mechanics and more interesting sights to see, and it is more polished, but it's not challenging, not complex, and its constituent parts are barely connected to each other.

...Okay, maybe partly. But every planet has several resources that need shipping around. Just to get the last science pack requires shipping something from every planet but Nauvis, .

but it's not challenging,

It seems essentially the same. SE just has more and more and more of it. More recipes, more etc. But it's repeating the same problem solving loop over and over. I played SE some but the only really, really challenging part was putting together combinators to automatically load the rockets. And I think I'd figure it now since I put together a logistic network / item chest balancer.

Fair enough, I'm probably just bamboozled by having played SE together with Krastorio 2, which made it all look very impressive and which SA seems very tame in comparison to.

SE is vastly more impressive than Krastorio 2. I played that, it was a slight extension of Factorio. A good one. SE is something else really.

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