I love this game but am kinda disappointed with the patch after almost two years of hype. I was hoping for a total overhaul of the quality mechanics, not just a random nerf here and there. And there is still the big problem that by the time you unlock late game cool tech like foundation, fusion, and legendary quality, you no longer have much use for them. And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.
I don't think the developers promised more here, but the community might have overhyped itself as it is common. It's still a very solid .1 release, the improvements to space logistics and platform building are very nice. There's also a whole bunch of really nice circuit additions.
Gleba is different, but I think that is good in a game that is as long as Factorio. There's a bit of a bumpy difficulty curve here if you approach Gleba in certain ways. But it is very different mechanically than the base game or the other planets in a way that is interesting, at least to me.
It took me two or three iterations when I first landed on Gleba. But afterwards my factories there were more robust than on the other planets and almost never stalled or broke down. And solving that was quite satisfying.
> And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.
I hated Gleba at first. I have come to love it, and it might be my favorite part of space age. Embrace its organic nature, stop trying to centralize an focus on "flow"...
Nauvis is a monolith, then gleba is micro services...
Quality mechanic is just broken as gameplay and broken as worldbuilding. Ford doesn't make a Lincoln by recycling 4000 Ford SUVs until they get a Lincoln SUV by change. It is stupid and tedious. Now even more stupid and tedious with the asteroid fix. Fortunately there are mods to just make normal things have the same stats as legendary. Also spoilage isn't fun, and the workaround of converting eggs into Q3 modules and recycling them later back into living eggs just undermines any argument against refigeration or other preservation tech. But hey, mods!
I haven't checked, but have they done anything about my personal balancing gripe: trains vs conveyors?
Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.
The right way to do that is trains. A fully compressed, stacked belt is 960/s, but a train can easily hit that throughput as well (and even exceed it). And they are much easier to set up across long distances than belts are.
The throughput of the rail is nearly infinity, but you will still be bottlenecked by the speed of inserters and belts on loading and unloading. I think of trains in best case as a highway that temporarily merges many belts together across a long distance before splitting off again at the end. Ultimately they are about saving space and keeping the infra tidy.
If you want the core loop of Factorio but with a fresh spin, I highly recommend Dyson Sphere Program. It's my personal fav of the factory genre for the pure scale of it. As a tip, there's full multiplayer support from the mod community that works great.
DSP is awesome and makes you hate hydrogen with prejudice. Also interplanetary logistics are better than trains. Combat is kinda meh though. Also hate the spherical grid.
I'm on the fence about quality now. I really, really dislike the recycler and asteroid processing spamming as the endgame. But is it going to too hard to bother now? Will having to deal with the rare exceptions of actually having a quality item pop out be worth all the extra logic?
Upcycling is not that hard. The real problem imo is that legendary quality is such a late unlock, and lower than legendary feels kinda worthless for everything except maybe personal gear and power poles.
Quality power poles are the key to Fulgora, IMO. Connecting islands gives you more power and a place to put your accumulators. Also, connecting a tiny island with a large amount of scrap but no room for power to your power grid turns that island from nearly useless to valuable.
I'm especially stoked about space-to-space logistics. One of my first projects will be an in-orbit space platform factory, so that making a new space ship won't take a bazillion rocket launches just for the platforms.
One of the things that makes Factorio so great is how solid it is, not just in its programming but also in its game balance. (At least pre-Space Age; I can't speak to its Space Age balance from my own experience, though I'd be surprised if it was badly unbalanced).
To give just one point of evidence in support of the idea that Factorio is a well-balanced game, there is a guy who goes by "The Spiffing Brit", whose Youtube channel is all about breaking games by finding an exploit, or a bit of unbalanced interaction between two different game mechanics, and abusing that exploit or unbalanced interaction to the maximum extent possible. Armies with a million archers in Heroes of Might and Magic, that sort of thing.
When he did a video on Factorio, I wondered what exploit he had found in the game. Then I watched it. It was about how quickly you could win the game if you got 50 people to play multiplayer with you. That's it. No exploit, no broken game mechanics, just a game mechanic working as intended (yes, any job can get done faster if you can divide it between 50 people who can work on it more or less in parallel). I'm pretty sure that if there had been an exploit to be found, he would have shown it off in his video.
That doesn't prove there are NO software bugs in Factorio. But it's pretty good evidence that any remaining bugs are quite hard to run across.
Space Age is superbly balanced because it’s dynamic, offering multiple paths.
You can mega Nauvis with molten foundries, but that requires importing Calcite.
You can mega Gleba for just-in-time and resource generating blades, but how do you handle stone?
Vulcanus offers limitless resources- yet other planets may actually offer more.
Fulgora offers much if you learn modular design.
How do you handle quality? Dedicated factories, or integrated with production? How much footprint reduction do you want, and how much input efficiency via production modules. But that requires circling back to Nauvis…
Factorio is an amazing piece of work. I wish the devs would open source the codebase and artwork; its just such an amazing piece of engineering that I think the world deserves to own it. They could continue charging for players to play the game and charge some royalty for derivatives… The devs have said that they are tired of working on it, which is fine, but wish their solution would then be to release the code or organize institutions that would continue development outside of wube…
I feel like the game could be taken in many directions. True multiprocess support, parallel execution, multi-level buildings and so much more.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadGleba is different, but I think that is good in a game that is as long as Factorio. There's a bit of a bumpy difficulty curve here if you approach Gleba in certain ways. But it is very different mechanically than the base game or the other planets in a way that is interesting, at least to me.
It took me two or three iterations when I first landed on Gleba. But afterwards my factories there were more robust than on the other planets and almost never stalled or broke down. And solving that was quite satisfying.
I hated Gleba at first. I have come to love it, and it might be my favorite part of space age. Embrace its organic nature, stop trying to centralize an focus on "flow"...
Nauvis is a monolith, then gleba is micro services...
Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.
edit: It does seem to be 240/s: https://wiki.factorio.com/Transport_belt_capacity_(research)
To give just one point of evidence in support of the idea that Factorio is a well-balanced game, there is a guy who goes by "The Spiffing Brit", whose Youtube channel is all about breaking games by finding an exploit, or a bit of unbalanced interaction between two different game mechanics, and abusing that exploit or unbalanced interaction to the maximum extent possible. Armies with a million archers in Heroes of Might and Magic, that sort of thing.
When he did a video on Factorio, I wondered what exploit he had found in the game. Then I watched it. It was about how quickly you could win the game if you got 50 people to play multiplayer with you. That's it. No exploit, no broken game mechanics, just a game mechanic working as intended (yes, any job can get done faster if you can divide it between 50 people who can work on it more or less in parallel). I'm pretty sure that if there had been an exploit to be found, he would have shown it off in his video.
That doesn't prove there are NO software bugs in Factorio. But it's pretty good evidence that any remaining bugs are quite hard to run across.
You can mega Nauvis with molten foundries, but that requires importing Calcite.
You can mega Gleba for just-in-time and resource generating blades, but how do you handle stone?
Vulcanus offers limitless resources- yet other planets may actually offer more.
Fulgora offers much if you learn modular design.
How do you handle quality? Dedicated factories, or integrated with production? How much footprint reduction do you want, and how much input efficiency via production modules. But that requires circling back to Nauvis…
Seeya sometime next decade.
ruh roh.
Be still, my heart.
Well, that'll make Rocket Rush a bit more fun to play. It was taking forever to get up to 40 U235s.
[Edit] Nope.... it doesn't change the requirements from 40 U235, just makes it so a centrifuge will fit on a rocket. 8(
Am I the only one who likes rocket rush?
I feel like the game could be taken in many directions. True multiprocess support, parallel execution, multi-level buildings and so much more.