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.
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.
Yes. Quality boosts storage for wagons and speed for trains. Also unloading is more compact due to inserter belt side selection.
I did a 1m eSPM base though, and I don’t think the totality of all of that would bring me back to trains. Belts are extremely reliable, and I have never managed to make trains so.
Trains don't need to be optimal, they just need to be viable. The fun makes them optimal. I think the quality, speed, and belt improvements did enough to return them to this balance (but I have not played, so I can't say myself).
For complex recipe graphs beyond vanilla train routing is also way more efficient. You get to reuse the same rail network, and sometimes not have to route dedicated belts for 6 low throuput ingredients from all over the map
I feel like a lot of the challenge in early Pyanodons is place-and-route and belt congestion. Unlocking trains feels amazing. They're definitely optimal for a lot of recipes in that mod I think
I agree they’ll be viable. They’re much harder to use but roughly equally good.
Also my late game experience is probably not representative of the phase just after victory where trains may have a slight edge - there could be a sweet spot there where the decoupling is worth it because you can horizontally scale through bottlenecks.
By the end I was using dedicated patches for each science so trains just get in the way.
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.
A train can easily move more than 960/s, but the train isn't always moving. To actually exceed 960/s over time with trains gets some massive stations.
And a track is two spaces, thus two belts can fit. Even just blue belts gives 1440/s for the same space.
Your first item delivers a lot faster with trains, and when you're dealing with stuff that spoils the faster transit is a big benefit, but for the most part I find trains underwhelming other than on Fulgora where you don't really have a choice.
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.
It's already faster even without that because it now uses mixed content rockets to build ships and platforms. But space-to-space logistics do mean that you can make rocket launches less bursty and continually ship stuff into space to then use it.
You could always have mixed rockets if you loaded them yourself, which wasn't ideal but not toooo much of a hassle. For me it was more that rocket platforms are dog slow to produce and can be shot up at only 50 platforms per rocket. Not too horrible in the endgame when you may have dozens of rocket platforms, but in the early to mid game it can really strain my rocket capacity sometimes.
I plan to have a slow but wide platform with lots of storage that just loops around between Nauvis and to hoover up as many metallic asteroids it can find, then turns them into space platforms. When it loops around to Nauvis, it ships off the platforms to any spaceship under construction that might need them.
I had the same experience with the platforms when I first played Space Age. But this depends entirely on how you scale your Nauvis factory before you start launching rockets. You don't want to start too small, if you rush to rockets too quickly the beginning of your space exploration will be tedious.
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?
I don't think it'll be too hard; you can build infinite legendary iron from just a dozen or so foundries on Vulcanus. Legendary coal and stone are not much harder, and from legendary coal you get legendary plastic and then legendary steel and copper via the LDS shuffle. It's not quite as broken as the asteroid casinos and feels much more factorio-y IMO.
Washing ore is probably the easiest solution - research high levels of mining productivity, put quality modules in drills, filter off uncommon+, and loop them through recyclers until they are at the desired quality level.
It’s inefficient but has a very low cognitive load.
You can improve the efficiency a little by increasing the quality floor each level, eg rare iron ore, epic iron plate, legendary steel. But in my post endgame playthrough I was drowning in so much legendary ore with this method I didn’t bother.
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.
My main gripe was fixed in this patch. Planting and harvesting with the agricultural tower can now be controlled with separate conditions. So now there is a better way to avoid wasting so much fruit and therefore, reduce spore pollution.
That makes production more interesting: On other planets (or Factorio 1.x), a belt can generally get backed up and that's no big deal. In fact, it's a useful game mechanic: Decreased demand is followed up (eventually) by decreased production. With this feedback, things tend to balance themselves well-enough that the game doesn't stall.
On Gleba, though? A backed up belt means more spoilage, which I liken to trash. That trash needs to be dealt with somehow -- whether burned or converted to nutrients or whatever, it's a problem that accumulates unless it is dealt with.
So it ultimately becomes necessary to find new (for the player) ways to limit production so that there's less trash and fresher ingredients for the stuff made on Gleba. That's is a new mechanic that I'm sure that some people find fun, but some folks just don't seem to like very much at all.
I don't mind playing on Gleba, per se, but those parts are annoying to me.
So I'm pretty lazy about it: My waste management system is centered around purple chests and a continuous flurry of bots. My production limits sometimes don't exist. I make up for this lazy play style with artillery, which Vulcanus is profoundly excellent at producing.
(Vulcanus, in turn, is often oil-starved so exporting with rockets might sound expensive. But I have tankers that bring in oil from the bottomless seas of Fulgora, which themselves become efficient with a small amount of productivity research. Dealing with the thousands of empty barrels that this requires has its own challenges, but that's just Factorio things and I enjoy working on this part more than I do finding tidy ways to sort garbage on Gleba.)
Limiting production is probably the most difficult way to play Gleba. The easier way is to minimize buffers and have a path to extract spoilage at every position where it could accumulate. And to never, ever have the factory stop at any point in time.
You never want to burn fruit itself since that wastes the seeds. So you always want to process fruit the first step.
I limit fruit production based on the number of fruit on the belt, to avoid creating a huge buffer. But after that the factory just runs continuously at the same speed. And if I have too much of a final product, it gets destroyed or burned for heat and electricity.
One benefit, especially in the beginning, is that by processing more fruit you get more seeds. And you need the seeds to expand your fruit production later.
The enemies are probably one of the not ideally designed parts of Gleba. It's trivial to handle them if you know how, and can be very frustrating if you try to approach it the "wrong" way. If you have been to Vulcanus and Fulgora you can trivialize their threat.
Somehow I've already internalized and expanded it as building on Gleba in a long, straight line -- with branches for input and output. Like a main bus, sorta... but probably much wider to leave space for stuff, and an emphasis on being straight.
Belts of fruits get fed in where they're harvestable. Processing nodes branch off, and the processing only happens where it must (for whatever reason it must). Inventory glut is handled by the logistics network's stats, perhaps finally finding something useful to do with buffer chests. Nothing spoilable loops, ever. All excess spoilables are burned at the end of the line. The excess is a thing of unbridled glory.
That, plus a cut-and-paste do-all bot automall for assembling building materials, and... hmm.
It's the opposite really! On Gleba, you are subsisting on an infinitely fertile river. On one end, the resources flow for ever and ever. On the other end, the resources burn for ever and ever. In the middle, you create whatever you want, for free, for ever and ever. Do not disturb the flow, but draw from it and feed into it. This is a zen of Gleba.
It seems like the developer intent based on spores and spoil times and farm space constraints is to harvest small amounts as needed and build just in time products. But the tools to do that a suck, and the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles. If products stop moving, you are kinda fucked because there is no good way to distinguish between fresh and nearly spoiled goods other than simple inserter priority rules.
Totally agree. I tried the JIT approach; I could never get it to work, and I've never seen anyone else do it either. The wisdom has always been to keep everything flowing and accept spoilage (or kludge it with lots of bots and then move on). This patch makes it a more feasible, I think.
I'd love to see splitter filtering by freshness (e.g. nutrients at >=80% freshness) but I don't think that's in the cards.
I'll be honest: I don't like Space Age. It seems like the developers were focused on providing entirely new types of logistics challenges to solve, but I didn't want that. I wanted things which were fairly natural extensions of the existing logistics challenges, fresh but not too different. The only part of the expansion I enjoy is Vulcanus, everything else doesn't feel like Factorio any more to me.
Gleba was the only planet I really struggled with getting started on, mainly due to the spoilage mechanic. Felt like I was always manually 'jump starting' things at first because something got spoiled and stuck somewhere. Once I finally got a good production loop going though things got much easier.
The main thing I took away from it, was to not be afraid to burn anything that can be burned if things got overproduced, otherwise they would get stuck on the belts and become spoiled. My end setup had lots of looping belts and sorters to dispose of excess production of spoilable products
> 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...
Fusion is so useful though. It is easy to set up on ships because it requires no consumables other than the fuel cells, and it has a small footprint. It is easy to set up power on all planets by stamping down a blueprint, and requires minimal resources shipped to them. If you're not expanding the factory, you probably already have a setup that works, so I can see why it would feel useless. But, when you want to double, or 10x your power consumption, fusion makes it easy.
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.
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.
Be still, my heart.
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.
I did a 1m eSPM base though, and I don’t think the totality of all of that would bring me back to trains. Belts are extremely reliable, and I have never managed to make trains so.
I feel like a lot of the challenge in early Pyanodons is place-and-route and belt congestion. Unlocking trains feels amazing. They're definitely optimal for a lot of recipes in that mod I think
Also my late game experience is probably not representative of the phase just after victory where trains may have a slight edge - there could be a sweet spot there where the decoupling is worth it because you can horizontally scale through bottlenecks.
By the end I was using dedicated patches for each science so trains just get in the way.
And a track is two spaces, thus two belts can fit. Even just blue belts gives 1440/s for the same space.
Your first item delivers a lot faster with trains, and when you're dealing with stuff that spoils the faster transit is a big benefit, but for the most part I find trains underwhelming other than on Fulgora where you don't really have a choice.
I plan to have a slow but wide platform with lots of storage that just loops around between Nauvis and to hoover up as many metallic asteroids it can find, then turns them into space platforms. When it loops around to Nauvis, it ships off the platforms to any spaceship under construction that might need them.
Seeya sometime next decade.
Avadii made a great guide about good ways to farm legendaries in 2.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuwBnOsULkc
It’s inefficient but has a very low cognitive load.
You can improve the efficiency a little by increasing the quality floor each level, eg rare iron ore, epic iron plate, legendary steel. But in my post endgame playthrough I was drowning in so much legendary ore with this method I didn’t bother.
ruh roh.
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.
That makes production more interesting: On other planets (or Factorio 1.x), a belt can generally get backed up and that's no big deal. In fact, it's a useful game mechanic: Decreased demand is followed up (eventually) by decreased production. With this feedback, things tend to balance themselves well-enough that the game doesn't stall.
On Gleba, though? A backed up belt means more spoilage, which I liken to trash. That trash needs to be dealt with somehow -- whether burned or converted to nutrients or whatever, it's a problem that accumulates unless it is dealt with.
So it ultimately becomes necessary to find new (for the player) ways to limit production so that there's less trash and fresher ingredients for the stuff made on Gleba. That's is a new mechanic that I'm sure that some people find fun, but some folks just don't seem to like very much at all.
I don't mind playing on Gleba, per se, but those parts are annoying to me.
So I'm pretty lazy about it: My waste management system is centered around purple chests and a continuous flurry of bots. My production limits sometimes don't exist. I make up for this lazy play style with artillery, which Vulcanus is profoundly excellent at producing.
(Vulcanus, in turn, is often oil-starved so exporting with rockets might sound expensive. But I have tankers that bring in oil from the bottomless seas of Fulgora, which themselves become efficient with a small amount of productivity research. Dealing with the thousands of empty barrels that this requires has its own challenges, but that's just Factorio things and I enjoy working on this part more than I do finding tidy ways to sort garbage on Gleba.)
I do that. It's annoying to me. I don't like being feeling annoyed by computer games; being annoyed is not one of my kinks.
> And to never, ever have the factory stop at any point in time.
So burn more stuff -> bigger spore clouds -> even more enemies -> more violence?
eg, always produce fruit as fast as the swamp can muster, and just always burn all excess as soon as it is possible to do so?
I limit fruit production based on the number of fruit on the belt, to avoid creating a huge buffer. But after that the factory just runs continuously at the same speed. And if I have too much of a final product, it gets destroyed or burned for heat and electricity.
One benefit, especially in the beginning, is that by processing more fruit you get more seeds. And you need the seeds to expand your fruit production later.
The enemies are probably one of the not ideally designed parts of Gleba. It's trivial to handle them if you know how, and can be very frustrating if you try to approach it the "wrong" way. If you have been to Vulcanus and Fulgora you can trivialize their threat.
Somehow I've already internalized and expanded it as building on Gleba in a long, straight line -- with branches for input and output. Like a main bus, sorta... but probably much wider to leave space for stuff, and an emphasis on being straight.
Belts of fruits get fed in where they're harvestable. Processing nodes branch off, and the processing only happens where it must (for whatever reason it must). Inventory glut is handled by the logistics network's stats, perhaps finally finding something useful to do with buffer chests. Nothing spoilable loops, ever. All excess spoilables are burned at the end of the line. The excess is a thing of unbridled glory.
That, plus a cut-and-paste do-all bot automall for assembling building materials, and... hmm.
Why do I hear birds singing?
It all works but feels wrong and dumb.
I'd love to see splitter filtering by freshness (e.g. nutrients at >=80% freshness) but I don't think that's in the cards.
> keep everything flowing and accept spoilage Yeah, I still have to do this too though.
Yes, you have figured out Gleba! Once you build with this mindset, you will achieve enlightenment.
The main thing I took away from it, was to not be afraid to burn anything that can be burned if things got overproduced, otherwise they would get stuck on the belts and become spoiled. My end setup had lots of looping belts and sorters to dispose of excess production of spoilable products
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...
https://factorio.com/blog/
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-441
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442
https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-443