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To Glory

What is most difficult map settings in game (vanilla) together with alien threat, with conquerable pathways?

If you want a challenge, install the mod "Rampant". It adds strategy to the biter attacks. It basically lets the biters attack where they cause the most destruction. And in huge numbers. You will have constant pressure applied to your base.

"Death world marathon" is also there for a reason. I assume the devs beat it. Also if you like a challenge and you like team play, try one of the comfy or redmew scenario multiplayer servers.

Definitely answering what is conquerable isn't trivial, because the world generation options do have more than enough room to make it very, very difficult, probably even situationally impossible if you really crank up the difficulty with every setting (one obvious example is being locked in on a small island without sufficient stone, which I think can happen). The biggest problem is that the starting seed can make such a big difference.

I reckon at least a good start for this is to use the death world marathon preset, then perhaps make the starting area a little smaller, or enemy bases a bit bigger... maybe even a desert spawn to go with it? Smaller ore patches to make expansion even more of a time pressure?

I think a large majority of all permutations will be theoretically solvable. Even ridiculously big enemy bases can be handled by managing pollution very strictly and often there are pathways around all kinds of obstacles, even though they could be extremely tedious.

In the end, you may have a more interesting time adding mods to spice up the difficulty since there is a limit to what vanilla biters have to offer. Lategame or maybe even midgame vanilla for example will always tend to be easy if you know what you are doing and I haven't seen a preset or playthrough that attempts to balance all the competing factors. (Bonus link to short clip of what extreme modded difficulty can be: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... plant_set/)