Friday Facts #373 - Factorio: Space Age

[aka13]

I am not saying it's "literally unplayable", but I think that currently in vanilla balance artillery covers exactly that spot - if you manage to automate it with simple circuits, and train infrastructure, you are rewarded with "your walls are here forever without your intervention".

Should this change, you would be losing the arms race on Nauvis against the biters with no mitigation available.

[yblondinca]

We are assuming the enemies we would face in Space Age on Nauvis would be the exact same that we currently face in Vanilla. There is already hints that enemies will be revamped with the teaser concept art. So it's possible that artillery (while convenient) would not actually be needed on Nauvis in Space Age.

Maybe enemies will cap out at Large size and the Behemoths only show up on a terrifying planet where you unlock the artillery needed to deal with Behemoth worm expansions. It's definitely too early to speculate balance issues when we only have the tip of the iceberg visible to us.

[aka13]

We are assuming the enemies we would face in Space Age on Nauvis would be the exact same that we currently face in Vanilla. There is already hints that enemies will be revamped with the teaser concept art. So it's possible that artillery (while convenient) would not actually be needed on Nauvis in Space Age.

Maybe enemies will cap out at Large size and the Behemoths only show up on a terrifying planet where you unlock the artillery needed to deal with Behemoth worm expansions. It's definitely too early to speculate balance issues when we only have the tip of the iceberg visible to us.

Well, while I am tempted to indulge into a discussion on what could be, this would be purely speculation.
My original opinion was based on confirmed information. Should the confirmed information change, or extended, so then will my opinion

[Chindraba]

This way, the planets allow you to have upgrades of what you have, but also provide more convinient solution to problems you have on the original planet.
But even as it is, without the cliff explosives, artillery and spidertron, you can still build quite a big base without problems as you still have trains, blueprints, robots, super strong turrets etc.

Cliff explosives: Removing cliff explosives destroys a whole lot of the blueprints I've seen, especially ones for trains.

I like having cliffs, and often even bump them up a bit in the map settings. In the early game, even after I have the ability to use cliff explosives, I like the challenge of building around cliffs, even with trains and larger factories. Eventually the "fun" of planning and building around them pales, and then I set up a plant for cliff explosives and move into using my grid-locked prints.

I am a slow player, and haven't, yet, made a base with multiple rocket launches. A better rig and putting UPS behind me a bit further might help that. That said, I'll have to wait and see what other options surface in the "good news" in future FFFs which might compensate in some way for the loss of cliff explosives.

Spidertron: Haven't used it and have no opinion on its delay.

Beta testing/Early Access: I'll pre-order the expansion tomorrow (today's mostly gone) if I can.

I've played over 5000 hours, but, as said, I'm slow and not that good at "planning" the base. I've launched two rockets (first one was at 284 hours) and I managed to get the GETLAP achievement with 69 sec. to spare. I've used, or at least tried, several of the QoL mods yet haven't used any of the ones which add/alter content, and I'm a long way from being ready to attempt an overhaul mod like SE or Bobs/Angels. I won't be, nor could I, compare SA to anything in SE of other mods. Whether that's good or bad would be WUBE's call, not mine. I also don't play other games, in the same genre or not, so there's no possibility of comparison with them either. As an added bonus I'm using older, limited, hardware - which I'll keep even if I do get a new rig built - and can report on how things work, or don't, with less than a "gamer" rig to use. [AMD FX 8300, 32 GiB RAM, nVidia GTX 1050 GPU, 1080p monitor]

Forgive me for not using some official application process, if one exists. My search-foo wasn't good enough to find it.

[yblondinca]

We are assuming the enemies we would face in Space Age on Nauvis would be the exact same that we currently face in Vanilla. There is already hints that enemies will be revamped with the teaser concept art. So it's possible that artillery (while convenient) would not actually be needed on Nauvis in Space Age.

Maybe enemies will cap out at Large size and the Behemoths only show up on a terrifying planet where you unlock the artillery needed to deal with Behemoth worm expansions. It's definitely too early to speculate balance issues when we only have the tip of the iceberg visible to us.

Well, while I am tempted to indulge into a discussion on what could be, this would be purely speculation.
My original opinion was based on confirmed information. Should the confirmed information change, or extended, so then will my opinion

Agreed. WUBE has a fine line to walk when presenting just a small part of the information up front. I do appreciate having the bad news first. It is also a great way to get first impressions on how offended people get when their tech tree is redistributed. I eagerly await more news over the coming Fridays!

[serhatozgel]

I do not have a strong opinion on cliff explosives but I think delaying spidertron and artillery makes sense.

They are overpowering tools that nothing in the game can match. They make sense as end game tools but I think we should have content-appropriate tools until the end game.

Also, after playing the expansion for a while, I would like it to feel like it was designed from scratch rather than having unbalanced remnants from the previous game.

I am not bothered by “losing” stuff we already have. A few weeks after its launch nobody will remember or care how vanilla used to be.

We do not know if we will have tools to fully automate defences before leaving for space. If we do not, we will have to be quick enough to build some good-enough defences and leave the planet, and return before biters evolve too much. If balanced well not to discourage new players, it sounds like a very exciting challenge.

[pointa2b]

You can't make an omelette without breaking an egg. Considering what there is to be gained from this (game engine upgrades, plenty of new content/stuff, plenty of cool mods to follow, etc), is it really a big deal if a few BPs are obsolete or older vanilla content is rebalanced to fit the new context it now resides in? I find it exciting more than anything that big changes are on the horizon.

[Rebmes]

What could be better than space, anyway?

[Chindraba]

You can't make an omelette without breaking an egg. Considering what there is to be gained from this (game engine upgrades, plenty of new content/stuff, plenty of cool mods to follow, etc), is it really a big deal if a few BPs are obsolete or older vanilla content is rebalanced to fit the new context it now resides in? I find it exciting more than anything that big changes are on the horizon.

It's even better than that. None of the Vanilla prints will be broken, and none of the Vanilla content is rebalanced. The patterns we've gotten used to and all the prints we have won't change in Vanilla. New mechanics, like train controls, and lots of stuff behind the scenes for mods to use, and surely a whole bunch of more optimizations, though how is beyond be, will be included in 1.2, but everything will still work as it was, prints, and balance, and everything else. Playing SA will be when things change, some prints might not work anymore - cliffs don't explode, modules don't exist yet, etc. Patterns will change, new items and new ratios, with new sequences in the tech tree. It'll be almost like a new game on the old field. Rather than using the pitch for football, now it's for lacrosse. The familiar old things sitting in the "new world" will be jarring, and exciting.

I might "complain" about the loss of the familiar, but I'm all set to explore the new final frontier.

[Xorimuth]

Maybe consider limiting automated use of cliff explosives (cliff removal) as opposed to delaying them completely. Making early cliff removal more expensive would be another possibility.

Nukes can already destroy cliffs and are both manual and expensive. Seems to fit your criteria perfectly.

[BicycleEater]

With regards to the artillery issue, why not add some kind of early game artillery on nauvis, then give the player a better version unlocked on the different planets.
Maybe nerf artillery, and allow the unlocking of, idk, missile silos? which have super high range and damage. Then make artillery relatively short range, low damage, or such. Not enough to be crippling, but enough to make defence a continuing challenge even with it.
Then when you get missile silos, you really solve the problem.
Similar could be done with cliffs, maybe having rarer steep cliffs, requiring more advanced destroying (and landfill potentially, adding 'ocean' as well as 'deep water', so *most* of the solutions are found on nauvis, but a better version is available off-world).
That would seem to tread the line, by mitigating aggressive enemy expansion on nauvis, without completely 'solving' it, thus incentivising the player to go off world and find a full solution (all the more so, as they are 'teased' with a partial solution).

[mcdjfp]

Nukes can already destroy cliffs and are both manual and expensive. Seems to fit your criteria perfectly.

If I intended to blow the adjacent section of my factory up, maybe. Plus, by nukes the fun of cliffs (at least at the default frequency) has ended.

[yert527]

I have extreme mixed feelings about this, I was expecting something worthy of a actual expansion when they promised that it would be worth the $20, not a re-hash of already made mods. This is just a mod rip off into a to full "$20 expansion". Earendel made Space Exploration, sure, but just ripping your own past mod-work to make his work "official" doesn't make it right. It's not even adding AS MUCH CONTENT. If it's a "light" version of your mod, it's a money grab. This is some Bethesda level mod-scam. I feel cheated as a fan of both Factorio and Erendel's Space Exploration mod. If this was actually Space Exploration 2.0 I would have actually supported it. If this was the mod integration into the game, and then added content to the mod (not just re-hashing and even stripping it), that I could have got excited for.

And Earendel's post in the FFF shows they knew it. If you have to have a disclaimer saying "no we promise, I'm the creator and I'm okay, no they aren't the same totally lets not get mad ok" means they knew that people would feel cheated and they went ahead with it anyway.

To Earendel specifically, Space Exploration was fun, is still fun! I would feel better if you were to actually come out and say that this expansion will be fully integrated into Space Exploration, and that the mod (maybe 2.0) will continue and expand as well. That way I can be assured that my hope for more SE content isn't dashed and can at least trust that you aren't going to abandon it for a money grab on the expansion.

It's the free stuff that the actual good news here. Bot changes, optimizations, train improvements, those are things I could get behind. It's baffling to me why they wouldn't lock this behind the $20 Expansion. Then they might actually be a unpopular opinion but that how economics and public opinion works. If you want to make it worth $20 you have to put stuff in it that is worth that much. (Also it's too late now any doing this now would mean massive PR disaster).

So now I'm caught in the middle. They are giving me the "good stuff" for free, but keeping the garbage behind a paywall, am I expected to pay for that? I expect this expansion won't helping Wube financially in any significant way.

[Atraps003]

There is a simple solution for players that find enemy expansion difficult or annoying without artillery tech. Turn off enemy expansion.

[aka13]

There is a simple solution for players that find enemy expansion difficult or annoying without artillery tech. Turn off enemy expansion.

Brother, I never played a game not on deathworld marathon in the last 5 years, except for the one and only SE run I am doing right now.
It's not about difficulty, or disliking enemy expansion. It's about "we will remove content from vanilla progression, around which difficulty was balanced".

See it as speedrunners complaining about speedhacks, but reversed.

[sarge945]

This post is probably going to make everyone hate me, but...

Factorio in general seems to be stuck in this weird contradictory middle-point between automation/puzzle game and tower defence game. The long, slow factory building gameplay somewhat contradicts with the need to constantly defend yourself, and I feel like these mechanics sort of undermine each other a little bit.

It doesn't have the quick, ease of creation of towers that your average tower defence game has, setting up a working factory is a VERY long process in comparison, and the emphasis is mostly on automation rather than setting up a good defensive line and managing resources. It also lacks a lot of tower variety and strategy, usually it's just a case of setting up turrets along a wall and building some artillery and you're essentially all done. The AI is rather simplistic for a tower defence game and the biters really aren't anywhere near as much of a threat as they should be, especially on default settings, compared to how much the player can pump out defensively in the mid to late game. Turrets are essentially unlimited eventually, and with auto restocking basically become an unstoppable kill-wall.

I feel like in some ways trying to do both things at the same time makes the game worse. The automation gameplay is very deep and compelling, and is definitely the best part of the game, and being constantly distracted from it in order to defend ourselves forces us to stop engaging with the deep parts of the game and engage in very shallow combat. Players who are looking for a factory simulator are going to be annoyed by the need to constantly stop what they are doing to defend themselves or destroy enemy expansions, and players who are looking for a game with compelling combat and strategy are going to be disappointed when they realise all the interesting design went into the factory automation aspects and not the combat gameplay, which essentially amounts to building and restocking turrets and artillery occasionally.

I feel like games like Riftbreaker provide much more satisfying tower defence gameplay, even if I don't think many of them are as good as Factorio overall. Obviously the goal of Factorio is not to be a good tower defence game, it's more of an automation game (I would consider it more of a puzzle game than a combat game), but since the combat mechanics are there I feel like they should try to make them good.

The point I am trying to make here is that whether or not we're able to automate defences with Artillery doesn't really seem like the core of the issue. If defending your base is just another automation puzzle, and the actual combat and defence aspect overall doesn't really offer much satisfying depth in the first place (at least in my opinion), then neither approach will be satisfying. Either artillery is something you get quickly, which nullifies the biters to the point where they may as well not exist, or it's something that takes AGES to get (which is being proposed), resulting in base defence becoming a constant chore that requires endless maintenance and takes attention away from building our factory while not actually being particularly interesting in the first place because there's so little depth.

Here's what I propose:

I feel like the development team should make a decision about whether or not they want biters to be a core part of the game. If they decide to keep them, they should spend a significant amount of time improving their overall gameplay, rather than just focusing on tweaking the technology tree and automation. Otherwise, they should abandon biters entirely and essentially make Factorio purely an automation game.

Personally I like biters in concept, and I am interested in having more interesting combat gameplay, but I understand if most players just want to build cool factories. I would hate to see them go, but it might be for the best depending on the direction the developers want to go in.

Making the combat more deep and complicated would go a long way to making it more interesting. Here's how I would do it:

- Add in multiple damage types with different biter types existing for each
- Find some way to limit towers through a difficult to acquire resource, so the player has to be smart about positioning or expend effort/resources to maintain their defences. Riftbreaker does this through AI cores, which drain significant amounts of power, which is interesting because losing power means all your turrets go down. Factorio has nothing like this, turrets are mostly self sufficient forever as long as they are stocked with ammo/fuel, with no real risk of making yourself vulnerable unless you really screw up.
- Add a lot more tower variety, especially utility towers, as well as different ammo types (such as cryo rounds or fire rounds) that can be loaded into turrets
- Add in a lot more biter variety to counter many tower types and enforce variety and strategy
- Make biters remain a significant threat throughout the game by tweaking evolution settings and improving their AI to probe for weaknesses.
- Make biters attack regardless of pollution settings so we don't get hours of peace, pollution would just aggro them more often and make them evolve faster or maybe even allow them to create "boss" biters that are significantly harder than usual.
- Researching Artillery should be a small but significant advantage as part of a long struggle to maintain technical dominance in the face of an overwhelming threat, and should be just another tool in the players aresenal. Right now it's basically the "delete biters" technology and people seem to want to get it ASAP because dealing with biters is more annoying than it is interesting.

Then, I would split "Freeplay" into 2 separate game types: Free Build and Survival.

Free Build would disable biters entirely (or put them on peaceful mode) by default (and also disable all the combat research and military buildings/objects etc) and let people focus exclusively on building an efficient factory
Survival would start the player off with a bunch of ammo and a few towers already built and fast-track some of the research to allow players to get started defending themselves quicker to compensate for the much more threatening biters. Survival would also introduce a lose condition, such as ending the game on character death (but still allowing saving and loading, it's not permadeath just game over, although an optional permadeath mode could be cool too). Riftbreaker works by having a HQ building which ends the game if you lose it, and it works pretty well.

This way, people who want to play with biters have actual interesting mechanics for dealing with them, and there's more to it than simply "buy artillery to stop the chore of dealing with biters", and the people who just want to build a cool factory don't have to deal with biters at all and can focus more on the sandbox and automation gameplay.

Obviously everything would still be customisable completely so people could make their own weird gameplay twists.

I guess I just feel like Factorio should either have proper tower defence gameplay, or abandon the concept entirely and be purely a factory building game where the challenge comes from figuring out the automation and planning your factory, rather than defending yourself.

Automation makes a lot of sense for tower defence and is an interesting twist on it, one which I feel has a lot of potential, but at the moment the biter gameplay is more about automating them away rather than using automation to augment a gameplay strategy.

Whether or not Artillery takes 10 extra hours to get isn't going to change much if the overall combat gameplay sucks.

[Atraps003]

Brother, I never played a game not on deathworld marathon in the last 5 years, except for the one and only SE run I am doing right now.
It's not about difficulty, or disliking enemy expansion. It's about "we will remove content from vanilla progression, around which difficulty was balanced".

See it as speedrunners complaining about speedhacks, but reversed.

As they should. Artillery and flamethrower turrets are super powerful in vanilla. At least artillery is placed appropriately in the tech tree at the end. Once flamer/artillery wall is up the only thing biters do is bloat up the tick time. You might as well turn them off. If a big portion of the codebase ought to be turned off well before the game is over why did we even bother coding them in?

[Atomos]

How come 'Wszystko będzie''? Polish phrase in a name of Czech company? There must be some more backstory

That's exactly what I thought, too.

[aka13]

Brother, I never played a game not on deathworld marathon in the last 5 years, except for the one and only SE run I am doing right now.
It's not about difficulty, or disliking enemy expansion. It's about "we will remove content from vanilla progression, around which difficulty was balanced".

See it as speedrunners complaining about speedhacks, but reversed.

As they should. Artillery and flamethrower turrets are super powerful in vanilla. At least artillery is placed appropriately in the tech tree at the end. Once flamer/artillery wall is up the only thing biters do is bloat up the tick time. You might as well turn them off. If a big portion of the codebase ought to be turned off well before the game is over why did we even bother coding them in?

Well, that is like your opinion man.
Biters are a big and important logistical consideration. It certainly is not a threat like a enemy AI in an RTS game, and I don't want them to be one.
Factorio is a logistical simulation, where any problem is solved by logistics first and foremost.
Artillery is one of such logistical solutions.
I want to be able to automate biters away, and it is also obvious that this is (at least in some form) also the devs wish. If you remember 4 sciences era, you'll remember the stupid purple egg hunt, where after X time you just had to jo and farm biters in circles, for your science production to run.

[aka13]

If defending your base is just another automation puzzle, and the actual combat and defence aspect overall doesn't really offer much satisfying depth in the first place (at least in my opinion), then neither approach will be satisfying.

I could not have worded it better myself, to be honest. Defending the base is an automation puzzle, I agree on that.
I think that the biters pose an interesting "outside" goal, which differentiates factorio from pure-sandbox experiences. I'd even say that the biters themselves are secondary to the biter purpose.

I have to think of rimworlds events, where with passage of time, stuff happens, which forces you to do something, or gives you the chance, should you be steamrolling, ignore it.
Rimworld is terrible in that regard, that no matter how far you are, you will never steamroll the challenge. BIters are a "solvable" event, where with logistics and a ton of research there exists an equilibrium, where they pose a threat, but can not overwhelm you, if you do the necessary precations. It gives a nice feeling of "I made it, I am the boss here, I dictate where I can expand, and where you can (or cannot).

On your other points - as far as the older teasers went, there seem to be different types of enemies on different planets. I think that that is going in the direction you suggest.