Friday Facts #373 - Factorio: Space Age

[LuxSublima]

[...]
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.
[...]

You make some great points but I view biters slightly differently:
- They are not there to make Factorio a tower defence-like game.
- They are one of the automation puzzles that you need to solve and put away. Just like any other challenge in the game. Once you solve it, it is a matter of making it bigger as you go.

I would definitely not want needing to strategically place turrets or making hard choices for how to use my limited resources. Factorio is not that game.

However, this is not to say biters can’t be made bettee. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement and great ideas for that from community.

But that should not mean turning Factorio into an action or tower defense game. I would like biters to stay as an automation challenge. But the challenge can be made deeper and/or more interesting.

This is a great take.

I would not want Factorio to become a tower-defense-like game either. If by default the expansion required players to pay much more time and attention to combat throughout the game it would completely lose it's soul, IMO, and alienate a ton of players. There are already a ton of options, in vanilla and/or through mods, to increase the importance, depth, and variety of combat.

But Factorio is first, foremost and always about automation -- about being an individual directly designing, building, troubleshooting, improving and expanding factories. It has a core theme of doing this alone on a hostile alien world, so it necessarily involves combat. But the combat adds spice and dimension to the automation. Combat is not the core concern, nor even an equal concern, nor should it ever be. There are other games for that.

I personally think the combat is already pretty good for its role in this game. I've had a lot of great times taking a little break from factory involvement to rough it up personally with nearby bases, enjoying new military tech as it becomes available, and trying out different tactics. In a mod like SE there are already moments where

tactics, armor, weapon, and ammo loadout can be crucial concerns for solving specific puzzles early -- or you can just come back much later with better tech

. But mostly I just automate my defenses, use massive overkill to expand without much fuss, and revel in the waves of enemy corpses piling up at my borders.

The fact that I can stop thinking about my defenses for hours, days, or even indefinitely, after putting in sufficient effort to automate them, is another great feeling of accomplishment Factorio gives me.

Sure there's room for improvement. I've long wanted to see more vanilla enemy variety, and we're getting that with the expansion. It sounds like we're also getting more varied combat mechanics, if I'm reading correctly between the lines, which I'm excited to learn more about in future FFFs. But all of these, I'm sure, will ultimately be interesting challenges that can be solved with automation.

I do not believe there needs to be any fundamental shift in Wube's approach to combat as OP suggests.

As for this:

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

Nah, no hate. You took the time to explain your point of view thoroughly, and raised some good points. Respectful debate is a very good thing.

[LuxSublima]

so tempting to hijack this thread and just talk about SE.

For real.

But to keep it topic-related: I've wondered if the hiring of Earendel (such a good move) was the reason SE was taken off the "Featured Mods" section of Factorio.com, months ago. I was sad to see that such a great mod was no longer being so prominently promoted. But after the hiring was it too much self-promotion? Or too much in the same vein of the coming expansion? Both make sense.

In any case, *waves* to a fellow Space Explorer.

The Featured mods section, iirc, uses a combination of mod metrics and randomization to choose what to show. Earendel has been working for them before that part of the mod portal even existed, I believe.

No he’s talking about the 3 mods shown on the factorio.com home page.

Yep - this section:

A recent screenshot of the "Featured mods" section on the Factorio home page.

Factorio_FeatureModsSection_20230903.png (202.39 KiB) Viewed 2508 times

SE used to be there several months ago. The selection does not change often.

[FuryoftheStars]

I would still imagine that uses some metrics to automatically place vs being dev picked.

[Kyralessa]

so the DLC announced >1.5 years ago is now announced to be entering another year+ of development? haha. trying to remain relevant or something? people certainly forgot by now. maybe this is a good way to remind them. good luck!

I love it when people post repeatedly to tell everyone how little they care about something.

[factoriouzr]

This feels lazy. Hey, you had spidertron, artillery etc, now you don't. The expansion you have to buy will take those away from you and instead give them back to you as a reward for doing the expansion content.

As I specified in the original post, these are not the only rewards, and you get more stuff when playing the expansion, and also ways to make the existing stuff more powerful. Its just the fact (based on testing and feeling), that on Nauvis itself, you have tools to solve (almost) everything locally, so without adding additional obstacles to the original planet, the motivation to expand it would be small and probably postponed too much.

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.

I put all the potentially bad news in the very first post, to kind of unload the potentially bad stuff in the start, but as we show more, things should make more sense.

I also see a special added value in the added challenge, where you need to make your base super reliable before leaving for another planet, as it should continue working without your presence and manual tweaks for some hours. So systems like trains supplying repair materials to outer walls etc. are suddenly much more important. But with artillery and spidertron, these challanges disappear too early.

I still disagree with this decision. Sounds like the expansion might not have been well thought out then. You should not remove tools that the player already has, you should expand and improve the base gameplay with the expansions.

You are basically taking an already existing mod (space exploration), building it into the base game with some tweaks because mods could only do so much. Then you are locking existing content behind DLC just to extend the game. An expansion/DLC should give more exciting things to unlock, not make you dread playing the game again because now you have less tools available and it takes you longer to unlock what you already had, let alone the new things. For the new tech, of course it will take longer to unlock and extend the gameplay. That is good, but taking away tools and tech you already had isn't good. You say you will unlock new things and that's fine and good, but that's another reason not to remove the existing tools.

[factoriouzr]

I don't like how you lock existing technology behind the new progression system like spidertron and the artillery. I think this is a bad design decision. I think you should leave these as they are and instead think of new cool technology you could give the players from the new planets instead of locking them out of things they already had.

Actually it's not that uncommon for game expansions to redistribute the original game content.
Reason for this is that the original game is supposed to work on its own, and being a complete experience by itself... so adding something to it without changing anything of the base game may lead in the expansion feeling like another game put next to the original.

There are various design answers, but when it comes to systems-heavy expansions (as in, new systems, not only content for existing systems) it's common to change the original systems.
A great example, although in a widely different genre, is Doom Eternal : the DLC basically removes the Crucible (the red glowing energy sword), to make room for the sentinel hammer.
Other companies simply plan their DLC long before the core game releases, Paradox does that all the time... but it can lead to the original game to feel weak or incomplete (or even plain bad).

Also, this "expansion" looks like it's going to completely change Factorio's physionomy. We are going from a 35hrs-to-beat game to a 80hrs-to-beat game, so with this amount of change, it's only normal to have a dramatically different experience. We are not speaking about an end-game DLC or an addition of a few story missions.

You provided one example of where this is done and claim it's a common thing. Even if it is common (which has not been my experience with DLCs), it's still not a good design decision in my opinion. All the DLC and expansions I can think of right now added more content to the games and didn't remove or lock existing things behind later tech.

[yfnstalker]

Any idea how much is the DLC going to cost, rough guestimates are fine? Also how will multiplayer work, i.e. will all players need it or just one player/the host?

[DarkShadow44]

Price was said to be at the base game price, so $30-$35. If nothing major changes, all players will need to have the expansion for multiplayer.

[cj_1601]

I really want to throw out there that I think it is a horrible idea to gate stuff that already exists in the game into these new planets. I understand the 'spirt' of the new features is meant to be played best on a new save but I seriously think that only new content should be gated behind these planets. While we currently don't have an idea how the new content will play out, it seems like a cop out to take things that have been in the game for some time and reassign them to new areas we'll have to explore instead of creating new unique content for each planet (Yes I know we haven't seen anything and there likely will be new content for each area) This also makes it so that you can't really just 'jump in' on an existing save even if you want to, though they say "It will play best with a new save but you can continue with your old one if you want" it's more like "Well, you really can't continue on an old save unless you want to do a whole lot of work to reacquire everything you already got" I guess there will be an option to keep your save in the 'base game' even if you have the expansion but the way I see it, unless you have some wild several hundred hour (or thousands of hours) save where such a case would make progression into the new stuff really easy, then we should be encouraging continuation of old saves instead of restarting from scratch, it would suck to drop into your 100 hour save (for some people 100 hours might be 'super advanced' but I think for the average player 100 hours is not a lot) and find out that none of your build works properly because you haven't unlocked the tech that you now have to unlock a whole bunch of stuff again. I understand veterans players desire for something new but I for one am still enjoying optimizing my first big base, I certainly wouldn't mind being able to continue right where I left off without jumping through hoops to do so, and still be able to continue onto the new stuff once I'm done with the old stuff instead of restarting everything.

The TLDR of it ;
Keep new content to the new planets only
Let us keep our "original planet' stuff with everything we unlocked there while still having the expansion 'enabled' on an old save

[DarkShadow44]

I really want to throw out there that I think it is a horrible idea to gate stuff that already exists in the game into these new planets. I understand the 'spirt' of the new features is meant to be played best on a new save but I seriously think that only new content should be gated behind these planets.

It's a common thing when introducing new content, it needs to be balanced. Basically all major overhaul mods do affect the tech tree in similar ways.

[cj_1601]

One should keep in mind that this is not 'introducing new content' as a mod or as some change to an early access product that is there for balance. This is supposed to be the next chapter of the game, and not given to us by modders. Not to say anything bad about modding, modding communities for games like this are part of what keeps the game alive. This is supposed to be something fresh and new, a fully fleshed out product, delivered to us by a professional team that we are going to end up paying real money for. Of course it is just my opinion but I feel we should build on what we have, not change what is already there. Again, in my original post I stated how the team recommends playing this on fresh save, but they mentioned that it would work perfectly well on an old one. If game play mechanics of the 'old game' are going to change, it's not as simple as loading up an old save and jumping into the new content, regardless of how far along in the game you were. You'll have to 'start from scratch' to unlock things that you've engineered to be a critical part of your build. Sounds more like forcing you to restart then having the option to continue, if you restart, which sure, might be loads of fun even! But, if you restart, your going to have to put dozens, if not hundreds of hours into the game to get back to the point you were already at just to experience the new content. Again, build ON the existing platform, don't REBUILD it.

[DarkShadow44]

Well, that would be inviting power creep. You know how powerful you can get in late game factorio, with nukes, maxed out power armor and massive drone swarms. When you go to another planet, what threat could potentially live up to that? I mean, you could make enemies that just shrug off a nuke and all your weapons, but I find that solution to be pretty annoying.

[Belter]

Please don't make the mid-game too painful!

PS: I have a feeling the a lot of decision was made already - and this is OK. Most of us here will buy it anyway, whatever Wube will release.

[cj_1601]

If we are talking about power creep in that way, then we are talking biters and only biters. At some point in the game the biters just become annoying anyway for one thing. I mean, one could play on peaceful but then the game seems dull at the start. Once you really start expanding out it becomes far less enjoyable. At the point you are ready to do that, your base is likely untouchable by biters, so you only have to run out to clear them. Sure there are creative ways in which you could do that, other than, say nukes, or an army of spider bots, those creative options allow for some fun builds, but that doesn't really change the fact that expanding out means clearing more biters, building more, needing more space, having to clear more biters, kinda dull, even if there is a challenge to the fights. Again much of this is opinion but I'd rather spend my time building the perfect (To me) engineered design and then trying to actually build it when I realize what a task it will be. It sounds more like they are going to take existing end game content and keep it as end game content instead of making new end game content. Again, I'm sure there are some big ideas planned but from what we've seen so far it is 'move this previously unlocked tech to a new planet and call it some mid-end game progression' instead of 'add some new factory stuff' The game is not all about biters. It all goes back to sounding like they want to force us to redo dozens/hundreds of hours of gameplay just to get to the new stuff. I have respect for the team cause they made an amazing product, but from a game development standpoint that is artificial inflation of a games longevity, instead of making 100 hours of genuinely new content, you make the players do the same thing for 100 hours. I'd much rather leave my old builds (and ones I am still building) working just fine the way they were, and spend my time with the expansion working on totally new things that build on the old.

[adam_bise]

WOOOOOHOOOOO!!!!!!!!

[Abarel]

one could play on peaceful [...] Once you really start expanding out [...] you only have to run out to clear them.

Same as with the cliffs or the water, or even the forests, you can adapt your buildings to the landscape, not landfilling, removing cliffs or biter bases. I find some fun on this too.

[adam_bise]

"May I take your order please sir?"

"I'll have the interplanetary spaghetti please!"

[Cerberus]

It sounds more like they are going to take existing end game content and keep it as end game content instead of making new end game content. Again, I'm sure there are some big ideas planned but from what we've seen so far it is 'move this previously unlocked tech to a new planet and call it some mid-end game progression' instead of 'add some new factory stuff' The game is not all about biters. It all goes back to sounding like they want to force us to redo dozens/hundreds of hours of gameplay just to get to the new stuff.

I don't think that will be true, but that is just my assumption. For example, they said they indeed moved some middle game and late game content to new planets, but also that they introduced new stuff to the beginning of the game, to compensate for some of the stuff that is now locked to other planets. Which seems logical to me, and also exciting. The ride from the beginning to the end is fun, and now we get to experience it fresh again, with new content so the experience will be different. The alternative would be to have a strong player arrive at these new planets, but other than having to fight an intelligent foe that can dissolve your incoming nukes, intergalactic spaceship wars where nukes are just a standard weapon like a pistol is at the start of the game, I don't see how it can be done and still be exciting (unless you are the kind of player to want to play in peaceful mode).

[QELO]

Hi, this is the simple question but many many users want to know, maybe.
Official mods (Space Age, Quality, Elevated Rails) can play on Nintendo Switch ?????

[Dylan J. McGrann]

Hi, this is the simple question but many many users want to know, maybe.
Official mods (Space Age, Quality, Elevated Rails) can play on Nintendo Switch ?????

I would like to know this as well. How will all this content work on Nintendo Switch which does not support mods?