From my relatively new perspective, I would have to disagree. End-game (I mean launching the rocket, not mega-basing) SHOULD be hard. It's the end of the game. It's the final hurdle and should be rewarded as such. Lowering the difficulty of mid-game blue-science is incentive to keep playing the game and give the player a sense of gradual progression. How many people have played a game that became too hard in the middle and then quit before finishing it? My guess is probably a lot. To use your number scale example, I don't see the current blue science hurdle as being 1 2 4 8 16 32. I see the current scale as being something more like 1 2 4 16 16 16mcdjfp wrote: ↑Sat Jul 27, 2019 10:05 pmIT does not matter how easy or difficult the chemical science pack is with respect to the productivity science pack. If the difficulty of the Chemical Science Pack challenge is lowered, then there WILL be a larger gap to the science pack that follows. Think about it, you are delaying the lesson. Unless removed from the game that difficulty will have to be faced later. Sure maybe you want to pack more of the difficulty increase into the later stages of the game, fine.
But how will the players currently stuck on the Chemical Science Pack react when they get there?
I honestly can't understand what is going on here. It is almost like you, the developers have suddenly decided that the core structure of Factorio is flawed. These challenges are linked. If you make one easier, players will run into the difficulty later. For me productivity is the spike as science packs start dominating my bases production verses building supplies. I am certain other players will site other challenges as their wall
Also, there's a big difference between blue science and purple science. Blue science is the last science pack that is required for EVERY research after it. Only red/green/blue are required for everything that comes after them, while there are techs after Purple/Yellow/Military that don't require those bottles because the tech tree forks into many paths for the player to explore. Making blue science such a huge hurdle as it is now is the main issue in my view, and the fact that it happens at the same time as the oil challenge just makes it seem like TWO difficulty spikes and not just one
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I agree with the dev's changes either. I only agree with their assessment of blue science's difficulty. In my opinion, they could have implemented better ways of smoothing out the difficulty curve. I, like many others, have proposed ideas, but they seem pretty stubborn despite all the feedback (some suggestions had substantial community support too)