Space Age.. feels a little flat

[MeduSalem]

It's far enough space science. Which makes me sad because i would have loved to build it much bigger. It's now on pause, as its storage and my home base is swimming in it. But it's ok, I mainly build it to learn about space stations and because it was fun (love that building anim.) and thought better a bit bigger than sorry.

It will definitely become bigger and more useful later beyond just Space Science.

Because if you ever intend to use the Foundry anywhere else but Vulcanus, the only other proper way to get Calcite is using a recipe on the space platform and sending it down to the planet. Because shipping Calcite from Vulcanus elsewhere seems annoying.

So my stationary space platforms will likely also end up a calcium factory. There seem to be a couple recipes that allows you to reprocess other chunks until you get more chunks of a particular type; for example reprocess metallic & carbonic chunks until you get more oxide asteroid chunks, which crushed with advanced crushing gives Calcite. But it will require lots of looping the other chunks to get more reliably what you want. That in turn takes some space on the platform. I am looking forward to doing it already.


That said there might be other uses too because with the advanced asteroid crushing you can get also copper and sulfur on the platform. If I would have to take a wild guess you can totally make a self-sufficient space platform. You can make almost everything on it since you have all the basic resources that somehow can be converted into the others. Even oil processing.

But I am not that far myself yet either. ^^

[Rebmes]

Not sure how I wandered into this post, but for me, Fulgora and Volcanus have been freakin amazing.
I have to say I disagree with every single point OP makes.

The first thing that feels quite bad about Space Age is rockets. At first I thought that rockets seemed great as they were so much cheaper than 1.1. But when I saw how little you can put in each rocket, they actually feel very expensive, especially because they're almost always wanted in large bursts. It's easy to accidentally underbuild, and then you're like, well I don't want to rebuild my whole base to add five more copper belts, especially because I want to use the new stuff from other planets in my next build, so I guess I'll just wait. The bigger issue though is the crafting time of each rocket. Considering how little they carry, the item transfer into orbit feels really very slow. I decided to upgrade my platform for a safer transit to Vulcanus and this involved about fifteen minutes of sitting around waiting for the expanded platform materials to be sent. It feels really bad to send necessary but ultimately cheap items, like belts or pipes. But it feels really very bad to send items like foundries, recyclers, etc because you fit so few of them per rocket, your platform just ends up sitting around for ages waiting to load them. Some items like uranium ammo or personal armour just feel punitive. I get that you wanted the platforms to be self-contained, but it may have been better to restrict space gun turrets to only firing "space bullets" made in space, rather than heavily nerfing transport for an item the player worked hard to get.

The bottom line is that transporting stuff around just feels like a huge barrier that frequently results in a lot of waiting and awkwardness.

For me, nothing was more exciting than loading up those new buildings to my platform. Yes it takes time, but I don't just stand there watching it.

The second issue is about the rewards for each planet. I have to admit that originally, it seemed great. Foundries with +50% prod? Sign me up! Actually, Vulcanus's rewards were.. quite empty. The biggest issue is the need for Calcite to operate the Foundries - I ended up not bothering using them on Nauvis at all because shipping both Calcite and Foundries is horrible (see above) and you can't automate it locally until you've been to Gleba. But the second biggest issue is that mining productivity is much easier to come by and with steel prod as well, I kinda.. just didn't really feel the need for increased prod on Nauvis. The only way to significantly improve my base would have been to make a megabase, but this doesn't feel appealing if you feel like you're just going to have to redo it when you get electromagnetic plants or bioflux or whatever. For Fulgora I also looked through the list and.. well, the only one that seems really interesting is mech armour. Ultimately the vast majority of the planetary rewards are simply of the "number go up" variety rather than new mechanics or fun toys, but when the player receives them, they are in no position to start megabasing, so it's not actually particularly impactful.

Weaponry and buildings from fulgora are pretty awesome; volcanus leads to green belts and some other goodies. Do you not enjoy these new things? xD

Meanwhile Quality.. is pretty hit-and-miss. I got super lucky and got a Rare Power Armour MK2 which is pretty nice. But 90% of my time working with Quality, I just kinda hated it. Not for any principled reason, but because you can't handle byproducts without the recycler. The game gives you Quality modules quite early, so you feel like you should use them, but it's actually really painful because you can't use Uncommon materials in Normal recipes. This actually makes Uncommon items way less valuable than Normal items. The fact that different Qualities do not stack together kinda just makes managing them a pain. In practice it seems like the only way to use Quality when it's given is to stick it on some final mall items, like assemblers, but if you only figured this out afterwards, you're stuck with thousands of uncommon red chips you can't use and 500 normal assembler 3s you won't need to replace so no opportunity for Quality anymore. It seems like a mechanic where making a mistake feels very punishing.

Uncommon items can be used to try to make rare items. Recycler can get rid of excess parts. Verticality (quality) is going to be exponentially expensive, which gives you something to use all that extra productivity on, which you said you didn't have a purpose for.

I also felt like there are quite a lot of restrictions that feel really unnecessary. One example of this is not being able to transport rocket silos. I get that it makes logical sense, but really, it's just annoying to have to transport all the ingredients, then handcraft it immediately upon landing. The effect is the same, it just takes me longer and costs more. Not being able to make the recycler on Nauvis seems kinda pointless as it doesn't require any Fulgora-specific resources. You can't prepare chemical plants/oil refineries before pumping oil. You can't prepare lightning rods- really? They're not a valuable item. It would not ruin the game if you could make them on Nauvis and bring them with you.

Making logical sense is a good start, but transporting a whole silo is just inviting you to skip all the stuff you're expected to do on the new planets in order to build up a new rocket silo. You don't want to actually play any of the content?? Besides, you can ship the materials over if you really want to. And for your example of the lightning rod, it's visible on the research tree before traveling to Fulgora, and you can easily bring some materials and immediately craft them upon arriving. I imagine this is what most people do.

The .. hardness .. of limitations on Vulcanus and Fulgora also feel pretty weird. It's slightly difficult to express why I didn't like them, because I'm a Warptorio enjoyer and that mod is all about building in much smaller spaces. On Vulcanus, you start in a tight spot (literally) because of all the cliffs, and you're not going anywhere really without cliff explosives, which you can't get until you're done. On the other hand, it feels like the production chain takes up a lot of space, with a lot of large Foundries. But the biggest issue here is impermanence. The player doesn't want to invest in their Vulcanus base because they know that when they come back with Lavafill or elevated rails or cliff explosives, or after they've built a small base so they can automate rails or whatever, they would do things very differently. But the starter zone is just too tight to comfortably bash out what you need. It feels like an awkward spot of "don't invest here" but also "can't do it quickly". The base required is also just a bit too big to change easily after you've done it, so any mistakes feel like you are just starting over. I way underprepared how many rockets I needed but couldn't fit anything more in without rebuilding everything. Fulgora is in a bit of a better place, but you can also end up in a similar situation where you built three quarters of your base, then you realise you don't have enough area to collect enough lightning strikes, but you can't get a robot connection to the island you now realise you should have built on so moving your base would be an incredible pain. It feels like another place where the player can get trapped easily.

Everything you build in Factorio suffers from the same "impermanence". There will always be another upgrade, or a better build. You say you enjoyed the challenge of building in limited spaces, and yet you found no enjoyment doing it here. You're a puzzling dude.

Finally, let's talk about the cargo hub. At first this seemed to work reasonably well. However it became a pain point pretty fast because there's a very limited unloading space. I'm trying to unload a bunch of sciences and different buildings all at once with very limited space. It feels like the only solution is to just use bots for everything which doesn't feel great.

So your cargo hub fills up, how do you not have - at minimum - some inserters down there emptying it for you?
In this expansion, there is no limit to how much stuff you can launch into space, or receive on planets. Not sure what your holdup is xD

TL;DR: If you make mistakes in Space Age, it feels like you get punished very severely. The rewards for each planet feel pretty lacklustre at the time at which you receive them. And rockets cost way too much considering how little they can do.

I made mistakes, like going to Volcanus with next to nothing, but it wasn't unforgiving and I was able to recover. Space age isn't really meant to be rushed, I don't think. I rushed to space, blundered a bit, but I've had so much fun taking on the new challenges of Volcanus and Fulgora; let's not forget about the immersion of the new planets, the music, the ambiance! All the cool new stuff to build, new enemies, everything!! xD

Your suggestions would destroy the game we all hold so dear, so hear me out, my suggestion to you is that maybe you should watch more videos on how to overcome these new challenges. Rather than try to take it away from everybody else.

[GrumpyJoe]

Your suggestions would destroy the game we all hold so dear, so hear me out, my suggestion to you is that maybe you should watch more videos on how to overcome these new challenges. Rather than try to take it away from everybody else.

How can you hold something "so dear" that is barely a week old?

I had a big breakdown in faith into the devs about 24h ago. Since then I have recovered a bit. But I never felt that way before in 7 years playing this game.
Of my 3500h, about half of it is various vanilla playthroughs with various predefined settings. From deathworld to a 9,5h private 100% (speed)run.
The other includes 2 finished seablock maps. 500h of pY. I know complex Factorio.

This is a total different beast. A beast not so much in complexity, but in change of playstyle. Because of new surfaces, new enemies, new interplanetary logistics. Why new? Because I never liked the idea of SE, not even touched it once. I tried Factorissimo and decided it isnt for me. Because I don't like playing on multiple surfaces. Because it's hard to balance them and I don't think this will ever be done in a way I like.

I will play it for a bit longer, maybe even finish it.
But if the new engine possibilities won't start new overhaul ideas, I'll be back to pY with elevated rails.

Noone wants to "take away" anything from "everyone", nor do critics hate the game and need convincing wall of texts to like the state of the game. If it wasn't possible, the Galaxy of Fame or whatever it's called would be empty, this isnt about calling for help, to just finish the game. Some people just prefer to play in a way this isn't meant to. The SE way. Only a bit easier.

Dont get me wrong, It's still a GREAT job they have done, but imho quite some oversights in their enthusiasm for that one idea.

It's trying to be too many things at once.

[Pizze]

Actually... Space Age changes a lot of the game. Locking Cliff Explosives behind getting established on Vulcanus was the first big thing that was really annoying because it also effects how you can build things on Nauvis until then. My learning was, that you shouldn't rush into space but rather go and build a good factory that can be operated by bots.

Landing on a new planet is like a New Game+. You keep some stuff and start over but the game has been changed from what you knew, so you have to find new ways to get the most basic resources, which is quite cool. It might be "flat" but it's actually what I would have expected from an expansion. It adds official new ways to play the game and adds a huge amount of extra complexity while still keeping a reasonable difficulty. The expansion is more difficult but that's exactly what I would expect from that. I've been following a discussion where people complained about paying for the base game and the expansion because they want to start with Factorio now. But I'm absolutely convinced, that you have to play 1000 hours of basic Factorio and maybe some mods before you're ready for the new adventure.

I absolutely agree with the product quality. I got the tutorial and thought: Yeah, I already have enough spaghetti due to cliffs. I don't want to filter products now. I see what the quality mechanic can do and I see that it's fully optional but I don't think that I'll make use of it. It looks nice to have better poles with a greater coverage but it's just nothing you can rely on. Unfortunately the UI promotes the quality stuff it almost feels like clickbait: Oh I can produce legendary stuff? Go for it! followed by a please insert legendary stuff then. And there everything starts falling apart because it feels like you have to build own factories handling the different quality levels and that's very exhaustive.

I'm overall happy yet with what the expansion adds: Seamless extension where the base game just left the player unclear why we're launching thousands of rockets into space. And secondly it adds new ways how to play the game by introducing a single sophisticated mechanic and don't open up a separate game within the game.
I'm not 100% sure if I would prefer the extension over the base game but it did its job the right way. But I agree that waiting because of space travel seems to feel a bit off. Especially for people who haven't reached a full level of automation and just try load everything up to the platform, it feels very slow to wait for the whole rocket animation. I'm not 100% sure if using the logistic request from the platform would be a better option for me to overcome the problem. Due to my rush and the problems with cliffs, I had some trouble with automation.

I'm not sure, if I was missing something like "what to bring to a new planet and what to do there" or if I'm just experiencing the new player feeling again because I'm just trying my best to avoid spaghetti without knowing the actual production chain yet.

[xTwisteDx]

Okay so I had to come here to add to this conversation just a bit. While I agree that the planets feel “Flat” they add significant complexity beyond what you’d do on Nauvis. In particular I’m very fond of the recursive mechanics on Fulgora. They introduce unique challenges previously only seen with nuclear power. In addition, it does indeed feel like a proper challenge to get sufficient resources from those planets back to Nauvis for usage.

I believe the overall content added to the game is this.
- Nauvis: Main Factory
- Other Planets: 5x Mini-Factories
- Platforms: “Space Trains”
- Quality: 3x Mini-Factories

With Quality, you should setup distinct and separate factories to manage and construct them. The goal is to improve your normal base to provide enough throughput for uncommon, then do the same for uncommon, for rare, and finally the same for legendary. I don’t think they meant for you to roll the dice, there’s a clear path. This applies to everything effectively meaning you really need 36 separate factories all coordinated to reach “Legendary”.

From my perspective, and it’s only an opinion, the additional content feels far from flat. Now the game is also setup for Modders (I’m one of them) to do some absolutely incredible things far beyond what’s been done in the past. Guarantee there will be more planets coming soon, perhaps even orbits, and other logistical complexities. The “Toys” you speak of are already there, you just have to grow the factory, that is your mind.

[Ashreon]

Well, it's very easy to see that people are doing the whole quality process all wrong.

It essentially requires:

This is how it splits out (for each step and end of the line)

Normal --> Normal
Normal --> Uncommon/Rare/Epic/Legendary
Uncommon --> Uncommon
Rare --> Rare
Epic --> Epic
Legendary --> Legendary

So let's take a fairly.. Common thing to craft and show the entire Extraction and production line. We want to make a Legendary Belt (but don't in-game).

Extraction --> Production --> Finished product --> Recycle
Normal --> Normal --> Normal --> Normal production line
Normal --> Normal --> Uncommon --> recycle
Normal --> Normal --> Rare --> recycle
Normal --> Normal --> Epic -- recycle
Normal --> Normal --> Legendary
Normal --> Uncommon --> Uncommon --> recycle
Normal --> Uncommon --> Rare --> recycle
Normal --> Uncommon --> Epic --> recycle
Normal --> Uncommon --> Legendary
Normal --> Rare --> Rare --> recycle
Normal --> Rare --> Epic --> recycle
Normal --> Rare --> Legendary --> recycle
Normal --> Epic --> Epic --> recycle
Normal --> Epic --> Legendary
Normal --> Legendary -- Legendary
Uncommon --> Uncommon --> Uncommon --> recycle
Uncommon --> Uncommon --> Rare --> recycle
Uncommon --> Uncommon --> Epic -- recycle
Uncommon --> Uncommon --> Legendary
Uncommon --> Rare --> Rare --> recycle
Uncommon --> Rare --> Epic -- recycle
Uncommon --> Rare --> Legendary
Uncommon --> Epic --> Epic -- recycle
Uncommon --> Epic --> Legendary
Uncommon --> Legendary --> Legendary
Rare --> Rare --> Rare --> recycle
Rare --> Rare --> Epic -- recycle
Rare --> Rare --> Legendary
Rare --> Epic --> Epic --> recycle
Rare --> Epic --> Legendary
Rare --> Legendary --> Legendary
Epic --> Epic --> Epic -- recycle
Epic --> Epic --> Legendary
Epic --> Legendary --> Legendary
Legendary --> Legendary --> Legendary

Yes, it seems like a lot but remember, you need.. At best one type of Crafting building per step, heck legendary is such an off chance that it's unlike to even happen so often that it's not something you just.. sit and let collect dust in a chest until you feel like crafting up a bunch of stuff.

So you want to have;
4 Furnace --> Uncommon/Rare/Epic/Legendary
8 Assembly Lines --> Uncommon/Rare/Epic/Legendary
^
That will now serve all other quality products that requires Gears or Plates btw so for each quality item you want to make the additional stuff required will become lessened.

It is far easier to simply have logistic bots move the stuff around aside from early in the process in which you separate extracted resources/smelted resources from your ore patches/super smelters with an inserter (for a logistic bot to pick it up).

It's not a mass production thing like it is with normal items so there's no need to concern yourself with throughput. It's never going to happen. You won't need a bus for quality. You won't need to dedicate large swathes of the base to quality, but it is very good - for certain items.
The first thing you should set up is a quality --> improve quality module setup and save up the rest for T2 modules.

[Vulkandrache]

How do people even care about quality?
Legendary being unlocked at the very end means quality itself gets unlocked at the very end.
You either go for legendary or you dont bother to even get started.

[nzer]

How do people even care about quality?
Legendary being unlocked at the very end means quality itself gets unlocked at the very end.
You either go for legendary or you dont bother to even get started.

Uncommon and rare are a significant improvement over normal and are very accessible even in the early game just by throwing quality modules in your miners. Not enough that you can use quality on everything, but occasional things like equipment and space platform parts are definitely worth it.

You could take the stance that because it isn't necessary to use quality to beat the game there's no point in bothering, but by that logic you shouldn't care about anything before the megabase stage, and that's obviously not how most people choose to play.

[Blailus]

How do people even care about quality?
Legendary being unlocked at the very end means quality itself gets unlocked at the very end.
You either go for legendary or you dont bother to even get started.

My Rare Tank is amazingly fun to drive around and go boom with. More space for equipment so I'm running 2 fission reactors, shields, belt immu, 4x exos, and a roboport, with 3 batteries. No room for all that in a common tank, so it's not as quick, and it's really not that hard to do.

[MisterDoctor]

having done Vulcanus and Fulgora, the content feels.. flat.

Vulcanus and especially Fulgora ARE "flat". Both have nearly infinite resources, which is just boring. And Fulgora has no dangers. Fulgora is a complete bore; Vulcanus is only moderately boring.

Gleba on the other hand is almost on par with Nauvis for complexity and being interesting. It is genuinely a Factorio 2 by itself. It seems to be where the devs put all their creativity and the other planets did not quite get the same amount of attention, especially Fulgora. Fulgora is just basically unfinished as it is IMO.

[Shaftoe]

i completely disagree with the first poster. Factorio is my favorite game every made (and i'm 52) and Space Age is even more goodness.

[klumhru]

I have such mixed feelings about SA. I like supporting the developers whose game I've played 5k+ hours. However as soon as I ran into the unutterably dull tedium of the first space platform I just stopped. I reverted to playing Factorio 1.0 essentially, albeit with the excellent QoL features of 2.0.

Getting reset essentially to square one as soon as you get to the first platform, and realizing that you're not even there yourself. First thing I did was to try to place logistics chests, but no, that gets taken away from you, even if the science you get from the platform is what unlocks them in the first place.

Then I went back, and getting to Vulcanos after squeezing everything into a shoebox, I was again reset to having no space to maneuver. I just don't care about the rest of the planets at this point.

I know it's unfair to the devs, but I am really a bit annoyed that I had to play 10 or so hours with SA before finding this out, or I would probably have considered refunding it. All the 2.0 QoL features are added to the base game, and are almost worth the purchase price in themselves, but my disappointment is pretty deep, so it would have been a refund out of spite and not for cause. I'm actually glad to a degree that I didn't get the opportunity.

Despite the enlightened comments of "just git gud" like Rebmes', or the "complete disagreement" of Shaftoe without any arguments, I think now I most look forward to Krastorio, Bob's, Angel's, or Space Exploration to be updated to support 2.0. Their content was more engaging.

The 2.0 QoL stuff feels really good. I almost feel like I would have paid full price for that alone, until I realize that what it does is resolve long standing issues like fluid handling that has made me leave several builds behind in the path.

SA feels like the mod I would have tried once for a lark as I did with many others, but then left behind as a curiosity. I love Factorio, and will continue playing it, but I will wait for modders to come back to fix Space Age before I invest more time in it.

P.S. The graphics on the planets are so good, and the audio is fantastic as well. What happened? Did design think that playing for 10 or more hours to build a base should best be rewarded with a full stop and start again, and then once more? Sorry for the snark.

[Fharkas]

I strongly disagree.

There are some rough edges here and there, but the expansion so far has been amazing. I just settled down on Fugora after Vulcanus, but already loving it. The atmosphere, music, the different factory building challenges and even the rewards.

From what I gathered from the first post, you want to build an endgame base from the start, without the temporary limits and progression. That's all good, but the whole game don't need to change for that.

A few observations:
The "infinite" and easy resources on the new planets exists so the building up of a "massive", sustainable rocket launching capability is much more easily reached.

On Vulcanus, I can get a 4 launch platform sustaining base on one quarter of the starting flat lands and a bit of a cliff build-around.

On Fugora, soaking in the atmosphere and figuring out some mechanics took some time, otherwise I could have launched a rocket within half an hour just from local resource processing.
Admittedly, I went prepared with a new planet starter pack.

On Quality:
Stockpiling rare quality materials for lightning rods on Fugora was super easy and barely an inconvinience. Also turned out to be a great investment.
I have quality since ores, and after initial sorting, my bots take over.
This way the Nauvis base built up so much uncommon stuff while I was on Vulcanus, my standard for substations were upgraded to uncommon on Fugora.
Here, it is a bit of a pity I can't unlock Epic yet and that it's tied to Gleba.

There is no need for legendary just yet. There are items that even on Rare quality quite nice. Power armor, its components and modules for starters (reaching their next tiers capability), space platform stuff, lightning rods and accumulators on Fugora.
Even fof uncommon, a few production plants. Put Quality modules into your mall early on, then you get a usable amount of uncommon ones that are just slightly faster, but good enough when you have a lagging production line.
Oh, and beacons!
And hopefully with a bit of rework, trains, wagons, ...
Didn't bother with huge numbers, but its fun to see some rare bots whizz past the normal ones in the early game.
A good strategy to let normal production of stuff go into science packs, and filter out uncommon and rare for what you will need it for later.

With Quality, the new buildings with 50% production and many module slots shine. Discovering the EM plant was pure joy with its module, substation and solar/acc recipes!

The low space transport throughtput makes these buildings more meaningful, as you have to decide where to prioritize them... or you can just automate the whole process while you tackle some problems and have more ready, then you need.

Building on what some previous commenters said, in Space Age you don't need massive bases at first (or lower rocket requirements). You need a solid base, that works without issue for a long time and plan ahead a bit, so it produces, stockpiles and delivers what you need, when you need it.
Science packs have 1000 rocket cargo size. Calcite as well. A round trip from Vulcanus to Nauvis is more than enough to have multiple rockets ready, not to mention space platforms need time to manufacture fuel and ammo for a round trip.
My whole Nauvis base switched to Foundry setup with Vulcanus exported calcite. No issue. Fully automated.

In summary, none of the mentioned issues are really a problem and the solutions to them would just lessen the gameplay for others.


Edit:
How is the space platform utterly dull??
Also the planets each has a specific challenge and puzzle type, scratching that itch for the various players. Some enjoy one, some most and some don't. That's how it is.
The developers were quite open with their intended gameplay with the weekly FFF.