Space Age is too hard

[mrdisaster]

I have over 6.000 hours of Factorio under by belt. About 3000 hours of that are Factorio without any mods. 3000 hours are with Space Exploration.

I absolutely love Factorio 1.0 and the Space Exploration mod.

Recently I updated to Factorio 2 & Space Age.

First of all: It is still an amazing game and Wube did a fantastic job. When it comes to Space Age: I am not feeling it - and it really hurts me. I do not want to spoil so I just want to summarise my current Space Age state with that I have all technologies that you can get with the three planets.

So I spent a good amount of time with Space Age.

Here are my main issues with the game:

- I absolutely love to play without enemies. To me enemies always were just like dishes: You have to take care of them and doing so is trivial. Also in the end end game not having biters just saves to much UPS/FPS because you do not have the biters themselves but also because you can focus your production on the important aspects: Science. Space Age makes this impossible. I am using a mod that allows me to have enable peaceful mode - which I did but it only works on Nauvis (and does not on Gleba). On Gleba I just recently was attacked by a big mob of enemies which forced me to seriously upgrade my defences just so that I can continue playing... Spending hours and hours to setup the defence automation for Gleba.

- Quality modules: I fully get why they exist. Space Exploration solved the issue differently: Better beacons, better modules, better buildings etc. In principle I really like quality modules because they are more flexible and generic. However getting high quality items (which are required for many compact blueprints) is just a mega grind. Even with 6000 hours of Factorio under my belt I would not qualify myself as someone who is good at Factorio. I just really like to casually play and optimise my stuff. The main thing that I really dislike about quality modules: Getting them is absolutely not trivial. It is too hard for me. I tried to get help by using existing blueprints that give me high quality items but I do not even understand how to use those blueprints nor is it obvious to me how those blueprints work. I mean look at this blueprint here: https://www.factorio.school/view/-OBNNkKwGZfO0BX89sDo wtf? Most of the quality related blueprints look like this.

- Spoilage: I hate it. It just feels the same way biters feel... its a chore. It feels wasteful. Its just not nice producing a lot of stuff and to see it to rott away. Spoilage also made it impossible for me to experiment without feeling pressured. I guess some people just like to relax while playing. I am already getting rushed at work... I do not need that in my spare time. Gleba stressed me out. Even with Gleba blueprints things only kinda work. I guess I am just too stupid.

- Space Platforms too complicated and punish stupid players: Building a good space platform requires a PHD. With Space Exploration I was able to build my own ships with no problems. It was not trivial but at least I would build them in Orbit - I could take my time. Experimenting was almost a 0 cost. Building a space platform "just for fun" is super punishing if what you built does not work out: The cost of sending expensive stuff to build your platform into space is super high - and then your approach turn out to just not work - so you have to send your stuff back to Nauvis again and try a different approach - spending lots of time and resources just to get the things into space. It is just another thing to worry about.

- "the 5th planet issue": I have a platform design that drives all of my 4 planets. It worked perfectly - never had a loss. Then I started to fly to the 5th planet (ice world or something) and I did not look on my screen for 5 minutes and BOOOM - my platform was hit by a giant thing destroying my solar panels. Causing a loss of power. I was unable to recover from this. It was a total loss. Without any warning. Without anything I could have done to prevent it. Yes I could have paused the game while grabbing something to drink but I would never have thought that the game immediately punishes this. In space exploration things like this also happened but the situation was always recoverable. Either my abandoning ship, recovering it with a second ship etc. Factorio made me watch getting my platform including my character destroyed.


To sum it up:

Factorio is no longer a game you can play and relax. Not unless you have a 200 IQ. It turned from something fun to something that feels very much like work: You are constantly under pressure. Experimenting is punished as is not looking at your screen at all times.

I think that Wube could make it a bit more casually friendly by:

- No more spoilage on Gleba. Anything that is currently spoilable could simply be fed into a "Composter" (new building) to get the "spoiled" item: Bacteria would be turned into ores by feeding it into the Composter. etc. This gives the control back to the player.

- Replace "Eggs" with a resource that naturally occurs but make it hard to find / get to. Eg. place "Eggs" far apart on little islands. Make them transportable only by train. (player cannot carry them). Etc. This would make it possible to disable enemies on Gleba.

- Feed the Biter spawner: Replace Biter spawner with a naturally occurring building that lives but never turns into a real spawner again. It just turns into a "useless" building that can be revived somehow.

- Make asteroid mining recipes easier. I like the idea of having self sufficient platforms - so asteroid mining is a cool idea in general - its just complicated.

- Make asteroids easier to destroy… Basically a peaceful mode where asteroids have 10 hp or so.

- Allow the player to abandon ship.

- Replace quality with the way SE did this: Bigger better buildings, better modules, better beacons etc etc. This is just a lot easier to understand than an abstract thing like quality.

[vinzenz]

Hey there, thank you for your feedback! I just wanted to quickly point out that there are detailed map generation settings when starting a new game. One can configure a lot of things like resources, terrain generation, enemies, asteroid spawn rate, spoil rate, etc. You don't need a mod to play without enemies.

Screenshot from 2024-11-26 07-56-01.png (552.7 KiB) Viewed 1668 times

I often play with reduced enemy bases on nauvis to have a more relaxed start.

[NineNine]

You can also just play 2.0 without Space Age.

[DeadMG]

Space Exploration is certainly harder than Space Age in total; SA doesn't really have anything as difficult as Arcospheres, or the secret ending. Gleba is the only planet that is a real challenge the first time you face it, and even then, it was not as hard.

- As Vinzenz said, the No Enemies setting is offered which basically does the same thing as you could get in the base game, which is that you never have to engage in combat with aliens (there are still asteroids though). You still get spawners for the pentapod/biter eggs.
- Quality is not really that hard. It's basically just a byproduct loop no different to Kovarex. The blueprint you are looking at is extra complicated because it combines Quality and Fulgora Scrap, rather than being a Quality-only print, and also does it in a really complicated way. There are far easier ways to deal with Quality, and scrap, with bots (happy to detail this more if needed).
- There is no need to feel time pressure because of spoilage. Individual items have time pressure, but designing your factory doesn't need to; you can always go out and find more plants/seeds/eggs to start again, or make your design with /editor first. That being said, if you really hate it, there's a mod that removes it.
- The rockets aren't really that expensive. Especially after you have been to Vulcanus, Fulgora, or both. They are quite expensive if you try to rush to Vulcanus as soon as you can, but if you build a moderate base on Nauvis with all Nauvis sciences and use some buffers, you should be able to supply a couple hundred launches without too much trouble. When you are using offworld buildings to quadruple production or more, then it is even less of a problem. You can also spam mining productivity with Nauvis-only sciences now; I'm on mining prod 50.
- The game doesn't signpost the requirements for travelling to the new planets super well, but there are autosaves made when you launch your first journey to a new planet, so you should have a save you can load from even if you didn't manually make one. Additionally, see above, but platforms should be something that you do not consider expensive/valuable. Losing one should be a fairly minor inconvenience of either reloading autosave or building new platform.

Overall it's certainly true that the expansion is a big step up than the base game, but it's not as hard as some of the heaviest hitting 1.1 mods, and if new challenges weren't introduced, there would be no point playing it.

Considering your preferred playstyle, I'd make the following recommendations:
- Retrofit Nauvis with Foundry/EMP and maybe make it a bit bigger, think about some trains. You should be able to do like 10x your current production. If building a space platform feels painful, then make more production. Add a bunch of rocket silos, like 50-100.
- Use /editor and change your map settings to disable enemies. You can additionally kill all currently spawned enemies with it.
- Use /editor and spawn an infinity chest of seeds and Pentapod eggs on Gleba. These are the only materials you need to restart your base, so you can always just throw everything in the heating tower and start over any time you like.
- Finding blueprints online is just setting yourself up for failure later when you don't really know the core mechanics well enough. It's much more productive in the long term to just talk to somebody and figure it out, as most mechanics will come up later again. You can usually find a bunch of people on the Discord.

[territrades]

Seems to me you are so used to Factorio 1.x after thousands of hours that any change of the established makes the game difficult for you. I have much less hours, only ever completed one playthrough and a ribbon world, and I think the difficulty is fine - if not a bit lacking in the end game.

One thing I agree with you: Space Age is super punishing if you play without reloads. In 1.x I could imagine playing without reloads, but in Space Age that would be brutal. Especially when designing space platforms.

[rldml]

Hmm... the game don't feels too hard in SA, just... different...

My first time on gleba was a hard one, i needed hours to comprehend where to find seeds and how to start the needed production lines. Additionally how to get the spoiled stuff out of my production lines was a big frustrating challenge for me in the beginning (next time i will add some time to the spoilage-setting while create a new game). Now my base works mostly and i generate ~1000 Gleba-Science per 15 minutes. Fast enough for me right now.

[NGMZero]

space platforms are the most "delicate" thing in space age, any mistake and the entire platform fail which is rough (the game even auto save your first platform launch just to save our mistakes) I think they are the cause of most difficulty and headache. with out knowledge of advanced factorio mechanics they are a pain to build, and even with knowledge they feel like you are writing a mini-program with fail safe counter measures. granted after you "perfect" your first platform you can just copy paste it.

if you have no knowledge on circuit network the only way to keep things moving in space-platform is

dumb anything that you are not consuming into space, and same thing for both fulgora and gleba by dumbing them in recyclers and heat towers. (and even dumbing stone in lava in vulcanus to keep things moving)

. for some reason this idea of "

its ok to delete resources

" was un-easy to figure out for me. to the point were I was storing land fill chests in vulcanus ... just .. in .. case ...

[adam_bise]

I've been having a lot of fun with SA overall and I think so far I like Gleba the best.

[simon4096]

A thing I figured out through trial and error is that it's a very good idea to use speakers to warn you about something failing. You can make the noise global or just make it put an alert in the bottom of the screen. I never used speakers before Space Age, but now with platforms and their fiddly nature of randomly failing because of some stupid mistake, I slowly figured out that I needed to setup warnings for things that the game doesn't warn me about.

It's very easy to make a mistake and have your whole platform blow up, such as running out of ammo, running out of rocks, running out of water, running out of steam, running out of uranium... if you could just know when it happens then you'd save yourself the trouble... so warnings are extremely useful (unless you're good at the game... unlike me) and help me know when I screwed up.

I make a bunch of stupid mistakes everywhere, especially on Gleba, so I put warnings for everything that went (or might go) wrong. Recently I went to Volcanus and power on Volcanus seems hit and miss, because it's different and I'm still just experimenting. For example, if you run out of acid or don't add enough steam turbines, or run out of water, or run out of steam... the whole thing just suddenly falls apart, which is annoying and often unexpected, so I setup my power station around an acid patch and configured warnings for all the important things, and whenever I expand or something changes in the ore patch, I get a little warning.

This all adds up to making it possible to play the game without having perfect or good solutions to any of the problems. Got an acid problem? Slap down some more pumpjacks. Got a rock problem? Larger rock buffers! Got an ammo problem? More foundries! Need more quality drills? Add more recyclers! If I get warnings for stupid things, then I can just keep automating more and more things until I somehow make it. Brute force is one of those things that works extremely well in Factorio.

[MisterDoctor]

I don't think it's "fair" to compare SA to "Factorio without biters". Standard Factorio has biters, and standard SA should be harder than standard Factorio. "Easy SA" should be harder than "easy Factorio" as well actually. But there doesn't necessarily have to be a limit to just how easy you can make the game with settings; but that's not the standard game anymore.

[angramania]

Seems to me you are so used to Factorio 1.x after thousands of hours that any change of the established makes the game difficult for you. I have much less hours, only ever completed one playthrough and a ribbon world, and I think the difficulty is fine - if not a bit lacking in the end game.

Exactly. Most of complains about difficulty are from 1000+ hours players who just do not want to learn new ways. But without these new ways SA would be just another big mod. I would say that SA is too good for expansion. In most other games expansion/DLC just add several new units/buildings/items/techs, some optional tactics but do not change gameplay in general.

[Larrie]

What do you suggest for those who find it too easy and would like more difficulty. How would you suggest they balance the game to accommodate everyone all at once?

1) Gleba Defence
Artillery and a few rocket turrets in your fruit farms and it's solved

2) Quality
Quality is not necessary at any point. If you tried playing the game for yourself instead of pasting blueprints this wouldn't be an issue.

3) Spoilage
Spoilage is another mechanic, one that adds a welcome challenge for a lot of people. Just make sure you have an outlet for spoilage on each bioplant and send it all towards a heat tower or recycler.

4) Platforms
What do you find so difficult specifically? I've had fun trying to push how small I can make them for a given speed/storage but if you just want a working platform it's no more complicated than any of the early sciences. Maybe just use another blueprint.

5) "5th planet" flight
The star map in game tells you what asteroids to expect. I'm not sure the game should be balanced around people who want to AFK the first time they make a new journey?

[evandy]

. to the point were I was storing land fill chests in vulcanus ... just .. in .. case ...

The game does not make obvious that you can dump something into the lava. I wish it had a better way to make this obvious. The same way i wish there were ratio calculators or something like helmod in the base game.

[evandy]

What do you suggest for those who find it too easy and would like more difficulty.?

Sa reminds me a lot of pure bob’s, pure angel’s and just a touch of seablock. I like new challenges and am loving it.

What would i recommend for people who find it too easy? I would add restrictions to earning achievements:
* no external blueprints - start without global prints and no import
* default settings only (or at least restrict what can be changed while keeping achievements
* no map previews
* single save only - like eu4 does. No save scumming
* add a win the game without dying achievement
* add achievement for earning all achievements in a single playthrough


And etc. leave the game as is for casual players. Achievement hunters and those who like a challenge should have that option to ratchet up the difficulty

[NineNine]

What do you suggest for those who find it too easy and would like more difficulty.?

What would i recommend for people who find it too easy? I would add restrictions to earning achievements:
* no external blueprints - start without global prints and no import

I don't understand why somebody would bother playing Factorio if they're just copying and pasting somebody else's blueprints. That seems like it would be super boring.

[evandy]

It is a valid and time tested method to learn, so i am really glad the functionality is in the game. But i dont think external blueprints should be compatible with achievements. You should need to earn achievements on your own.

[Khazul]

I have over 6.000 hours of Factorio under by belt. About 3000 hours of that are Factorio without any mods. 3000 hours are with Space Exploration.

6000 hours? I have to ask and I appologise, but what were you doing? Did you go AFK a lot and I mean a helluva alot, like 5999 hours worth?
A lot of what you said just doesnt stack up for someone who has played that many hours. I get that for many, designing stuff and solving problem just isnt for them. Usually those are the folks who just want loads of guns, lots of ammo and go kill stuff, or forage or whatever. Not folks who play in peaceful mode.

...


- "the 5th planet issue": I have a platform design that drives all of my 4 planets. It worked perfectly - never had a loss. Then I started to fly to the 5th planet (ice world or something) and I did not look on my screen for 5 minutes and BOOOM - my platform was hit by a giant thing destroying my solar panels. Causing a loss of power. I was unable to recover from this. It was a total loss. Without any warning. Without anything I could have done to prevent it. Yes I could have paused the game while grabbing something to drink but I would never have thought that the game immediately punishes this. In space exploration things like this also happened but the situation was always recoverable. Either my abandoning ship, recovering it with a second ship etc. Factorio made me watch getting my platform including my character destroyed.

Yes - bigger rocks. Flooring it a little junker tends to result in splat...

To sum it up:

Factorio is no longer a game you can play and relax. Not unless you have a 200 IQ. It turned from something fun to something that feels very much like work: You are constantly under pressure. Experimenting is punished as is not looking at your screen at all times.

I think that Wube could make it a bit more casually friendly by:

- No more spoilage on Gleba. Anything that is currently spoilable could simply be fed into a "Composter" (new building) to get the "spoiled" item: Bacteria would be turned into ores by feeding it into the Composter. etc. This gives the control back to the player.

- Replace "Eggs" with a resource that naturally occurs but make it hard to find / get to. Eg. place "Eggs" far apart on little islands. Make them transportable only by train. (player cannot carry them). Etc. This would make it possible to disable enemies on Gleba.

- Feed the Biter spawner: Replace Biter spawner with a naturally occurring building that lives but never turns into a real spawner again. It just turns into a "useless" building that can be revived somehow.

- Make asteroid mining recipes easier. I like the idea of having self sufficient platforms - so asteroid mining is a cool idea in general - its just complicated.

- Make asteroids easier to destroy… Basically a peaceful mode where asteroids have 10 hp or so.

- Allow the player to abandon ship.

- Replace quality with the way SE did this: Bigger better buildings, better modules, better beacons etc etc. This is just a lot easier to understand than an abstract thing like quality.

Yes there are some point that are frustrating until you know what is going on, but if paying attention, then nothing is really that challenging to deal with in a minimal way even if you first tries may fail, but try, try again and learn along the way.

Spoilage seems kind of the point of Gleba. Yes it is a pain if you approach it with the same build mindset that works for Nauvis, but for many It might be the first time they have been compelled to make heavy use of more adavanced game features and build approaches and think about their designs a bit more and I particulary not always doing the brute force approach of arrays of fully beacons stuff with fully compressed belts everywhere as that is going to fail badly on Gleba. In the end Gleba aint hard. It just will trip most up a bit to start with until they figure it our or watch a video or whatever.

Eggs (pentapod and biter) seem just fine as they are. I would like some features elsewhere in the game to better support the handling of them, but the buildings seem fine with just enough circuit control on them (but couild do with some better circuit control elsewhere to handle them better overall).

I am struggling to see how the biter spawner could actually be made any easier to use. Resource in (food), wait, eggs out. Pretty much like any other machine.

By asteroid mining recipes, I take it you are struggling with dealing with the multi-output recipes? For one, only use them if absolutely needed. Second, the dumb way to deal with them is overflow splitters to shovel the excess overboard. Many much better options exist as well to get to the point where what you throw away ends up being no more than what cannot be use but has to be produced to not clog it. Yes - that will need some circuits.

Asteroids are just fine. Maybe using the wrong kind of ammo. Maybe you never looked inside a turret to realise you can set what they shoot at now? Or actually it just sounds like you headed off to aqilo, floored it with nothing more than a few underfed gatlings. Yep - 'splat' will be the result of that.

Why abandon ship~? Oh - I get it you were on board when it went splat? Well you get respawned somewhere (not died on board so not sure where, but I guess at Nauvis spawn point?). Either way, what would abandoning ship actually do, or more specifically where should it place you? It needs to be on a surface somewhere (planet or platform). Think of ship that goes splat while onboard as 'assisted abandoning ship'

As for quality - you do get some bigger 'better' (by some definitions) buildings,. but that isnt quality, it is progression. You mentioned elsewhere about complex blueprints for quality. IMHO the quality side of things needs some more work in terms of how it is handled in blueprint (parameters specifically), but the premise of it seem just fine as is. Building could do with an accept any quality that is the same or better as the recipe quality. To often I have had high quality items in vast number that i will never use, because I cant feed them into a lower quality machine to be treated as if they were lower quality. Other than that, it has resulted in a bunch of new designs, so all good. Just annoying that I cant (or at least didnt see a way) to take an existing blueprint and set a parameter to adjust ALL recipes , filters etc in it to an higher quality relative the the current base quality and really this was the most painful aspect having to manually click over and over and over on every little thing to adjust its quality. Make work. I also think there are some machines that need quality effect improvement or even a quality effect adding.

If you do want to know how to do stuff, maybe watch some videos. Otherwise, I guess back to mods.

While I have absolutely no idea how you build on Nauvis, I have seem some common threads from posts in discord - people rushing into space with poor infrastructure on Nauvis that cant support them adequately in terms of supplies and they get stuck/frustrated because getting going on another planet than seem really hard because they are trying to do it from nothing each time. The other is some crappy little ship (that I am surprised moves at all for more than 30 seconds) to transport stuff around that just cant fit much in (no cargo bays), so the concept of bring the bits for a starter base and even starting on a new planet with any preparation whatsoever seems to be completely lost on them. Yes- some folks do this deliberately, but they tend to just suck it up and roll with it because well that was the point...

[Tertius]

I don't understand why somebody would bother playing Factorio if they're just copying and pasting somebody else's blueprints. That seems like it would be super boring.

For quite some people, building and using stuff and watching things running is fun, but designing things are not. They let other people design and do the building themselves. As long as it's fun for everyone involved, every play style is valid.

Playing this way has completely different challenges. You need to find blueprints, you need to find out if they are actually working, and you need to find a way to include these blueprints into your factory. They're all blackboxes for you, and you never know how good or bad they are. Since you have a lower understanding of the game mechanics, that's usually quite a challenge on its own.