Factorio Forums

(I couldn't find a generic feedback forum, so move this if it's not in the right place.)


We've been duoing the expansion together and have done the first three new planets. Haven't gotten to the ice one yet. Our thoughts are thus, in order of visited planet:

If you're just interested in space age stuff, the nauvis stuff takes a really really long time. I know mods give the option for faster starts, but it still stuck out that we weren't playing new stuff for quite some time.

We went to volcanus first and it ended up being a very good idea. The new techs were extremely useful, reaching the planet was easier than the other two, and setting up a base took no time. The volcanus worm bosses are cool but it's boring to only have 1 enemy type. Maybe a few more boss enemies? Anyway we had fun here and were excited for the next planets, hoping they would be as good.

Fulgora was kinda disappointing. The lightning barely tickled so we just ignored it when exploring. We were disappointed that there were literally no other threats; we were expecting nasty lighting strikes and maybe some enemies. Nope... just endless sand and iron gears. The recyclers were cool and going "backwards" through the item production chain was a great idea that's executed mostly okay. Logistic bots are overpowered to solve the issues. Voiding items with recyclers is silly.

Gleba sucks. The spoilage mechanic is a cool innovation but feels executed really, really badly. We were basically just lost for a few hours, trying to harvest and process some trees, but mostly just ended up with spaghetti belts to remove spoilage and horrible throughput. Eventually we just dumped belts and used logistic bots (again...) to solve everything. And even when you're able to produce everything, the production lines seem... shallow? You make everything with two tree types and never need to expand your base. Unlike fulgora there were, in fact, enemies, but we were again disappointed since there were so few of them and they're lacking in any sort of variety. We were expecting monsters to be popping out left and right but we just got some spider things that died instantly to anything. Having spoiling eggs pop out enemies was pretty hilarious but if you ran out then you had to go manually harvest some more eggs from enemy bases which sucks. Long after we'd been sending science back to nauvis we hit medium evolution and a spider crab thing tore through our base when previously they were stomped underfoot by a stiff breeze.

Space platforms are pretty cool. They're not very conducive to coop play though since the strict requirements means you can't make individual parts separately and then stick them together later, like we usually do with the rest of our factory. One of us would be fiddling with a new design for a few hours and barely interact with the other player. Overall the puzzles they provide are interesting though. We were a bit... overwhelmed with how soft the sci fi was. I know factorio isn't super duper realistic but it usually gets things like measurements right. Instead we have planets merely 100,000 km away from each other (note: the moon is ~380,000 km from earth), asteroid belts filled with more rocks than star wars episode 5, and (one of the most heinous of crimes) drag in space. Unless you're going like 80% of the speed of light, the drag from the occasional hydrogen atom in space is not a factor. Also we had to be told out of game that the ship's width is an important factor for drag too. We can accept the dense asteroids as a video game contrivance but the other stuff seems like it'd be easy to fix with just changing some numbers. Thruster efficiency is prominently displayed but not very important... if instead of drag we had to slow down to not overshoot a planet, that would make for more interesting puzzles when maximizing travel speed, and be less pet peeve triggering for us.


Anyway that's our feedback ramble. The tl;dr would be: volcanus good, fulgora meh, gleba bad, space platforms sillier than they need to be. We'll be heading to the ice planet next, once one of us takes a few hours to sit down and design a new ship.

If I think of the new planets as just other planets orbiting the same Sun as Nauvis, then it makes more sense to me.

I agree the drag in space is really weird.

I have to justify it to myself by thinking about the constant turret shooting in the opposite direction.

Okay so we got the "you win!" message after reaching the solar system edge, so I guess that mean's we've completed the expansion. We're not gonna bother to go to the shattered planet thing together, though I might do so solo.


Aquilo: Pretty great actually. A bit overwhelming at first with all the things you have to juggle, but once you get the hang of it it's a nice complication that makes for different designs than usual. Ice platforms take too long to make; we spent the first few hours trying to economize on space before saying screw it and put all our efforts into getting ice platforms to post scarcity. Having to build a line of like 30 ice platform producers before you can do anything else kinda sucks. Construction bots seem to get confused by the multiple ground tiles; I frequently had deadlocks where all my personal construction bots were hovering over a spot waiting for another bot to finish the ice platform or concrete, but they were tied up waiting for something else. I could only break the deadlock by placing ground tiles manually. Heat pipes are great; they remind me of a self imposed challenge I did a while back to use burner buildings exclusively, which resulted in fuel lines that mechanically are very similar to heat pipes on aquilo.

Quality's current implementation sucks. Having separate recipes for separate qualities and not allowing items of different qualities to be used together was a bit of a shock and disappointment. It's needlessly convoluted when you could've just allowed any quality inputs and the output to be determined by the ingredient quality + quality modules on the building.

Final thoughts on space platforms: asteroids are too predictable. Maybe further out they could get their own quality levels? Regardless, having the exact same amount of health on every asteroid of the same type makes for very noticeable breakpoints. Getting the explosive damage research high enough to go from killing a big asteroid in 3 rockets to 2 rockets is huge. Railguns one shot everything and it makes you wonder why the infinite damage research exists instead of just stopping when huge promethium asteroids would be one shot.

tldr: aquilo ice platforms take too long to make but aquilo's otherwise pretty great, quality shouldn't have different recipes for each quality level, and asteroids could use health variance.

Anyway we had fun and it was certainly worth the price tag. Thumbs up.