Factorio Forums

Hello Factorio Forums!

So I have spent about 111 hours in this game so far trying to find the ideal difficulty, and I have finally found something to my liking, so I thought I would share my methods for those interested. The idea is to be as close to the vanilla experience as possible but also to significantly increase the difficulty and longevity of the game.

I will update this post to reflect my current opinion on the exact settings (and how to change things yourself) as this may well evolve with further experience (warning: many edits!)

(Also see the latest FFF about difficulty settings!)

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Step 1 - Install the mod attached to this post to increase all science costs (including time) by 4

Simply copy/paste the zip file into your \AppData\Roaming\Factorio\mods folder, and then enable it in the Mods section from the main menu of Factorio. Credit to Expensive Science for the original mod which I then edited down to be nice and simple for my purposes.

You can edit this fairly easily if a 4x multiplier is too much or too little. Simply unzip, edit the .lua file in notepad and then re-zip (right-click -> send to -> compressed zip). It is also possible to increase time required independently of the cost increase. I made some comments in the .lua file about how to do this. I originally tried this setting at x10 and x5 and found it to be a tad excessive.

Optional but highly recommended in this step is to also install Research Revolution, which adds the science overhaul changes coming up in the next version of Factorio, which in particular adds more expensive high level science.

Further and even more optional to this is The Free Energy Promise, which gives alien artifacts a fuel value of 50 MJ (compared to the 8 MJ of a piece of coal), mentioned only because with the science overhaul changes alien artifacts cease to have a use in science or crafting for that matter and I found this solution to be the most balanced, at least pending the official Factorio 0.15 changes.

Step 2 - Map Generation Settings

Water: Normal | Small
Iron ore: High | Small | Very Good
Copper ore: Normal | Small | Very Good
Stone: Very High | Very Small | Regular
Coal: Very High | Very Small | Regular
Crude oil: Very High | Very Small | Regular
Enemy bases: Very High | Very Small | Regular
Starting area: Very Small

The idea here is to spread small patches of rich resources over relatively large distances, separated by frequent small clusters of alien bases (which get much bigger as you explore further for more resources), which rewards expansion with higher resource throughput and encourages the use of trains for distant large scale mining as well as promoting territorial compromise and ongoing military engagement where complete annihilation of the aliens in the pollution cloud surrounding your territory is otherwise too easy or too difficult.

Generally, you should find these settings result in slightly more iron than copper and about half as much stone and coal, with small groups of 1-3 oil patches scattered around. The slightly higher amounts of iron vs copper vs stone and coal is to ensure a certain minimum amount of the primary raw material of any standard factory and also helps to make seeking out the other less useful minerals somewhat more relevant. In other words, you should find resources in roughly the same ratios you use them in. The oil changes are simply to keep it more uniform and less random, bearing in mind it doesn't run out the way the other resources do.

Step 3 - Restart until you get at as few trees as possible (eg. desert biome), one decent patch of each ore and no (or few) visible oil

It may take a few restarts (average 5-10) but the lack of trees means that pollution spreads significantly further from the start of the game, which often results in a lot of alien activity in the early game. Having to find and/or fight for oil also means you can't just stay in your base until you have laser turrets and modular armor, which is also very important.

Step 4 - Increase alien aggression and evolution from pollution by 4

Press the console button (tilde ~) and enter the following commands:

/c game.map_settings.enemy_evolution.pollution_factor = game.map_settings.enemy_evolution.pollution_factor * 4
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.max_expansion_cooldown = game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.max_expansion_cooldown / 4 (default 60 minutes)
/c game.map_settings.enemy_expansion.min_player_base_distance = -1 (default 3)

These are probably the most important changes of all, without which the rest of the above become more of a novelty. Firstly, the aliens can now expand close enough to you that player presence is not required to trigger ongoing attacks, which is made even more dangerous by increasing their rate of expansion. This also requires you to kill more alien bases, further increasing their evolution speed, which tends to be the most important factor in terms of difficulty.

With these change and the lower resources in effect you will have to pay careful attention to pollution output and focus much more on efficient base design and effective use of resources. Falling back on brute force mass production and alien destruction will result in rapid alien evolution, and you will have very little hope of even reaching rocket silo technology before running out of resources or being overwhelmed by alien attacks.

As a side note, the pollution evolution increase also means efficiency modules gain some viability compared to the more standard choice of speed and/or production.

Step 5 - Losing is fun

Hopefully this speaks for itself!

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Feel free to post feedback, results of your attempts or request help with tweaking mods or other settings.

Good luck. You will need it!

Addendum

Further optional mods to increase/offset late-game difficulty:

Long Range Turret (be aware this makes turret creeping more effective)
Klonan's Military Research 5 (adds another tier of magazine/shotgun/rocket ammo)
Klonan's Bergius Process (makes coal a viable alternative to oil, requires oil to get started)
Space Extension Mod (massively increases end-game research costs)

Addendum #2

Having now completed this challenge, I was brainstorming ways to make it harder, and specifically to require/motivate the player to build bigger. The first iteration of my solution to this, which I have since found a better replacement for, involved multiplying the cost of rocket silo technology by x100 (instead of x4). You can download this version of the mod here.

The second iteration of my attempt to make the end-game significantly harder comes in the form of the Space Extension Mod.

I'm also planning on installing the Rampant AI mod when my evolution factor hits 100 (it's at 97).



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Cheers,

Schismatise