I am loving marathon mode in 0.15

[iceman_1212]

I have ~15 hours into my marathon game (i.e., eat, sleep, work, factorio) and I'm liking the pace. It makes for a much richer gameplay experience working up to the stage where you have thousands of speed 3 / prod 3 (which I'm nowhere close to). The higher cost recipes of key intermediates is also a good thing imo as it requires more gradual scaling of a factory.

Others initial impressions?

[Engimage]

I am loving it too. The increased cost on initial intermediates such as Iron Gears, Green Circuits, Steel - make the game much more decision based. You actually consider using yellow belts as opposed to red ones due to enormous cost of the last compared to the first (nearly 10 times more iron) and that means much.
And the slow research makes you actually play through the low tiers of science feeling them before you advance.
New recipes for red/green circuits made me think of the new design for them which is awesome. I am very pleased to see how every intermediate you produce is feeling more valuable and important.

In other words - a must have experience for every factorian!

[hoho]

I absolutely love it. Currently running railworld with marathon + 4x science cost and it's great.

[aober93]

Hmm i thought it was bugged, because when i tried running marathon with increased research cost, the recipe for research was unchanged. The recipes for a few items went up but didnt scale with the multiplier. Maybe it was fixed hm

[Tev]

Hmm i thought it was bugged, because when i tried running marathon with increased research cost, the recipe for research was unchanged. The recipes for a few items went up but didnt scale with the multiplier. Maybe it was fixed hm

Research cost is now correctly multiplied, dunno if it was ever bugged. Only a few recipes are changed of course, it is sufficient to alter the game drastically.

However it still doesn't match the difficulty and slow pace of the original Marathon mod, which is a shame for player like me but I understand few players would enjoy such crazy challenge - on normal settings in marathon save from 0.12/0.13/0.14 I lauched just ~100 rockets in 200hours, and besides full research I did not really waste resources . . .
For marathoners there's still death world which I'm trying at the moment. One thing is nice right from the start - finally no mods are needed for truly great factorio experience Thanks devs!

[aober93]

Well i started marathon with like 1000 multiplier. Only the gear is up from 2 to 4 iron.

Science 1 is still 1 copper, 1 gear.

The gears should be taking like 2000 iron or not???

WHat is it if not bugged?

Edit, ahh since i upped the multiplier like that, i noticed the technologies are increased from the tech screen not the recipes. And the default multiplier for "expensive" is 1 which doesnt make it expensive at all.
So the selector is not working, the multiplier is, and it does only increase tech.

[iceman_1212]

Tech multiplier was 4 for me, when selecting marathon mode.

[evopwr]

Yes, I'm loving Marathon mode as well. I just used the default Marathon option, no changes.
I've already got all 38 steam achievements, so the only thing I was interested in, was experiencing all the new content and changes, so Marathon mode seemed the perfect choice to really experience all of this.
I haven't got too far as of yet, probably similar progress as you. I've got a good automated supply of Military Science Packs going, and almost finished automating Science 3 - so still quite early on.
I can already see resources are going to be a constant challenge building new outposts everywhere.
Lovin it

[Neemys]

Some people here seem to misunderstand something :

In Recipe/technology part of the map generator :

- Recipe difficulty only change those recipes, it have nothing to do directly in research.

- Technology difficulty : Is intended to have a different technology tree and harder research (more research, change in bottle requirement, etc) but is is NOT implemented in vanilla. Mod can still read this value to change their tree accordingly.

- Technology price multiplier : Multiply all bottle needed for each research by the number entered. Technology is longer, but not harder.


Each three setting can be chosen independently. You can play with normal technology tree and recipe but 10 time longer research.

[aober93]

Ahh interesting, thanks! Now it makes sense. That one setting that doesnt work had me mislead.

[Tev]

So far deathworld setting seems to be adequate replacement for marathon mod - production seems much easier, but pressure from biters and slow expansion makes things difficult. Just made coal liqef. which seemingly stabilizes my situation, we'll see.

Notable is ridiculous strength of tank now. It was strong in midgame before, now it crushes everything with ease. +100% bonus to bullets is awesome, with grenades you still don't need shells (yet; ~70% evo).