0.17 normal settings too easy?

[Jan11]

I know there are settings with higher difficulties . And I will play them (I played them before too) but with 0.17 I played a game with normal settings again.

There was no difficult at all. Maybe one, to reach the oil without lasers.

I mean I can get everything in the tech tree without problems. I can`t remember that I reached nuclear power, and lasers so easily. In 0.16 I had to expand far away to get enough resources for black and blue science but now I can sit at my starting position. I have to expand only once to one additional ressource field from each kind to win the game.

Vanilla with normal setting was okay in 0.16, but with all new changes in 0.17 it is a way too easy.

[Koub]

The default game settings can't be fine tuned precisely for your needs. Other people find default settings hard enough, or maybe even too hard.
If you're such an elite player, there are vanilla ways to make your experience slightly harder, like a marathon deathworld with the smallest starting area possible.
And if that's even too easy for you, you still can tweak advanced map settings for even more extreme experience.
And all that without even needing mods.
However, the discussion is open, anyone can express one's opinion
[Koub] Moving to Balancing

[bobucles]

Default settings can throw you in a desert or it can throw you in a forest. It's 50/50, either you hit easy mode or you don't.

[orzelek]

When I played with vanilla map gen and compared it to RSO. One thing I noticed was that while starting area patches were actually smaller then what RSO creates then first patches out of starting area were much larger. Richness scaling with distance might need looking at.

[nafira]

Default settings can throw you in a desert or it can throw you in a forest. It's 50/50, either you hit easy mode or you don't.

Agree.
I started in a desert map with coal far from any water point, and I struggle at mid game (I'm just starting blue).

A thing I noticed was that scaling with distance of patches is ... weird. my 3 first spot of Copper and Iron are like 500k, and the next "close" patch is ... 7.2M !!!
But I need to secure the area and get there by train.


I think that 0.17 is easy if you have no bitters to take care of thank to grass and trees + good starting area. But in other setups, it's quite hard because desert is very present.

[hypertrax99]

try it with more enemies like this, i have fun with these worms

20190308140153_1.jpg (356.47 KiB) Viewed 5247 times

[BlueTemplar]

You can't achieve that just using the sliders, can you ?

Default settings can throw you in a desert or it can throw you in a forest. It's 50/50, either you hit easy mode or you don't.

I landed RIGHT between the two !

(default Deathworld)

Don't know if the map generator has been tweaked for this situation to happen more often than it would be at random, would be very cool if it did !

Also, pollution spread over desert has been brought closer to the one over grass.

[Skev]

The default game settings can't be fine tuned precisely for your needs. Other people find default settings hard enough, or maybe even too hard.
[Koub] Moving to Balancing

No, it's TOO easy. Not just too easy for some people, the default difficulty is broken to the game's detriment, and it's significantly worse in 0.17. A new player that randomly happens to start in a forested area could play for a LONG time without either getting attacked significantly or having to expand any reasonable distance, resulting in that player researching technology after technology that is apparently totally useless. Hell, they could launch their first rocket without even needing a train or building 1 piece of wall. This isn't an optimal new player experience!

I'm currently playing with 1/8th of standard resources, with 8x research costs and 4x time factor for evolution. That's not bragging, that's just a comment on how ridiculous the defaults are. The game badly needs a default that isn't so insanely generous with how far you have to reach for resources in order to research to end-game tech, and tweaks to improve consistency of how many aliens you'll have to face in desert vs forest starts.

[Koub]

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=67829

[steinio]

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=67829

Does not exist... :/

[bobucles]

Saying the difficulty is "broken" is a bit harsh. There is a very big learning curve as players get used to the idea of belts, inserters and assemblers. No one mastered factorio on their first day, after all. Beyond that point is learning how to spaghetti a factory, and getting good at it while fending off biters.

The biggest swing in difficulty is the presence of forests. Anything that absorbs pollution reduces enemy attack difficulty, and a forest can make land many times more effective at absorbing pollution. So I think there is a big swing in what players experience for difficulty. If they have dry desert lands with few trees, the difficulty seems very high. On the other hand a map with thick forests may seem very easy.

Enemy attacks only get stronger as players get more proficient at building factories. A player who produces a lot of pollution will not have it all absorbed, while a player who produces very little may have it all absorbed. The difference in pollution levels will create a greater difficulty for the more skilled player.

[Koub]

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=67829

Does not exist... :/

Sorry, this was me trolling myself ... After the search function was fixed, I started to do some merging ... This is the resulting topic :

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=67249