Making things challenging

[axefrog]

In my latest game I decided I've learned enough and that playing on standard settings is kind of pointless, a bit like Minecraft. If all you want to do is build things for the hell of it, more power to you. I like a challenge however- something to struggle against and triumph over.

I set the game to have very sparse (but rich) resources and a high enemy base count and as a result I've had a very challenging game so far. A screenshot of my map is below. I got lucky in that I found a path to some copper that had just enough space between bases that I could establish an early flow of copper without being attacked too much, but as I've grown my base, the attacks have grown so frequent that probably 80-90% of the time (if not more) I have 1-3 waves of attacks hitting my base from various directions. Before I got laser towers, I was at a point where it was very dangerous to even visit my copper mining/smelting operation because my mere presence caused the biter attacks in that area to amplify to a point where they were overwhelming my factory's ability to resupply turrets with bullets. Now that I have laser towers, most of my vast arrays of gun turrets have been replaced with lasers, and they are a hell of a lot more effective, but now I have the issue that with so many laser towers, and so many attacks, I'm having to massively increase my ability generate and store electricity because my base is constantly going on the blink as huge laser arrays drain my power reserves while defending against attacks. Another thing is I've had to focus a lot more on trying to work within limited space while building up to higher research levels, whereas in the past I'd pretty much use as much space as I want to get things laid out neatly. Now neatness is very much put aside in favour of literally just staying alive and keeping my base in one piece while not stagnating on the research front.

Overall, I'm quite happy with how this game is playing out. In a future game I would probably lower the richness level of resources - right now I've noticed that having chosen "very high" resource richness, even though I've been mining my small patches for the entire game, they are still in no danger of running out, which lessens my need to optimise the way I use resources, and my need to start seeking out new resources sooner rather than later. It has become apparent that I can probably wipe out all of the enemy bases in range of my pollution areas and still not run out of resources. I may also try changing enemy bases from high to very high in a future game, though I have no idea if that would make things too hard.

[n9103]

Be careful of the highest and largest settings, both for biters and for resources.
Either one can unbalance the game, and make it too hard/easy to really be fun anymore.

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

that amount of oil will last you till rocket defence, wowzer.

If you want to mix things up a bit, try lowering oil to the point you need to set up a train network to go get some.

[ssilk]

moved from general

[Xecutor]

I tried something like this and I've found it more boring than challenging.
Try to set very high terrain segmentation and big water size with everything else on default.
That's where compact designs shine and your huge OCD-friendly layouts crumble

[User_Name]

Try RSO mod. It makes ore patches that are further from your base more rich. Makes them very sparse too, forcing you to explore and use trains.

[Boogieman14]

Check https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=8&t=5959 for an example of "Very high" nest settings. I'll have to echo Xecutor's remark though, it very quickly turned into rather boring turret creep for every tile of expansion.

[axefrog]

Thanks for the comments, guys. I'll have to check out the RSO mod. I'm a bit wary of mods adding ugly graphics to the game, but RSO doesn't do that, so why not?

[OBAMA MCLAMA]

Rso is a very fun mod, but tweak the config.lua to your desire. To some people there are not enough biters, but most of the time I think that is just thr luck of the draw on.map generation.