what settings are you going to play when the expansion is released?

[Cerberus]

Hello everyone. I just finished Factorio for the second time. This time on deathworld settings.
I had to restart a few times. The first few times I kept getting overwhelmed very early in the game (desert map). Then there was a time I couldn't even start basebuilding because there was a large base of biters right ON my starting area coal patch. No idea how I could have done that even, the pistol is not so great and you start with low ammo. Then the final time it was a green, lush forest map, and then it was actually ridiculously easy to beat the game once I got my base surrounded by turrets (but until then I had to reload my autosaves a few times, and abusing the fact I know in advance where they will attack from). The forests ate all my polution so it only reached the biters further away when I already got flamethrowing turrets set up, and lots of cliffs and water giving me some natural choke points for easy base defending. So apparently there is a HUGE difference in difficulty depending on where you start (desert or green) and how the lay-out is of the starting area (biter bases or not, patches close or not, good lay-out of cliffs and water).

Then I started wondering. What settings will I play on when the expansion is released? Standard settings might be too easy, but deathworld might be too hard if I have bad luck with the starting area. Especially since we will not know what is coming higher in the tech tree and what new aliens we are going to be up against (contrary to the deathworld playthrough I just did). Probably will need to use manual settings, for example use the faster evolution settings of deathworld but still use the increased starting area of normal settings which seems more fair to me.

And what about you? What settings do you normally play on now and are you going to do it differently for the expansion? And why? Thought it would be fun to talk a bit about that and give each other ideas even if me might now know 100% if there will be new difficulty settings once the expansion is released.

[aka13]

I have specifically started a dw marathon playthrough 500 game-hours ago. Since 1.2 is supposed to be for vanilla as well, and the expansion is considered "a game on top of the game" I have high hopes that the expansion will target end-game content, and that I will continue that save.

[Cerberus]

While it might be possible to use a previous save, I will not do that, since I suspect it will affect gameplay enormeously. We saw a new alien in concept art. When is this alien supposed to appear? If you use an old savegame, you have your (mega)base set up already by the time they come, so you give yourself an unfair advantage. I will definitely just start a new game.

[Tertius]

I usually play with the default settings, or with peaceful enemies, or without enemies. My interest is not growing a factory while biters try to destroy it, but to grow a perfect factory. And since you're never able to do anything perfect, this is a truly never ending challenge.
I play with biters only, because there are quite a few recipes and buildings that make only sense if there are enemies, and I don't want to ignore a quarter of all the items the game has to offer. And a small brawl here and there is quite entertaining.

Should the expansion be released, I will probably start a new map to see all changes and additions right from the start. And to avoid any migration/compatibility issues with old saves. I guess, there will be small things that change the gameplay in a way that current factories could be rebuilt in different, hopefully more efficient ways, so continuing with an old save makes no sense if it comes to my personal goals.

[mmmPI]

I will play with any new settings that is implemented so far we have Railworld, Islands , Ribbon and their Marathon, Deathworld, or Peaceful variation.

I like railworld because of train and because there is no ennemy expansion, otherwise i play peaceful or without biters to only focus on building over-engineered design.

I wouldn't want to miss the new ennemies given the concept art that was shown, so maybe my first game would be a railword with a few biters if there is no new scenario/mode.

Or maybe just default settings, can't go wrong with those , and only later alter them to adress any particular desire.

[astroshak]

I tend to turn resources up a bit (maybe more, maybe less than Rail World size/richness), but I turn the frequency to the bare minimum of 17%. I’d love to be able to reduce that a bit personally, as I feel that resource patches are still a little too close together at that setting. I always max out water settings, and play with default biter settings (including expansion being on).

I will play the expansion the same way unless something about it convinces me to change.

[pointa2b]

I prefer a railworld/deathworld hybrid with lowest frequency, and large size/richness. This is what I'm doing currently with K2/SE and its brutally fun. But the first time the expansion loads on my PC... I'm going straight to redmew or some high pop vanilla server to experience it with other people. This is what I've done with all of the major content updates over the years and it sortof turned into a tradition pre-v1.0.

[ColonelSandersLite]

I prefer a railworld/deathworld hybrid with lowest frequency, and large size/richness.

This is what I usually like too. Sometimes I'll tune the terrain settings a bit if I'm in the mood for something specific. If I'm after a more relaxed game or I want to build really big, I'll combine railworld with normal biter settings (i.e. re-enabling expansion and the like) instead of deathworld. The reason for that with a big build is mostly because I don't want to end up just having to disable them to continue or at least put it off for as long as possible.

[Eternal]

Default settings, infinity chest to get max QOL armor and nuclear bots for my engineer...
Mapwise , i will go for more green and few deserts, always neat to have refineries in deserts

[Cerberus]

Turned out I played death world, but set the starting area to 100% instead of 75%.

Probably will need to use manual settings, for example use the faster evolution settings of deathworld but still use the increased starting area of normal settings which seems more fair to me.

Exactly this To avoid a biter base on my starting resource patch.

Don't regret it, the challenge was just perfect. Died a lot in the beginning at Nauvis but always managed to rebuild after respawning. Especially Gleba was not easy and required me to reload my first-trip-to-gleba autosave a few times to start again because pentapod evolution and expansion outpaced me figuring out how to tackle spoilage.

[red_spiderrr]

Congrats on beating Deathworld! That’s no small feat, even with some autosave help. It’s interesting how much the starting area can swing the difficulty—forest maps feel like a blessing compared to deserts where biters swarm you early. I like your idea of tweaking settings for a balanced challenge; combining faster evolution with a larger starting area sounds like a good middle ground.

For the expansion, I’m leaning toward experimenting with custom settings too—maybe something like default evolution but with higher enemy density to see how the new tech and aliens handle. It’s always fun to mix it up! Looking forward to seeing what others are planning.

[Cerberus]

Thank you. Technically I did not beat Space Age yet as I still need to build my victory spaceship, but that is unrelated to death world as there are no enemies in space The part of Space Age where death world is relevant is beaten though My evolution factor is nearly 1 already and my base keeps holding, with my artillery fire covering more space than my pollution cloud.

Deserts are indeed deadly for death world. I think for a next playthrough I will attempt a combination of death world and railworld like others have recommended in this thread. And keep loading a new seed at worldgen until my starting biome is a desert I would try deathworld marathon but that got nerfed apparently as expensive recipes got removed. So it does not feel "real"

Good luck with your Space Age playthrough! Make sure not to put any setting one asier than "standard" to not lose achievements and you are set to go

[adam_bise]

Pfft deathworld in SA is kind of meaningless.

Nauvis biters were already way too weak and deathworld doesn't do much there. You have to tweak every aspect of them for any real challenge, but many of these tweaks don't play well together. Like starting area size determining the distance between nests for the rest of the map, or nest size affecting how closely they will build to your base. Huge nests are great, but then they never expand close enough to your rails to attack your trains, which would be ignored anyway on elevated rails. Mech Warrior armor you can just float over water, trees, and cliffs and they literally can't even get to you. Best I've done is tweaking pollution absorbtion rates, diffusion rate, and cost for attacks, but still can't manage to get steamrolled if I have even the most rudimentary line of flamethrower turrets.

So pretty much Nauvis enemies are even easier now. We got new stronger weapons, for what? rocks I guess? There are no enemies at all on 2 of the new planets. Vulcanus does have the demos, but those are one time battles.. Deathworld means absolutely nothing in Space, Fulgora, Vulcanus, or Aquilo..

Enemies don't seem to be a part of the Factorio direction anymore. Despite them being featured on half of the opening scenes, having their own science tree, own tab in map settings, and a huge list of items...

[Cerberus]

The biggest challenge of death world (or any setting with biters for that matter) has always been the beginning. Once you set up a perimeter that is automated (turrets + bots) you are already 80% there, and once you have flamethrowers you are 95% there. The final 5% is artillery for clearing out bases for you making your own expansion easier. Space Age does not change that, except lock the final 5% behind a planet.
But the other planets could be seen as "part of your inner base" (the safe part in your walls), so Space Age does not really change the difficulty much I think for death world. Because as soon as you go to space, you are already far enough in your tech tree to keep your base sustainably safe, also if it was regular 2.0 or 1.0 for that matter because you have bots and flamethrowers.

What do you mean starting area influences determines the spacing between bases for the rest of the map? Really?

"The starting area is the an almost circular radius around the spawn point that does not contain enemy bases. Increasing its size pushes the bases further out, decreasing its size generates enemy bases closer to the spawn point. The size setting does not have any other effects."

Is what I found. I only did it because I had once a huge biter nest on one of my starting resource patches, and with only a pistol I can not solve that problem, which I saw as unfair.
I have no idea the rest of the map is influenced?

I can live with Fulgora being devoid of enemies, but Vulcanus could have used some more challenge I agree. Beating the small demolishers is ridiculously easy, and then you have access to huge resource patches. I think some mechanic where they would come to your base triggered by pollution or similar mechanic would be more thrilling, forcing you to use the green modules for pollution reasons rather than electricity reasons, until you have access to rocket launchers for the smaller demolishers and railguns for the big ones.
I assume they toyed with such idea during development but didn't for their own reasons (too complcated to get right, too frustrating to lose your Vulcanus base completely if a large pollution cloud catches you off guard because by coincidence all your machines activate at once, ...) but £I haven't read the FFF yet about them since I avoided enemy and planetary FFF's for spoilers. Will do later

But demolishers attacking your base and being so strong they could invade a quarter of yuor base before dying could have been a cool mechanic (as in, can your base auto repair? Were you smart enough to put reserves of all necessary components of your base spread out in buffer chests?)

[adam_bise]

The biggest challenge of death world (or any setting with biters for that matter) has always been the beginning. Once you set up a perimeter that is automated (turrets + bots) you are already 80% there, and once you have flamethrowers you are 95% there. The final 5% is artillery for clearing out bases for you making your own expansion easier. Space Age does not change that, except lock the final 5% behind a planet.
But the other planets could be seen as "part of your inner base" (the safe part in your walls), so Space Age does not really change the difficulty much I think for death world. Because as soon as you go to space, you are already far enough in your tech tree to keep your base sustainably safe, also if it was regular 2.0 or 1.0 for that matter because you have bots and flamethrowers.

What do you mean starting area influences determines the spacing between bases for the rest of the map? Really?

"The starting area is the an almost circular radius around the spawn point that does not contain enemy bases. Increasing its size pushes the bases further out, decreasing its size generates enemy bases closer to the spawn point. The size setting does not have any other effects."

Is what I found. I only did it because I had once a huge biter nest on one of my starting resource patches, and with only a pistol I can not solve that problem, which I saw as unfair.
I have no idea the rest of the map is influenced?

I can live with Fulgora being devoid of enemies, but Vulcanus could have used some more challenge I agree. Beating the small demolishers is ridiculously easy, and then you have access to huge resource patches. I think some mechanic where they would come to your base triggered by pollution or similar mechanic would be more thrilling, forcing you to use the green modules for pollution reasons rather than electricity reasons, until you have access to rocket launchers for the smaller demolishers and railguns for the big ones.
I assume they toyed with such idea during development but didn't for their own reasons (too complcated to get right, too frustrating to lose your Vulcanus base completely if a large pollution cloud catches you off guard because by coincidence all your machines activate at once, ...) but £I haven't read the FFF yet about them since I avoided enemy and planetary FFF's for spoilers. Will do later

But demolishers attacking your base and being so strong they could invade a quarter of yuor base before dying could have been a cool mechanic (as in, can your base auto repair? Were you smart enough to put reserves of all necessary components of your base spread out in buffer chests?)

I agree about the 95% but that is on default death world settings. When your pollution cloud is expanding across closely knit large nests and diffusing past them to nest behind them, and biters (and other things) absorb less and it takes less pollution for an attack, then that is another situation completely. You can't tweak pollution on planets that don't have any, which is where I'm coming from. There isn't anything there to tweak. The only planet with pollution mechanic is Nauvis and Gleba unfortunately.

On starting size, unless they changed it, it used to influence how far nests were from each other. A low starting area used to make a contiuous red sea of nests very close together. According to your quote, perhaps they changed that. Also you can tweak frequency and size beyond their normal bounds in map_settings.json BTW you totally can kill a spawner with pistol and 10 rounds you just have to punch the spawner to death when you run out of ammo.

100% agree that Vulcanus needs expanding, evolving, rebuilding enemies, just like every other planet.

The Demo is what it is, just a one-time boss. After that its crickets.

[Cerberus]

BTW you totally can kill a spawner with pistol and 10 rounds you just have to punch the spawner to death when you run out of ammo.

Is there punch?
Anyway maybe you can kill a spawner but you can't kill a huge base, because enemies also kill you

[aka13]

I have specifically started a dw marathon playthrough 500 game-hours ago. Since 1.2 is supposed to be for vanilla as well, and the expansion is considered "a game on top of the game" I have high hopes that the expansion will target end-game content, and that I will continue that save.

Boy was I wrong about everything

[Tertius]

Fascinating, I was right with everything (which was not much, to be honst).