Friday Facts #373 - Factorio: Space Age

[p03t13]

Ok so other than my previous comment about SA looking like a simplified version if SE, which seems moot if SE is still gonna be compatible with SA, probably my only concern is that it sounds like they are gonna pit cliff explosives after space travel. I'm pretty sure that we figured out dynamite LONG before rocketry in the real world. If this is a thing, I'll learn just enough coding myself to write a mod just to keep the cliff explosives sooner in the playthrough lol. I like the cliffs for the natural walls they provide against the biters, I HATE them with the burning intensity of 10,000 suns when they get in the way of my bus. :-p

[tolomea]

> I HATE them with the burning intensity of 10,000 suns when they get in the way of my bus.

They kinda exist to discourage the community from just blueprinting the perfect bus.

[sarge945]

> I HATE them with the burning intensity of 10,000 suns when they get in the way of my bus.

They kinda exist to discourage the community from just blueprinting the perfect bus.

Honestly the best way to play this game is to only use your own blueprints.

The ultimate goal of Factorio is to discover the perfect automation techniques to make your base successful, and to personalise your factory to produce what you want. This is pointless if you just download someone elses solution. It's essentially the same as playing any other game by using a community save from immediately after you kill the final boss, or playing a complex RPG by following a "most overpowered build" guide and steamrolling the game. It won't be a satisfying experience.

I have utilised community ideas in the past - main bus design, city block base, etc - but always by building it from scratch and never looking at the details of anyone elses implementation.

[sarge945]

BIters are a "solvable" event, where with logistics and a ton of research there exists an equilibrium, where they pose a threat, but can not overwhelm you, if you do the necessary precations. It gives a nice feeling of "I made it, I am the boss here, I dictate where I can expand, and where you can (or cannot).

I am okay with this, especially at the endgame, I guess my main issue is that biters are almost always very passive already - as long as you don't pollute them they will never attack you, and when they do attack you the combat part of the game tends to be very boring.

I feel like if the combat part of the game was more engaging and interesting, and setting up the perfect "kill wall" was a lot harder than it is now, it would feel more rewarding, and automating away the biters would be a good challenge to overcome after fighting them for so long.

At the moment, you can not see biters for multiple hours at a time if you don't pollute. They need to be more active participants in the game.

I feel like them going on "raiding runs" every 2-3 ingame days, regardless of pollution, would already be a good step in the right direction. It would force the player on the defensive more.

[serhatozgel]

This post is probably going to make everyone hate me, but...

Factorio in general seems to be stuck in this weird contradictory middle-point between automation/puzzle game and tower defence game. The long, slow factory building gameplay somewhat contradicts with the need to constantly defend yourself, and I feel like these mechanics sort of undermine each other a little bit.

It doesn't have the quick, ease of creation of towers that your average tower defence game has, setting up a working factory is a VERY long process in comparison, and the emphasis is mostly on automation rather than setting up a good defensive line and managing resources. It also lacks a lot of tower variety and strategy, usually it's just a case of setting up turrets along a wall and building some artillery and you're essentially all done. The AI is rather simplistic for a tower defence game and the biters really aren't anywhere near as much of a threat as they should be, especially on default settings, compared to how much the player can pump out defensively in the mid to late game. Turrets are essentially unlimited eventually, and with auto restocking basically become an unstoppable kill-wall.

I feel like in some ways trying to do both things at the same time makes the game worse. The automation gameplay is very deep and compelling, and is definitely the best part of the game, and being constantly distracted from it in order to defend ourselves forces us to stop engaging with the deep parts of the game and engage in very shallow combat. Players who are looking for a factory simulator are going to be annoyed by the need to constantly stop what they are doing to defend themselves or destroy enemy expansions, and players who are looking for a game with compelling combat and strategy are going to be disappointed when they realise all the interesting design went into the factory automation aspects and not the combat gameplay, which essentially amounts to building and restocking turrets and artillery occasionally.

I feel like games like Riftbreaker provide much more satisfying tower defence gameplay, even if I don't think many of them are as good as Factorio overall. Obviously the goal of Factorio is not to be a good tower defence game, it's more of an automation game (I would consider it more of a puzzle game than a combat game), but since the combat mechanics are there I feel like they should try to make them good.

The point I am trying to make here is that whether or not we're able to automate defences with Artillery doesn't really seem like the core of the issue. If defending your base is just another automation puzzle, and the actual combat and defence aspect overall doesn't really offer much satisfying depth in the first place (at least in my opinion), then neither approach will be satisfying. Either artillery is something you get quickly, which nullifies the biters to the point where they may as well not exist, or it's something that takes AGES to get (which is being proposed), resulting in base defence becoming a constant chore that requires endless maintenance and takes attention away from building our factory while not actually being particularly interesting in the first place because there's so little depth.

Here's what I propose:

I feel like the development team should make a decision about whether or not they want biters to be a core part of the game. If they decide to keep them, they should spend a significant amount of time improving their overall gameplay, rather than just focusing on tweaking the technology tree and automation. Otherwise, they should abandon biters entirely and essentially make Factorio purely an automation game.

Personally I like biters in concept, and I am interested in having more interesting combat gameplay, but I understand if most players just want to build cool factories. I would hate to see them go, but it might be for the best depending on the direction the developers want to go in.

Making the combat more deep and complicated would go a long way to making it more interesting. Here's how I would do it:

- Add in multiple damage types with different biter types existing for each
- Find some way to limit towers through a difficult to acquire resource, so the player has to be smart about positioning or expend effort/resources to maintain their defences. Riftbreaker does this through AI cores, which drain significant amounts of power, which is interesting because losing power means all your turrets go down. Factorio has nothing like this, turrets are mostly self sufficient forever as long as they are stocked with ammo/fuel, with no real risk of making yourself vulnerable unless you really screw up.
- Add a lot more tower variety, especially utility towers, as well as different ammo types (such as cryo rounds or fire rounds) that can be loaded into turrets
- Add in a lot more biter variety to counter many tower types and enforce variety and strategy
- Make biters remain a significant threat throughout the game by tweaking evolution settings and improving their AI to probe for weaknesses.
- Make biters attack regardless of pollution settings so we don't get hours of peace, pollution would just aggro them more often and make them evolve faster or maybe even allow them to create "boss" biters that are significantly harder than usual.
- Researching Artillery should be a small but significant advantage as part of a long struggle to maintain technical dominance in the face of an overwhelming threat, and should be just another tool in the players aresenal. Right now it's basically the "delete biters" technology and people seem to want to get it ASAP because dealing with biters is more annoying than it is interesting.

Then, I would split "Freeplay" into 2 separate game types: Free Build and Survival.

Free Build would disable biters entirely (or put them on peaceful mode) by default (and also disable all the combat research and military buildings/objects etc) and let people focus exclusively on building an efficient factory
Survival would start the player off with a bunch of ammo and a few towers already built and fast-track some of the research to allow players to get started defending themselves quicker to compensate for the much more threatening biters. Survival would also introduce a lose condition, such as ending the game on character death (but still allowing saving and loading, it's not permadeath just game over, although an optional permadeath mode could be cool too). Riftbreaker works by having a HQ building which ends the game if you lose it, and it works pretty well.

This way, people who want to play with biters have actual interesting mechanics for dealing with them, and there's more to it than simply "buy artillery to stop the chore of dealing with biters", and the people who just want to build a cool factory don't have to deal with biters at all and can focus more on the sandbox and automation gameplay.

Obviously everything would still be customisable completely so people could make their own weird gameplay twists.

I guess I just feel like Factorio should either have proper tower defence gameplay, or abandon the concept entirely and be purely a factory building game where the challenge comes from figuring out the automation and planning your factory, rather than defending yourself.

Automation makes a lot of sense for tower defence and is an interesting twist on it, one which I feel has a lot of potential, but at the moment the biter gameplay is more about automating them away rather than using automation to augment a gameplay strategy.

Whether or not Artillery takes 10 extra hours to get isn't going to change much if the overall combat gameplay sucks.

You make some great points but I view biters slightly differently:
- They are not there to make Factorio a tower defence-like game.
- They are one of the automation puzzles that you need to solve and put away. Just like any other challenge in the game. Once you solve it, it is a matter of making it bigger as you go.

I would definitely not want needing to strategically place turrets or making hard choices for how to use my limited resources. Factorio is not that game.

However, this is not to say biters can’t be made bettee. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement and great ideas for that from community.

But that should not mean turning Factorio into an action or tower defense game. I would like biters to stay as an automation challenge. But the challenge can be made deeper and/or more interesting.

[Suslik]

My bet is that the only reason they mentioned the cliff explosives nightmare is only to get people all riled up so that they can triumphantly fix it later

[p03t13]

> I HATE them with the burning intensity of 10,000 suns when they get in the way of my bus.

They kinda exist to discourage the community from just blueprinting the perfect bus.

Honestly the best way to play this game is to only use your own blueprints.

The ultimate goal of Factorio is to discover the perfect automation techniques to make your base successful, and to personalise your factory to produce what you want. This is pointless if you just download someone elses solution. It's essentially the same as playing any other game by using a community save from immediately after you kill the final boss, or playing a complex RPG by following a "most overpowered build" guide and steamrolling the game. It won't be a satisfying experience.

I have utilised community ideas in the past - main bus design, city block base, etc - but always by building it from scratch and never looking at the details of anyone elses implementation.

I'm talking about early game, I've got a decent amount of space, i lay down a couple belts of copper iron bricks etc, start building science inserters etc off the bus, expand half a screen to the east, 3 walls of cliffs directly in the way of my nice neat line, I can either spaghetti around it temporarily until I get cliff explosives, or turn the whole damn bus 90⁰ ruining the layout I had planned. I understand that it's part of the challenge of the game, and I've seen some AMAZING spaghetti bases. My brain just doesn't work that way. I intentionally leave the cliffs on, but I get the explosives as soon as feasible

[tuhe]

Why are we discussing this instead of the most important question of the expansion: Will there be more music?

My 2c on the cliffs:

The way I see water, cliff explosives and biters is primarily as a constraint on how you build: Cliffs and water promotes spaghetti and thinking about the world, while biters promote dense spaghetti bases (easier defense) and rebuilding (build small early for research, then larger later) -- this also means they are important for progression, because one can look forward to when these constraints are "lifted" (cliff explosives & bots+artillery, respectively).

Personally I really love this aspect of the game -- for me, one of the best parts of the game is the satisfaction of when your first artillery turret goes boom, or when bots just clear everything and put down a blueprint. But this would feel less good if I had not first had to work around the problems first!

I tend to build bus-type bases in Vanilla, and I find them boring to look at -- I just cannot help myself. So cliffs and all that stuff makes the game better (for me!), and to be honest, I would love to see more of it.

Others have very different preferences -- I think it is because they are better able to enjoy the late game (megabases), which is not something I have enjoyed so far unfortunately. I am one of those people who would love a longer burner phase in SE .

I hope WUBE will carry out the vision they have in mind for the expansion as best as they can, and then let us control this stuff via mods and settings if anything proves too controversial -- regardless of whether this means I need a mod for late cliff explosives or not. . So WUBE -- don't listen to us all that much, except please add more music! .

[Dev-iL]

Others have very different preferences -- I think it is because they are better able to enjoy the late game (megabases), which is not something I have enjoyed so far unfortunately. I am one of those people who would love a longer burner phase in SE .

You know, there are various mods if you want a slower-paced game I highly recommend IR3 if you haven't tried it already.

[Tertius]

The way I see water, cliff explosives and biters is primarily as a constraint on how you build

Now you say it, I severely hate games that constraints players to force them play the game the way the developers intended. This is a terrible way, because it frustrates players as long as they aren't playing the game according to the sample solution by the developers. This makes players ask around how to overcome this and that obstacle instead of doing it themselves, and it all ends up in videos and guides made by people who found out about it first, then everybody else is duplicating it. It kills creativity except on the top players who always try to "cheat" around the way that was designed, because this is their challenge. Everybody else just copies the most efficient way.

I see Factorio as not this kind of game until now, because there are so many ways to play this game, it simply isn't possible to force players do something exactly one way to advance progress. But indestructible items that thwart the usage of (selfmade) blueprints is nothing I'm happy about. Or not being able to automate biter defense (artillery) until I'm almost finished with one run anyway. I cannot see where this could increase my fun with the game. If there were less cliffs overall, or new turrets that are able to keep spawner creep away without being destroyed by the worms, this could be something not so bad. On the other hand, we don't know the big picture yet, so it's a bit too early to dismiss this change out of hand.

I always saw Factorio primarily as automation game. First, you encounter a challenge you tackle manually. Then you get a means to automate that, and you research and automate it. While doing that, you're getting the next challenge you first do manually, then automate it. I expect the same with cliffs and biters. You encounter them, first you handle them manually, and the next step is to automate it. The next step, not some distant step far far away.

[BlueTemplar]

[...]
Maybe nerf artillery, and allow the unlocking of, idk, missile silos? which have super high range and damage. Then make artillery relatively short range, low damage, or such. Not enough to be crippling, but enough to make defence a continuing challenge even with it.
Then when you get missile silos, you really solve the problem.

We are quite likely to see them, IIRC missile turrets were promised in the Factorio crowdfunding, just like the space platform endgame was ?

Similar could be done with cliffs, maybe having rarer steep cliffs, requiring more advanced destroying (and landfill potentially, adding 'ocean' as well as 'deep water', so *most* of the solutions are found on nauvis, but a better version is available off-world).
That would seem to tread the line, by mitigating aggressive enemy expansion on nauvis, without completely 'solving' it, thus incentivising the player to go off world and find a full solution (all the more so, as they are 'teased' with a partial solution).

What about rail bridges/tunnels, but for cliffs/water only ?

----

I have extreme mixed feelings about this, I was expecting something worthy of a actual expansion when they promised that it would be worth the $20, not a re-hash of already made mods. This is just a mod rip off into a to full "$20 expansion". Earendel made Space Exploration, sure, but just ripping your own past mod-work to make his work "official" doesn't make it right. It's not even adding AS MUCH CONTENT. If it's a "light" version of your mod, it's a money grab. This is some Bethesda level mod-scam. I feel cheated as a fan of both Factorio and Erendel's Space Exploration mod. If this was actually Space Exploration 2.0 I would have actually supported it. If this was the mod integration into the game, and then added content to the mod (not just re-hashing and even stripping it), that I could have got excited for.
[...]

Did you not read the relevant FFFs or something ??
First, not sure where you got the $20, it's going to cost as much as the base game, so $35 (or maybe $30 because that's how much Factorio cost when that price was announced). And it's going to cost that much because the goal is to have as much new content as there is already in the base game, meaning that we have only seen a tiny fraction of it (remember how we have ~52 FFFs to go before release ?).

2nd, the overwhelming majority of players that would want to buy a Factorio expansion (remember, the median player has never placed a locomotive) would never want to play something as deep/long/grindy/complex as Space Exploration.

----

This post is probably going to make everyone hate me, but...

Not sure what is the point of this introduction ?

Factorio in general seems to be stuck in this weird contradictory middle-point between automation/puzzle game and tower defence game. The long, slow factory building gameplay somewhat contradicts with the need to constantly defend yourself, and I feel like these mechanics sort of undermine each other a little bit.

Biters are here as another way to limit your scaling : both in area by having to get rid of nests, and in intensity - by having to be careful about pollution. IMHO the game becomes boring without them. (Also shooting them is fun. )

It doesn't have the quick, ease of creation of towers that your average tower defence game has, setting up a working factory is a VERY long process in comparison, and the emphasis is mostly on automation rather than setting up a good defensive line and managing resources. It also lacks a lot of tower variety and strategy, usually it's just a case of setting up turrets along a wall and building some artillery and you're essentially all done. The AI is rather simplistic for a tower defence game and the biters really aren't anywhere near as much of a threat as they should be, especially on default settings, compared to how much the player can pump out defensively in the mid to late game. Turrets are essentially unlimited eventually, and with auto restocking basically become an unstoppable kill-wall.

Turret defense games are quite different in that you don't ever lose your turrets there because enemies do not directly attack them, this makes for quite different game dynamics than a wave defense scenario or freeplay Factorio.

That unstoppable kill wall can still run out of ammunition, at least while you are still on gun turrets : depleting your ore spots before you're able to expand / get to oil is a real (the only so far ?) challenge.

I feel like in some ways trying to do both things at the same time makes the game worse.
[...]
Personally I like biters in concept, and I am interested in having more interesting combat gameplay, but I understand if most players just want to build cool factories. I would hate to see them go

So which one is it ? Also there's always the option to put them on peaceful / disable pollution / turn them off.
Biters Off and Death World are two very different game modes, and yes, it's harder for Wube to balance both of them, but they're hardly the only game that has several game modes. (And we haven't even mentioned PvP(vBiters), which is quite fun (at least as an MMO), but *desperately* needs either a balance mod or a balance pass.)

Either artillery is something you get quickly, which nullifies the biters to the point where they may as well not exist, or it's something that takes AGES to get (which is being proposed)

Atraps003 already covered it, but to second them :
Uh, artillery *already* takes AGES to get, it's one of the most expensive techs in the game, to the point where I personally usually consider it (with atom bomb and spidertron) to be the win condition : messing around with these OP weapons is IMHO a much better payoff than the (relatively) anticlimatic one of the rocket launch.

A longstanding issue in Factorio biter balance is that it's the *flame turret* (and getting oil to fuel it) which is that thing which nullifies biters (even behemoths !), which is quite an issue since it's available by early-mid game, and I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are impatient to see the expansion shaking off that OP-ness one way or another.

*A bunch of suggestions*

Almost all of these are already implemented in mods, it's questionable how much the expansion pack will want to step on those toes (compared to adding engine support for even wilder mods).

which drain significant amounts of power, which is interesting because losing power means all your turrets go down. Factorio has nothing like this, turrets are mostly self sufficient forever as long as they are stocked with ammo/fuel

Uh, Factorio has exactly this with laser turrets (with the caveat that flame turrets are earlier and mostly superior)

with no real risk of making yourself vulnerable unless you really screw up

that's not «no real risk», that's kind of the point

Survival : dying in Factorio is punished by lost time, during which biters can destroy more stuff and keep evolving. Mods can also turn on breakable armor again, though sadly not depleting pickaxe any more. Fish to heal is also a limited resource.

----

BIters are a "solvable" event, where with logistics and a ton of research there exists an equilibrium, where they pose a threat, but can not overwhelm you, if you do the necessary precations. It gives a nice feeling of "I made it, I am the boss here, I dictate where I can expand, and where you can (or cannot).

I am okay with this, especially at the endgame, I guess my main issue is that biters are almost always very passive already - as long as you don't pollute them they will never attack you, and when they do attack you the combat part of the game tends to be very boring.

I feel like if the combat part of the game was more engaging and interesting, and setting up the perfect "kill wall" was a lot harder than it is now, it would feel more rewarding, and automating away the biters would be a good challenge to overcome after fighting them for so long.

At the moment, you can not see biters for multiple hours at a time if you don't pollute. They need to be more active participants in the game.

I feel like them going on "raiding runs" every 2-3 ingame days, regardless of pollution, would already be a good step in the right direction. It would force the player on the defensive more.

Sounds like you might be playing with too easy biters ? After all, default settings are designed for Factorio newbies, not players with several games under their belt !
«as long as you don't pollute them they will never attack you» is not strictly true, because they send settling parties, which, as we discussed recently, eventually settle right next to your walls.
Agreed about potentially making them more diverse and smarter... maybe not on the level of Rampant in the base game ? (Also, smarter biters sadly comes with a performance cost.)

----

[...]
I would definitely not want needing to strategically place turrets or making hard choices for how to use my limited resources. Factorio is not that game.
[...]

Both of these are already the case if you play on harder settings.

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[...]
I'm talking about early game, I've got a decent amount of space, i lay down a couple belts of copper iron bricks etc, start building science inserters etc off the bus, expand half a screen to the east, 3 walls of cliffs directly in the way of my nice neat line, I can either spaghetti around it temporarily until I get cliff explosives, or turn the whole damn bus 90⁰ ruining the layout I had planned. I understand that it's part of the challenge of the game, and I've seen some AMAZING spaghetti bases. My brain just doesn't work that way. I intentionally leave the cliffs on, but I get the explosives as soon as feasible

No, this is just Factorio punishing you for not doing the bare minimum of scouting (which you will quickly need to find oil anyway) !

----

[...]
It kills creativity except on the top players who always try to "cheat" around the way that was designed, because this is their challenge
[...]

Limitations breed creativity, and you too can be a hacker if you let go of this elitist idea that you can't figure them out by yourself.

[...]
Everybody else just copies the most efficient way.
[...]

You can't prevent people from looking up the solution to a puzzle, but that's on them.

[tuhe]

You know, there are various mods if you want a slower-paced game I highly recommend IR3

lol I really liked IR2 for that reason . I plan to check out IR3 after I complete Nullius (another mod with an IMO great take on early progression).

The way I see water, cliff explosives and biters is primarily as a constraint on how you build

Now you say it, I severely hate games that constraints players to force them play the game the way the developers intended. This is a terrible way, because it frustrates players as long as they aren't playing the game according to the sample solution by the developers. This makes players ask around how to overcome this and that obstacle instead of doing it themselves, and it all ends up in videos and guides made by people who found out about it first, then everybody else is duplicating it. It kills creativity except on the top players who always try to "cheat" around the way that was designed, because this is their challenge. Everybody else just copies the most efficient way.

I see Factorio as not this kind of game until now, because there are so many ways to play this game, it simply isn't possible to force players do something exactly one way to advance progress. But indestructible items that thwart the usage of (selfmade) blueprints is nothing I'm happy about. Or not being able to automate biter defense (artillery) until I'm almost finished with one run anyway. I cannot see where this could increase my fun with the game. If there were less cliffs overall, or new turrets that are able to keep spawner creep away without being destroyed by the worms, this could be something not so bad. On the other hand, we don't know the big picture yet, so it's a bit too early to dismiss this change out of hand.

I always saw Factorio primarily as automation game. First, you encounter a challenge you tackle manually. Then you get a means to automate that, and you research and automate it. While doing that, you're getting the next challenge you first do manually, then automate it. I expect the same with cliffs and biters. You encounter them, first you handle them manually, and the next step is to automate it. The next step, not some distant step far far away.

Hi -- I think you misunderstand what I meant by constrain -- I meant exactly what you wrote in your last section: First we have small inefficient setups and annoyances, and then a bit by bit we "earn" better tools (explosives, flame turrets, bots, artillery) that overcome these constraints. So it is only about the timing, and I certainly think that explosives should not be "too" late (because of the synergy between explosives and construction bots is so important for making bots feel good as you point out!).

I am also hoping for something new with the military tech -- artillery IS very late, and when we get it, it fairly quickly trivialize the biters in my experience.
This makes it rewarding but for less time if that makes sense. If the biters are a bit different on the different planets, that might be an option for adding tools like artillery early, and still leave new challenges (and new tools) for later in the game -- perhaps also give more reasons for using a combination of flamers, lasers and regular turrets.

Lets see what happens. If this for some reason proves to be a controversial point, having an "spaghetti" option on game start (similar to train world, marathon, etc) that basically makes cliffs, etc. harder to deal with in other ways than frequency would be an idea.

[blazespinnaker]

Pushing pre-existing content down the tech tree is lazy. I've seen mod authors do it, and it always strikes me as an attempt to just stretch out stuff that already exists.

Like, come on.

That said, not a deal breaker. Irritating, but hardly the end of the world.

Though seriously, how hard is it to just create content that makes the players less omnipotent? Like, make late game biters seek out artillery or something. Or better yet .. give them anti-artillery that shoots back at the source. And then add something like an artillery shield down the tech tree.

I mean, you get jet packs early on in SE, and that doesn't unbalance the game afaict. In fact, I find it deliciously harder, even with the upgraded weapons. Just amp up the biters..

[Atraps003]

Well, that is like your opinion man.
Biters are a big and important logistical consideration. It certainly is not a threat like a enemy AI in an RTS game, and I don't want them to be one.
Factorio is a logistical simulation, where any problem is solved by logistics first and foremost.
Artillery is one of such logistical solutions.
I want to be able to automate biters away, and it is also obvious that this is (at least in some form) also the devs wish. If you remember 4 sciences era, you'll remember the stupid purple egg hunt, where after X time you just had to jo and farm biters in circles, for your science production to run.

You're talking as if artillery has been removed from the game. Tech that trivializes a big part of the game belongs near the end of the tech tree.

[Tertius]

You're talking as if artillery has been removed from the game. Tech that trivializes a big part of the game belongs near the end of the tech tree.

Building an ammo supply infrastructure for artillery and repair/replacement infrastructure for damaged defense walls isn't trivial. It's a task that requires a non trivial amount of time. It's also a task that cannot be solved by brainlessly dumping some pre-made blueprints and let robots do all the building work.
And I don't consider biters a big part of the game. They're a nice addon to spice things up, but for me they are not a relevant part of the game. Relevant is factory building. Your mileage might vary, but this is how I see them.

[catma]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373

Definitively needs that animated GIF done as a video instead, if you can't somehow debug it.

The GIF didn't work on any of my 3 screens, on any of my internet provider, across 3 OSes and 8 browsers. even after refresh and long wait times.

[BlueTemplar]

It's a mp4, gifs have been obsolete for decades for anything bigger and more complex than something like this :
Also, probably an issue on your end ?
P.S.: Even downloading it doesn't work ??

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[...]
Like, make late game biters seek out artillery or something.
[...]

They already do, as any military building, but *especially* when you fire it.
(Won't help them much if you built the train-based one and you can evacuate quickly...)

Or better yet .. give them anti-artillery that shoots back at the source. And then add something like an artillery shield down the tech tree.

Oh yeah, even though we have behemoth worms now, the gap between them and even automatic artillery is still a bit ridiculous. (As designed ?)
But I would be surprised if we didn't get something in that vein...

I mean, you get jet packs early on in SE, and that doesn't unbalance the game afaict. In fact, I find it deliciously harder, even with the upgraded weapons. Just amp up the biters..

Aren't SE biters stronger ?
Sorry for linking to Twitch, but I can't resist...
https://clips.twitch.tv/AmericanCheerfu ... Gc2Fw6UIJ-
https://clips.twitch.tv/TentativeStylis ... oStD4DG1Gx
https://clips.twitch.tv/ElegantClumsySt ... dnRecfIEqw
https://clips.twitch.tv/BashfulLittleBa ... nZKi5vnCC2

[Tertius]

Here it is! (beep boop)

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-373

Definitively needs that animated GIF done as a video instead, if you can't somehow debug it.

The GIF didn't work on any of my 3 screens, on any of my internet provider, across 3 OSes and 8 browsers. even after refresh and long wait times.

It's actually a mp4 video, not an animated gif. It has this URL:
https://cdn.factorio.com/assets/img/blo ... orm-HR.mp4

[aka13]

Jetpack in SE is so stupid. Shits on literally all transportation, unless on a megabase grid already, it legit stops you from using trains, cars, caring about walkways, completely removes the need for exoskeleton.
Boy am I glad I am encouraged to fly everywhere myself as a large logistic bot instead of actually having logistic bots.

[XtheGxmerz0]

how will space exploration work with space age? are they gonna be compatible