No Marathon mode in 2.0: My solution

[aganierm]

I was also disappointed to learn that there was no marathon mode for Space Age equivalent to base game. By marathon equivalent to base game, I mean no expensive recipes, and the current marathon setting does not counter-balance for the removal of expensive recipes. I searched to try to find an explanation why, and found a post titled "No Marathon mode in 2.0 confirmed?" which contains the reasons why. The reasons are unquestionable, they had to take it out to balance the new mechanics. What is not unquestionable is a lack of counter-balance with other means when it comes to marathon mode difficulty. This is my solution. Well, I have 2:

1. The Trivial Solution: By my experience in the base game, expensive recipes made crafting stuff vaguely ~4x harder. Thus, all it takes to counter-balance for the lack of them is multiply the science research cost by yet another 4x: change technology price multiplier to 16x to compensate for the lack of them, and that's it.

2. My experimental ultra-marathon game mode: By my latest experience in the base game, I was last playing marathon at 100x science cost + expensive recipes, which if expensive recipes made crafting stuff vaguely ~4x harder, would be matched at 400x science cost in space age. Let's make it 1000x to counter-balance for all the new features in Space Age that make scaling up easier; like stacked belts, elevated rails, or module quality, to name a few. Let's lower some resources availability a bit: All 50% on Nauvis, 17% uranium (I always thought this rarish resource should be rare). Increase all resources richness to 600%. Nauvis water scale to 200%, coverage 150% (train world). Evolution settings: 2, 10, 1 for Time factor, Destroy Factor, Pollution Factor, respectively. We're gonna be in for the long run, the evolution needs to be scaled back really hard. Enemy expansion.. disabled: I wish I didn't have to disable it but at 1000x science cost, expansion could be a nightmare to deal with due to how long it will take us to reach artillery (train world also disables expansion, I had forgotten about that). Technology: Price multiplier 1000 (like acknowledged above). Polution: we're gonna be in the long run, so trees should last longer: minimum damage to trees to 9999, or 166x more than base game, but remember.. science cost is 1000x, so it's only balanced to bump it up a notch :p. Not sure about this one balance wise, but I'd rather be safe than sorry when I'll be few hundreds of hours into my playthrough. Asteroids: 50%. Spoiling rate: 10%. Neither sure about these two balance wise.. like I said, it's experimental. That's it. The seed is not specifically selected, it is left at random, feel free to randomize it. Exchange string:

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Would gladly take any feedback and ideas on my ultra-marathon design. I already started my experimental ultra-marathon playthrough, but I could have messed up some balance in there and very possible I'll have to start over. I had to restart plenty of times just to balance my 100x + expensive recipes base game marathon settings, so I do have some clue about how these settings affect balance. Where I do have more of a blind spot is how these settings will affect the game relative to all the new features.

May the factory grow

[Panzerknacker]

Good to see I'm not the only one feeling like this (I knew I'm not anyway :p). Unfortunately they closed my thread about it.

I think simply increasing the science cost further is not a real solution because the expensive recipes also required different (more demanding) factory layouts, also the stuff you build to scale up was much more expensive, for example gun turrets are much more expensive which also makes defending the base more difficult in another way.

My solution is that they can recreate Marathon in a official mod. Remove Marathon and Death Marathon modes from the Freeplay menu because they are not that anyway, you can simply use Default and increase the research cost. Also, without the expensive recipes, normal Death World might even be more difficult than Death World Marathon (because Biter settings are higher).
Then with the mod enabled, have those modes there again and ONLY those 2 modes. When the mod is enabled, recipes are changes to the expensive.

This can already be implemented now for Factorio 2.0 by simply copying the recipes from 1.1.110 and later it can be added to Space Age recipes also.

I like your idea for a ultra-Marathon mode although I think it's pretty extreme, probably not for many players haha.

[Koub]

[Koub] This is half a suggestion, half balancing. I'll move it to Ideas and suggestions.

[mmmPI]

I think the marathon mode in 2.0 is good, i think the lack of expensive recipe is not very important because with quality you get a lot of different "optimal" build at different stages of the game where you can / need to sink ressources.

I think the ideas presented here fits more a personnal playtstyle, bumping up ressources to 600% richness and making trees tank much more pollution than normal "because we're in marathon" seem to defeat the purpose of why i play marathon.

I don't think trees need be changed either, they have already been by the space Age, and would recommend maybe a regular playtrhu before attempting extreme settings as it could give you a better understanding as of what to modify in space age for a good Marathon experience. Spoilage rate doesn't matter much, although if you are going X1000 science you may want instead a second landing pad per planet or something like this.

There exist mods already made for megabase with little alteration in the game, like "biolab in space", which would also fit a custom marathon x 1000 science imo.

[aganierm]

I think the marathon mode in 2.0 is good, i think the lack of expensive recipe is not very important because with quality you get a lot of different "optimal" build at different stages of the game where you can / need to sink ressources.

Don't get me wrong, I think the removal of expensive recipes is very important, that it's a good thing for them to be removed, because it's already very hard to balance recipe costs. Introducing a second set of recipe costs (that also need to be balanced) sounds like self-indulged pain for the game designers, lol. It also splits the community in half, where default recipe blueprints don't make any sense for the other camp. Adds tons of unnecessary hurdles. A single, unified recipe cost design just keeps everything simpler, less headaches, etc.

It's not that I want them back, it's that I want a counter-balance effort to make up for their removal. That's where my proposed solution comes into play, as a counter-balance attempt.

[mmmPI]

I would say quality play a role into the length of the game. If you could reduce the strengh of the quality module it would make for me the vanilla game feel more like with expensive receipe when trying to max out quality as in resssources disappear fast.

But those ressources on the other hand are easy to get "infinite" in Space age, apart from Uranium. If you play past the 200h mark on a save game , you probably can organise yourself for relying only on infinite ressources from asteroids or lava. This part i don't know how you can find a counter measure. It would still force massive scaling, but not frequent outposting expansion and logistic for it.

You can grow trees in space Age , so i think it doesn't really matter if they are good or not at absorbing pollution, you can just make more of them at the end. And you can produce things in planet where there is no pollution.

You could maybe mod/increase the distance between planets. ( i'm not qualified x) ) To force players to make larger ship like in marathon game everything takes more time and require more scalling because if the trip takes a minute you bring 120 science pack, but if the trip takes 10 you need 1200 and 100 minutes you need 12K and so on. I don't know how extreme it can be.

[aganierm]

Fun accident about my experimental ultra-marathon:

With 1000x research cost, it takes a LONG TIME to get better weaponry. So I made sure to scale back biter evolution to the minimum. The problem is that minimum is still pretty high. Default pollution factor is 9. Minimum is 1 (excluding 0). There is no decimal values. 1000x costlier research, only 9x slower pollution evolution. What this means is that the ratio between research rate and pollution factor on evolution is FAR harder than deathworld. Big biters and big spitters are already showing up (0.5 pollution) and I'm not even close from unlocking bots.

I should be dead. But I'm not because of this Space Age change:

Greatly increased default tile pollution absorption.

I call it a fun accident because I hadn't fully read the changelog before starting this new save, and now I realize that this change accidentally saved me by keeping my pollution cloud much smaller than it would have been, keeping biter attacks small and survivable despite evolution going so fast relative to research.