Isn't mining in earth orbit too OP?

[freeafrica]

For me it seems, easy energy with solar power... no pollution/no-evolution, infinite supply, hence no need to relocate mines... I can just dropship down everything for 0-resources.

I haven't yet reached any other planet orbit, but ATM i'm kinda gave up because this, I lost motivation. :/

[BorisOZ]

Yeah, technically all resources you can get in orbit are infinite. But it's not exactly easy to get large amounts like you would from a setup on a planet. I have a fairly large platform, spent a good few hours building it up and getting everything automated and I can get a few hundred iron plates per minute. Wouldn't call that game-breaking. There's also a limit on what you can build in space early on, given that you can only get carbon, ice and iron plates. No copper or oil derivatives severely limits what you can make in space. Sure you can technically get enough infinite resources from space to power a megabase, but that's so impractical it may as well not be possible. Not sure why this is a reason to lose motivation to play the expansion.

The only orbit that's "easy" is Nauvis orbit, because it's meant to be a safe haven where you can build your first ship and stock it from the small number of chunks that exist there. It would suck if any time you tried to build a ship it immediately got destroyed by asteroids. Every other travel route and orbit has asteroids in it, which you need to defend your space platform from. You also wouldn't be able to leave Nauvis orbit if you couldn't mine anything there, you need water + carbon + iron ore to make the fuel for thrusters. Having to send up water and iron ore just to power your ship would get annoying quickly, and adding carbon to Nauvis wouldn't make sense.

[mmmPI]

For me it seems, easy energy with solar power... no pollution/no-evolution, infinite supply, hence no need to relocate mines... I can just dropship down everything for 0-resources.
I haven't yet reached any other planet orbit, but ATM i'm kinda gave up because this, I lost motivation. :/

This can feel a bit similar to the seablock experience where ressources are easy to have, but require logistic and puzzle to scale. I can understand that it may have the same effect that playing with creative mode for me to some degree where if you think about it since everything is infinite , one may feel as if thereis no better or worse situationnal solution, or less impact for them since "in the end it's all free ressources".

Reaching another planet orbit require overcoming some threat for the platform as was mentionned, and is necessary to get some of the ressources that are not found in Nauvis nor in space, those are not "infinite".

[Stargateur]

I just disallow myself to abuse it

[Nova]

While yes, the resources are infinite, actually getting them in big enough numbers sounds like so much more work than just mining them on Nauvis, or extracting from the lava on Vulcanus. You need quite a bunch of rockets to get enough material in orbit to start refining getting iron plates in slightly bigger numbers - and that's just for the start. You need a platform capable of traveling to Gleba to get the advanced asteroid refining technology.
A run where you have to get most of you resources from space appears so much harder for me, it could be quite a challenge (to not die of boredom).

[MEOWMI]

I used it for producing extra belts, but that's about it. It's also no doubt the reason for why you can only have 1 cargo landing pad. But even then, it's usually easier to take a new ore patch, which produces a much larger stream of ore, and efficiency modules greatly reduce enemy attacks. Evolution still happens regardless, especially on death world, so it's not like you get away completely for free.

You CAN probably do setups with 10+ ships and get decently good amounts of ore, but even then it'll be mostly iron, and the setup cost and time is still present regardless.

On other planets, it's a handy boost at the start, but you have so many other opportunities to gain resources and develop your base more quickly, that it takes serious effort to scale up "space mining".

All in all I would say it's pretty balanced. Potentially very useful yes, but with very meaningful drawbacks.

[Panzerknacker]

Hmm because it can be automated I don't see why it is not OP. I would probably abuse it but I already lost motivation before that because I can't power my platform with the available options (steam). If you, like most people do, build a big main base where all the research happens you can just drop in all the iron there and belt it to the furnaces, or even smelt it in space while ur at it.

But that's why you guys are all playing the game now, to test it and find stuff like this so that Wube can properly balance things and then I can play it xD

I guess it's just too big of a game to balance everything prior to release, even tho I think they could have put more time into that.


If you ask me, cargo drop pods should not be free, except for dropping the engineer, there is always a spare one for that onboard. So you will need to build them on a planet and ship them to the space platform so that you can drop things back in them.

[freeafrica]

Evolution still happens regardless, especially on death world, so it's not like you get away completely for free.

Wait, are u saying that space mining increases evolution, even doe' no pollution happens? Or that during the time u build out the space-mining logic, evolution happens because of time passing?

But even then, it's usually easier to take a new ore patch, which produces a much larger stream of ore, and efficiency modules greatly reduce enemy attacks.

For me, not really, I play on DWM with green-modules and it really is a big thing to get to a new iron patch... so space-mining is just a super easy fix for this... ofc it's not a megabase, but u get my point.

Back to the original topic, in my opinion it should be built-in somehow into the space platforming, that sending back stuff to planet has material costs. Except dropping down the player, cauze it would suck if u can lock yourself up there. Maybe the LORE for this could be: "If you launch yourself up, you bring a landing capsule for yourself, however for normal item-drops that capsule needs to be crafted." I dunno, but its legit free/goes-forever ATM, which bothers me... but i am weird.

[Panzerknacker]

Your not weird, look at what I already wrote. I don't like stuff like that at all either.

[MEOWMI]

I don't think space mining increases evolution on its own, but on DW in particular, evolution increases rapidly even with the mere passage of time. I have more than 50% evolution caused by just time, and deploying new space ships has been a pretty time intensive process for me as I'm learning it.

Honestly, I will agree that very experienced players will probably find the free ore from space to be very useful, but vanilla Space Age isn't meant to be highly challenging to veterans, so I would say that it is reasonably balanced. It is also true that on DW, the impact of pollution is higher, making free ore from orbit have more value. It is also not the only source of "free" resources in the expansion.

Technically, setting up space mining at scale requires quite a lot of infrastructure, so it's probably intended to be strong, even though seasoned players will find spaceship automation to not be that challenging in the end. I'm not sure I could scale up space mining faster than ground mining, even with enemies in the way, but space mining would definitely be a good investment since it never depletes, and with almost no downsides besides the high initial cost and the learning process.

I've no doubt the main reason space mining is so strong, relatively speaking, is to enable the gameplay in space to be more engaging even for newer players.

I don't at all hate the idea of landing payloads having a minor cost associated with it, but it does also feel like an additional challenge factor, definitely the kind that mods would want to add for difficulty. It is a bit of extra headache for a player who has very possibly never faced the challenges of launching and managing space ships (no matter how exactly the resource cost would be implemented.)

I can't comment on the overall difficulty balance of Space Age yet, but it feels fairly appropriate for most players that have completed the base game.

In many mod packs I've played, I would try to seek out options to generate free ore, but I've since come to the conclusion that it isn't really that valuable - although fun - and in some ways it was even offputting when I did realize that it was possible. In the end, most of the time, it would not really have been harder to get more ore patches instead, though mod packs always have a different measure for how difficult that is anyway. In the Factorio base game, I do absolutely believe that finite ore patches make the game better as a whole, but Space Age adds so many new things that it doesn't necessarily seem like a bad idea anymore.

[BraveCaperCat]

The only problem: There is no earth in this game. (In planet terms)

[EustaceCS]

Without mid-game planet tech you can only get Iron Ore, some water and some (really crappy) fuel from the orbit. From ANY orbit you can reach.
On my current save four space platforms dedicated to supplying the ground with carbon are barely enough to keep 40

Uncommon

Steam Engines somewhat busy. And by the time you can afford four dedicated carbon mining platforms, 40 steam engines barely woring is... not worth the effort...
Sample platform:

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

Copy blueprint

Now, since Nauvis belt have significantly more iron chunks - it may or may not be OP to focus on infinite iron and iron accessories derivatives.
Given how much iron AND infrastructure you need to kickstart infinite iron production... is it really overpowered to reap big rewards for playing smart?

If you can afford snowballing your mining fleet - sure, why not?
Eventually it will pay off.
It still appears to be quicker to plunder your neighbourhood for a quicker benefit than to TRY to become self-sustaining though.
And doing so in early game is hella hard even with 600% starting area / 600% resource patches richness.

I haven't yet reached any other planet orbit, but ATM i'm kinda gave up because this, I lost motivation. :/

Research Quality.
Rare Quality 2 modules.
Get that Rare Armor achievement.
Make everything blue.
THEN we will talk about losing motivation.
If (big if!) you'll have any resources left

[HadesSupreme]

There's a hard cap on how fast you can land resources since you can only have one cargo pad and it has a maximum rate of acceptance. I'm not doing any dropping of orbital mining, just transferring advanced resources from planet to planet, and I can feel the lag of all my freighters taking forever to drop 10k science and 10k tungsten and so on per cycle. Someone else can go through the trouble of calculating the true throughput cap, but you're not gonna even approach the amount of resources that a few turbo belts with stacked resources can deliver.

Dropping is OP, but only for initially starting out. The devs seemed to have wanted you to start from scratch but you can skip several hours of early build up if you drop pod in a full chest full of each type of circuits, rocket fuel, low density structures, a full robo network, and a nuclear setup with a few hundred uranium cells. And with how many dozens of rockets you need to build even a single ship getting those resources into the ship is pretty quick.

[BlueTemplar]

I wonder what the megabase balance will be for VERY LONG games : AFAIK they eventually start having issues with RAM due to map size due to depleting ores.
Space mining might be a fix to that (or might not, if that drop pod throughput is an issue).

[Stargateur]

I wonder what the megabase balance will be for VERY LONG games : AFAIK they eventually start having issues with RAM due to map size due to depleting ores.
Space mining might be a fix to that (or might not, if that drop pod throughput is an issue).

with new mining drill that have -50% resource drain and new mining productivity that only cost 4 sciences and research cost that is not exponential and legendary big mining drill have 8% resource drain that mean 12.5 MORE productivity, so 1M ore with let's take my current one +570%... that mean for normal big mining drill it's a 11.4M ore, and with legendary one it's 71.25M ORE you will NEVER run out of resource with space age.

Lithium brine on aquilo is maybe the only weak point of resource for space age.

[mmmPI]

Lithium brine on aquilo is maybe the only weak point of resource for space age.

But you can use legendary pumpjacks !

[BlueTemplar]

VEEEEEEEEEEEEERY LONGGGGGGGG

[Stargateur]

Lithium brine on aquilo is maybe the only weak point of resource for space age.

But you can use legendary pumpjacks !

oh indeed I didn't see pumpjacks quality effect ! thus "only" 16% so "only" 6.25 MORE productivity XD

PS: and mining drill also have this quality effect, interesting for early game...

[shopt]

For midgame, I doubt it. The resources you need to sink into space platforms to get an amount of resources that move the needle are way more than just tapping a new ore patch on nauvis. The evolution saved from pollution is probably lost to time and pollution based evolution making that many platform foundations.

For extreme long games, evolution tops out anyway, and with mining productivity every new patch lasts for literal real life days. Or you could just make however much you want on Vulcanus.