Aquilo feedback

[KuuLightwing]

Aquilo doesn't sit right for me. I liked all other planets, even Gleba, but with Aquilo there's several things that rub me the wrong way.

First of all, some annoyances:

- 5x bot energy drain means that building anything with bots becomes much slower, as they drain even a pretty decent suit (Q3 mech armor with 4x Q3 fission reactors and 2x Q3 Mk III batteries in seconds) Doesn't help that you need to landfill and concrete a lot and placing tiles always introduces additional strain on bots.

- Designing anything without connecting it to a heat source first is annoying as it gets plastered with freezing icons over every single item and I can't actually see anything behind them.

- Building something too quickly or rebuilding something introduces a lot of cool pipes to the network, and if you also run power off those same pipes it leads to power outage.

- I think too many recipes are limited to assembler or cryo plant that probably don't need to be, namely cryo plant itself. It's not all that interesting to slap down an assembler, put materials inside and get your craft, so allowing manual crafting for those wouldn't really change much.

All that put together introduces a lot of inconveniences to the building and designing process itself.

Next, the heat mechanics itself. It's rather strange that devs decided to nuke old fluid system due to how it wasn't intuitive, and yet introduced the whole planet with a gimmick of relying on a system that's about as unintuitive as old fluid system (not to mention that IIRC it is in fact the same system). I have somewhat remote lithium brine cluster, and I want to pump it back to my base. I honestly have no idea whether I can just run one long heat pipe, or I will have to introduce any intermediate heaters on the way, as mechanics behind the system are rather opaque. It seems to be propagating so far, but it does it rather slowly, so I don't know if in the end it will work.

Then, I feel like it's a bit of a thematic mess. Now I don't expect the game to be realistic, not at all, but at the same time usually it tries to maintain at least some verisimilitude. But here you need to heat up any machine, even if it's a turbine that's running on 500 degree steam. There's cryogenic plant that "can handle extremely low temperatures" but of course it freezes over if you don't heat it up. There's a fluid that has both hot (180 degrees) and cold (-150 degrees) states, and to work with it you need to heat up the tanks and pipelines to 30 degrees or they freeze over, which really doesn't make any sense for either of the fluids.

Now the heating puzzle itself is functional. I didn't find it all that fun to work with so far, but I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with it - it is what it is, I just don't like working with lots of pipes in general, and this is exacerbated by also adding heat pipes to the mix.

Aquilo also feels like it's much "shorter" than the other planets. It took me a while to get a working base, but that's due to inexperience and rebuilding certain elements multiple times, and also due to the annoyances I had with it - and having to ship construction materials constantly.

Overall the unlocks it gives are definitely useful, although it's a bit of a shame that fusion plant seems to be vastly superior to fission plant despite being far easier to design for, and railguns honestly being only really useful against asteroids, so they feel more like mandatory unlock for the endgame, rather than some piece of equipment you'd want to use. Now the handheld version is nice to kill demolishers, but it still makes them a little narrow in scope.

[Daid]

I just finished the game. And let me start off by saying that I loved Aquilo. The heating mechanic causes you to revisit how you do a lot of things instead of just being a copy&paste from previous planets. All planets do this in some way or another, but Aquilo is best at it. And I love that.

HOWEVER, I heavily agree with your bot energy drain statement. It doesn't seem to serve much purpose other then being annoyingly slower, and you need a lot more roboports if the bots come from the network, as they need to charge very often. As roboports just need power and heat, it's not like there is a challenge in placement, it's just slowing things down. (after writting this, I realized that while annoying for construction bots, I guess it makes a huge impact on logi bot run bases, but that's not my style of play)


My base froze due too fast expansion as well, but, I learned from it, and put the energy generation on a different heat network. So I had 3 heat networks in the end, one running just the turbines, one running the fuel generation and the last one running the rest. As I mainly expand the last one, it wasn't a problem if it froze, as it could be waken up by the rest. I found it an interesting challenge. I also kept the heaters at 800C, allowing for quite some drop before things started to freeze.

That steam turbines with 500C steam in them freeze, and then unfreeze if there is a 30C heatpipe next to it is a bit odd. But, it's far from the only odd thing in Factorio.

Personally, I wished there was more to do there, you just go there, setup a small base for science production and some quantum processors, and you're pretty much done. Yes, you can craft a bunch of things from those quantum processors, but you don't need any real production chain for that, as you are shipping in most required components. After beating the complex production on Gleba, it felt a bit flat.

[KuuLightwing]

I just finished the game. And let me start off by saying that I loved Aquilo. The heating mechanic causes you to revisit how you do a lot of things instead of just being a copy&paste from previous planets. All planets do this in some way or another, but Aquilo is best at it. And I love that.

HOWEVER, I heavily agree with your bot energy drain statement. It doesn't seem to serve much purpose other then being annoyingly slower, and you need a lot more roboports if the bots come from the network, as they need to charge very often. As roboports just need power and heat, it's not like there is a challenge in placement, it's just slowing things down. (after writting this, I realized that while annoying for construction bots, I guess it makes a huge impact on logi bot run bases, but that's not my style of play)

As I said, I don't have anything against the heatpipe puzzle itself, so that part isn't an issue on itself for me. Bots I understand the logic behind it with logistics bots but ultimately since it also hits construction bots, it inevitably makes the act of building and designing the base more tedious which isn't a good thing.

My base froze due too fast expansion as well, but, I learned from it, and put the energy generation on a different heat network. So I had 3 heat networks in the end, one running just the turbines, one running the fuel generation and the last one running the rest. As I mainly expand the last one, it wasn't a problem if it froze, as it could be waken up by the rest. I found it an interesting challenge. I also kept the heaters at 800C, allowing for quite some drop before things started to freeze.

That steam turbines with 500C steam in them freeze, and then unfreeze if there is a 30C heatpipe next to it is a bit odd. But, it's far from the only odd thing in Factorio.

Well I switched to a small 400MW fusion plant now, so my fission reactors really just heat everything, but when you are starting out that's just additional annoyance to deal with. And again, main issue to me is that heating network is just hard to work with because it's mechanics are hidden and unclear. As an example, after laying down the pipeline I talked about, my fission reactors are stuck at around 695 degrees. Maybe I need more reactors. Maybe it will go up once the pipeline heats up a little, even though it does that extremely slowly at this point. I have no idea.

Personally, I wished there was more to do there, you just go there, setup a small base for science production and some quantum processors, and you're pretty much done. Yes, you can craft a bunch of things from those quantum processors, but you don't need any real production chain for that, as you are shipping in most required components. After beating the complex production on Gleba, it felt a bit flat.

Yea, I kinda feel the same. It's essentially Fusion plant, railguns, and cryo plant and most everything is imports, you can't even build a mall there or anything (not that I would want to to be honest.)

[Daid]

Well, in theory you could build a partial mall if you drop iron-ore/copper-ore/carbon/sulfur from space, as you can make most things from that, except for stone. And that's one of the key things you need on Aquilo for the concrete. So the end result is that no mater what you do, is that you have to import goods, and if you do, you might as well do everything imported. I didn't even bother with rocket fuel production, solid fuel is good enough for heating and power, and for rocket launches I need to import other stuff anyhow, so might as well import the fuel. It's a bit of a shame that the game steers to hard towards that that is leaves no other alternative.

[Stargateur]

I have also a lot of trouble with the coherence in aquilo, I know gameplay > realism but I personally like when it's logical, we build heat pipe on concrete to not melt the ice.... MEH, floating foundation would make more sense. Yes aquilo is too short, but I have the feeling it's not over yet. Energy on bot is to limit robot usage, it's actually a good idea IMO but I think only logistic robot should be affected.

Heat from pipe is way more intuitive than fluid of 1.1, basically you loose 1C for each tile I think, I found use of heat pipe very clever but I don't like much how hard it is to deal with it. The radius of heating is a bit small. Since you need to head EVERYTHING it's very annoying

Why lithium lime is not a infinite resource ?!? Well I don't particularly want them to be infinite but why all crude all, sulfuric acid fluorine is infinite but not lithium ?!? In late game, it's gonna be hard to get more of them, rail on aquilo ?!?

My biggest problem is no way to have stone on aquilo, even if I do a support space plateform it's impossible to get stone without send millions of stone from nauvis to aquilo... We really get everything in space BUT not simple rock ?!?

[xUCGx]

- Designing anything without connecting it to a heat source first is annoying as it gets plastered with freezing icons over every single item and I can't actually see anything behind them.

Next, the heat mechanics itself. It's rather strange that devs decided to nuke old fluid system due to how it wasn't intuitive, and yet introduced the whole planet with a gimmick of relying on a system that's about as unintuitive as old fluid system (not to mention that IIRC it is in fact the same system). I have somewhat remote lithium brine cluster, and I want to pump it back to my base. I honestly have no idea whether I can just run one long heat pipe, or I will have to introduce any intermediate heaters on the way, as mechanics behind the system are rather opaque. It seems to be propagating so far, but it does it rather slowly, so I don't know if in the end it will work.

All the planets have (obviously) a (gimmick) with Aquilo in mind this is actually my favorite planet because of this unique gimmick. Although I will admit it is pretty interesting coming up with designs that work around the whole frozen aspect I still like the direction they went with.

As you mentioned-I agree on the whole “running heat pipes” everywhere. The cold gimmick is a pretty cool idea but I do think they could have done it a bit better. Maybe have a special “heated” concrete that uses heat pipes as an ingredient and I was thinking if they went that route (or someone mods it in) then instead of having an item that’s only useful for one purpose on one planet, just like in space exploration the asteroid belt could also have the gimmick that freezes factories and you could use the concrete on there as well.

Another idea was to have certain oil products be heated-running through the pipes with a way to monitor them- and that satisfy the frozen mechanic. I work in the oil industry specifically on the lubricants side and some of the products we make and sell are pumped heated before we load it because either the customer requests it heated or because the viscosity is so high it literally would not move through our pumps unless it was hot. These ideas might be to far for the scope of this expansion or utterly useless but I figured an ideas an idea