Friday Facts #438 - Space Age wrap up

[cackling.fiend]

shame we're only getting one factorio expansion.
i could've forseen an expansion including caves and oceans levels under the surface of the planets, as well as different kinds of planets like a barren moon/murcury planet and maybe a gas giant. not sure how the gameplay would've worked for the gas giant though and if it'd be too similar to underwater

Lets see what the modders bring us.

[BlastYoBoots]

Mods will definitely keep expanding the game even further as always, especially given how they've set up the potential for modders to add compelling new planets with enough work!

I can't imagine needing much more out of a vanilla 2.1 besides maybe a little more use for Promethium science/chunks, to make expanding one's factories and fleet better incentivized in the post-game. I could always make a ship that can bring home even more Promethium science than before, but I want to NEED to make that ship.

[Hpcrusher]

Thanks for this amazing game and the over 2500 hours of joy and those that will come.

One improvement i would love to is that the robots would start with the jobs closest to me instead of furthest away.
That way i could run over the blue print area left to right and the distance the robots would need to fly would be alway be very short.
A compromise would be if you could make it possible to choose how big your robot range is. Then i would make it very small and would get a simillar effect.

With king regards David

[scarhoof]

Thanks for the update, an RPG made by you guys could be interesting. I was kinda hoping that you'd leave a developer or two on Factorio to work on 'official' mods or something to continue to drip some ideas you guys hadn't been able to implement for 2.0, but I totally understand how working on a singular game for this long your team probably wants to put it in the rear view mirror for a long while. Regardless, thanks for the amazing game and attention to detail, and I'll be here for your next venture. Any chance we can get proper "Game Mode" support for Mac with 2.1?

[BlueTemplar]

If «Game Mode» involves non-borderless fullscreen, then that's probably not going to happen because Factorio's engine has not being designed to do that.

[hazherino]

I hope that a new dlc come..
maybe a underground mode in the planets.
underwater.. more planets
more planets.
i think factorio can be more even that it are.

[Pales]

I don’t know about you all, but I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed that we didn’t get one final planet focused purely on intense combat. Imagine a “hell on earth” scenario where you’re swarmed by endless enemies and forced to expand while fighting tooth and nail to survive. Don’t get me wrong-I love the variety and unique challenges each planet brings in the expansion. But with all the advanced tech we can build, it would have been amazing to pour everything into one climactic, do-or-die battle on the last planet so to speak. It could've had so many unique elements to it.

[Dimava]

Multiplayer will probably stop working at one point in time, which is inevitable.

As far as I know, the api.factorio.com URL is not hardcoded
I'd be more worried about mods, because unlike matchmaking API it *really* has a considerable traffic and requires a considerable storage
...
Okay, maybe not a considerable storage, I'd estimate the total mod size of around 100 gigs because only graphic mods are big and there's only so much of graphic mods

[NicodemusNKX]

I don’t know about you all, but I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed that we didn’t get one final planet focused purely on intense combat. Imagine a “hell on earth” scenario where you’re swarmed by endless enemies and forced to expand while fighting tooth and nail to survive. Don’t get me wrong-I love the variety and unique challenges each planet brings in the expansion. But with all the advanced tech we can build, it would have been amazing to pour everything into one climactic, do-or-die battle on the last planet so to speak. It could've had so many unique elements to it.

This sounds like a job for a sufficiently motivated modder; More planet types, a larger solar system to explore, and/or extending the endgame content.

[BlueTemplar]

I don’t know about you all, but I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed that we didn’t get one final planet focused purely on intense combat. Imagine a “hell on earth” scenario where you’re swarmed by endless enemies and forced to expand while fighting tooth and nail to survive. Don’t get me wrong-I love the variety and unique challenges each planet brings in the expansion. But with all the advanced tech we can build, it would have been amazing to pour everything into one climactic, do-or-die battle on the last planet so to speak. It could've had so many unique elements to it.

That wasn't going to happen when a significant fraction of the player base dislikes dealing with enemies. From what I've heard, endgame is about having to face a LOT of asteroids ? (Please keep spoilers to a minimum.)

[wizcreations]

the game should be pretty okay

I can see the headline now

Factorio Space Age is Pretty Okay

[ShadyNetworker]

Thanks for all the hard work! All that's left for us is to enjoy it as much as we can

Something I'm wondering about after reading the blog: can we read up somewhere on the testing practices?
Do you have any tips on how you approach it and how others can also implement this?
Thanks again!

[Xorimuth]

I don’t know about you all, but I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed that we didn’t get one final planet focused purely on intense combat. Imagine a “hell on earth” scenario where you’re swarmed by endless enemies and forced to expand while fighting tooth and nail to survive. Don’t get me wrong-I love the variety and unique challenges each planet brings in the expansion. But with all the advanced tech we can build, it would have been amazing to pour everything into one climactic, do-or-die battle on the last planet so to speak. It could've had so many unique elements to it.

There’s too many players who dislike combat enough for that to work. Additionally combat has never been the primary focus of factorio so it would be weird to have a final challenge planet being about combat. Aquilo is a much more factorio-appropriate challenge.

Rest assured I’m sure there will be plenty of deathworld planet mods coming soon.

[TheOldRusty]

Thanks for all for stealing my time.

Jokes aside, it will nice to see video footage from soundtrack recording, especially from Space Platform #2

[adamvai]

Thank you guys for your great work, I love averything in the game (execpt gleba I love a little bit less cause it give me hard time to figurelol). Space age is gallenging and rewarding as good as it can be.
The only thing that bother me is why we it cant roll automaticaly throught research queued depending on available pack? can be nice for time saver and not constantly having to recheck it

Thank you for the great game!

[dragon_gawain]

A hearty congratulations on a successful launch of Space Age! And a good job on all those bug fixes!

[mmmPI]

I'm a bit disappointed to read that Kovarex is going to play Wow while the rest of the team is fixing the bugs, i was expecting story of private jet, or sport cars, at least some golden toilets, or any important milestone of success.

It's also sad to read it's the last FFF for a while, hopefully there is the music to forget about it.

I wish you good fortune in your future adventure ! It has been a pleasure to follow this one !

[Premu]

Even if you have now 800 bug reports the quality of the release is not that of your typical AAA game out there. It's a lot better than that. I assume you put a few quality modules in your software factory?

And I agree, automated testing will reduce bugs a lot and prevent problems. We use it for our embedded software as well - no code can be merged to the main development branch without passing our large amount of software component tests first. With many different developers working on the code in parallel, such automated methods are the best method to ensure consistent quality.

[mcmase]

I don’t know about you all, but I can’t help feeling a bit disappointed that we didn’t get one final planet focused purely on intense combat. Imagine a “hell on earth” scenario where you’re swarmed by endless enemies and forced to expand while fighting tooth and nail to survive. Don’t get me wrong-I love the variety and unique challenges each planet brings in the expansion. But with all the advanced tech we can build, it would have been amazing to pour everything into one climactic, do-or-die battle on the last planet so to speak. It could've had so many unique elements to it.

There’s too many players who dislike combat enough for that to work. Additionally combat has never been the primary focus of factorio so it would be weird to have a final challenge planet being about combat. Aquilo is a much more factorio-appropriate challenge.

Rest assured I’m sure there will be plenty of deathworld planet mods coming soon.

I posted this early after Space Age announcement in the ideas section... I also wanted this. But in my idea it wasn't for progression, it was more of a "high score" feature, so you could just leave your score at 0 with no consequences if you hated combat. But my idea was for the "Raid Planet" to be something like gold to be the score (just something "valuable" in the aesthetic sense to keep score) and as soon as you landed on the planet, the infinite evolution would accelerate and you had to try to mine and launch as much of the resource off-world with rockets as possible before getting overrun. So 2 challenges, 1 being combat to buy yourself as much time as possible, and 2 being how quickly you can set up your factory to mine gold before the factory is destroyed. The bonus is that the event would be repeatable, so you can always go back and improve your late-game mega factory on Nauvis-Aquilo to improve the stuff you can take down to the raid planet... i.e. eventually you go for all legendary turrets & ammo with 15x infinite upgrades and get a higher score each time.

I think it is relatively low investment to design, but high impact for combat loving and mega base players. No downside since it is only related to leaderboards, not progression. For me, I never play past endgame because the factory is no longer producing something with a "goal", the only goal is expansion for expansion's sake. It would be nice to have a true endless war to consume everything the factory is producing.

[Phnod]

Really glad to have the whole music suite available now! The soundtrack really blew me away and I didn't expect it to grip me like it did. You all have done such an amazing job for this expansion!