Space Age feels too scripted

[HadesSupreme]

Vanilla Factorio has a huge amount of options and you can use them all or refuse to use most of them. Things I've done:

- Stay on burner furnaces the whole game.
- Not use solar or nuclear, just coal in the boilers.
- Use standard turrets all game, no laser or flamethrowers.
- Use all lasers.
- Live in (mostly) peace with biters thanks to efficiency modules and green power.
- Use trains damn near everywhere or never at all. We all just belted resources in from a mile away in our first game, right?
- Use bots heavily or not at all.
- Rush artillery or not use it at all
etc etc


Now, what do we do in Space Age?

- If you want to succeed in space, you practically HAVE to use gun turrets, missile turrets, railguns in that order. There's a semi-enforced order of recipes to provide ammo for these guns, so 95% of ships are doing the same thing in a slightly different configuration.
- If you want to beat Vulcanus you HAVE to kill the Demolishers and you CAN'T use laser or fire. In practice you can't use personal explosives either (even nukes) since you can't shoot them fast enough to overcome HP regeneration, so it's uranium ammo or a wall of advanced turrets.
- If you want to beat Gleba you HAVE to have turrets that outrange the Strafers, can pierce through the Stompers, and has the HP to not be destroyed in seconds by Stomper AoE slams. In practical terms this means tesla turrets, though you can use missile turrets as well after you've finished Gleba and researched them.
- Note that there's no way to live in semi-peace with these enemies like you could with efficiency modules and green power on Nauvis. There's also no alternate way to get through asteroid fields, like by pumping a lot of energy into shields or evading them with a small fast ship or something.
- Fulgora forces you to use trains and mostly forces you to use bots with how cramped and awkward the land is (at least for me, maybe I had bad map RNG).

Now I'm obviously not saying that all of these are automatically bad limitations, and there's a few ways around these requirements I didn't mention. But taken together there's a fairly narrow set of ways to progress. I feel it would be better design if progression didn't require finishing each planet but instead just became more difficult without their research and contribution. Hopefully mods can add a lot in the coming months. As it is I don't feel that vanilla Space Age is going to have nearly the impetus to replay that vanilla Factorio did.

[Roshi]

Agree. Why can't I walk on the space platform, or use bots, or have an inventory?
Make achievements for the way you want the game to be played, do not impose it.

Factorio 1 felt like a sandbox game - here are your toys play with them.
In this DLC I just reached the space platform stage now, and it's annoying.
The new rails? These are somewhere on another planet, same with cliff explosives.

[Spawnxd]

I saw this while looking up belt capacity calculations and made an account just to reply. In my honest opinion I can't agree with what you said, just from personal experience.

- In our 2 man run we abandoned ammo turrets almost as soon as we got lasers and never used them for much after

- we juggled and distracted demos till we built up nukes

-gleba we just manually cleansed any threat with power armor

- maybe our base did something weird but the walkers almost never bothered us unlike biters which i would get a destroyed ping nearly every 5 seconds
and you can just ram through asteroids if you are lazy and stack a ton of platforms to the front of a ship with supply (we did this with our first research shipping vessel before outfitting the ships with reactors and lasers)

- i sorta agree with the train/bot thing but for power we just used reactors

Admittedly most of these things were far from optimal, but i never felt i was forced to do any specific tactic or use any particular design. The most limiting thing i found was everything on gleba rotting, i was livid when i had to restart my whole base for the 5th time since something ran out of nutrients.

[nzer]

The new rails? These are somewhere on another planet

No? Elevated rails are a Nauvis tech.

[Panzerknacker]

Agree with this thread, even tho I am not that far yet. The fact that you get forced to research Solar energy the very second after you launch your first rocket (with the space platform in it) in order to continue progressing feels very gated.

I like the examples you give in your thread, I am also one of those crazy people that beat the game in strange ways, for example with only burner drills, without extra technology, without gun turrets even.

I think many opportunities were missed to find ways to make those things usuable in a balanced way. The game is only just out yet tho so I have hope that it will still come later.

[Roshi]

I feel kind of forced to solve puzzles, instead of having all the tools (somewhat accessible - like cliff explosives and elevated rails, or bots and walking on the space platform) and be able to make anything anywhere.

How many players play the "Game scenarios"? I am not at all interested in puzzle games, as a Factorio player, I am playing in "stupid mode", better called "artistic mode" - make a big factory, and make it look as I want it to look, without feeling restricted anywhere. I will self impose restrictions if it feels fun, or if there are achievements related to them.

[mmmPI]

I don't think "artistic mode" = "stupid mode" , although i tend to agree that not seeing elevated rails being available on nauvis and complaining about it sounds like "stupid mode" to me

[trancexpress]

To pipe in on peaceful Gleba, my factory and plantations have not been attacked for a few months now. My factory is kinda small though (2 maxed out harvesters, 5 biochamber blocks producing agricultural packs, 1 of which also dumps bioflux). Also a space mining based block to produce rocket part materials, bots, gun turrets and ammo. I also have 8-ish spidertrons loaded with rockets at the perimeter but they have not engaged anything also for months. In essence I've only been doing quality upgrades to my Gleba factory for a very long while, the planet has not required my attention for other things in this period.

[EnderNecro]

The fact that you get forced to research Solar energy the very second after you launch your first rocket (with the space platform in it) in order to continue progressing feels very gated.

You can actually use nuclear/steam power for your first ship. Just keep a stock of water barrels and fuel cells, then use heat exchangers to make steam for turbines.

Although they could let you use early pure steam power by just allowing you to build boilers in space, which would let you skip the heat requirement.

Also, apologies for the 4 month late reply.

[InUniverse]

You can actually use nuclear/steam power for your first ship. Just keep a stock of water barrels and fuel cells, then use heat exchangers to make steam for turbines.

There's no way to get liquid water on the platform without already having power. Melting ice requires a powered chemical plant, unbarreling water requires a powered assembling machine, and there's nowhere to put an offshore pump. And without water, you're not getting any nuclear steam.

[pioruns]

Has anyone ever run out of 20M scrap field? I am finishing off small scrap fields with 100-200k, and next will be 20 million one. I think it will last for a long time
Regarding balancing scrap recycling process, I am first boxing items away and separate them, and then if there is any excess of something, I recycle it further (with quality modules). Sushi belt first gives space for secondary recycling products, and then for scrap from the fields, making sure there's always space on the belt.
That way, I don't worry about balancing scrap, secondary recycling always keeps items in balance.

[Kyralessa]

Has anyone ever run out of 20M scrap field?

Use big miners with productivity modules and it'll last for gazillions of years.

[Panzerknacker]

Yeah, you NEED solar, even tho it's not a prereq for Rocket silo.

I already made a suggestion a long time ago
viewtopic.php?p=662628#p662628

[Shulmeister]

Space Age isn't scripted. You can explore the planets in the order you want, you don't have to play with biters but even if you do you can still be mostly at peace with them thannks to green modules that hasn't changed.

The expansion enhanced the combat system making more options viables and offering new technologies that extend the range of options.

You can still belt things from miles away or use trains.

You can still use a lot of bots or not at all.

Sure you have to do some research before you can do all you want, but that was the same in the pre-expansion factorio.

There are so much more possibilities to organise logistic in late game, the multiplication of surfaces and means to gets ressources really increase the depth of the choices players have at their disposal.

And not only that but all the new methods with interrupts and circuits improvements or priority system for trains again increase a lot the realm of possibilities compared to 1.0.

I hope the time since release passing allows players to realize they may have missed part of the complexity that was added in the expansion in their firsts playthrough, and seek to make a even better factory the future times !

[wobbycarly]

*snip*
You can still use a lot of bots or not at all.

*snip*

I agree with most of what you wrote, but not this one. I believe it's extremely difficult to manage rocket logistics without bots. To use belts, one would need to either have a dedicated rocket for each item to be launched to space, or have a bunch of chests around a rocket silo that only fills the silo when the item is requested. Good luck doing that with blue circuits, rocket fuel and LDS.

I love using belts, and would rather avoid robots apart from low usage stuff (like nuclear fuel for trains) and player deliveries, so this part I have found a little disappointing. YMMV

[Shulmeister]

I believe it's extremely difficult to manage rocket logistics without bots. To use belts, one would need to either have a dedicated rocket for each item to be launched to space, or have a bunch of chests around a rocket silo that only fills the silo when the item is requested.

I agree it is difficult, but not impossible ! You are not strictly required to launch many things in space from Nauvis, you are not required to launch in space the item you mentionned as they can be made in space !

Or you can do that manually.

Or use dedicated rocket for each item

Or use combinators to create elaborate contraptions.