My space age review

[TheFrizz]

Factorio is by far my favorite game and it's not even close. Things were rough for a bit, and looking forward to Space Age was something that frequently occupied my thoughts as a positive on the horizon. I was tempted to write a review shortly after it came out. I had a kind of mild disappointment, it was palpable but hard to explain. I didn't write one at the time and I'm glad, because Space Age is very good. However, I still feel like I need the catharsis of writing this review.

It would be easy to write about how Vulcanus is overpowered or whatever, or the technological rewards from Gleba don't follow a coherent theme. But I think the real review of Space Age has to be zoomed out a bit, and if I can put it into words it would be this: Factorio is like a brilliant Haiku. Beautiful, simple, self contained. You land, create beautiful machines that score somewhere on a continuum of capital deployment efficiency and then suffer the pollution consequences from the biters accordingly. The difficulty ramps up as you ramp up until you either figure out the rhythm of the dance and mind-meld with the game for hours on end and eventually win, or you realize that Factorio is not for you. Space Age is from the same author as the haiku, but is more of a rambling run-on sentence. It is extremely interesting the whole time; I hang on every word even. The author is the same. The brilliance behind it is all there. But somehow it doesn't neatly package itself into this perfect poem.

To make a Minecraft analogy, Factorio default settings is a bit like Survival, and when Space Age came out I imagined I was buying more Survival. But the reality is that it actually shortens the survival game and instead, after validating the player's bona fides, it essentially switches to creative mode. Space Age as a DLC is essentially more Factorio creative mode. You can now be all powerful in more fanciful ways. You can create challenges for yourself like winning the game with the fewest rocket launches possible etc. I'm not sure how long the Survival game could have been stretched, perhaps for mass market appeal this is the optimal balance for a 6 surfaces game run.

The game has shipped. And no radical changes are happening now. But every brick that Space Age is built with is already very good. I think, if I had to offer my humble advice, it would be to add some kind of New Game+. You beat the game, and you unlock a new difficulty preset and this preset gives you the game that is Survival all the way through to the end where death is finally no longer nipping at your heels and you can bask in all that you have created, even if it was quick and ugly at the time in the name of survival.

Ultimately we are satisfied when we have built something that either allowed us to survive or was beautiful in its perfection. Space Age mildly disables the former while diluting the latter. Quality and productivity continually change what the optimal design looks like so frequently one has to either: not interact with these subsystems at all until Legendary everything, or rebuild similar but different designs over and over again at every quality level until fatigue sets in and saps all the fun.

To draw a quote from Dr Robert Zubrin "I think societies are like individuals. We grow when we challenge ourselves, we stagnate when we do not..." Space Age should challenge us to bring our very best so we do not stagnate in our play.

To everyone who makes Factorio happen, thank you. I have bought so many Steam copies it's practically on the family budget. Even if none of my complaints are addressed for 2.1 I still look forward to being able to finalize some of my designs as best as I can build them.

[Panzerknacker]

Think I can agree, Space Age needs a lot more work imo. For me personally it was a missbuy. Removal of expensive recipes (higher difficulty) and fluid simulation don't weigh up to the new content for me.

I wonder actually how the sales are doing, somehow I have a feeling it didnt get better with SA. Because if you compare vanilla 2.0 with 1.1, I firmly believe it is a downgrade.

I have not much hope for 2.1 because the creator of Factorio, Kovarex has been so quiet since release, like he is barely involved with the project these days. Yet only he is the one able to steer the ship into the right direction. And this is not a small ship either, it's a massively complicated behemoth .

[danbopes]

My only major gripe with space age was the design of the landing pads being limited to 1 per planet. Watching AVDII on YouTube (Who did 1M spm run) have to resort to using bots to extract items out of the pad because throughput wasn't high enough, kinda goes against the idea of "Base must grow".

Looking forward to 2.1. I believe they mentioned some improvements to how red/green wires interact with different entities (Being allowed to read and write to them using different color wires)

[eloepp]

I'm mostly happy with Space Age, although as somebody who can get pretty overwhelmed easily I find it very hard to plan things with the Quality system. I almost just shut down and had to go on a year break...but now I am actually making a lot of Legendary items; probably not in the most efficient way but it's happening, at least. Slowly. You are right about having to rebuild over and over. That is just something I couldn't do, so I am mostly skipping all tiers of Quality and going straight to Legendary.

Anyway, After you unlock everything in vanilla Factorio you can immediately start laying down finalized copies of blueprints if you desire. I'm not sure this is really a good thing though. Seems a little too easy in retrospect, but a little "messy" in Space Age. I honestly have no better idea or words of advice if Wube reads this, it seems complicated. I think you touched on an "issue" precisely though - a lot of people will find it very overwhelming having to rebuild for each Quality tier or find it too difficult or time-consuming to go straight to Legendary. Both routes present issues. It may be best to just leave it as is though... if you can do it, the end result is satisfying, being able to get the same output with much smaller designs.

[coffee-factorio]

It's a bit of a dragon in that the issue isn't made to be tractable. Keep at it with a steady pace.