Factorio Forums

coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 9:02 pm

evandy wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 8:49 pm
Exponentially increasing difficulty? Wow, that's the first time I've ever heard that about vanilla factorio, but I guess it depends how you measure difficulty?

The better one I think, is science costs. Purple science is something else when you realize it's asking you for 10 rails a second for a unit, and compare that to the cost of everything else that came before it. And that's combined with the individual cost of the research. Normally though, only damage upgrades follow an exponential track. Mining productivity is linear. It is beautiful game design though, because it is a manageable task.

Yeah, depends how you are calculating difficulty. I do not equate an ever increasing volume of throughput as an increase in difficulty. It just means we need to make a bigger factory. But it's not a more complicated factory - just more copies of the same thing.

evandy wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 9:42 pm Yeah, depends how you are calculating difficulty. I do not equate an ever increasing volume of throughput as an increase in difficulty. It just means we need to make a bigger factory. But it's not a more complicated factory - just more copies of the same thing.

Well, the thing is, you can't really rely on copy and paste till you have a robot work force. Which you need chemical science for. So that's how this works, you have the challenge of scaling a factory, but if you put the effort in you get an increase in capability. If you do, you don't just get bots to do it, it's cliff explosives and the works.

When I see big jumps in capability like that, I feel like the 300% productivity schemes are more related to that kind of balancing. Rerolling is good for some things (it's a least a start with sulfur). But if there's something else that provides that huge lever and it's being missed, it raises some questions on if it's functioning as intended.

coffee-factorio wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 2:06 pm

Nidan wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 7:12 pm 5 legendary prod modules add another +125%, pushing the total over the cap of +300% / x4.

This works for all recipes where you can reach the +300% prod cap and get the ingredients back by recycling.

If you are not familiar with thing, you would do well to not rush to conclusions.

What do you mean ?

coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 9:02 pm Look at biter health . That's one of the two best examples.

Biter health and robot requiring chemical science are your 2 examples of exponential difficulty ?

coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:38 pm
Well, the thing is, you can't really rely on copy and paste till you have a robot work force.

Why? Manual copypaste is effort-intensive yet some players find this a relaxing meditative practice not a burden.

Plus, how worker drone techs are related to crushers and asteroid recycling? Platforms DO build everything automatically if they have instructions and materials.

evandy wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 9:42 pm

coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 9:02 pm

evandy wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 8:49 pm
Exponentially increasing difficulty? Wow, that's the first time I've ever heard that about vanilla factorio, but I guess it depends how you measure difficulty?

The better one I think, is science costs. Purple science is something else when you realize it's asking you for 10 rails a second for a unit, and compare that to the cost of everything else that came before it. And that's combined with the individual cost of the research. Normally though, only damage upgrades follow an exponential track. Mining productivity is linear. It is beautiful game design though, because it is a manageable task.

Yeah, depends how you are calculating difficulty. I do not equate an ever increasing volume of throughput as an increase in difficulty. It just means we need to make a bigger factory. But it's not a more complicated factory - just more copies of the same thing.

Quantity has a quality all its own, as the saying goes. I do believe that increasing throughput demands require you to qualitatively upgrade your understanding and implementation of logistics multiple times as you play through the game and a fair amount of post-game. E.g. as a post-game example, upgrading from just connecting things with a rail network to designing things in a way that one that avoids congestion as you move greater and greater quantities of goods through it.

Although I imagine by the time you've researched up to 300% productivity you're probably near the end of that.