I will selectively respond to comments that I feel are important to talk about.
NineNine wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 2:09 amHave you actually played Space Age all the way through yourself, or are you just making all of this up? I'm get the impression that you haven't actually played the game, yet.
So yeah, you haven't even played the game yet.
If you play the game, and have actual questions about it, you should post them here. I notice that you've made no posts to "Gameplay Help", so you clearly haven't tried the game and asked for advice. It sounds to me like you're just reading random stuff on the Internet and slagging off on the game based on whatever you've read.
If you made that protestation about me, I could try to make a misinformed allegation against you, but I won't, as it leads nowhere good.
As for making a post in "Gameplay Help," why should I? I have very specific niche gameplay goals:
- Avoid Gleba as much as humanely possible
- Ensuring that it flawlessly works when I set it up on the first try and lasts for the rest of the session without paying any attention to it.
- Especially while losing parts of the Gleba farm to fauna attacks while working toward finishing the achievements.
- A very tight timing window to work on Gleba. I can't spend more than a half dozen hours or more there while working on four non-Gleba worlds and several Space Platforms.
Do you honestly expect me to get actionable help when it is challenging for you to understand what I am trying to do with Gleba? Do you understand why comments like "you haven't even played the game yet" are unhelpful when I have spent thousands of hours in Factorio and have considerable experience trouble-shooting from doing so?
Jay_Raynor wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 6:09 amWe literally contended with biters, expansion, evolution, nests, and pollution on Nauvis. Are you contending none of those lessons carry over? Did you expect the new enemies to behave the same way as biters?
When I initially tested some defense strategies on Gleba, I found that very little to nothing about defending against biters/worms was applicable to Gleba natives.
A defense perimeter of turrets and walls? Stomper walks over the wall and potentially becomes aggressive due to the presence of turrets.
Strafer spawns wriggler on top of the turrets and, as the namesake implies, strafe instead of moving in close.
I didn't ask for new enemies to act the same way as Nauvis fauna. I accepted and dealt with Vulcanis Demolishers of various sizes, for instance.
Yet, at the same time, Gleba's fauna is different enough that new players will have problems adjusting after Nauvis.
Jay_Raynor wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 6:09 amI really feel like we keep crossing "new player" and "speedrunner" wires here, but I'll indulge.
I am not mixing those two kind of players as if they are the same kind of players.
"Introducing" new Gleba mechanics is all dumped almost back-to-back, giving new players little time to adjust and learn the mechanics.
Speedrunner has to deal with the Gleba factory potentially failing and costing them the attempt, as time is a limited currency. See my next post.
When did I mix the two categories of players up? I am asking because I clarified several times that they aren't the same, and I want to improve my communication.
Jay_Raynor wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 6:09 amAnd thank you for taking that time to do so. I hope you understand that I'm not pointing out the discrepancy here to try and poke fun at you. Imagine the dev responsible for Gleba reads your remarks. How do you think they would interpret a complaint about time spent from someone staking claim to a few thousand hours? I admittedly can't say for sure with this set of professionals, but I've seen nasty community engagement discussions between professional tech staff and customers before. The people that do this for a living will absolutely skewer you for even the slightest perceived inconsistency. Remember, this is your hobby but their profession.
What inconsistency? You made it sound like I played Space Age for 2k hours when I didn't make that claim.
I responded to skepticism about how much of an 'expert' I am with Factorio by pointing out that I have thousands of hours of gameplay with Factorio.
I did not mention how much time I spent with Space Age, partially because there isn't a reliable way to track time spent playing with Space Age. Steam treats Factorio 1.1, Factorio 2.0 without Space Age, and Factorio 2.0 with Space Age as a singular number of total hours spent.
Since its release date, I have had at most a hundred hours of free time to play Space Age at my best guess, and even then, I didn't spend all of that time on Space Age.
Those statements are not mutually exclusive, and thus, there is consistency.
Jay_Raynor wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 6:09 amThe funny thing is that I'm still curious enough to work with you despite the hostility. I'm not sure what blueprint you pulled or why it failed. I do know I left Gleba dozens of in-game hours ago and my factory still chugs along with no intervention.
It doesn't matter why or how the blueprint/factory failed. The point that I am still trying to get you to understand is that when it does, it fails. It is frustrating that I spent hours doing whatever it was at the time only to find something failed or not working and not knowing why. See my next post.
Then I started to follow the trail of how something failed (no agricultural science, no flux, the particularities don't matter here), and it turns out that something went wrong with the Gleba Factory. Production charts only show what was being produced but not the particularises in how it failed or ceased producing.
The damage was already done by then, and I tried to revert to an earlier save game. However, I still couldn't find the cause for the failure as the earlier Gleba save game continued well past the fail timeframe without incident.
That is not the first or last time I have had to diagnose what went wrong with Gleba without data or even the only situation I have encountered, but it illustrates that dealing with Gleba is a bottomless well of dissatisfaction.
Jay_Raynor wrote: Tue Jan 21, 2025 6:09 amYou quite clearly implied I had no life, career, or other concerns in your flippancy.
I am still trying to have that conversation.
Let's review why I made that flippancy comment and what I was trying to do.
In my first few posts, I add a bit of commentary about various issues with Gleba, which all went by without incidents.
While quoting one of my posts, you indicated that you were busy defending the Gleba mechanics.
Jay_Raynor wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2025 1:55 amI've been busy defending Gleba as a concept so I wanted to address your specific listed points:
Then, you end your post with an unconstructive, confrontational take on my stance.
Jay_Raynor wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2025 1:55 amLimited time: This is MOST of us and
unbelievable that this is a complaint. Space platforms take
a lot of time to master, are you going to complain about them, too? Space Age requires multiple different production dynamics. If you don't want to spend the time learning a particular one, mod it out or go back to vanilla.
See underlined portions.
In what way or shape are those portions meant to be constructive commentary that would get me to listen to you ranting about how I should take the time to learn how to play Gleba? Especially after a complete lack of sympathy for me not having fun with Gleba's mechanics?
Even more directly to the point, you made the point that I should "complain" about Space Platforms because they are not easy to master?
What does the quoted statement have to do with me not having fun with or not enjoying Gleba's mechanics?
), too. The belt setup for a minimal Gleba base (just enough for rocket parts and not quite functional yet AgroScience line), is indeed complicated. Looks more like spaghetti than streamlined. Got my robots ready, but worried about the power drain. Fuel for the boilers is another (fragile) production line. Good thing that the stuff you need grows on trees 