quineotio wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 5:10 am
coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Sep 19, 2026 7:28 pm
You might be surprised if you go to look at the original blog post. Kovarex explicitly laid you how he thought the strategy would play.
I am.
In practice, a small number of quality items is almost completely useless - the exception being personal equipment (and
maybe space platforms). For example, you have 20 assemblers for green circuits and 2 of them are uncommon? It doesn't matter - it's easier to just build more normal assemblers. You design around what you have, so either it's normal quality or some other. So in practice, if you're going to engage with quality in a meaningful way, you need a good level of reliable production - which you CAN'T have until after you leave Nauvis and get the recycler.
If you want to upgrade your factory to quality using the recycle loop method only, that's really, really boring and wasteful. And when I say wasteful I don't mean of resources, because who cares (resources are unlimited). It's wasteful of your time and effort. And even if you do it this way, you're eventually going to get all you need, and then you've built a bunch of infrastructure that doesn't do anything any more, which goes back to my point about quality in the lategame.
And then there's the other trap for quality, which is that your builds will break if you didn't account for additional tiers after Gleba/Aquilo. I can't help but feel like it would be better if all tiers were available at the same time, and there were ways to limit which outputs you got. Having to account for 5 different outputs every single time you put a quality module anywhere is also annoying, especially after recyclers where you're getting 5x the number of ingredients outputs.
Quality items themselves are fun, but so many things make the system unwieldy. It's just so strange that other areas of the game have had so much polish and quality of life and bug fixing, but so little has been done to address probably the most complained about thing in the game.
Part of me, tries to imagine what the game designer was thinking. For some reason, when people do that, it's a weird daemon. Because it is a daemon, it knows all.
Is not a man, with finite knowledge and energy.
One of things I figured out in the map editor is, you have your own story of what the gambling mechanics are. But my story is "optimization" and not "gambling mechanics". A lot of the things that I think are appropriate criticism of Wube's approach is that they are not being clear that the quality system is supposed to have the traits that I associate with an optimization process.
Ambiguity, complexity and context sensitive problems are all parts of optimization. When you look at it from that perspective, they meet the criteria for the system. There's a requirement I feel that is enforced where the quality levels are to make a safe sandbox rather than one where things truly break, which makes things feel too similar till you start upcycling on multiple planets.
I can have my opinion that it is a dishonest engine meant to make you deal with context sensitive problems that yield context sensitive results. I'm not sure I can defend the developer's approach or should.
quineotio wrote: Sun Sep 20, 2026 6:05 am
And I have to add, the problems with quality (and some other things) arise in part from the lack of iteration upon game design choices in Space Age. It's one thing to design a system that works in theory, but when it comes into contact with the broader playerbase, issues arise.
And this is one of my longstanding complaints about Space Age. The game was released and then there was silence for 1.5 years. There was a dire need for iteration based on player feedback, but this didn't happen. And now, after almost 2 years, the design has become baked in, and now it's difficult to change anything.
Yeah. I interpret this as a standing assumption that players will design something that corresponds to a prompt that makes sense. Make a Red / Blue choice (and blue is evil? I dunno...) . The reality is that you optimize the blue pill, which now has a decorative five dot label. And I still don't know if the blue pill is evil because ambiguity is, part of the design criteria.