Factorio Forums

Spoilage mechanics is interesting. The new enemies are interesting.

The combination of the two is catastrophic, if you are the type who has never obtained (or attempted to obtain for that matter) any of the speed achievements.

You quickly (actually, slowly, but inevitably) find yourself basically softlocked from being able to retake your only allowed landing foothold spot.

Arguably this is more a product of the "no redeeming features" space mechanics. I will list the many, many redeeming features this doesn't have at a later time, after I actually complete the game. If I can still complete the game. Maybe I will just become a god and smite my enemies from the editor?

But you can't ship in what you need to retake your starting resources. And you can't produce them locally, because it is infested with tier 0 enemies that literally walk all over what once would have been a post-endgame empowered engineer.

Yes, I shipped in nukes, of course, at great expense. Ten wasn't enough. I lump the retarded 5000kg U235 pits in with the no redeeming features of space, rather than a Gleba issue. Assuming that a complete rethinking of all aspects of space platforms and rockets isn't on the table, you need to find a better way to balance Gleba.

Perhaps a guaranteed enemy-free zone which means you can at least progress and stockpile enough resources to attempt to push out

antstar wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:59 am But you can't ship in what you need to retake your starting resources. And you can't produce them locally, because it is infested with tier 0 enemies that literally walk all over what once would have been a post-endgame empowered engineer.

Yes, I shipped in nukes, of course, at great expense. Ten wasn't enough. I lump the retarded 5000kg U235 pits in with the no redeeming features of space, rather than a Gleba issue. Assuming that a complete rethinking of all aspects of space platforms and rockets isn't on the table, you need to find a better way to balance Gleba.

Hate to say it, but this really sounds like a skill/experience issue.

The easiest way for me to wrestle a foothold on Gleba,. in fact also on a maximized enemies playthrough, was importing a Tank with a pre-loaded equipment grid (focused on exoskeletons because it's better to not get stomped on than trying to "tank" it) and 500 coal and making cannon shells locally. You can speed up the making of cannon shells by importing 500 explosives, 400 steel and 2000 plastic, with just 3 rocket launches you can make 400 cannon shells. You can aidrop ammo from your space platform for the machine gun, it's good enough to destroy wrigglers and strafers.

3-20 cannon shells will easily do the work of 1 nuke, while being a tiny fraction of the cost, when destroying nests you can just pop the egg rafts and drive away leaving the defenders to despawn, but it's also pretty easy to take down strafers and stompers with the cannon, they pop quite satisfyingly. Slowdown capsules and discharge defense can be used to stop stompers chasing you, the Tank can outrun them especially with rocket fuel and exoskeletons, but slowdown capsules makes it very trivial, they're cheap and stack 100 to a rocket.

You can also bring a personal flamethrower and 100 flamethrower ammo, setting fire to a Small Stomper is a touch of death at fire damage 2, so you can potentially destroy hundreds of stompers with just the 100 flamethrower ammo. Needs a little finesse with flicking the fireballs in the path of the stomper/strafer, but very efficient.

Destroyer capsules are highly effective against the Glebian wildlife because they have no electricity resist. Destroyer capsules only stack 25 to a rocket, but each capsule deploys 5 destroyer bots, you only need to deploy a few capsules to have an effective personal defense system.

In short, there are lots of great options which can be imported at low cost which will wreck not only the default setting enemies but even much harsher settings.

Finally I'm not sure what the state of progression is from the experimental branches to stable, but Gleba enemies have been toned down a lot over the patches, but I don't know how much of that has made it into stable. Select the experimental branch to get the latest state of things. But all of the above advice is for the Space Age as it was released.

antstar wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:59 am But you can't ship in what you need to retake your starting resources.

Could you elaborate on this ? because to me it seem possible to ship whatever you want/need

BlakeMW wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 11:52 am Hate to say it, but this really sounds like a skill/experience issue.

The easiest way for me to wrestle a foothold on Gleba,. in fact also on a maximized enemies playthrough, was importing a Tank with a pre-loaded equipment grid (focused on exoskeletons because it's better to not get stomped on than trying to "tank" it) and 500 coal and making cannon shells locally. You can speed up the making of cannon shells by importing 500 explosives, 400 steel and 2000 plastic, with just 3 rocket launches you can make 400 cannon shells. You can aidrop ammo from your space platform for the machine gun, it's good enough to destroy wrigglers and strafers.

3-20 cannon shells will easily do the work of 1 nuke, while being a tiny fraction of the cost, when destroying nests you can just pop the egg rafts and drive away leaving the defenders to despawn, but it's also pretty easy to take down strafers and stompers with the cannon, they pop quite satisfyingly. Slowdown capsules and discharge defense can be used to stop stompers chasing you, the Tank can outrun them especially with rocket fuel and exoskeletons, but slowdown capsules makes it very trivial, they're cheap and stack 100 to a rocket.

You can also bring a personal flamethrower and 100 flamethrower ammo, setting fire to a Small Stomper is a touch of death at fire damage 2, so you can potentially destroy hundreds of stompers with just the 100 flamethrower ammo. Needs a little finesse with flicking the fireballs in the path of the stomper/strafer, but very efficient.

Destroyer capsules are highly effective against the Glebian wildlife because they have no electricity resist. Destroyer capsules only stack 25 to a rocket, but each capsule deploys 5 destroyer bots, you only need to deploy a few capsules to have an effective personal defense system.

In short, there are lots of great options which can be imported at low cost which will wreck not only the default setting enemies but even much harsher settings.

Finally I'm not sure what the state of progression is from the experimental branches to stable, but Gleba enemies have been toned down a lot over the patches, but I don't know how much of that has made it into stable. Select the experimental branch to get the latest state of things. But all of the above advice is for the Space Age as it was released.

In terms of hours and experience, it's not a skill issue. It could be said to be a playstyle issue - there are things which I don't use. There are other things which I haven't used. There are also things which I still wont use. No, I'm not burning down the very resources I want to collect

I went with my gut and landed on Vulcanus with a dozen nukes and it was indeed the correct call there. Not sure why I see so many videos of people setting up gun turrets. Actually I hit a cliff too and got spammed with achievements.

I haven't tried tesla weaponry. I could have researched it, just haven't bothered. If the turrets can wreck them, then I will leave and come back with some of those. They are only 50% resistant to laser turrets though, and a literal stack of those got their - um - spoilage pushed in. I haven't tried using a tank, but I assumed it wouldn't like the water. Get slowed and stomped on at the very least. I have a rare tank, but it's a tank - not exactly a engineer with 8 exoskeletons.

Destroyer bots aren't completely useless now, you say? I only used them once after they were added, laughed, and then used good things instead. Well, I guess I can give them a go and see if they found a purpose in existing.

You can aidrop ammo from your space platform for the machine gun, it's good enough to destroy wrigglers and strafers.

Yes, in fact despite babysitting several chests worth of local production, I have imported the vast majority of iron, steel, and ammo from space. But it's yellow ammo and does little without the use of local copper. Also, I must confess to hating gun turrets passionately and have always considered them a thing to be surpassed ASAP. This is one of the non-redeeming features of space. Making them de facto necessary

Thank you for the suggestions.

antstar wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 12:41 pm I haven't tried tesla weaponry. I could have researched it, just haven't bothered.

I would strongly suggest you try it. Tesla turrets and the Tesla gun are very effective on Gleba. (As long as you don't have power issues. If you do have power issues, you should probably be burning jellynut in the heating tower.)

I would strongly suggest you try it. Tesla turrets and the Tesla gun are very effective on Gleba.

In the process of trying it now.

If you do have power issues, you should probably be burning jellynut in the heating tower

Nah, space carbon is where it's at. When (if I can take back my planet) I scale up, alternatives will be needed. But I am making carbon faster than I can burn it, and I can burn it faster than I can use the heat

I spent ~60 hours on Gleba avoiding coming to grips with spoilage or setting up local copper/steel/iron production while tinkering with my other bases and ships remotely. All that was required to defend my perimeter was me in Mech Armor with 2 PLDs occasionally running over to kill rafts that had spawned in the spore cloud of my two throttled agricultural towers.

When Medium Stompers finally appeared I set up an automatic import of explosives to supply my personal rocket launcher.

Knowing what I know now, I'd probably tackle Gleba first next time.

antstar wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:59 amThe combination of the two is catastrophic, if you are the type who has never obtained (or attempted to obtain for that matter) any of the speed achievements.

I do not have and do not intend to get any of the speedrun achievements. And I do mean that I have never attempted *any* of them. Getting on Track Like a Pro, No Time for Chitchat, There is No Spoon...

But you can't ship in what you need to retake your starting resources.

Why not? I did Gleba with heavy amounts of imports from Vulcanus. Also, the nature of Gleba enemies is that they don't really care about you unless you go poke their nests or have agriculture going. If they're getting too intense you can turn off agriculture, fortify your positions, and then resume harvesting.

I will admit that I turned down the enemy expansion rate quite considerably for both Gleba and Nauvis, but that just meant that I didn't have to worry about defense much. Aggressively pushing against the enemy rafts with power armor mk 2 and rockets worked out very well, and keeping my spore cloud clean of rafts highly limited the number of attacks I faced. (I do not have and do not want to use the mech armor because I dislike its aesthetics. They'd be even more manageable with that armor since you can ignore cliffs and water and such.)

mmmPI wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 12:25 pm

antstar wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:59 am But you can't ship in what you need to retake your starting resources.

Could you elaborate on this ? because to me it seem possible to ship whatever you want/need

We tend to build far from (0,0) on Gleba. So if you lose your hub and had a bunch of rafts at (0,0), they will eat the Engineer whenever they drop down / respawn and whatever shipped in can't be really used?

I think the issue with Gleba defense is, if you got it wrong the first time, it's a huge nuisance to fix it after things escalated. You need to action-game enemies to clean up the landing spot for ammo drops, fight all the way to your base ruins, remove junk and rebuild nutrient / power, build a hub, then restart logistics before you can have anything resembling automatic defense. Big strafers out-range legendary PLDs so you can't sit there and laser them down like you can do with spitters. Doable, but not very factorio.

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jan 06, 2025 1:18 am

mmmPI wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 12:25 pm

antstar wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:59 am But you can't ship in what you need to retake your starting resources.

Could you elaborate on this ? because to me it seem possible to ship whatever you want/need

We tend to build far from (0,0) on Gleba. So if you lose your hub and had a bunch of rafts at (0,0), they will eat the Engineer whenever they drop down / respawn and whatever shipped in can't be really used?

I think the issue with Gleba defense is, if you got it wrong the first time, it's a huge nuisance to fix it after things escalated. You need to action-game enemies to clean up the landing spot for ammo drops, fight all the way to your base ruins, remove junk and rebuild nutrient / power, build a hub, then restart logistics before you can have anything resembling automatic defense. Big strafers out-range legendary PLDs so you can't sit there and laser them down like you can do with spitters. Doable, but not very factorio.

Possible solutions:
Don't build far away from 0,0.
Build a backup hub and stick it in a box.
Drop a Spidertron with a roboport and have it carry a hub to the old ruins, then drop more supplies.
Reload an old save.

I don't really see how "it's too hard to break back in" is a game balance issue when there's plenty of ways to not lose your foothold in the first place.

We tend to build far from (0,0) on Gleba. So if you lose your hub and had a bunch of rafts at (0,0), they will eat the Engineer whenever they drop down / respawn and whatever shipped in can't be really used?

Building far from 0,0 puts you in the regions where larger and more frequent raft nests are found, so you’re effectively raising the difficulty of Gleba by doing this.

If you stay near the initial drop zone, I think you will find that Gleba is a much more manageable experience.

Related: Do you build your initial Nauvis base in the starting area or do you also go on an overland journey first?

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jan 06, 2025 1:18 am

mmmPI wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 12:25 pm

antstar wrote: Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:59 am But you can't ship in what you need to retake your starting resources.

Could you elaborate on this ? because to me it seem possible to ship whatever you want/need

We tend to build far from (0,0) on Gleba. So if you lose your hub and had a bunch of rafts at (0,0), they will eat the Engineer whenever they drop down / respawn and whatever shipped in can't be really used?

It feel like a deliberate choice of the player to do something unusual, which happens to backfire. I don't see it as a balance issue from the game.

I must have been lucky with my choices. I went Fulgora then Gleba and the mech suit + personal lasers made the whole thing pretty easy. Being able to outrun everything and jet over water or up cliffs makes you unkillable. I was able to clear everything out with ease.

I wasn't particularly fast about it either. I spent 40-60 hours on every planet. Default difficulty settings. As I left, I set up turrets around my base and farming outposts but they didn't get attacked once. At least not until I had finished Vulcanus and shipped a spidertron to watch over Gleba. So by time I had to worry about enemies I already had a remote controlled rocket platform that could keep the spore zone clear.

Not here to flex or anything. Just curious about how so many people seem to have had a completely different experience.

fatallight wrote: Fri Jan 10, 2025 12:59 am Not here to flex or anything. Just curious about how so many people seem to have had a completely different experience.

The experience of Gleba depends a lot on prep. The more stuff you bring, the easier it is. At the moment Gleba is the first planet for speedrunners, because they have exceptional prep it's very easy to import a whole lot of stuff and get the science started and unlock Biolabs.

But the less prep you have the less pleasant the experience is.

In one playthrough I went Gleba first and naked, well, I think I had a basic Power Armor setup, I did this because I hate myself. Even though I knew how to Gleba, it was still a pretty tedious experience. It's way more enjoyable airdropping a bunch of supplies. For many it's more enjoyable to airdrop literally everything they can.

I had some time to keep playing.

So I can report back - yes, tesla turrets wreck the local fauna. They aren't too expensive to build. They are too expensive to run.

Not when I'm there and doing stuff. But when I'm not. I've never had a base which had a grey mode was 80% of its peak consumption.

And you need to keep them in pairs at least, even with rare and epic turrets. I have no idea how to make a 30MW+ supply which wont deadlock. The closest idea I have uses what I'm doing now with a recycler eating its own excrement to deal with spoilage. But I'm convinced it will find some way to spoil somewhere and lock up. So much spaghettis, every belt and every machine needs a drainage inserter. It really puts the pre 2.0 burner only runs in a new light of "could be worse".

I think I'm just going to bring in a few k nuclear fuel cells. Tried and trusted power generation tech.


BTW devs, cbf making bug reports but you can't blow up cliffs on Gleba, but bots can, if you tell them to build something over them. (they should clearly be destroyable, please don't make our lives harder)

Also, green for spores on the map was a terrible choice

Yeah I should also add that My actual drop zone wasn't infested - not sure if that can happen. But my very special soil patches both were. I spent at least 10 hours making everything I wanted and upgrading stuff (generally mucking around and avoiding going back) and in that time they didn't attack the high ground even once. I just needed to push them out of the biomes I needed to use again. Actually I'm hoping that since I'll be gone for hours again the spores will dissipate and there wont be attacks so I ripped up most of the turrets. If not, I'll just evict them again I guess

antstar wrote: Sat Jan 11, 2025 1:02 am I have no idea how to make a 30MW+ supply which wont deadlock.

On Gleba? Manufacture rocket fuel, stuff it in heating towers. 75MW per biolab building rocket fuel.

antstar wrote: Sat Jan 11, 2025 1:02 am The closest idea I have uses what I'm doing now with a recycler eating its own excrement to deal with spoilage. But I'm convinced it will find some way to spoil somewhere and lock up. So much spaghettis, every belt and every machine needs a drainage inserter. It really puts the pre 2.0 burner only runs in a new light of "could be worse".

Literally just burn the spoilage? That generates electricity and gets rid of the waste. Look at what heating towers do. Spoilage is quite inefficient at generating power but that's why they added the ability to read temperature on reactors/heating towers, so you can mix in some additional fuel into the supply when the temp gets too low, while prioritizing the waste runoff from your factory.

antstar wrote: Sat Jan 11, 2025 1:02 am BTW devs, cbf making bug reports but you can't blow up cliffs on Gleba, but bots can, if you tell them to build something over them. (they should clearly be destroyable, please don't make our lives harder)

This appear incorrect, i suppose it is a player issue again