Factorio Forums

I'd like some help figuring out difficulty settings.

More specifically, what are Oldschool, Hardcore, ect?
How does Alien base richness affect the aliens? Frequency and Size are pretty self explanitory, and while richness in resources makes the fields last longer by having more resources per square, it is not so clear what richness means in alien bases...do they spawn faster? evolve to harder alien types quicker?

I played my first freeplay with all resources turned up one spot, all alien settings turned down one spot, and my starting area larger by one spot. my second game was played just straight normal all the way. Now I'm on my third freeplay, where I toned down forests a bit (hate those trees!), and increased alien base size and richness.

And about the trees....I saw on the latest friday's dev post that the new build is supposed to have 10 types of trees? ugh! I'm actually not looking forward to more tree types...(is that thing a tree blocking my building or just a background ground object I can ignore...?) no I don't need palm trees or cactuses or...yeah, trees...usually I just want to find ways to get RID of the damn things faster. How about a difficulty setting for weaker trees?

Try a shotgun on the trees. It'll clear your vegetation problems right up.

I tried the richness setting on enemy bases a few versions back and I seem to remember having fewer artifacts drop from destroyed spawners. Might be wrong though.

No idea what the "oldschool/hardcore" difficulties do. Hopefully someone knows, I've been wondering the same.

Psycho0124 wrote:I tried the richness setting on enemy bases a few versions back and I seem to remember having fewer artifacts drop from destroyed spawners. Might be wrong though.

Oh, interesting... I did have one spawner only drop 2 alien artifacts with the richness setting upped one level....but those spawners seem to drop such random amounts of artifacts I think it would be hard to notice an increase unless I really kept track and averaged it out at the end of a game.

Psycho0124 wrote:Try a shotgun on the trees. It'll clear your vegetation problems right up.

Most efficient: use the poison capsule!

If you have it. Clears a whole forest within seconds.

We are not planning to have more trees, we just want the world to be more variable. From the small testing I already started to do, I can say it is more pleasant to play with nicer environment graphics.

ah, poisoning the trees...sounds fun death to the environment!

Anyhow, the original questions still stand, what are the various difficulty levels, and how does richness affect alien bases?

From what I know dificulty setting is used only in scenarios. You can suposingly have diferent entity placment in scenario for each difficulty. Check the ingame editor.

ssilk wrote:

Psycho0124 wrote:Try a shotgun on the trees. It'll clear your vegetation problems right up.

Most efficient: use the poison capsule!

If you have it. Clears a whole forest within seconds.

Also being inside vehicle will protect you against poison damage.