Second playthrough of the game?

[Nilaus]

I just launched my first rocket and of course I want to start a new game immediately.
The question is just what to change for the second playthrough?

I set everything to difficult and I would like a bit more of a challenge, but not go overboard either. I am considering stuff like Bob's mods for a third playthrough, but think the next should be focused on getting the ratios correct and not making too much spaghetti in my factory layout.

Ideas are welcome

[Frightning]

What settings did you use in your first game? And what do you want to accomplish 2nd time around? That will inform you and how to setup your 2nd play.

[Ackos]

Experimenting with some of the excellent mods is a good option.

[British_Petroleum]

Factorio is a creative game. How you play is up to your own imagination You could play a hard vanilla game with low resources and lots of enemies, or play with easier settings and aim for a really neat and efficient factory. There are heaps of great mods to choose from, so you can really customize your game to your liking. More are being made all the time. I'd recommend experimenting with everything and following your own curiosity and creativity.

[ChurchOrganist]

I have no hesitation in recommending the RSO mod which makes trains far more relevant as you have to travel longer distances to find resources, sometimes having to fight the natives to possess them.

If you also use the Big Brother mod, then you will have radar which you can upgrade to deal with the bigger area you ned to cover.

[steinio]

If you want to have more puzzling fun add Bob's mods.
If you want to have a lot more puzzling fun add Bob's and Angel's mods.

[Nilaus]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I feel the game has so much more to offer than what I saw on the first playthrough. I only had 4 bases and never any trouble with aliens. The game took 30 hours which is fine as I don't want to rush. Only the last rocket parts were a bit tedious but aside from that there was always a ton of stuff to do and improve.

I'd like to be a bit more challenged in the next game, but just lowering the yield of resources and increasing the aliens would make the game longer and slower, but not necessarily more challenging. I've had no reason to dive into red/green wires, combinators, advanced train scheduled or anything like that in my first game, so these would be cool to use in my next game without it simply being for the fun of it in itself.

At the recommendations in this thread I have now started a new game with all of Bobs mods. It is extremely daunting, but I think this is what I was looking for. Solving resource dependencies and making a good factory.

Thanks for the advice

[orzelek]

If you want to have more puzzling fun add Bob's mods.
If you want to have a lot more puzzling fun add Bob's and Angel's mods.

Add science cost tweaker and maybe natural evolution on top of that... and you'll have a lot of things to do

[Frightning]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I feel the game has so much more to offer than what I saw on the first playthrough. I only had 4 bases and never any trouble with aliens. The game took 30 hours which is fine as I don't want to rush. Only the last rocket parts were a bit tedious but aside from that there was always a ton of stuff to do and improve.

I'd like to be a bit more challenged in the next game, but just lowering the yield of resources and increasing the aliens would make the game longer and slower, but not necessarily more challenging. I've had no reason to dive into red/green wires, combinators, advanced train scheduled or anything like that in my first game, so these would be cool to use in my next game without it simply being for the fun of it in itself.

At the recommendations in this thread I have now started a new game with all of Bobs mods. It is extremely daunting, but I think this is what I was looking for. Solving resource dependencies and making a good factory.

Thanks for the advice

Hence when I asked about what settings you used in your first map (in the map gen), because you can substantially alter what you will need to do by what settings you choose there. I finally decided to try a max biters game recently, and and because my start was extremely iron poor, I'm finding myself having to do something I wasn't planning on initially which is that I'm going to HAVE to take out some sizable bases really early on to get at a large iron deposit to my SW (My start had a tiny 15k Iron ore patch, but that will be enough as the bases on the SW Iron ore only have Small worms in addition to loads of spawners, so I can, in principle, clear them w/ just Tier 1 military and a healthy amount of gun turret support). What's going to be really interesting is that after I take that Iron, it's still going be just about surrounded by biters and hence will get attacked a TON.

There a few quirks w/ how the map gen works that are worth knowing:
The frequency values for resources do not affect average resources per map area but instead control to what extent the resources will be scattered or clustered into large spread out deposits. With the latter happening with lower settings, former with higher settings. (I personally tend to love Very Low frequency with very big deposits that are very rich; loads of resources, in huge deposits, which are spread out, this is ideal for using trains to get resources to your main base from outposts). The size of your starting area has a huge effect on how soon and how significant biter attacks will be over the course of the game. Large starting areas result in ample time to get setup and prepare, whereas smaller starts mean the biters will be smelling the pollution soon and they don't like it. It also tends to mean that, as the early game progresses to mid game, many more bases will start to get hit by pollution, hence the intensity and severity of biter attacks tends to be increased.