Factorio Forums

So where to begin, I currently have some time off from work, so there is plenty of time to go around. A majority of it these last few days has been ~ 70% factorio mixed in with a few other things to keep me alive bla bla bla.

I have only recently heard of this game from Destiny. or Steven Bonell II more or less brought it to my attention, after watching some reviews and a little of his stream I decided I needed to do have it. its been awhile since I've had a decent base builder / resource gathering game.

Anyways, After a quick run through the basic tutorial and jumping into a game with all the basic defaults things started off pretty damn well. Iron and copper, stone and coal were all instantly nearby and it was pretty easy to get started and teching.O il was the next struggle but not very difficult to get the concept fairly quickly.

I didn't build a wall around my base for the most part, a couple turrets seemed to hold off most of the enemies fairly easily, until mid game where I had most of it being auto made. when i finally built a wall and even then they weren't really much of an issue. For the most part I can barely even tell there are aliens around me, besides the red shit on my mini-map. The only time they have been an issue so far is when i need oil and they have a hive nets directly over top of it. Even small bases I've made near enemy hives rarely seem to get attacked.

So I'm about 50 hours in, reset my file two times and a few big things are starting to come to my attention.
Resources especially the main 4 in the early game are way, WAY too abundant. 1 iron ore vein can basically last you a majority of the game , same with copper. Coal and stone becomes next to obsolete directly after hitting the mid game, Compared to how much you are given at any time. (just took a quick look, I might have around 500k coal)
And although trains look cool, and are a fuckin blast to set up and have them just racing around the map, there is barely even a need for them compared to how much I actually have in my initial base, and on top of that it's not uncommon to have another ore vein close to your main base. resulting in even less incentive/need to have trains set up.

So things that I would like to see balanced / changed

-INITIAL spawning resources to be far less rich than other spawning veins.
Maybe keep the size the ~ the same, as only have 3 or 4 miners can kinda gimp you in time spent actually mining.

-Give me a reason to want to leave my base. I barely have any reason to explore if I have more iron/copper ore then I know what to do with.
If I see that my resources are going to be gone, that puts pressure on me to get trains going, that puts good pressure on the player to go out there and start setting up a separate base.
and figuring out how trains work.

-Aliens need to be more aggressive, not attacking non-stop but so that I know something is actually out there besides me and the Trees.
Aliens also seem to currently more be about passively slowing down expansion and exploration then actually attacking you, but with how much start resources I have I doubt ill need to expand much more. Maybe in the end game where I so many factories I don't know what to do with half of them they might be an issue.

please dont base your experience on such a small sample. you got a lucky abundant start, and its sorta intended that you can get most of the way through the tech without having to take on the aliens in any major way.
its after you get deep into the tech, and start to consume, especially oil, in huge quantities that you want to explore, and then you need to get rid of those aliens.

i do custom games with large and rich resource fields. i have consumed over 2million copper/iron and about 500k stone/coal. not to mention ~1 million oil. my base is on a huge start and nearly the whole thing is covered with factory.

if you want more alien fights, restart with a custom map and choose poor resources. the option is there if you want a challenge.

I set size and richness for iron and copper to max (frequency minimum) on a recent game and burned through it all before I got to alien science.

If all you're doing is launching a rocket yeah the starting resources are plentiful, but that's not really what the game is about. It's about realising "Oh, if I want 1 solid belt of Electronic Circuits I need to feed it 1 belt of iron and 1.5 belts of copper" and reworking your factory to do that, then finding you're now short on iron because it's all going to circuits so you double your iron production, now copper is having problems so you double that too oh now the lights are flickering because your power's not enough any more and steam engines are running out of coal so you double your power and install efficiency modules in the furnaces oh bugger with all the advanced circuits being made you find you STILL don't have enough Electronic Circuits so you decide you need 2 belts and it starts aaaallll over again xD

You can make the resources far less abundant than default settings if you so desire. Setting both frequency and size to lower values has a dramatic effect on how much resources per unit map area there are on the map (richness also affects this but not as dramatically with the current v0.14.20 mapgen at least). To give an extreme example, in my random map challenge world, I got Very low frequency and size for oil and I have just 1 Oil field to work with, even though I have scoured around 5-6 Radars worth of map area looking for more; I am 35 hours in on that save, and really starting to feel that Oil starvation too).

Edit: As for the biters, if you want them to be more a nuisance, set your starting area size smaller than default, that way they will start smelling the pollution sooner and will generally get exposed to more of it. If you're (un)lucky, and get a desert starting area instead of forest, you'll be in for some stiff resistance pretty fast due to how much farther pollution will spread (I had one factory in 0.12 that was a desert start, but it had a nice couple of choke points on my eastern flank and water otherwise, so I had quite a bit of fun turtling that game.

That said, I do think you have one legitimate gripe, which I actually share..and that is that resources are, generally, to abundant in your start, or more accurately, too abundant compared to the rest of the map (i.e. just as common). It would make more sense (gameplay wise) for starting area resources to be much less rich than resources as you move away from your start (this already exists to an extent, but the effect is very gradual, to the point that it's not readily apparent that it's even there). The tl;dr here, imo, is that starting area richness should be much lower but 'roll on' as you get away from the start much more quickly, eventually settling to more or less current values after a few Radar's worth of distance from start.

I think you would like RSO mod
I agree that the base game makes resources too abundant (unless you want to make a megabase for the lols), and that trains are mostly irrellevant - or at least, the rail networks you need to build in the base game are actually small compared to real life.
Anyway RSO changes the resource spawning so that it is region-based: the map is divided up into regions, and each region has a small chance to spawn a resource patch (sometimes 2 together). It also takes over biter spawning to make it easier to explore - which you will need to do to find resources. The size and richness of resources increases the further you are from the starting area, so you are rewarded more for exploring further.
It's very highly configurable, there are many options to make resources as scarce as you like and the change the richness/size distance scaling. Starting area resources are also configurable, so you should play around with the settings a lot until you find something you like.
I have RSO set up to give me only coal, iron, stone and copper (no oil) in the starting area, and only enough to get me going with green science and small-scale production of basic items. So I have to start exploring out 30-60 chunks with radar outposts early on to find new resource patches. I find it a lot more satisfying.