Factorio: Space Age
My friend and I beat Factorio: Space Age.
Our map is visible here on the Galaxy of Fame.
It's worth every penny. The additions slot beautifully into the niches left behind by the prior mechanics. The level of communication in the development process reveals Wube to be not one of the most skillful gamedevs but even software teams of all time.
Once space was available my friend and I did Fulgora first, specifically for the mechsuit. Then we scaled up Nauvis which was probably a mistake to do before Vulcanus. We then did Vulcanus to get artillery and cliff explosives before tackling Gleba because Gleba has a reputation.
Nauvis Start:
The new world gen is fantastic. The cliffs are impenetrable obstacles but generate in patterns that you can actually work with instead of against. It took a bit to get the rockets, why they only carried full loads, and so on. I now regard them as very big logistics bots. They will carry one rocket-stack from A to B. Need less? Tough. It's fine with logistics bots but early rockets take considerable time and resource investment to launch. I wish they could apply some logic to launching mixed payloads, but alas. I'll get to more points about them later.
The interrupts for trains are fantastic. The ability to make a push-based train network where available trains of any type just go to an outpost and wait until they're needed is amazing. Is it necessary? No. But it gives you so much to tinker with to optimize the factory and, to me, that's what Factorio is about (but we'll get more to that later).
At this point in the game you make your first space science platform and you'll probably want to load the rocket by hand because it'll use small numbers of lots of parts. This part changed a lot from the Friday Fast Facts, originally you still launched a satellite to get a trickle of space science to unlock the ability to create space science directly in space, although that recipe required that you launch enriched uranium to make the science (although at a far cheaper rate than satellites).
On one hand, that would make science-ingredient launches compete with launches for building your first space ship. On the other hand, it would be an early hint how inefficient crafting chains will get replaced (a lesson I only realized with foundaries, taking way too long to even use electromagnetics plants). And on the gripping hand, it would force players to learn the automatic supply systems on a much smaller, simpler scale. Although it would also borderline force players learning and employing kovarex enrichment.
Fulgora:
Fulgora stumped us for a solid ten minutes because we were certain that we'd read that the native lightning rods produced power, so we'd have to build in their footprint until we could build our own. We were baffled because the native lightning rods weren't connecting to our shipped-in power poles. Then I remembered a reddit post about making sure players can avoid getting softlocked on any planet (except Aquilo) and we looked for natural resources and what we could craft with them where we found the basic lightning rods.
We set up shop on the first decent sized island that had a rich scrap location within power-pole distance and started building our factory. It took a few tries balancing the input and making ad-hoc extra recyclers to deal with unexpected resources. The phrase "two recyclers kissing" was said way more often than it should have been.
We left behind a tank with a roboport but realized that, given the distance between islands, there's no way we'd be able to expand very far because we had zero radar coverage of other islands. Speaking of radar coverage, we thought the game bugged because my friend's cat bumped his mouse and sent his camera a hundred thousand tiles away from the map origin and we thought Fulgora just wasn't rendering for him any more.
From here we export what you'd expect: electromagnetic plants, recyclers, superconductors, super capacitors, quality modules, and tesla turrets.
Nauvis rebuild:
With a good supply of extraplanetary science and a sense that there was a lot more we could ship to prepare the other planets we made a new freighter and scaled up. This is where we made 2000 electric furnaces and started making buttloads of traditional science. Here I made a new pull-based train system where a cluster of stations would say what they want and a train located at a programmer station would receive its orders. Importantly, I recorded that the train was dispatched and used that to temporarily reduce the demand! This little circuit pretty much replaces mods like LTN or CyberSyn for me. We didn't really make any novel developments here besides that, just scaling up and stretching out.
Vulcanus:
People say that the Demolishers require tanks with armor piercing rounds and high bullet damage or giant piles of turrets or massed artillery. I found them quite susceptible to the cleansing power of the atom. I also found cliffs quite susceptible to that back on Nauvis, which is why I got the achievements "I am the destroyer of worlds" and "Terraformer" at the same time. Sure you need to ship the raw materials in but who cares? By this point you have enough rockets to handle anything driven by player demand.
Shamefully, this base is half-assed. We made decent arrays that can make a lot of stuff but then just... let bots carry it around. It took us until after we'd cranked Aquilo science production to realize that we still had Vulcanus with only one science assembler!
We export, again, what you'd expect: foundries, big mining drills, tungsten plate and carbide, and turbo belts. However we also export cliff explosives and artillery stuff, both guns and wagons. What about the calcite? Didn't need it yet. After Gleba we built a calcite collector in orbit over Nauvis.
Gleba:
Gleba... Okay, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that Gleba would be better if there was another intermediate processing chain and a somewhat obnoxious hint about reprocessing.
Basically you start with Yumako and turning that into mash and seeds. You get stuck here if you don't gently work the numbers and realize that you only break even without productivity. Then you start turning the mash into nutrients, great! You can set up shop right next to your agriculture tower and get a self-sustaining loop that way. But this is a trap because what you really need is nutrient from bioflux, which requires the jellynut from the other side of the damn landing site.
If jellynut had its own small, self-contained nutrient loop, possibly some kind of accelerated-to-spoilage-to-nutrient recipe, then you can get both of those spinning independently and bring them together on your own time. I think the only problem with this is that you don't really have your own time and, in fact, you don't want to have your factory by your fields because of the five-legged-bastards roaming about.
The problem with Gleba is that you have to build an entire production line from start to finish before you can turn it on and it might run fine for ten or twenty minutes before it jams. It's just a bit of a pain to engineer and this whole while you're nervous about stopping because your farms might run out of seeds and fail. Or the pentapods in your biochambers will hatch.
Also, when the Friday Fast Facts talked about using eggs in the context of turret whitelists, I figured it was going to be more like setting up a perimeter around a nest, shooting the enemies, and bots picking up their drops, like how early Factorio alpha versions had the alien artifacts. I was a little disapointed this never came to pass.
My advice for Gleba is to let the belts flow. Do not ever let them back up. If the belts would stop, do not let them stop, burn the excess. Internalize this and Gleba will make sense. It's basically the opposite of this brainrotted Lancer meme (courtesy of u/Andreus):
Anyway we export bioflux and agricultural science on their own dedicated ships (did I mention I export science from the other planets? That's probably obvious) as well as rocket turrets, stack inserters, and carbon fiber.
Aquilo:
It took us a few tries to make a ship that could do this. With essentially the same design we went from dying horribly on the way out to being able to jaunt back and forth without stopping. We made two of these, one carrying supplies to Aquilo and the other carrying Aquilo exports back. We also redesigned our freighter to go significantly faster.
I really like the idea of the cold system. I really like the gameplay of it. The general vibe, however? Because Aquilo doesn't produce much in the way of traditional resources, you mostly end up building power infrastructure (which either ignores heat, provides heat, or should be enveloped in high-temperature materials) and structures explicitly designed to work in the cold that still freeze over. Why do we need to heat pipes with 500C steam in them? Isn't it a bad idea to heat pipes carrying the cooled fluoroketone?
I love how it makes you consider an entirely new form of spaghetti. Aquilo's crafting chains are very simple, you just have to totally rethink how you lay every block of the factory out. Just... don't think about the narrative aspect of the temperature. Maybe instead if it was only a smaller list of things that froze instead of a rather large list of things that don't. How about just things with moving parts that are small or exposed to the elements, like belts, inserters, and pumpjacks. That alone would retain the logistic challenge of heating resource sites and winding heatpipes through builds
We exported pretty much everything we made here. The only real decision we made is the barrels of hot fluoroketone. It's used in fairly small amounts so it's not worth exporting a bunch of raw resources to craft it on other planets. And besides, why chill it locally?
Solar System edge:
Yeah, we cheesed it. We were starting to build a proper ship when I saw there was a patch coming that nerfed the landmine-facetank strategy so I plopped down a blueprint and we blasted out to space. I get that landmines are overpowered but now they're basically useless because they obliterate everything near them on the platform. Maybe if they took longer to settle before becoming live again, or if they destroyed the tiny asteroid chunks you need for resources, they could be balanced so that they're useful but you can't use only them.
And this brings me to my two major complaints: The space part of Space Age. The planets are fine, it's everything between them that I feel kinda "Huh." about!
Rocket Problems:
In Space Exploration rockets are configured to land at a specific landing pad and, I believe, require a signal to launch. They are your main form of interplanetary logistics until end game tech of space ships are unlocked. You can't control every aspect of them with signals but you can control most of them. My parter and I made a system where remote planets would use interstellar radios to request resources which would set bot requests to load the rockets and then dispatch the rocket once ready or a timer had run out.
Like I said earlier, rockets feel like giant logistics bots which would be fine if they were dirt cheap, fast, and near-infinitely scalable. They are not and so I want a lot of ways to tinker and optimize.
In the absence of any other addition I would love the ability to load a rocket with a mixed bag of resources and send it a signal whereupon it launches to a platform that is requesting all of the material on board.
My dream would be for each platform to have its own ID and an orbital surveillance radar can list how many platforms there are in orbit and, by feeding in a signal, it gives you the platform ID. Then using a communication uplink you can see what signals it is sending to know what it wants. No, this absolutely should not replace the existing system, it should augment it. Wube says that circuits aren't mandatory and while I find space platforms way more difficult than they should be without them, I believe it. There would also be a way to link comms between different planets so that signals can be sent, just like in Space Exploration.
I think that, regardless, the communication uplink should exist for the sole reason that you can't query a rocket silo for both its contents and the current orbital requests. You have to have a decoy silo if you want to get requests and that's just a level of inelegance I won't tolerate. Landing pads have an even worse issue: You can either set their requests by signal or you can read their contents by signal, not both. Because landing pads are a unique-per-surface structure it's literally impossible to do both. Maybe the cargo bay addons should be wireable to read contents of the entire thing?
It should probably also be possible to make multiple landing pads. As is, there's an ultimate cap on how much throughput can be done by inserters and I don't like the idea that bots, or any other part of the game, is mandatory. To this end, rocket silos would need a small change so that rocket-components can be loaded onto them. Space Exploration, if I recall correctly, solved this by telling you how many rocket sections were loaded so it was up to you to stop loading them. Again, I don't want circuits to be mandatory, so perhaps silos have a dedicated place where things are loaded? I'm pretty sure I've seen modded buildings where inserters access different inventories depending on where they grab. Maybe there's a rocket workshop that connects to the silo like a cargo bay and that provides both the location you insert rocket components to and it stores an additional waiting rocket for the silo?
Rockets are totally serviceable but they're such a core part of the expansion and there's so many things I would love to do with them but I can't that I want to overhaul them.
Space Platform Problems:
Space Platforms reminded me a lot of the dredging platforms from Freight Forwarding. They're space limited and involve cyclically cracking big rocks to get basic resources. Dredging platforms have a small, fixed space and, if I recall correctly, don't allow underground belts. You also don't do anything right there with the produced resources, you just box 'em up and ship 'em out. So understand that I liked the challenge and the design. They felt like a mix of that and the space ships from Space Exploration. But in a few ways they feel really underdeveloped.
There's only one thruster, you can't unlock more advanced engines despite unlocking a fusion reactor. You can't rendezvous with other platforms. Space Exploration had really cool design challenges and optimizations with loading and unloading them due to how they dock and physically appear in the world at other locations. They feel very restricted in their design space and that attempts at opening that up are their own can of worms, exemplified by the landmine nerf. Also, when I first read the Friday Fast Fact about different weapon systems to deal with different asteroids I thought it was going to be like, carbonic absorbs laser heat really well and is weak to that while ice and metallic are too specular and have higher resistance. I understand the game design reason for having three four sizes that you need progressive technology unlocks to deal with but this part of the expansion, in particular, feels like there was a lot of "No, you're having fun the wrong way! You will construct ammo as you go! You will use these weapons for these rocks!" Like, got it, but it feels like I'm being disproportionately punished for not doing it that way. I think it should be fairly even between designs that manufacture ammo and have it shipped up.
But maybe I'm crazy. Factorio has a huge design space for your factory but in the end you still make bullets and ship them to walls. Space Age is only different in that it's okay to let biters nibble on your walls as a sustainable design but if asteroids make it to your hull you're near-instantly fucked. I'd love to see shotgun turrets at the same tier as flame throwers and tank-shell turrets at the same tier as rocket launchers, and reinforced Platform material that can actually tank a few hits but isn't able to be constructed on. That would go a ways to increasing the available design. Also, adding the armored snapper versions of biters to Nauvis would make all of the available weapon systems more interesting by making turrets have meaningful priority differences per-type, not just per-size.
I also feel really icky about how there's drag in space and the formulas for acceleration has a hidden 10000-ton term in it. From a balancing perspective I get it, you need platforms to move at a fairly predictable speed so that turret engagement times are reasonable. I also get why the craft can't do an actual brachistochrone trajectory because how do you slow down if you've run out of fuel? But definitely this part could have cooked for a bit longer.
Quality
Yeah the names kinda suck but the only thing I've heard that's better is +1 +2 +3 +5 which is even more D&D. Quality is great for no other reason than it encourages the creation of production lines for player equipment. Spidertrons (and now tanks) using equipment grids is great because each player only exists once so they want to fill out their armor and then call it a day. If you're not going for Lazy Bastard why bother? Just hand craft it! The quality equipment is so much better, and you probably want to load out a spidertron or at least a tank, so you better create something that can create high quality roboports, reactors, and defense lasers.
Conclusion
It definitely has some rough edges and could have done well for another LAN party and month of development time. Despite that I thoroughly enjoyed it and it remains one of my favorite games. I know 2.1 is scheduled and I'm looking forward to seeing what last oddballs make it in. After all, 1.1 gave us the spidertron. More than that, I'm looking forwards to what the modding community does with all of the new mechanics. I think the only thing I repeatedly see called for, and think is categorically a bad idea, is making spoilage stop on Aquilo. I want mods to be able to have hot spoilables that cool! Now, if the modding API lets each item declare if it spoils on a given surface or not then that would be a best-of-both-worlds compromise.
Also, as a last thought, I really like how they removed filter inserters and made everything able to filter. However imagine if inserters had a psuedo-module-slot that took a basic circuit and adding that enabled filtering (and the bulk and stack inserters would take an advanced chip, naturally). I think this would be great from a historical perspective, it would encourage some level of meaningful decisions versus how I see some players say "Now I just filter all the things", and imagine what mods could do with it! If buildings could have functions that depend on the presence of an item inside of them all kinds of new modded ideas and challenges would be possible.
Wube says that the next thing they want to try is an MMO. Sounds dangerous to global productivity. I haven't played one in the past 10 years but I'm looking forwards to it.