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I'm starting to think factorio space age suffers from the same gamey mechanics problems that make modded Minecraft unappealing for me.
Everything goes quadratic, everything before a particular weird meta becomes instantly obsolete the second you hit an arbitrary point on a tech beeline.
Like the correct way to make Legendary Concrete is a rube Goldberg system of turning stone into basic furnaces and recycling them back into stone with quality modules and filtering. Then taking all the non-legendary concrete, painting stripes on it, then erasing the stripes in an infinite loop to farm a 1% drop rate of the highest tier concrete. It's a game mechanic totally disconnected from both reality and the internal rules established at the start of the game.
The same sort of thing turned me off Minecraft too. You get invited to a group server and play for a bit, and then someone goes:
I don't know, it just ends up seeming so arbitrary that there's no real joy in thinking your way through it, like one of the old point and click adventure games with the nonsense puzzles.
Maybe I'm just a stick in the mud, but this is the reason I always preferred the vanilla experience in games. It's like all the mods are just cheat mode but with an extra long and frustrating to type console command. And space age feels like a mod.
This is what has burned me out on most video games. Eventually you discover that there’s one “right” way to do it and everything else is pointless. That’s part of why I loved PUBG so much: you had to scavenge limited supplies of items from the game world so most of the time nobody is running meta because they have to work with what they can find.
I maintain (with no personal disrespect intended) that this is a self inflicted problem. If the game is less fun when you go with the optimal solution, it is very easy to simply... not use the optimal solution. I do it all the time (for example, I played wide in Civ V despite all the game's mechanics pushing you away from that). Humans aren't rats who can't help but do the things that trigger dopamine in the brain, we have agency and should use it.
@ZorbaTHut had a post on I think /r/TheMotte about how, as a game designer, you basically had to trick the players into having fun because otherwise they'd fall into whatever pattern looked "optimal". I can't find it though.
I know the one you mean. It was about Rimworld, and how players wanted grow lamps for plants to turn off at night (because they used a lot of power). But the lamps were intended to be expensive, to nudge people towards growing crops outside. So they wound up having the lamps turn off at night, but use twice as much electricity when active.
Another similar example is how beta WoW had a "fatigue" penalty to XP from kills (after playing for a long enough time), because they wanted quests and not grinding to be the best way to level up. Players complained, so they added the rest XP system which was mathematically equivalent but inverted - you always gained the lesser rate of XP, but if you logged out for a while you would gain rest and earn double XP while rested. And people praised the system even though it was the same thing.
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