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PaperclipPerfector
3mo ago
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My honest review of the Factorio expansion, after getting through (ish) all four planets: I don't like it, and I think it doesn't really feel like Factorio except for Vulcanus.
The good stuff is that elevated rails and Vulcanus really are fun. And some of the stuff the other planets get you is fun (notably mech armor and the electromagnetic plant). Vulcanus in particular they just knocked it out of the park. Interesting new enemies, liquid metal processing is fun as hell, you have multiple (strong) ways to generate power, even the music slaps.
Unfortunately the bad stuff is... every other planet. And also quality (more on that later). Fulgora is really a pain with how cramped your builds are. Even on bigger islands there's not much room, and the need to use accumulators for lightning really cuts that space down further. Gleba combines one of the least fun things in the game (dealing with belts jamming up), and a new un-fun thing (spoiling timers) Bots at least make Gleba manageable, but trying to do a belt base is hell. Then it caps off with the extra kick in the dick that Gleba science both spoils and gives you less science per pack thanks to the timer ticking down as you transport it back to Nauvis. And it doesn't even give you a cool new building which is useful back on the main base like Fulgora or Vulcanus did. On top of all that, the enemies just aren't very interesting. They basically act like biters, except they can cross walls so you need more firepower. The spore mechanic is just pollution under a different name, so there's really nothing interesting going on there. Aquilo makes logistics much harder thanks to needing heat, and it makes bots impossible to use effectively. Not only that but you have to make shit tons of ice foundation (and import concrete) just to be able to have a half decent production setup, both of which are slow. I finally gave up on the expansion when I realized that I would need several thousand concrete+ice (above and beyond what I already did) just to make 60 SPM. Not to mention getting to the more outlying ice islands once my starter supply of lithium brine ran out. I already have spent 270 hours on this save, and I can't really see myself putting in more time to do all that, research the tech needed to get to the solar system edge, and building a ship to do it.
Quality is one of those things which seemed like it would be fun, but wound up not being fun. Just unlocking it makes the interface harder to use (I had to break my deeply ingrained habit of set recipe->hit esc when setting up new buildings), and it's such a pain in the ass the way it's all or nothing. You have to have belts carry only one quality of item or your machines will jam up constantly. Would've been much better if quality ingredients gave an increased chance at a quality result (with full quality being guaranteed as it is now).
Overall, it feels like Kovarex really loves compact belt spaghetti bases and tried to make the expansion push you in that direction as hard as possible. Aquilo is by far the worst with the bot energy usage penalty (probably unsurprising since Kovarex said in the past he regrets adding bots to the game), but three of the five new environments (Aquilo, Fulgora and space platforms) are extremely space constrained. And I just... don't like that. I like doing big, sprawling builds where I make pollution that blots out the sun and I laugh as the biters break on my defenses like waves on rock. Vulcanus is really the only planet of the four that still feels like Factorio (minus the biters part), and it's a shame.
Obviously many people do enjoy Space Age. But ultimately I realized... I just wasn't having fun any more, and haven't been for a long time. I thought about continuing just to finish the game (I am closing in on the end), but ultimately decided to not give into the sunk cost fallacy on this one. I wish that we had gotten more content like Vulcanus (which is honestly incredible, 10/10) and less of the wild divergence from the base game. But c'est la vie.
I've seen this sentiment from quite a few people and I don't really get it. Maybe Space Age isn't pushing people in the right directions or communicating clearly enough. I'm going to rebut you because I'm a fanboy with nothing better to do, but I don't mean to question your conclusion for what's best for you or call you dumb or anything. If the game isn't making you do things you enjoy then don't play it.
A lot of people say the new planets are super space constrained and you can't build big but that just... isn't true? Space platforms and ice platform are both pretty trivially cheap (especially once you are a Vulcanus enjoyer). Fulgora has infinite islands to claim whose only cost is the rail to reach them and lightning rods which are also pretty trivially cheap. Fulgora limits the max size of any one build, but most big islands are larger than the big city blocks people like to build anyway. It is true these things aren't literally free, but biters and demolishers and cliffs and lakes and lava put a cost on land that is pretty comparable. Only Fulgora constrains the shape of your factory and if you don't like it there you only need to extract holmium ore and make science.
I don't understand why people think bots are good on Gleba (or that belts are bad/hard). The fastest spoil timers are still several minutes, which means you can belt them several thousand tiles on express belts before they spoil. The only output that cares about spoilage percentage is the science which crafts twice as fast as the other new sciences for 1/4 of the "mining" area so it just doesn't matter if it is showing up at the labs at 40% freshness, just ship 2.5x as much. The real unique valuable building from Gleba is the stack inserter, which can quadruple the throughput of all of your belts which is much more game changing than the EM plant. I wasn't a huge fan of the pentapods, they're fine, but to say they didn't change things is probably a result of hyper overinvestment in military.
My first Aquilo science setup targeted 60spm and took just over 500 concrete (1/3 of a rocket load of stone brick processed through a foundry) for the main processing core and rocket silo which both sat on the starter island (so didn't need platform) and about 600 platform to train in my closest fluorine. This was all common quality machines and modules as I hadn't set up any meaningful quality processing yet. Where is all the concrete going? Also why aren't you just making more?
(The quality interface change really bugged me, the move from dropdown to radio buttons helped a lot but muscle memory is a hell of a drug. Also the mixed quality for chance of better output sounds sweet, but is a lot more complicated than people make it sound. What weight do different ingredients/qualities get? There are several different recipes with drastically different efficiencies for making the various materials so using summed ore count is awkward and overweighs processed materials because of productivity. Should I be able to consistently make good circuits from legendary copper and common iron? What I think it really needed was some sort of downgrade machine that didn't feel terribly inefficient to use so you could have your mines output a stream of common and uncommon ore which could go to their own smelting stack without dealing w
I also felt that the expansion railroaded players very hard towards the specific play styles the developers like, while the original game let the player choose between multiple viable options. For example:
That said I did enjoy the expansion, even Gleba. There were lots of interesting mechanics, and those mechanics were pretty well designed (except maybe quality, but that one is optional anyway). But it did quite often feel that the developers were gating progress behind using the new expansion game mechanics, rather than making the mechanics available and rewarding the player for exploring them.
I think you being a bit too critical of Wube's design here. The basic gun/laser turrets will handle the initial enemies easily enough. Rockets, tesla turrets, flamethrowers, or some mix thereof (railguns too, but those are overkill...) are all viable to handle Gleba's enemies once evolution starts kicking in. Rockets can be researched and sourced entirely locally. Tesla turrets require the player to go to Fulgora, but trivialize Gleba's enemies. Flamethrowers are held back by the lack of oil production on Gleba, but Vulcanus's coal liquefaction combined with Gleba's coal synthesis make it viable. Or you can just ship the fuel in from another planet since flamethrowers are so frugal and enemy attacks so sporadic. And if you really want to keep using the basic laser/gun turrets, the infinite damage research for both keeps it viable though expensive. You can get sufficiently far into them to handle Gleba's enemies without ever leaving Nauvis since they don't require any other planet's science.
On top of that, Gleba's design encourages a different defensive strategy. On Nauvis, nearly everything produces pollution that aggros the biters, which expand aggressively and attack in large waves. This encourages players to build a defensive wall around the entire factory for the constant biter attacks to break against. In contrast, only harvesting produces pollen on Gleba, so most of your factory doesn't need to worry about attacks if you ensure enemies don't need to path through it to get to your farms. Your defenses can thus be focused around your farms with almost no defense needed for the rest of the factory beyond some artillery turrets to keep expansions from popping up too close.
Wube's design is thus pushing people to try something different, with multiple options unlocked or enhanced by visiting the other planets. You can still use the same defensive strategies you used on Nauvis, but there are better ones and the design rewards you for trying something new.
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