Playing at 'full speed'

[Porter65]

I'm totally unable to play at 'normal speed' for myself. I find things too frantic, even in the absence of any attacks. When I'm engaged with the local lifeform, I need to slow down (with a mod).

I'm curious how you guys fare, if you don't play peaceful that is! Are you able to play at normal speed at all time? And is it even possible to play on a Death World at normal speed? This must be insane.

Factorio is not a 'RTS' for me, it is real time, but real time should not step over my pleasure I get from the game, which is in equal part to develop my industry and push off the bitters so I have more room for my ever growing factory.

Curious about how you feel about the default speed, and if you manage to always play without slowing down.

[TPReal]

Well, most of the time, when there are no fires of any kind in the factory, it should safely run by itself, which means I can do whatever for e.g. 5 minutes and nothing will break. The worst thing that can happen is that some production runs very slow because some resource is going slow (which means that I should be fixing this supply right now, but there's nothing that forces me to do this fast). The only time-critical parts are, in my opinion:
- producing (and dispatching) ammo
- producing electricity

So I really never feel the pressure of time, apart from when my defences fail in some place and I'm far from there so I need to walk through the base for a minute to even come close to the point of attack. But this just should not happen. Maybe play with a little less biters.

Just don't try to get things like "full belt of something". Get as much as you can, and then take your time to optimise the bottlenecks, one after another, while letting the factory run in the background, even if it is mostly stalled by lack of some resource.

I don't know anything about how it plays in death world, I guess it's not my type of game then

[zOldBulldog]

I think most players like to "play at their own speed". Some slower and some - like deathworld fans - faster.

That is where the New World settings come into play.

- For more time at the beginning, increase the starting area size.

- To have attacks ONLY when your pollution cloud touches the nests, set it to "No Expansion". This BTW is part of the defaults of the Railworld mode, which you might find attractive if you like to setup your initial base in peace before engaging the enemy.

- To adjust the size of deposits, look at the ores tab. Richness is probably what you want to change as it changes the amount of ore without changing deposit sizes. Size makes them bigger or smaller in dimension (not sure about content). Frequency is how often you see them.

- If you want to change how much biters evolve look at evolution and pollution settings (since pollution affects their evolution).

- There are other settings you might (or might not) want to touch: Cliffs, amount of water, whether you have access to the research queue (in 0.17 it is only available for Space Science by default, but you can enable it in the settings for the whole game).

[mrudat]

My first base has a double-wall with a double-row of laser turrets and enough solar power to drive it; this is overkill for default settings, which allows me to fiddle around for days with my factory without even contemplating defences, apart from the occasional alert telling me about a new set of dead biters.

I believe that one rule of thumb is that you should own your pollution cloud, as spawners within your pollution cloud will send waves of biters to dash themselves against your defences on an ongoing basis, which will cause evolution to increase faster than if you had just gotten rid of the spawners in the first place.

It takes a lot of time and resources to do it, but if you wall in your base and put up turrets (including feeding them ammo!), so long as you don't run out of bullets, you can pretty much ignore the enemy except when you need to expand the base, either for more resources or because your pollution cloud has grown bigger.

[TruePikachu]

I believe that one rule of thumb is that you should own your pollution cloud, as spawners within your pollution cloud will send waves of biters to dash themselves against your defences on an ongoing basis, which will cause evolution to increase faster than if you had just gotten rid of the spawners in the first place.

Killing biters/spitters doesn't raise the evolution factor, only killing spawners and potentially worms does.

[zOldBulldog]

I believe that one rule of thumb is that you should own your pollution cloud, as spawners within your pollution cloud will send waves of biters to dash themselves against your defences on an ongoing basis, which will cause evolution to increase faster than if you had just gotten rid of the spawners in the first place.

This is a nice concept, one that I tried to do since I started on 0.15 Factorio... only to realize that we don't have proper tools to do it in vanilla gameplay. So I quickly gave up on controlling the pollution cloud and resorted to other methods of play.

It is less than ideal but today the choices for those that prefer to spend their time on design rather than combat are: (1) mess with the New Game settings or (2) Use a mod like BioIndustries that create such pollution-reducing/avoiding options.

And both options have a high probability of disabling achievements. I am so glad I did those before 0.17. I feel sorry for new players.

[BlueTemplar]

What do you mean ? There are plenty of tools...

I believe that one rule of thumb is that you should own your pollution cloud, as spawners within your pollution cloud will send waves of biters to dash themselves against your defences on an ongoing basis, which will cause evolution to increase faster than if you had just gotten rid of the spawners in the first place.

Killing biters/spitters doesn't raise the evolution factor, only killing spawners and potentially worms does.

Not directly, but if you leave any nests in your pollution cloud, you'll have to defend against frequent biter attacks - which will cost you energy and materials, to produce which you'll need to pollute, which is going to raise evolution !

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I generally prefer to play at 20% speed (when not acting), using Vlad's Auto Time (aka "Matrix bullet time").
But 0.17 gave me the motivation to try a vanilla-only game again - so far I'm managing in my Marathon Deathworld game. (Car combat generally takes several reloads per nest though...)

[Dixi]

I never thought that game speed can be changed, neither had any problems about it. If you think biter attacks are too fast - just build more defense in advance. If you fight for extra territory - do it some automatic way - not by hands, like in shooter.

[BlueTemplar]

Vlad's auto time also binds CAPS LOCK to "Maximum Speed" : ignores activity state and just sets speed to 300% !
(Very useful for those moments when you have to wait !)

[TPReal]

(Very useful for those moments when you have to wait !)

I thought that if you have nothing urgent to do then you are playing Factorio wrong Well, probably not wrong, but this basically never happens to me.

[BlueTemplar]

You never make mistakes?

[TPReal]

Hmm, what do you mean exactly? Sometimes I make mistakes of course and sometimes this means I need to wait a long time for some part of the pipeline to recover, but there's always something else I can work on during this time. Or it's possible I can speed up the recovery manually, e.g. by carrying ores or coal to the furnaces manually...

[BlueTemplar]

What about the situations where the wait is too short to start doing anything else ?

[TPReal]

Then I take a short train ride while waiting.

[eX_ploit]

Never knew that you could change game speed, nor had any desire to, nor have I ever changed game settings. I dunno why you have problems, this game has tools to resolve every situation. Getting overrun by biters? Place some turrets surrounded by a wall in the exact spot where they are attacking and research some military upgrades. It takes you too much time to research something? Invest in more science production. Can't clear a biter base? Automate some red bullets, grenades, rockets, combat drones, make better armor, build a tank etc. Also you can now even dodge Worm attacks in 0.17. It takes you too much time to setup mining/smelting outposts? Build personal roboport + construction drones and use blueprints to place them instead.