Space Age feels too scripted

[HadesSupreme]

Vanilla Factorio has a huge amount of options and you can use them all or refuse to use most of them. Things I've done:

- Stay on burner furnaces the whole game.
- Not use solar or nuclear, just coal in the boilers.
- Use standard turrets all game, no laser or flamethrowers.
- Use all lasers.
- Live in (mostly) peace with biters thanks to efficiency modules and green power.
- Use trains damn near everywhere or never at all. We all just belted resources in from a mile away in our first game, right?
- Use bots heavily or not at all.
- Rush artillery or not use it at all
etc etc


Now, what do we do in Space Age?

- If you want to succeed in space, you practically HAVE to use gun turrets, missile turrets, railguns in that order. There's a semi-enforced order of recipes to provide ammo for these guns, so 95% of ships are doing the same thing in a slightly different configuration.
- If you want to beat Vulcanus you HAVE to kill the Demolishers and you CAN'T use laser or fire. In practice you can't use personal explosives either (even nukes) since you can't shoot them fast enough to overcome HP regeneration, so it's uranium ammo or a wall of advanced turrets.
- If you want to beat Gleba you HAVE to have turrets that outrange the Strafers, can pierce through the Stompers, and has the HP to not be destroyed in seconds by Stomper AoE slams. In practical terms this means tesla turrets, though you can use missile turrets as well after you've finished Gleba and researched them.
- Note that there's no way to live in semi-peace with these enemies like you could with efficiency modules and green power on Nauvis. There's also no alternate way to get through asteroid fields, like by pumping a lot of energy into shields or evading them with a small fast ship or something.
- Fulgora forces you to use trains and mostly forces you to use bots with how cramped and awkward the land is (at least for me, maybe I had bad map RNG).

Now I'm obviously not saying that all of these are automatically bad limitations, and there's a few ways around these requirements I didn't mention. But taken together there's a fairly narrow set of ways to progress. I feel it would be better design if progression didn't require finishing each planet but instead just became more difficult without their research and contribution. Hopefully mods can add a lot in the coming months. As it is I don't feel that vanilla Space Age is going to have nearly the impetus to replay that vanilla Factorio did.

[Roshi]

Agree. Why can't I walk on the space platform, or use bots, or have an inventory?
Make achievements for the way you want the game to be played, do not impose it.

Factorio 1 felt like a sandbox game - here are your toys play with them.
In this DLC I just reached the space platform stage now, and it's annoying.
The new rails? These are somewhere on another planet, same with cliff explosives.

[Spawnxd]

I saw this while looking up belt capacity calculations and made an account just to reply. In my honest opinion I can't agree with what you said, just from personal experience.

- In our 2 man run we abandoned ammo turrets almost as soon as we got lasers and never used them for much after

- we juggled and distracted demos till we built up nukes

-gleba we just manually cleansed any threat with power armor

- maybe our base did something weird but the walkers almost never bothered us unlike biters which i would get a destroyed ping nearly every 5 seconds
and you can just ram through asteroids if you are lazy and stack a ton of platforms to the front of a ship with supply (we did this with our first research shipping vessel before outfitting the ships with reactors and lasers)

- i sorta agree with the train/bot thing but for power we just used reactors

Admittedly most of these things were far from optimal, but i never felt i was forced to do any specific tactic or use any particular design. The most limiting thing i found was everything on gleba rotting, i was livid when i had to restart my whole base for the 5th time since something ran out of nutrients.

[nzer]

The new rails? These are somewhere on another planet

No? Elevated rails are a Nauvis tech.

[Panzerknacker]

Agree with this thread, even tho I am not that far yet. The fact that you get forced to research Solar energy the very second after you launch your first rocket (with the space platform in it) in order to continue progressing feels very gated.

I like the examples you give in your thread, I am also one of those crazy people that beat the game in strange ways, for example with only burner drills, without extra technology, without gun turrets even.

I think many opportunities were missed to find ways to make those things usuable in a balanced way. The game is only just out yet tho so I have hope that it will still come later.