[0.11.x] Marathon Mod

[bgirard]

Announcing my first mod (hosted on github):

Description

Do you find factorio too quick to complete and would like a challenge that requires you to scale a bigger factory, spend more effort on research, plan investements more carefuly and require the use the train feeding bases? Do you like the feel of the base game as-is? This is the mod for you!

This mod is designed to increase the length and difficulty of the game without changing the recipes. It makes the following major changes:

Power generation is more costly and fuel yield are halfed.
Science costs drastically increased.
Most costs are increased, partitucarly electronics circuits.
Electronics circuits changes cause the cost of automation (assembly machines, non burner inserter, electric drills) to be very costly. The player has to weight investements early on.
Bitter evolution is unchanged. Since the game is sigifincantly slowed down this means that you'll like need to use gun turrent against spitter and you'll face bitter evolution with less research completed making biters harder.
Copper outputs significantly more plates per ore (5 to 1 right now) and copper costs are significantly increases. This will cause significant copper bandwidth issues.
Various build times are increased.

Expect the following:

The game to take roughly 10 times as long.
Burner stage (turrets) can't be skipped.
Getting your first research (lab, power) will over an hour.
Higher tier research are very costly.
Be forced to use trains.

Mod compatibility

This mod has not been tested with any other mod. If it works the balance will likely be completly off thus it's not suggested.
Contributing

Contributions are welcomed. The aim of this mod is to not change recipes at the moment so I'd suggest forking this repo if you'd like to explore that.

Here's my current play-through 5 hours into it. Still using burner drill + inserter, significant copper scalling problem (direct cable insertion is not optimal), just finished railway research, exhausted a large coal patch. Green research is so costly that I toggle it on-and-off:

Repo: https://github.com/bgirard/FactorioMod-Marathon
Download:
1) Goto: https://github.com/bgirard/FactorioMod- ... ster/build
2) Select the latest version and click 'Raw'.

[FishSandwich]

This sounds like an excellent mod for people that enjoy the early game. I wonder how devastating it can be when you get into the late game?

[sillyfly]

This sounds like an excellent mod for people that enjoy the early game. I wonder how devastating it can be when you get into the late game?

I think you misspelled "fun"

I always find that by the time I get to the late game, the early assembly lines are more than enough to keep up. You just don't get the opportunity to build really massive factories, because with relatively few assembly machines, all research is done before it's even begun
On the other hand, I fear that this mod will make the beginning a bit too frustrating.
How about starting the player with say 5 burner-miners and 5 stone furnaces to help them get starting? Oh, and probably having a coal-powered version of the assembly machine as well, as you said electricity is far more expensive.

[bgirard]

I made it further into my play-through. I get crushed by a large quantity of small spitter and a few medium bitters. I didn't manage to research turret upgrades and laser turrets are still too far away. I turned it into peaceful mode using console cheats for now.

The early game isn't that bad to be honest. Getting power isn't too bad but I felt like getting to the first factory was too long (1k time unit of crafting IIRC) but you could go idle during that time. I'm thinking of modifying the mod to include a level 1 assembly machine as a starter item. The mod also needs something to balance bitter evolution since you need a lot more time and a much larger factory (pollution) to do military research so you end up getting to far behind. Maybe slowing down the bitter evolution over time and from pollution would help. I might also increase coal to be 75% instead of 50% of it's original value. I left solid fuel at it's default value which has caused me to switch to solid fuel once I researched oil, something I normally don't do.

I didn't make burner miners and stone furnaces more expensive so it doesn't need to be added to the starter items. Actually it causes me to prefer them even when I can afford the alternative because they are so cheap, however over time I'm replacing to electric components because they are a one time investment, easier to move and the drills cover a bigger area.

[Qberticus]

This seems pretty interesting since I do find that I tech up quite quickly and would like more incentive to create far flung outposts.

[bgirard]

I posted my progress so far:
http://imgur.com/a/btnsc

[theamazingrando]

This mod is great, loving it so far.

One problem: I'm trying to expand my power generation, and wanted to automate the production of steam engines so they can be made while I'm doing other things. The mod currently requires 100 pipes to make a steam engine, but they only stack in groups of 50, so the assembly plant can never make one.

[bgirard]

Yes I noticed that too. I hand crafted 30 engines which was slow. But after that I switched to solar because I've been burning through a ton of coal and I'm trying to save my oil for electronics. It's expensive but solar is the way to go if your map isn't energy rich. I'll probably fix that if I make another upgrade and do the fix to the bitter progression.

But it takes a long time to do a play-through and I haven't finished my first one so it might take some time . I'm at 30 hours now. I'll post my progress later. I'd love to see yours!

[theamazingrando]

I'm using it with the RSO mod, so there's fewer resource patches, but they're much larger and richer.

Here's my base at 10 hours in:



My starting area had very little coal, so I had to expand slowly and carefully to make sure I was able to research trains. I'm running low on copper ore now, so I'm expanding the rail line to the patches out east.

Here's my main smelter and manufacturing operation:



I started with three parallel lines of copper plates trying to feed my circuit factories, but that wasn't just keeping up. I now manufacture copper cables right after the copper smelters and main bus them to the other factories. I think for the copper rail, I'm going to manufacture copper plates and wires on-site, and train them back to my main base like that. Since there's also iron ore near that copper, I may eventually just make green circuits in that location for shipment back.

I like how this mod makes me think about logistics like that, rather than just importing as many raw materials back to the main base as possible.

[bgirard]

Yes I came to the same conclusion with the copper wires. You can see on my earlier screenshot the setup I have for cable production. I now have 2 large offset circuits factory with over 100 assemblers.

Here's my overall base 30 hours in:

[baldurs1982]

Hello, is there any chance you adapt your mode to dytech modes?

[tecxx]

hy,
coming from this post, i was directed here. looks great, will test this out asap!

[Chronosfear]

pretty damn hard in some way and a very long game

My friend and I play this mod when we have time. We both like it cause with 2 people vanilla gameplay is to fast and easy.
though we think the green chips should be a bit cheaper .. half cables might be enough.

STILL
I recommend this one for mulitplayer.

[Ohz]

Hey I was swimming through posts about mods, and you're catched my eyes !

Also since you said that you had to cheat and switch to peacefull mode, you can take a look at this one to reduce the alien evolution:
Alien Temple

[Tyrant597]

Really liking this mod so far. I always felt like there was no reason to build a sprawling base when you could make everything you need basically in a fairly small factory. There's usually no real reason to even use a train to bring in resources since you find all you can use so close to your base. Factorio needs a difficulty modifier that acts like this mod. I'm wondering if you have any other changes in mind?

[Ohz]

What a nightmare... Few hours later, it's a huge pain to make just ONE electronic circuit ! RAH

[Tyrant597]

Yep, it's not easy! I actually increased my character's crafting speed a bit because that is just ridiculous. I'm currently trying to come up with an efficient, stampable design for making circuits. I've currently got 20 Steel Furnaces feeding 12 wire assemblers with copper, and that is feeding 9 green circuit assemblers non-stop. I also need about 5-6 Steel Furnaces smelting iron to keep up. That's about as much throughput as I can provide on one red belt. Also you need at least two wire assemblers 'ahead' of your first circuit assembler, as they need slightly more wire than one assembler can provide.

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[Ohz]

I LOVE THIS MOD !!

8 hours later, I'm still dependant of the stone age and some burner equipment is not remplaced yet. I'm making only 60 circuits per mn and that absorb the outputs from my whole 32 copper furnaces. Aliens are little bit harder to handle so it makes a serious trouble that you have to deal with.

Everything is harder, slower, each step is a huge improvement, I felt each military technology as a breath front of the threat.

That's just how should be the real game in my opinion, because each building is slow to make so push you to take each choice important. You cannot really craft by hand lot of things. It takes 4 whole minutes to make 1 steam machine from scratch. That's very realistic: you cannot build a whole steam set-up in few seconds, it takes time and thoughts. As you see I'm switching my furnaces and my drills, but it's going to take hours.

I have LOT of fun thank you so much !

[Tyrant597]

*Update*
Just finished working on green circuit production again. This will run those 18 assemblers non-stop! Isn't it beautiful...

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[Ohz]

This mod is great, loving it so far.

One problem: I'm trying to expand my power generation, and wanted to automate the production of steam engines so they can be made while I'm doing other things. The mod currently requires 100 pipes to make a steam engine, but they only stack in groups of 50, so the assembly plant can never make one.

Can someone fix that? I'm sorry to ask because I have no clue how to programm And steam engine is so a pain to handcraft