My space age review

[TheFrizz]

Factorio is by far my favorite game and it's not even close. Things were rough for a bit, and looking forward to Space Age was something that frequently occupied my thoughts as a positive on the horizon. I was tempted to write a review shortly after it came out. I had a kind of mild disappointment, it was palpable but hard to explain. I didn't write one at the time and I'm glad, because Space Age is very good. However, I still feel like I need the catharsis of writing this review.

It would be easy to write about how Vulcanus is overpowered or whatever, or the technological rewards from Gleba don't follow a coherent theme. But I think the real review of Space Age has to be zoomed out a bit, and if I can put it into words it would be this: Factorio is like a brilliant Haiku. Beautiful, simple, self contained. You land, create beautiful machines that score somewhere on a continuum of capital deployment efficiency and then suffer the pollution consequences from the biters accordingly. The difficulty ramps up as you ramp up until you either figure out the rhythm of the dance and mind-meld with the game for hours on end and eventually win, or you realize that Factorio is not for you. Space Age is from the same author as the haiku, but is more of a rambling run-on sentence. It is extremely interesting the whole time; I hang on every word even. The author is the same. The brilliance behind it is all there. But somehow it doesn't neatly package itself into this perfect poem.

To make a Minecraft analogy, Factorio default settings is a bit like Survival, and when Space Age came out I imagined I was buying more Survival. But the reality is that it actually shortens the survival game and instead, after validating the player's bona fides, it essentially switches to creative mode. Space Age as a DLC is essentially more Factorio creative mode. You can now be all powerful in more fanciful ways. You can create challenges for yourself like winning the game with the fewest rocket launches possible etc. I'm not sure how long the Survival game could have been stretched, perhaps for mass market appeal this is the optimal balance for a 6 surfaces game run.

The game has shipped. And no radical changes are happening now. But every brick that Space Age is built with is already very good. I think, if I had to offer my humble advice, it would be to add some kind of New Game+. You beat the game, and you unlock a new difficulty preset and this preset gives you the game that is Survival all the way through to the end where death is finally no longer nipping at your heels and you can bask in all that you have created, even if it was quick and ugly at the time in the name of survival.

Ultimately we are satisfied when we have built something that either allowed us to survive or was beautiful in its perfection. Space Age mildly disables the former while diluting the latter. Quality and productivity continually change what the optimal design looks like so frequently one has to either: not interact with these subsystems at all until Legendary everything, or rebuild similar but different designs over and over again at every quality level until fatigue sets in and saps all the fun.

To draw a quote from Dr Robert Zubrin "I think societies are like individuals. We grow when we challenge ourselves, we stagnate when we do not..." Space Age should challenge us to bring our very best so we do not stagnate in our play.

To everyone who makes Factorio happen, thank you. I have bought so many Steam copies it's practically on the family budget. Even if none of my complaints are addressed for 2.1 I still look forward to being able to finalize some of my designs as best as I can build them.

[Panzerknacker]

Think I can agree, Space Age needs a lot more work imo. For me personally it was a missbuy. Removal of expensive recipes (higher difficulty) and fluid simulation don't weigh up to the new content for me.

I wonder actually how the sales are doing, somehow I have a feeling it didnt get better with SA. Because if you compare vanilla 2.0 with 1.1, I firmly believe it is a downgrade.

I have not much hope for 2.1 because the creator of Factorio, Kovarex has been so quiet since release, like he is barely involved with the project these days. Yet only he is the one able to steer the ship into the right direction. And this is not a small ship either, it's a massively complicated behemoth .

[danbopes]

My only major gripe with space age was the design of the landing pads being limited to 1 per planet. Watching AVDII on YouTube (Who did 1M spm run) have to resort to using bots to extract items out of the pad because throughput wasn't high enough, kinda goes against the idea of "Base must grow".

Looking forward to 2.1. I believe they mentioned some improvements to how red/green wires interact with different entities (Being allowed to read and write to them using different color wires)

[eloepp]

I'm mostly happy with Space Age, although as somebody who can get pretty overwhelmed easily I find it very hard to plan things with the Quality system. I almost just shut down and had to go on a year break...but now I am actually making a lot of Legendary items; probably not in the most efficient way but it's happening, at least. Slowly. You are right about having to rebuild over and over. That is just something I couldn't do, so I am mostly skipping all tiers of Quality and going straight to Legendary.

Anyway, After you unlock everything in vanilla Factorio you can immediately start laying down finalized copies of blueprints if you desire. I'm not sure this is really a good thing though. Seems a little too easy in retrospect, but a little "messy" in Space Age. I honestly have no better idea or words of advice if Wube reads this, it seems complicated. I think you touched on an "issue" precisely though - a lot of people will find it very overwhelming having to rebuild for each Quality tier or find it too difficult or time-consuming to go straight to Legendary. Both routes present issues. It may be best to just leave it as is though... if you can do it, the end result is satisfying, being able to get the same output with much smaller designs.

[coffee-factorio]

It's a bit of a dragon in that the issue isn't made to be tractable. Keep at it with a steady pace.

[jooshkaboosh]

For me it was also a missbuy, after watching a video (dosh) and understanding some of the quality system, i haven't touched the game in over a year. I found this thread looking for a mod solution that would remove the quality system entirely while maintaining balance in late game (my understanding is that space ships in late game need some high quality components like grabbers and recyclers to be viable).

[Tertius]

remove the quality system entirely while maintaining balance in late game (my understanding is that space ships in late game need some high quality components like grabbers and recyclers to be viable).

All of Space Age is perfectly viable without quality. From the first rocket launch up to promethium farming as final challenge. And it's not barely viable, it's fully viable. It's the full game and the full experience without quality. I built everything with normal quality and never felt the need for quality items or that I missed something. Not for one second. My endgame platform is fully normal quality, and it's neither slow nor lacking. You don't need that much asteroid chunks to require quality collectors, and you can boost any recyclers with speed modules directly and with beacons with speed modules.

So give Space Age a chance and start a new map and pretend there's no quality. You cannot remove the mod, because Space Age has a dependency, but that's probably because of the recycler, which is a required building for some tasks other than quality.

[NineNine]

For me personally it was a missbuy.

I have to laugh every time I read somebody writing something like this. If $35 is such a huge deal for you, then in all honesty, you should be doing things other than playing video games.

Personally, I don't know of any video game that provides more entertainment per dollar than Factorio does, and I've been playing video games since before there were video games. I know I'm probably just feeding the trolls, but this sort of comment is so incredibly insulting.

[jodokus31]

I think, Space Age needs a lot of time to digest all the new concepts and mechanics and it will take me years. I recently started to engage with early game quality and i really love it, although I'm quite hesitant towards quality. Gleba also gave a me major drawback until I figured it out, now I really dig it.

Many people, who were satisfied with 1.1 are likely to don't want to engage with that in case, all they want is playing 1.1 and mods. I mean, it's still possible, but mod support is declining and most mods are rather update to 2.0

Personally, I see vanilla 2.0 as upgrade, because of all the new QoL features, but it also changes some aspects of 1.1, which might bring some people on the fence like fluid change, rail changes, no expensive recipes, etc. I can live with that, I really like the rail changes, not a fan of fluids, but I don't care enough. Expensive recipes is a good mod candidate, but I prefer to increase the science multi, which is similar, but surely not the same.

[Kyralessa]

For me it was also a missbuy, after watching a video (dosh) and understanding some of the quality system, i haven't touched the game in over a year. I found this thread looking for a mod solution that would remove the quality system entirely while maintaining balance in late game (my understanding is that space ships in late game need some high quality components like grabbers and recyclers to be viable).

Quality basically allows you to "build tall" rather than "build wide." But if you don't want to mess with quality, there's nothing wrong with building wide. It just means you build more machines or bigger space platforms.

And even without quality you can already build taller once you get foundries, big miners, biochambers, electromagnetic plants, etc., as well as high-level modules to put in them.

[NineNine]

Quality basically allows you to "build tall" rather than "build wide." But if you don't want to mess with quality, there's nothing wrong with building wide. It just means you build more machines or bigger space platforms.

Right. The amount of stuff you need to build to make everything Legendary, is almost another game in itself, because you really need to scale up in a way that you don't need to to finish the "regular" game.

[Stargateur]

the creator of Factorio, Kovarex has been so quiet since release, like he is barely involved with the project these days.

A programmer doesn’t talk when he’s working - Ryuunosuke Akasaka

[sushi_eater]

I regret buying Space Age. I got burned out by the jankiness and stopped playing. The frequently unreasonable developer/moderator attitude to bug reports, where things are obviously broken doesn't help. Critical posts are suppressed and get silently deleted.
The space platform logistics are in an atrocious state. There is next to no circuit level control. There is no control over having space platforms leave, when there are extremely sporadic shipments (shipments that trickle in sporadically delay the departure indefinitely). It doesn't help that there are spoiling ingredients, there the most basic functionality is missing. How do I trash things that are 20% spoiled? Shipping stuff based on inter-planetary demand is plain impossible.
Quality could be an interesting mechanism, but the way it currently works plain sucks. Why can't higher level quality ingredients be used in crafting lower level stuff? The standard up-cycling loop adds nothing interesting to the game.

How could this behavior possibly not be considered a bug (Biter Egg spoiling while over water gets biters stuck on the water):
viewtopic.php?t=117716
(That's the most recent tip of an iceberg,)

IMO, overhaul mods like Krastorio, Seablock, Space Exploration are FAR, FAR, FAR ahead of Space Age.

[NineNine]

How could this behavior possibly not be considered a bug (Biter Egg spoiling while over water gets biters stuck on the water):
viewtopic.php?t=117716
(That's the most recent tip of an iceberg,)

Hahahaha! Unplayable!!

[evanrinehart]

If the point was to find the one optimal design that beats all, and you couldn't immediately find it. Sounds like a game worth buying. If you eventually found it and felt like that was the end, immediately quit retired champion. I really feel like maybe you missed a few things along the way.

Factorio after a certain version really became a reflection. The stated objectives really started taking a side seat to the player's emergent priorities, self imposed side quests. And the concrete stuff in the base game became like a subtext to riff on. I found it fascinating how much better at this Factorio was than a sandbox game.

When Space Age came out, it's like that generating subtext multiplied. Suggesting new avenues to explore and develop. Yeah there might be some tweaks left, but the expansion really feels like it keeps this player engagement-reflection aspect alive. Of course it can be optimized away (in many ways) if you're determined.

And if you never noticed any of this, maybe that could be held against the game somehow. I don't know how but maybe it could have tricked you harder into having fun.

[Nemoricus]

Critical posts are suppressed and get silently deleted.

Do you have examples of something being suppressed?

[mmmPI]

Do you have examples of something being suppressed?

Not me who was asked, but it happens sometimes players gets very passionate about reporting something they consider an issue, make several post about it, and don't necessarily have the ability to consider things from a different angle than the one they are very passionate about, or that maybe they missed something which can leads to escalation into personnal attacks, or other unhealthy behavior , sometimes the moderators have to intervene to keep the discussions focussed onto what they arbiter is a more productive feedback. I know because one time i published a machine that speak random gibberish made with combinator and a player who felt mimiocked by it reported it and it was deleted. I have made a new one that says "skill-issue" since then, i think it would an example of things suppressed if i were to post it. Because it would needlessly inflammatory without actually contributing usefully, i suppose. The etiquette always has some implied part, and is always imperfect, but i figure it may be something along those lines that was in question, more than advertising for another product or a website with naked people, those are also suppressed, but no-one complains about it usually

[Makka77]

All these posts raise interesting points, about a game we are all very much invested in.
I think one of the best things about Factorio is the open-ended moddability. Don't like quality? Mod it out! Game too long/short/hard/easy? Mod away!

It is tempting but unnecessary to feel things should be played "as the devs intended". I have a weak PC that did not cope well with all the ships and surfaces, so after beating the game at ~25FPS and ~16kSPM I installed a mod called Everything on Nauvis (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/EverythingOnNauvis) which clearly removes many aspects of the game, but I'm having an absolute blast! Everything runs smooth, I built a (completely unnecessary) train network for fun, I have biters and pentapods vying to absorb my ammo production, and after watching too much abucnasty I'm learning how to time inserters and build combinator stuff I never even knew was possible we could, even though it's been there since the early days. I miss the interplanetary challenge, but that was not the main part of the fun for me. The main part was building the factory and fighting!


We have remarkably flexible and fun sandbox in our hands and a great community. Vanilla 2.0 is flawed, no doubt, and much could be improved, but I don't get anyone hating on the game or the devs. They have presented their work in such a way that if we really don't like it we can change it until it tickles our mental health issues in just the right way!

I humbly submit that it is the best game ever released and will remain so (in my eyes) for a very long time. Factorio 3.0 anyone? X

[sushi_eater]

Critical posts are suppressed and get silently deleted.

Do you have examples of something being suppressed?

Posts get silently deleted (not just mine). I would be fine with moderators replacing a post with an off-topic, unproductive message warning or whatever. That's not what happened. I haven't received any kind of notification that my posts were somehow inappropriate. They were silently deleted.

One "impolite" thing I did, was questioning the devs, if they had ever tried to built a mega base. Trying to "beat" the game is trivial. Speedrunners do it in a few hours. The Space Age world record is below 4 hours.

\\

While some miracle with hell freezing over occurred and combinators got fixed:
viewtopic.php?t=131363

the dev response was that:

Thanks for the report however this is working as intended. Combinator use the secondary input priority and so other entities get power first before they do.

As far as I’ve ever known, they were not designed to be a critical part of anything.

WTF?????????? How is it acceptable that combinators randomly fail in an unpredictable and pretty much impossible to debug manner? Briefly being low on power doesn't just break any kind of state keeping/counters, it also breaks any combinator setup that properly handles combinator propagation delays. Any non-trivial combinator creation will experience sporadic spurious signals / random failures in low power conditions.

Space Age makes power issues a lot worse with causing massive power spikes (e.g moduled rocket silos). Reliably handling power spikes requires an insane amount of power generation overbuilding. Given how broken the whole spoilage stuff is for large scale setups, an insane amount of rocket silos is required in the first place.

I've played Factorio since the 0.16 days. Circuits were working reliably, including extremely sophisticated sushi setups that relied on reliable counting.

I can't comprehend the dev statement: "As far as I’ve ever known, they were not designed to be a critical part of anything." at all.

[Tertius]

viewtopic.php?t=131363

WTF?????????? How is it acceptable that combinators randomly fail in an unpredictable and pretty much impossible to debug manner? Briefly being low on power doesn't just break any kind of state keeping/counters, it also breaks any combinator setup that properly handles combinator propagation delays. Any non-trivial combinator creation will experience sporadic spurious signals / random failures in low power conditions.

This is similar to the real world. With a blackout/brownout, all kinds of funny stuff will happen with more advanced manufacturing control. To prevent this funny stuff, sensitive production lines do emergency shutdowns and have controlled reset/restart procedures. Do the same in the real world simulation that is Factorio. This behavior is a pro, not a con. To have everything streamlined and every edge case controlled and mitigated by the game engine is bland and boring.

You have your opinion, and this is mine. And the developers have theirs. So in my opinion you have no reason to be so upset about something that doesn't entirely pleases you. It is a valid design decision, not a flaw and not making the game "unplayable" as your reactions about this and other Space Age rough edges suggest. I suggest you respect that design and create a factory that includes the design quirks and challenges, just as every engineer would do in the real world. The engineer cannot change the real world, but he can change his factory build.

I'm definitely the combinator guy and all my factories are covered with circuits, but all of my combinator designs are robust. They self-reset and always get to some valid working state again on their own. In computer science, there is the invariant. It's an assertion about the program data. Design your circuits so the invariant cannot be violated. Every single tick the invariant must stay true and the circuits must converge to a valid state if the state is destroyed by an external event.