Saboteur's tricks Space Age

[SaboteurKiev]

I have played Factorio more than a year and found a lot of useful things that can be used in different constructions. So want to share some ideas

* Let's start with easy thing. I use display to see current state of liquids, science pack reserve, other things. And I put all of these display together in "dashboard". Than I use "pin" (alt + rclick) to make this dashboard available from anywhere:

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* output/input hatches are important. For each plant I have a separate platform which travel Nauvis-Planet and brings all goods. So the task how to speedup the route - calculate amount of rockets you requests, make enough rocket silos on planet, but also add enough cargo buy on platform to have enough input and output hatches, so the time on orbit will be minimal in this case.

* standard calculations should be based not on random numbers like 100 items per minute or 1000 items per minute, but on logistic limits, which are:
green stacked turbobelt brings 14400 items per minute. If you need more - you will need more turbobelts. And you need 4 legendary stack inserters to fill green turbobelt.

* Trains in Space Age are not effective. Majority of items are moved to liquids, and the rest are stone and coal, turbobelt is more effecient than you think, if you are use tanks:

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You can use legendary tanks, you can add legendary belts to the tank, and it just beat any trains with great advantage. In late game filling the tanks is very easy:

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* In any time you do not sure what to investigate, investigate Mining Productivity. After 400-500 level it make your resource not only almost unlimited, but also increase speed of Mining and Pumping a lot. This is my pumping central, which gather crude oil for all my base (~500k spm):

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. Mining productivity 1000+ level.

* Quality. I do not like to gamble items of all qualities, so I prefer to reach Aquilo, learn legendary quality and optimize all gabling for legendary, instead of collect each item of each quality. This takes much less time. Of course you need some items to be build with lesser quality (guns with different ranges, for example)

* Also, asteroids - the best way to receive legendary basic materials. For the rest things, I use pretty slow, but very small constructions to receive legendary products:

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Just need to wait some amount of time.

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etc...


The most complicated was gleba things because of spoilage:

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I have additional logic here - to recycle pack of items, instead of single-by-single.


* Space platforms.
Do not spend a lot of ammo on side asteroids. Concentrate guns in front, and keep just 1-2 guns in middle, to cover your ship during orbit. It save a lot of ammo/asteroids/electricity for you.
The same about Asteroid collectors - amount of asteroids in front of platform and on side are very different, so there is no need to put them on side.
Almost all my platforms are using only solar panels (even for aquilo, but in this case maybe you need quality). And only promethium platform have fusion reactor.
After researching asteroid reprocessor, there is no need to filter them, just convert to what you need. It saves a lot of belts.
Example of typical mid-late Aquilo platform:

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Example of typical close-planet platform:

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* Bugs.
The best way how to cleanup tons of bugs - actually I found two different ways for now.
If you want action - discharge defense. Legendary armor, 3 portable fusion reactors and you can clean cities.
Standard legendary set: 3 portable fusion reactors, 4-6 exoskeleton, 4 energy shields, 1-2 personal lasers (useful to highlight anything alive here), and fill the rest with discharge defence. You will able to clean 600% bugs cities non-stop. On Gleba too.

If you want just to clean them without fun, build a set of spidertrons with personal lasers. 10-15 in squad, And they will just cleanup everything remotely.

I think it is pretty useful things I wanted to share. Have a nice day.

20250322-1723-spider.mp4

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[mmmPI]

The easiest way to clean bugs is just to use artillery, because it's all automated, what you describe is unfortunatly "manual", i have seen players complaining that it takes much time to keep sending the spidertron squad when they didn't realize artillery was the superior automated option in late game !

[SaboteurKiev]

The easiest way to clean bugs is just to use artillery, because it's all automated, what you describe is unfortunatly "manual", i have seen players complaining that it takes much time to keep sending the spidertron squad when they didn't realize artillery was the superior automated option in late game !

To clean bugs with artillery, you need to build defense enough to kill all bugs which comes to your base after artillery shoot.
Also if you have 600% settings to bug, I am not sure how many artillery you should use.
Just check video below:

20251120-1113-cleaning.mp4

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So IMHO artillery is a good way to put bugs expansion far away after cleaning done.

[mmmPI]

To clean bugs with artillery, you need to build defense enough to kill all bugs which comes to your base after artillery shoot.

Yes, hehe it's a bit risky if you do it for the first time maybe , prone to cause disaster, and maybe consider it a bad a idea, legendary artillery turret have comically huge range and can aggro much more than expected, but then if you're late game legendary tesla will get rid of everything

Before that you can always make this easier for yourself if you control how many artillery shell are delivered / shot in your artillery outpost , or the size of the artillery train. If you only have 1 artillery turret, it will cause a trickle of biters instead of massive swarm. It's not really shining as the "lazyest" method in this case, but when your defenses are good enough you can increase the fire rate of the outpost, with more turrets or more research with the aim of being able to paste the artillery outpost blueprint at several location and just watch them drain the map of any hostile without any more clicks or actions from the player.

It will not need to be immediatly enclosed, like territory obtained with spidertron squad.

If you are used to a playstyle where you kill nest before pollution hit them and your defenses are thin but in a large perimeter built only to kill expanding party and not attack triggered by pollution, it may require rethinking the role of the defense, if you are already using 600% biters settings though, you should have already good enough defenses to handle the extra from artillery, just don't be too greedy

I think your other tricks show quite the level of comitment and research in the game, i only felt maybe your defenses tricks were not at the same level as the others, i think you could develop "better" system than spidertron squads but there is also a part of what you think is fun there. I think spidertron with nuke are fun, even though half of the time they end up doing some friendly fire when i forget them somewhere x)