Maybe unpopular, but I can see the logic behind pushing cliff explosives back. The way they are now, cliffs pose so little impact on your long term build strategies, there may as well not even be cliffs in the game. If you are going to play with cliffs on, they should have an impactful effect on your builds, IMO. I think there's argument to be had on improving how cliffs are generated in the landscape (in an ideal world, might be something like a City Skylines map that can help push certain strats/themes you might not normally consider).
I appreciate that they ensure a solid foundation for the core game and continue to refactor improvements and optimize but also can see that their time to market is so slow that they're being outpaced by the mod community for innovation - but the solid foundation enables the community to innovate, unlike other games where the mod community must rebuild and fix the core game before they can incorporate their novel ideas
We saw something very similar with Rimworld (which also has a very strong mod community). Their least successful dlc was royalty because all it did was add some new units and objectives. There wasn't anything that the mod community hadn't already done. But in the ideology and biotechnology expansions, they created frameworks that added tons of tools and frameworks for the mod community to be inspired by. And they are *awesome*
yeah factorio and rimworld to me are modding foundations and i love it for that, mods add SO much cool stuff though im not a big fan on hugely complex stuff in factorio
I know it's minor in the grand scheme of things, but I personally am really satisfied to hear about the drone improvements. It always bugged me when I would lay down a big blueprint or erase a chunk of trees while far from my main base, and my personal roboport robots would do exactly-one task and then chill while a fleet of drones trekked over from the mainbase. This is a minor QoL improvement, but a nice one!
I personally like how restrictive belt mechanics in Factorio are. They provide a nice puzzle challenge. Multi-level belts sounds like something that would be interesting in a mod, but I wouldn't want that in vanilla. I agree about the slight disappointment. It makes sense. Space exploration is just too good of a mod. It will be difficult to get people, especially veterans, excited for content that is so similar. When I thought about what they could introduce that SE can't easily, beause it is a mod: Maybe one of the 4 new planets could be a water planet, where you build underwater and on the surface ("cargo ships" + more)?
Absolutely. I've been thinking and wanting to make a modpack which combines all features like advanced balancers, loaders, compressors and stuff and I ended up realizing that even though vanilla is restrictive that's the fun it gives. Which lead me to wanting to unlock these extra features at top level science such as belt loaders to be 2x slower, more expensive, more power hungry and only unlocked after blue belts (even yellow loaders) but then it makes no sense because it's not that good to be locked so late in the game. Some things are just not good ideas no matter how nice it may feel.
a lot of the unique mechanics in SE feel a bit janky (cannons, spaceships, cargo rockets), due to the lack of engine integration maybe it's cause i don't really like using combinators but i think having these things be unique "core" mechanics in a similar way to trains are done would be a big improvement already
@@vincent78433 I agree. I feel like modding Factorio is very easy to get into, even for people without prior coding experience, but somewhat limited in complexity. Honestly, one of the things I am most looking forward to about the DLC is what modders will be able to achieve with the additional tools and mechanics that the DLC will unlock.
Underground trains could make the cliff explosives change feel not nearly as restrictive for sure. Maybe make it take dynamite and wood/iron/steel for longer lengths underground, kinda like belts?
in general i kinda have high hopes factorio developers really absorb a lot of mechanics from a lot of community mods but in a balanced and official way with their own polish. one thing do I do want personally is just more unique terrain (similarly methods to deal with it easily), i'd love more personality in the worlds rather then the flatscape, maybe the spawn can remain a flatscape but the entire planet being it is a little bland currently (cliffs dont really count + their mildly annoying than being immersive).
My guess is, the reason to build a base on each planet, but make it not too grindy or too repetitive, could be that each planet has some different dangers (like we have biters on Nauvis), these could be hostile weather, different hostile creatures, natural cataclysms (earthquakes? lava flows? tides/floods/tsunamis?), something like that. Each planet, from what they said, is going to have unique threats. This way on each planet you have to set up mining and manufacturing for the resources unique to that planet, but also defenses and countermeasures unique to that planet's problems. Say, if a planet is very hot, maybe each building will require cooling liquid and you'll need to plan the entire heat transfer system and whatnot. Just on that one planet. And then another planet could have freezing cold and buildings might freeze (perhaps buildings could generate heat as they work, so you'd be rewarded for designs where all buildings rarely idle, and those where buildings are close together to warm each other up?). Something like that. And then it would be up to you if you want to manufacture all the other stuff on-site, or bring it from other planets. I had similar thoughts about cliff explosives - sure, if it turns out as bad as we imagine we can simply disable cliffs or fix it with mods, but even the fact they'd try to balance out the different planets with cliff explosives as a reward on one of them means it would make more sense to replace the reward with something else (my first thought was some kind of jetpack tech). While I guess I could try whatever WuBe comes up with in the end just to see what their vision was, and maybe there is some value to the idea that cliffs could make early game less repetitive as you have to design around them... I still think many people will hate this. I would not be surprised if WuBe drops the idea, they still have plenty of time (though the question is how did this survive over a year of testing and internal feedback?) As for the 'bad news', my reaction was "only a year? That's good news!". I've seen my share of software projects where I had to wait years for the product, so if they can deliver in just a year, that's comparatively good. Admittedly, my relationship with Factorio is 'come and go', I might play intensively for a few weeks, sometimes months, then switch to other games or have a period of low-gaming as I'm busy with other stuff, and then come back after 2-3 years to play again. So I've only just learned that they're working on the expansion. I suppose people who were more in-the-loop perhaps see this as a project in the works for a long time already. Lastly, I wonder if the biggest benefit of the expansion could be that game engine updates will allow Space Exploration to also vary things up a bit, using Space Age game mechanics to add things it could not before due to being just a mod limited by the engine. This could end up like in ONI where some mods use Spaced Out mechanics... though that would probably require Space Exploration to split into two versions, one for vanilla and one for Space Age. I think this is an interesting topic to think about.
@@BrennanLu as for gas giants, they could also have thunder storms - unprotected, your buildings could be struck by lightning and take damage, but you could build lightning rods to protect your buildings. The catch is, you would need to discharge the rods before they can be used again, either into accumulators or into power consumers, so you would have to build some system that prioritizes power from the rods, but still can produce other power as backup. The nice thing is, this can be accomplished in a number of ways: 1. Circuit networks (and quite a few ways you can do it with them too, e.g. controlling power sources, or controlling power consuming machines, or connecting and disconnecting accumulators...) 2. Having multiple power networks, one that runs on rod power and one that runs on e.g. nuclear. 3. The simplest solution - a base that only runs on rod power, but as a result is out of power for periods of time. Basically, there are ways to solve the problem without circuit networks (as I presume the devs don't want to scare away those people who play without dabbling in circuits), but you can be more efficient if you do add some logic.
I share the feeling of not being overly suprised. However, there is still room for very unique and exciting stuff during the coming year. Let's hope for the best :)
The "doc ock" grabby arms are one of those visuals which is oddly satisfying to sit and watch. Cliff explosives are like landfill in DSP since they trivialise the puzzle aspect of working a base into a map rather than the boring approach of cueballing a map and sitting about waiting for something to get built. Flush with cash at the moment doesn't mean they should blow it all rather than keep their pace steady and maintain the financial security of the company. Everything that factorio is at the moment took a fair while to get to where it is so while pace could be a bit faster from a consumers viewpoint its clearly a pace that's working for the team at Wube. Testers will be under NDA so there's very little point in asking youtubers to take time away from their work to playtest a game.
Overall good points, especially the part about the release date from a developer's perspective. But I do think you're expectations are a bit high for what essentially is a teaser post. Not to hype it too much, but we have 52 FFFs to look forward to! Who knows what will be unveiled in the coming year? Based on the years past of FFFs, we know the devs never reveal anything that isn't presentable, and even then they still hold some secrets (eg. Spidertron), so there is still opportunity to be surprised by something :)
About your little "disappointment": I bet that they simply didn't want to tell all the secrets right now - they want to have some stuff left to surprise youjust when the DLC goes live, and on the way to that point - I'm pretty sure that they WILL have some surprises on the way ❤
Agree with you. I also think they don't want to info dump everything all at once, to give us time to digest stuff in bite size pieces. There is also the fact that they don't want to show something only to take it out before launch.
I'm expecting the train improvements will be about making it easier for new players. Even online, you still see a fair amount of posts about 'why are my trains stuck' because the learning curve on signals can be rough.
I find it very intuitive and pretty simple. Just two signals and you can do so much. I can't come up with a way to simplify it but if it exists, I'd love to see what it looks like.
@@Derzull2468 It's not necessarily about simplifying the design itself, but making it easier to learn how it works. Better and more specific error messages than 'No path' would go a long way.
Newb here, still wrapping my head around signals, and stations, and, and, and. Yeh it took me watching like 40 something tutorials before finding one that simplified the language for me enough to understand how chain vs signal worked, why I couldn't place them on certain tracks the way I wanted, etc. Now I'm getting the hang of it finally. I'm a pretty patient gamer, I'll take my time to fiddle with things as I go, and then if I get stuck for an hour or more, I'll go looking for help. I was almost immediately in need of help at the beginning with trains lol. Hopefully the improvements do make it easier.
As far as surprises go: Nah, I'm done with "having my expectations subverted" ever since Star Wars. I don't mind it being just like what I'd expect it to be.
Cliffs are weird. For long time some players wanted cliffs to add depth to the factorio. Devs were opposed to it for some time, because it would not fit factorio. But then when it was added, most people didn't like it. The devs knew better from the start... But that's weird that they want to make cliffs more challenging now. I think that also the implementation is not that great, but improving it probably is not worth the effort.
Thanks for this Nilaus. Always interesting to get a different take on things. I'm eagerly looking forward to getting hands-on (someday) on this new Factorio content. Until then, there's lots of mods and combinations of mods to stay busy with.
One thing I would like to see is a sort of biter invasive species mechanic. One of the new planets would have either no biters, or an even worse form of biters than behemoth. You have to carefully clean your rockets and items in a special facility in order to prevent the spread of the original biters, or of the new worse ones to your old planets. If you mess up, you have the time to quickly contain the spread by killing the invasive species, but if they settle, you're done. You'll have to upgrade your defenses to defend against the new biters.
Looking back at this. It qould make sense for the glep whatever (i cant remember, biological spidertrons) to have to disinfect the roxket aince that entire planet is fungal
I think what factorio needs is different ways of producing the same stuff. Right now, it's fluids, solids, or both. Dyson sphere is the GOAT at this, they have a bunch of buildings that have different mechanics that force you to build unique factories rather than "put in assembler, take out of assembler"
I disagree on the product manager perspective - passionately. Shipping a playable game that's not really that polished and working on the finer details later might not fix underlying core issues that could be fixed if they really take the time to rework those things from scratch. So imo that's a pretty rare but still very good thing, because it will most likely improve the quality of the game in the long run, which is in the end the thing that will potentially stay forever while profits dry up.
17:30 : about the early playable: in game development, playables are usualy existing for most of the development time, but as you said yourself, it is like with the cyberpunk game you've mentioned: playable isn't good and often it is said, that some games should have taken another year. It gives the company time to try new stuff, cut things that aren't fun to create a fun experience then. About Space exploration as DLC argument: Well, if you read the article, you would have seen that the first post where WUBE wanted Space content predates Space Exploration by a year easily, and similar to the Spidertron, they have been working on it in the background. Wube has also mentioned in a previous FFF, they haven't wanted to talk about stuff they plan before time because they knew people would create mods which would set expectations. An worry by wube you have proven to be correct. I like WUBE's decision that they take the time to make a proper and good (and polished) release.
more factorio! i really liked the product manager perspective. This kind of point of view is still very rare in gaming crowd - how things work. Stakeholders, money, presure etc. I'm really happy you talked about it in very balanced and common sense way. And yeah... I hope they will transform the game to a point where we will need to re-invent logistic patterns.
I'm super excited for this! I've been playing a lot of Dyson Sphere Program lately and kinda miss Factorio, but this will super incentivise me to go back and build a new factory. Also nice seeing your face for the first time!
cooling would be a pretty cool mechanic where cooling in space becomes basically like power on the ground, but in reverse. your growth is limited by the amount of machines you can cool.
Biggest thing about bot and blueprint behavior that annoys me isn't really edge case. For example, set a logistics request in a chest, the remove that request, you'll still have bots bring that request even though it's no longer actually requested. Or build a blueprint, then decide it needs to shift by a few tiles, hit undo (marking everything for deconstruction) then place the blueprint over it, anything that was the same entity is still marked for deconstruction and you'll sometimes see bots try to place entities before there's room for it to get placed and now all of your bots are deadlocked because they're all waiting for get marked entities to be deconstructed. It's not about how it can have new features, but how they can fix the biggest pain points that exist with bots and blueprints
I agree that trains, blue8prints, and robots are in a good place and any "better" changes they make would be incremental as they stand today. I would assume there are some dramatic differences to the overall logistics flows that would require enhancements to those things or potentially it's simply backend optimization to save more frames (not sure how with blueprints, but definitely with trains and robots)?
Re: Cliffs - I get the controversy of these and agree with you that the current mechanic of these in Factorio is stupid - having them not be removable in some way until after a certain point mid-game is way too linear. I think they need to redesign how players deal with cliffs to be more dynamic and fluid, for example being able to deal with them right from the early science level but maybe at a slower pace - instead of blowing them up you have to dig them up once you upgrade your pickaxe which makes it manageable from early on and then explosives later for a much more speedy option.
I'm kind of hoping they don't add a third layer to the map. One of the things I really like about Factorio as opposed to Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program is that Factorio is just a 2D plane. I find it easier to comprehend what I need to do and where things need to go much easier and suffer from less analysis-paralysis. Overall as someone with a few wrinkles in their brain, I am very excited for Space Age, it's a much more approachable Space Exploration, and I'm all for that as well, "The 300 Hour Mod" is a title that's just daunting and I don't really want to even begin.
I have played factorio for over 800 hours, yet I am the kind of player who always wants to optimise and do things better so I always start again with a concept that in my mind will work better. This means that the furthest in actual gameplay I have been to is just getting to roboports. I haven't build a single artillery in 800hrs, I haven't launched a single rocket, I haven't even mined uranium, yet I keep coming back trying to do better and better. I feel that for the majority of players, a year will be nothing, since according to steam achievements OVER 80% OF PLAYERS HAVE YET TO LAUNCH THEIR FIRST ROCKET. This is what is beautiful in this game, it's replayability and freedom, even at the cost of completing it. I freaking love it and I will keep playing, and I'm gonna try to stick with one game to launch a rocket before the DLC comes out.
With the addition of this new stuff and tech. I think it's going to elevate things like space exploration even more. I get it though as slave exploration is quite an advanced mod to players. It's a long playthrough and can be confusing.
It would be pretty cool if the space platforms as seen in the blog post (or similar) could be used to land on a planet. You could have a ready made base wherever you go.
this is fair. I'm still looking forward to this. I think they will force a space logistics by making some processing mandatory on planet, due to inability to transfer raw materials. I never got into SE, but I'm looking forward to SA as a next step. I do agree that they need to do something to the core automation mechanics to distinguish the expansion. But for a mid game player like me, I do like the idea of each planets having different enemies/biomes.
17:50 I totally understand that after moving from a pure developer position to a leading position. I hope I can be in the place kovarex is someday with my tech company.
I was hoping to have multiple layers to explore on Nauvis. Have an underground area, undersea/water areas and above water, maybe have something in orbit or sky. Making it about space and multiple planets feels kind of eh. Changing the tech tree around also seems kind of like they listened to much to the Space Ex dev.
Me too, going underground or underwater seems like it would mesh better with vanilla game, plus the idea of exploring different biomes in z level a la dwarf fortress always appealed to me. Still I am looking forward to the expansion (and what the new tech can enable the modders to do).
As a nerd who often tries to get through limitations I can't help, but heavily disagree with you on not being excited about the improved robots and trains. It's always been my dream to allow trains to do more advanced routes and things that are impossible in the vanilla game. Recently realized that a train needs a straight path. If you have a Z shape and two-way locomotives, the pathfinder won't actually manage to go forward and then backward to navigate the zigzag. Also robots are often very painful to use with certain base designs causing you to lose large quantities of them. Sometimes bots get stuck in a recharge loop being unable to go through the way they want to use and would keep flying until running out of energy making the delivery extra slow.
I completely disagree with the disappointment around Space Age not showing anything completely unique and new. Firstly, we really haven't seen anything in terms of in-depth features or content, and the post is basically nothing more than an announcement of the project. Secondly, I still play Factorio after all of this time because it's perfect for what I want it to do. I would hate to see all this time pass and the DLC to drop just to discover they broke the mold and tried something like Dyson Sphere Project or Satisfactory. Those games are neat, but they're not _factorio._ I'm excited to see what the DLC actually includes, when the time comes. Even if it's just an incremental, predictable step into space, I know it'll have all of the heart and polish that comes with factorio. Those grabber arms sure are weird, though. The biomechanical feel is a big change from the classically brutal, industrial diesel punk vibe of the classic buildings. I wonder if they'll update other structures like the rocket silo or the reactor to fit in.
i am 100% sure that they will drop a HUGE bombshell on us which will explode into so much new content, not just Space related but a possible full rework of the base game with so many new features. Factorio devs NEVER do anything halfheartedly
@weaponized666 good point. I've played maps with and without the cliffs. No cliffs makes the planning easier, buti like the abstract look of a factory with them
Regarding more Factorio content, I am of course looking forward to see the self-expanding base continue, but you were planning that anyway. I also enjoyed the story missions and was a bit sad to see those discontinued. Not sure which format would be best if you were to continue at some point though...
when they talked about it early on it really sounded like they were doing something significant, and a lot of people thought you know, a more 3D type/Dyson Sphere kind of engine redesign. But it really is just a more accessible SE. I thought that's what they meant when they talked about the NEED to separate it into two different playable versions that wouldn't interact with each other
I like the new blueprint upgrades, it's easier to see ghost blocks now, sometimes it was hard to see if the wall was build or not. Also like that you can edit inserters and assemblers as prior building it, that has annoyed me a bit before.
Introduce more critter types- and via "asteroids" etc; (critter type: blob) It comes from a meteor impact & slowly assembles a faux base by harvesting nearby organic material. Change it's sprite usage for pipes/belts to something appropriate, like pulsating goo. Make the central blob core then send out growth pods. Spawn various blob-type critters from pods depending on resources harvested. Make blob-types feed off the default biters & pursue a new evolution type. Make the central blob capable of 'farming' biters somehow. The central blob continues to try & grow and take over large areas. That's just a potential new "blob-type" critter... The concept is easily expanded on. Try to get all critter types to interact with each other somehow.. Something like if they can outnumber & overpower another type they'll try to pursue some goal with it, such as blob-types farming biters Look at the nesting strategy of teleuteromyrmex schneideri for example.. Ok, then have "alpha critters"; Look at those tentacle-grabby arm things harvesting the floating space debris in the video, Hook these into a large submergable-type alpha critter like a mutant octopus that lurks in water and GRABS NEARBY STUFF!! 😂 To eat, of course.. Make it get bigger.. Make it's arms get longer? Make it pop out a swarm of horrible little babies every now and then, Like little turtle things maybe, Have another critter type feed off them, yeah? ... Make an interactive flora & fauna system indigenous & balanced for every planet type.. Then make methods for other-worldly life forms to get introduced & upset the established pecking order in bizzare & entertaining ways.. Awesome mods they've cooked up, tysm More critters plz And a living interacting universe
I feel about the same, cliffs sound like a bad idea locked behind a tech wall that isn't unlocked on the main planet. The overall community seems really happy to just get more content of any kind but I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed. Hey still a year to go so hopefully some good reveals and no doubt a surprise or two on launch so here's hoping.
Map generator. Terrain tab. Move sliders to the left under 'Cliffs'... or they removing those tools? A lot of complaints for sake of complaining for now, one FFF post, year plus of development, testing and polishing yet to come.
@@mindaugasstankus5943 1000+ hours in game. I know the controls. My point still stands... As a side note, lots of blind fan boys just defending wube to defend wube.. If the expansion turns out to be great then great but until then I'll voice my concerns whenever I want.
I feel like my desire for cliff explosives earlier entirely depends if I can see a preview of the other planets on map gen. It's no good getting 25-30 hours into the game to find that your 2nd planet is a mess of cliffs.
Appreciate your opinion on this, especially as someone who has definitely taught the community to truly min/max the current game. However "optimizing and redoing all of the designs" vs "rethinking how a base would be built" are two fundamentally different challenges. I'm interested in your prespective on the latter one. From my perspective I wouldn't go wow because now I can stack belts on top of eachother to make things smaller- faster-more efficient ... I'll go wow when I see a new planet I need to conquer, fit into my current base and new technologies I need to unlock somehow. Imagine your home planet has a lot of cliffs you can't clear until you've launched your first rocket to a certain planet... You won't be able to rely on pre-fab designs to min/max everything from your first belt onwards. You'll have to go back and redo things until they are as efficient as you want them to be. And yes, we're all impatient ... But if you have the luxury of funding to truly develop a refined and polished game - why would you deliberately stop at "releasable V0.1" ? Think about what Larian released with BD3. Let them cook, it will pay off just like with Factorio vanilla today I'm very sure!
Honestly. I've been so addicted to factorio that I have to play pyadon just to feel anything anymore. So nothing wube could possibly do would change that for me.
Thank you for the update. Guess Satisfactory is beating them to release then seeing as Satisfactory is aiming for 1.0 release after Update 8. Time to put Factorio back on the back burner. Totally agree with you about Space Exploration mod. Announcement is not a surprise at all when all you do is port an existing mod into the game as a DLC. Finish the Factorio Story missions, I enjoyed those, you stopped at mission 7 if I recall.
Yes More Factorio, How about a guide on how to figure out how many factory elements needed to produce n resources? I still don't get it. You have talked about it a lot but I dont use any calculators or any of that in game. Is there a way to figure out what you need to build to produce a certain quantity of resource per time unit that is more casual?
I just started Exotic Industries, so far (~20 hours) it has been great, second favorite mod right after SE. Would like to see Nilaus playthrough of it.
in a way they could do resources. imagine if they made uranium significantly smaller in quantity in nodes on Nauvis, but overly abundant on some distant planet. That's one way I could see "resource incentive" working Edit: Not specifically uranium. I was using it as an example to help build a picture for what I was saying.
they could've go into the planet and core it out, with space restrictions, maybe it would've changed the way we extract resources, and the added verticality would be super nice
Yeah why not massive ore harvestors that you build and these are sent out and you literally colonise new worlds that feed into a massive mega tech base of NANO tech. Drone harvestors. On a smaller level until you get like in the Matrix those massive sentimel drills.
A lot of great points. I'm about to have a baby, so the wait will fly by for me. Love your content, appreciate your opinions, and super excited for the expansion.
Maybe the incentives to these new planets could be energy productivity, passive buffs for players, less enemies to worry about, maybe certain special resources have a passive productivity bonus when being produced on the planet its gathered from. Modules can have a stronger effect. Enemies have new base structures and attacks. I know space exploration is super difficult because of the many complicated resources. There is no incentive to build another large base on the other planets in SE. Maybe these passive buffs will give these planets more value instead of "make a mining base and bring all the resources to Navius". There can also be minor debuffs too. Beacons, bots, and turrets can be made stronger
Personally I'm exited for it, as I'm more of a casual player, as space exploration is way to hard for me so being able to basically play a "space exploration light" mod get me really exited
I don't think multi level belts are the way to go, belt weaving and undergrounds already accomplish the same as multi level belts. I guess I'm open to the idea, and the most recent FFF as of today shows that there is a possibility given that train ramps introduces the concept of Z levels, but I don't think multi level belts would add nearly as much as you think it would. All the other games you listed aren't doing as well as Factorio is, even Satisfactory which I think most folk instinctively think of as Factorio but 3d.
Great video, you make some interesting points, personally when I read it wasn’t going to release this year I was fine with it. In discord awhile back they said they didn’t think it was releasing this year so no big deal I can wait. They have already put a ton of effort into the base game but I’ve always felt the base game was too short so getting a expansion is gonna be awesome! I’ve played SE multiple times but unfortunately never have finished it but gotten really far in it, but I’m glad to hear the expansion isn’t going to be as hardcore as SE.
Yes, I'd like to see another Factorio series if that's something you want to do. "Fast, good, cheap, pick any two". Sounds like the Factorio team has chosen good and cheap. And I don't mean that as a dig, far from it. Creating software is expensive and trying to do it fast and still keep the quality high sends an already high price through the stratosphere. Unless you have _very_ deep pockets trying to do it fast and good usually ends in a train wreck.
I would guess that the constraint that's intended to get you to build a whole new base on another planet would be *stack compression.* Let's assume for the sake of argument that one of the planets offers titanium and the recipe for low density structures is changed from copper+steel+plastic to titanium+steel+plastic. Now, if *each stack* of low density structures takes *5 stacks* of titanium plates (which is kind of the opposite of how it works now), and if the cost of flying one stack of material back to your home planet is expensive, then it would be "more optimized" to set up steel production and plastic production on the titanium planet, in order to ship the titanium back in the form of low density structures (or maybe even in the form of titanium-colored science), because it would cut down on the size of the rocket fuel production that you have to set up on the titanium planet. Nothing would keep you from just setting up 5x as much oil refining on the titanium planet in order to ship the titanium as titanium plate (or 25x as much rocket fuel production in order to ship the titanium as titanium ore). But firstly, the average Factorio player will not feel good about that. And secondly, more oil production means that you need to liberate more land, and if you have that land, then why wouldn't you just use the iron patches in order to smelt up some steel. Or as a third strategy, you could send the rocket fuel for the "titanium planet to home planet" trip from the home planet - but only if you don't care that the rocket equation scales exponentially.
I think a more interesting expansion would be adding one (or more) underground layers, changing how drills and buildings work would be cool and not something I think mods would be able to do (at least not in a good way).
To each their own, we have nearly opposite views on the topics you touched on. I really love the concept of space exploration but I found it very tedious to play so I'm very excited to see what WUBE has in store for us since they said that they'll bring in features that couldn't be made before with mods. I'm a big fan of making things simple and approachable, but with a ton of depth to it, this is what vanilla Factorio is. I'm also very happy with the train improvements since I spent a lot of time designing train systems and the current option for train management start to get very restrictive for me. On the other hand I'd hate belt stacking because it would visually clutter the base even more and it would solve a space problem in a boring way. I can't really imagine underground trains working either, it's just trains but with less complexity. Space is the most logical and cool continuation after launching a rocket for me, and I love the first gif they published. We'll see in the next FFFs what they have to offer, there are more than 50 coming up!
For the lore there wasn't really a whole lot that could be done other than go into space. You can't really go underground and build factories. The only other place is up. And that is space. And what else can you do in space other than move to different planets. To combat the shipping of resources to the main base, you can make the cargo rockets, space fuel, and space elevator extremely expensive to build, and would require you to build a base to build the infrastructure and fuel. And the first time you get to the planet you physically do not have enough space on your person or on the single use landing module to build everything required for the space elevator or cargo rocket. And because it's extremely expensive to move large amounts of material to space no matter the structure, it would be far more efficient to condense the material into its final form before being shipped off. This would naturally intensive building an intermediary base, but other materials should require the raw and some intermediary products of other planets, which will naturally rewards a proper central processing station in space.
thee announced they want to go to space before the space mod was even in tought.. they also released pictures of sort of a platform long before the mod.. the mod was clearly inspired.. so they just do what they started after the change from beta.. the mod was just faster out.. ;)
As a guy that's doing his first Pyanadon playthrough, I'm almost 800 hours in, and still don't have cliff explosives. It is a major drag. I wish I'd have done a little research before starting the run, because I'd have definitely disabled cliff generation.
Yes, I must admit, being about 200 hours into an SE run through, I was a little disappointed by the Space Age announcement. It does feel a lot like SE-Lite, which rightly or wrongly I feel is not as ground-breaking as I had anticipated following 3-4 years of time that will have passed since the 1.0 launch. I get that the excellent modding community has made life difficult for the Devs by being so good which is why I had not expected them to go head-to-head as it were but to delve into places that modders cannot go. For example, one of the most innovative mods I have ever seen was "Train Tunnels" by Godmave which was really pushing the envelope of what a mod could do by introducing a whole underground world. However, it was so bleeding edge that it was very temperamental and could be broken by the simplest of changes. That said, I played an island map with the islands joined by undersea train tunnels that was both very challenging but also rewarding. I think the Devs could have embraced that (and maybe they have and/or will) to create a whole new layer for Factorio where pollution behaves differently, solar panels don't work, underground minerals could be mined that were not available for surface mining, tunneling biters, cave-ins, the need for supporting pillars, etc etc. In that way Factorio 1.x is played on a single surface whereas Factorio 2.x would be played on two surfaces. The transitioning from one layer to another and the interactions between layers are beyond a modders reach (though never say never) but in my opinion would be perfect for the Devs to introduce, thus creating a whole new environment for modders to "explore". That said, I still have faith in the Devs. They have created a game that is just so wonderful and I look forward to learning more about what features Space Age will incorporate but am hoping I am more excited as things are revealed in future as I am currently feeling a little underwhelmed.
i think space age will be for easy mode chillin', just having fun with ships and planets without much work space exploration is if you really want to hate yourself for 5 years... at least...
Right now my robots 30 min trying to cross "logistic space" betwen my outpost stantion and main base. They are passing half a distance, turning back, recharging and repeating secuence. If this is 11:54 pretty damn good already, I assume that we are playing different games.
One thing UA-camrs who play games all day long and get paid for it don't understand is that the vast majority of us can't do that. I, for one, do want SpaceExploration Lite. I played SE and it took time I couldn't afford. Its exactly as the blog post says: SE is geared for a minority of extreme players (with extreme amounts of free time I'd add), while Space Age is lighter. I can't wait for it and unlike Nilaus, I'm super excited.
Perhaps there's way more than meets the eye. I'm sure we can't really judge one way or another based on a single blog post and insufficient detail. Perhaps you'll be pleasantly surprised as the FFFs start pouring all those details in. Edit: I think the devil is in this detail that speaks of hidden gems and mechanics not even SE had: "The expansion contains 4 additional planets. Each of which has its own unique theme, resource, challenges and gameplay mechanics. Most of them also have different military targets."
My personal opinion is that Space Age expansion is the sane Space Exploration mod. Which feels more vanilla+ in term of gameplay. You know I absolutely adore K2 for the same reason: it's an overhaul mod that feel like vanilla. I hope Space Age achive the same effect.
As someone who came back many... many times in anticipation for the expansion it's been amazing to know that it'll be coming next year. However I won't be watching or reading more related content. Did this same mistake with Minecraft as I watched the snapshots and all new stuff without ever trying them out myself. Would suggest you guys do the same. Preserve future information for your own surprise when you actually explore the expansion. I'm sure there's a whole lot of new cool features that we haven't yet seen so you still have time to preserve yourself.
I think the better trains and robot behavior might also just be driven by running simulation on four planets simultaneously. They’ll be extra CPU time an extra demands on what you’re sending where.
I just hope that along with making the game attractive and fun for the average player, the potential and reward for building 'mega bases' and investing huge amounts of time into a playthrough beyond just the standard game direction is a consideration in this and any updates / dlc. Sure if factorio ended right now after launching a rocket i would play it. But the fun starts for me when automating scaling up and taking on stupid levels of infinate research trees takes place. I can partly blame Nilaus for this 😜 Heck i enjoy watching other people do playthroughs on youtube to this aim
Better engine support for multi surface mods, as those have been some of the most successful IMO, warptorio, factorissmo, Space Exploration, etc... and they all suffer limitations based on resources crossing surfaces and memory/crash/performance issues that revolve around them. Other engine improvements can help make mods bigger, more involved, alter deeper functionality, and aid overall performance, such as being able to leverage even more resources of the host machine rather than hitting technical limits and slowing down. I agree, there's plenty to be excited about, but not necessarily anything surprising. But the time delay is quite disappointing as it doesn't sound like an enormous amount of content, and considering they have already been working on this for a year or more?
Is his name Nilaus or is it nick? Will be there Master class with LAN party experience later on available to watch? And will be required to attend the class room which kills creativity or is it necessary to watch series to be able to play the game? 😊😊😊
Well wanting multi layer belts is different from being able to have multi layer belts. It would be very inconvenient in this game surely? You can't see through the top layer. How would you actually do it?
Maybe unpopular, but I can see the logic behind pushing cliff explosives back. The way they are now, cliffs pose so little impact on your long term build strategies, there may as well not even be cliffs in the game. If you are going to play with cliffs on, they should have an impactful effect on your builds, IMO. I think there's argument to be had on improving how cliffs are generated in the landscape (in an ideal world, might be something like a City Skylines map that can help push certain strats/themes you might not normally consider).
I appreciate that they ensure a solid foundation for the core game and continue to refactor improvements and optimize but also can see that their time to market is so slow that they're being outpaced by the mod community for innovation - but the solid foundation enables the community to innovate, unlike other games where the mod community must rebuild and fix the core game before they can incorporate their novel ideas
We saw something very similar with Rimworld (which also has a very strong mod community). Their least successful dlc was royalty because all it did was add some new units and objectives. There wasn't anything that the mod community hadn't already done.
But in the ideology and biotechnology expansions, they created frameworks that added tons of tools and frameworks for the mod community to be inspired by. And they are *awesome*
Yeah, the game engine update is what's really going to allow them to leap forward.
They are working on big DLC for Factorio, so thaty why we see no new content, only core improvements.
yeah factorio and rimworld to me are modding foundations and i love it for that, mods add SO much cool stuff though im not a big fan on hugely complex stuff in factorio
it must suck for them because space factorio was 100% always the future plan they were just doing other stuff
I know it's minor in the grand scheme of things, but I personally am really satisfied to hear about the drone improvements. It always bugged me when I would lay down a big blueprint or erase a chunk of trees while far from my main base, and my personal roboport robots would do exactly-one task and then chill while a fleet of drones trekked over from the mainbase. This is a minor QoL improvement, but a nice one!
I personally like how restrictive belt mechanics in Factorio are. They provide a nice puzzle challenge. Multi-level belts sounds like something that would be interesting in a mod, but I wouldn't want that in vanilla.
I agree about the slight disappointment. It makes sense. Space exploration is just too good of a mod. It will be difficult to get people, especially veterans, excited for content that is so similar.
When I thought about what they could introduce that SE can't easily, beause it is a mod: Maybe one of the 4 new planets could be a water planet, where you build underwater and on the surface ("cargo ships" + more)?
a gas planet would be interesting
agree multilevel belts would be bad, but i get his point about wanting something radically different after so long
Absolutely. I've been thinking and wanting to make a modpack which combines all features like advanced balancers, loaders, compressors and stuff and I ended up realizing that even though vanilla is restrictive that's the fun it gives. Which lead me to wanting to unlock these extra features at top level science such as belt loaders to be 2x slower, more expensive, more power hungry and only unlocked after blue belts (even yellow loaders) but then it makes no sense because it's not that good to be locked so late in the game. Some things are just not good ideas no matter how nice it may feel.
a lot of the unique mechanics in SE feel a bit janky (cannons, spaceships, cargo rockets), due to the lack of engine integration
maybe it's cause i don't really like using combinators
but i think having these things be unique "core" mechanics in a similar way to trains are done would be a big improvement already
@@vincent78433 I agree. I feel like modding Factorio is very easy to get into, even for people without prior coding experience, but somewhat limited in complexity.
Honestly, one of the things I am most looking forward to about the DLC is what modders will be able to achieve with the additional tools and mechanics that the DLC will unlock.
Underground trains could make the cliff explosives change feel not nearly as restrictive for sure. Maybe make it take dynamite and wood/iron/steel for longer lengths underground, kinda like belts?
I would love train tunnels. Cliffs are a better defensive structure than walls. But I doubt we'd unlock train tunnels before cliff explosives.
in general i kinda have high hopes factorio developers really absorb a lot of mechanics from a lot of community mods but in a balanced and official way with their own polish.
one thing do I do want personally is just more unique terrain (similarly methods to deal with it easily), i'd love more personality in the worlds rather then the flatscape, maybe the spawn can remain a flatscape but the entire planet being it is a little bland currently (cliffs dont really count + their mildly annoying than being immersive).
A bit late but what are y’all thoughts on elevated rails instead?
My guess is, the reason to build a base on each planet, but make it not too grindy or too repetitive, could be that each planet has some different dangers (like we have biters on Nauvis), these could be hostile weather, different hostile creatures, natural cataclysms (earthquakes? lava flows? tides/floods/tsunamis?), something like that. Each planet, from what they said, is going to have unique threats. This way on each planet you have to set up mining and manufacturing for the resources unique to that planet, but also defenses and countermeasures unique to that planet's problems. Say, if a planet is very hot, maybe each building will require cooling liquid and you'll need to plan the entire heat transfer system and whatnot. Just on that one planet. And then another planet could have freezing cold and buildings might freeze (perhaps buildings could generate heat as they work, so you'd be rewarded for designs where all buildings rarely idle, and those where buildings are close together to warm each other up?). Something like that. And then it would be up to you if you want to manufacture all the other stuff on-site, or bring it from other planets.
I had similar thoughts about cliff explosives - sure, if it turns out as bad as we imagine we can simply disable cliffs or fix it with mods, but even the fact they'd try to balance out the different planets with cliff explosives as a reward on one of them means it would make more sense to replace the reward with something else (my first thought was some kind of jetpack tech).
While I guess I could try whatever WuBe comes up with in the end just to see what their vision was, and maybe there is some value to the idea that cliffs could make early game less repetitive as you have to design around them... I still think many people will hate this. I would not be surprised if WuBe drops the idea, they still have plenty of time (though the question is how did this survive over a year of testing and internal feedback?)
As for the 'bad news', my reaction was "only a year? That's good news!". I've seen my share of software projects where I had to wait years for the product, so if they can deliver in just a year, that's comparatively good. Admittedly, my relationship with Factorio is 'come and go', I might play intensively for a few weeks, sometimes months, then switch to other games or have a period of low-gaming as I'm busy with other stuff, and then come back after 2-3 years to play again. So I've only just learned that they're working on the expansion. I suppose people who were more in-the-loop perhaps see this as a project in the works for a long time already.
Lastly, I wonder if the biggest benefit of the expansion could be that game engine updates will allow Space Exploration to also vary things up a bit, using Space Age game mechanics to add things it could not before due to being just a mod limited by the engine. This could end up like in ONI where some mods use Spaced Out mechanics... though that would probably require Space Exploration to split into two versions, one for vanilla and one for Space Age. I think this is an interesting topic to think about.
@@BrennanLu as for gas giants, they could also have thunder storms - unprotected, your buildings could be struck by lightning and take damage, but you could build lightning rods to protect your buildings. The catch is, you would need to discharge the rods before they can be used again, either into accumulators or into power consumers, so you would have to build some system that prioritizes power from the rods, but still can produce other power as backup. The nice thing is, this can be accomplished in a number of ways:
1. Circuit networks (and quite a few ways you can do it with them too, e.g. controlling power sources, or controlling power consuming machines, or connecting and disconnecting accumulators...)
2. Having multiple power networks, one that runs on rod power and one that runs on e.g. nuclear.
3. The simplest solution - a base that only runs on rod power, but as a result is out of power for periods of time.
Basically, there are ways to solve the problem without circuit networks (as I presume the devs don't want to scare away those people who play without dabbling in circuits), but you can be more efficient if you do add some logic.
I share the feeling of not being overly suprised. However, there is still room for very unique and exciting stuff during the coming year. Let's hope for the best :)
I'm hoping the design of the other planets will make it interesting. Different types of biters and more interesting combat would be good too.
The "doc ock" grabby arms are one of those visuals which is oddly satisfying to sit and watch.
Cliff explosives are like landfill in DSP since they trivialise the puzzle aspect of working a base into a map rather than the boring approach of cueballing a map and sitting about waiting for something to get built.
Flush with cash at the moment doesn't mean they should blow it all rather than keep their pace steady and maintain the financial security of the company. Everything that factorio is at the moment took a fair while to get to where it is so while pace could be a bit faster from a consumers viewpoint its clearly a pace that's working for the team at Wube. Testers will be under NDA so there's very little point in asking youtubers to take time away from their work to playtest a game.
Overall good points, especially the part about the release date from a developer's perspective. But I do think you're expectations are a bit high for what essentially is a teaser post. Not to hype it too much, but we have 52 FFFs to look forward to! Who knows what will be unveiled in the coming year? Based on the years past of FFFs, we know the devs never reveal anything that isn't presentable, and even then they still hold some secrets (eg. Spidertron), so there is still opportunity to be surprised by something :)
About your little "disappointment": I bet that they simply didn't want to tell all the secrets right now - they want to have some stuff left to surprise youjust when the DLC goes live, and on the way to that point - I'm pretty sure that they WILL have some surprises on the way ❤
Copium
Agree with you. I also think they don't want to info dump everything all at once, to give us time to digest stuff in bite size pieces. There is also the fact that they don't want to show something only to take it out before launch.
"My will is flat and square"
I'm expecting the train improvements will be about making it easier for new players. Even online, you still see a fair amount of posts about 'why are my trains stuck' because the learning curve on signals can be rough.
I find it very intuitive and pretty simple. Just two signals and you can do so much. I can't come up with a way to simplify it but if it exists, I'd love to see what it looks like.
@@Derzull2468 It's not necessarily about simplifying the design itself, but making it easier to learn how it works.
Better and more specific error messages than 'No path' would go a long way.
No one saw the actual train changes coming lol
Newb here, still wrapping my head around signals, and stations, and, and, and. Yeh it took me watching like 40 something tutorials before finding one that simplified the language for me enough to understand how chain vs signal worked, why I couldn't place them on certain tracks the way I wanted, etc. Now I'm getting the hang of it finally. I'm a pretty patient gamer, I'll take my time to fiddle with things as I go, and then if I get stuck for an hour or more, I'll go looking for help. I was almost immediately in need of help at the beginning with trains lol. Hopefully the improvements do make it easier.
Have to admit, I havent't seen Nilaus videos in a bit; but first thing I notice... you have a warm and welcoming voice, I feel right at home, at once.
I've never even played with cliffs turned on, so I couldn't care less where cliff explosives are locked haha
As far as surprises go: Nah, I'm done with "having my expectations subverted" ever since Star Wars. I don't mind it being just like what I'd expect it to be.
Cliffs are weird. For long time some players wanted cliffs to add depth to the factorio. Devs were opposed to it for some time, because it would not fit factorio. But then when it was added, most people didn't like it. The devs knew better from the start... But that's weird that they want to make cliffs more challenging now. I think that also the implementation is not that great, but improving it probably is not worth the effort.
Thanks for this Nilaus. Always interesting to get a different take on things.
I'm eagerly looking forward to getting hands-on (someday) on this new Factorio content. Until then, there's lots of mods and combinations of mods to stay busy with.
One thing I would like to see is a sort of biter invasive species mechanic. One of the new planets would have either no biters, or an even worse form of biters than behemoth. You have to carefully clean your rockets and items in a special facility in order to prevent the spread of the original biters, or of the new worse ones to your old planets.
If you mess up, you have the time to quickly contain the spread by killing the invasive species, but if they settle, you're done. You'll have to upgrade your defenses to defend against the new biters.
Looking back at this. It qould make sense for the glep whatever (i cant remember, biological spidertrons) to have to disinfect the roxket aince that entire planet is fungal
I think what factorio needs is different ways of producing the same stuff. Right now, it's fluids, solids, or both.
Dyson sphere is the GOAT at this, they have a bunch of buildings that have different mechanics that force you to build unique factories rather than "put in assembler, take out of assembler"
I disagree on the product manager perspective - passionately. Shipping a playable game that's not really that polished and working on the finer details later might not fix underlying core issues that could be fixed if they really take the time to rework those things from scratch. So imo that's a pretty rare but still very good thing, because it will most likely improve the quality of the game in the long run, which is in the end the thing that will potentially stay forever while profits dry up.
Cliffs were an interesting idea that I've had disabled since the day they came out.
17:30 : about the early playable: in game development, playables are usualy existing for most of the development time, but as you said yourself, it is like with the cyberpunk game you've mentioned: playable isn't good and often it is said, that some games should have taken another year. It gives the company time to try new stuff, cut things that aren't fun to create a fun experience then.
About Space exploration as DLC argument: Well, if you read the article, you would have seen that the first post where WUBE wanted Space content predates Space Exploration by a year easily, and similar to the Spidertron, they have been working on it in the background. Wube has also mentioned in a previous FFF, they haven't wanted to talk about stuff they plan before time because they knew people would create mods which would set expectations. An worry by wube you have proven to be correct.
I like WUBE's decision that they take the time to make a proper and good (and polished) release.
Your point on WUBE being able to take their sweet time is exactly the same for IronGate & Valheim. Great games you just need to wait years.
more factorio!
i really liked the product manager perspective. This kind of point of view is still very rare in gaming crowd - how things work. Stakeholders, money, presure etc. I'm really happy you talked about it in very balanced and common sense way. And yeah... I hope they will transform the game to a point where we will need to re-invent logistic patterns.
I'm super excited for this! I've been playing a lot of Dyson Sphere Program lately and kinda miss Factorio, but this will super incentivise me to go back and build a new factory. Also nice seeing your face for the first time!
cooling would be a pretty cool mechanic
where cooling in space becomes basically like power on the ground, but in reverse.
your growth is limited by the amount of machines you can cool.
litteraly cool mechanic,great pun
Biggest thing about bot and blueprint behavior that annoys me isn't really edge case. For example, set a logistics request in a chest, the remove that request, you'll still have bots bring that request even though it's no longer actually requested. Or build a blueprint, then decide it needs to shift by a few tiles, hit undo (marking everything for deconstruction) then place the blueprint over it, anything that was the same entity is still marked for deconstruction and you'll sometimes see bots try to place entities before there's room for it to get placed and now all of your bots are deadlocked because they're all waiting for get marked entities to be deconstructed.
It's not about how it can have new features, but how they can fix the biggest pain points that exist with bots and blueprints
I agree that trains, blue8prints, and robots are in a good place and any "better" changes they make would be incremental as they stand today. I would assume there are some dramatic differences to the overall logistics flows that would require enhancements to those things or potentially it's simply backend optimization to save more frames (not sure how with blueprints, but definitely with trains and robots)?
Re: Cliffs - I get the controversy of these and agree with you that the current mechanic of these in Factorio is stupid - having them not be removable in some way until after a certain point mid-game is way too linear. I think they need to redesign how players deal with cliffs to be more dynamic and fluid, for example being able to deal with them right from the early science level but maybe at a slower pace - instead of blowing them up you have to dig them up once you upgrade your pickaxe which makes it manageable from early on and then explosives later for a much more speedy option.
I'm kind of hoping they don't add a third layer to the map. One of the things I really like about Factorio as opposed to Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program is that Factorio is just a 2D plane. I find it easier to comprehend what I need to do and where things need to go much easier and suffer from less analysis-paralysis. Overall as someone with a few wrinkles in their brain, I am very excited for Space Age, it's a much more approachable Space Exploration, and I'm all for that as well, "The 300 Hour Mod" is a title that's just daunting and I don't really want to even begin.
I have played factorio for over 800 hours, yet I am the kind of player who always wants to optimise and do things better so I always start again with a concept that in my mind will work better. This means that the furthest in actual gameplay I have been to is just getting to roboports. I haven't build a single artillery in 800hrs, I haven't launched a single rocket, I haven't even mined uranium, yet I keep coming back trying to do better and better. I feel that for the majority of players, a year will be nothing, since according to steam achievements OVER 80% OF PLAYERS HAVE YET TO LAUNCH THEIR FIRST ROCKET. This is what is beautiful in this game, it's replayability and freedom, even at the cost of completing it. I freaking love it and I will keep playing, and I'm gonna try to stick with one game to launch a rocket before the DLC comes out.
With the addition of this new stuff and tech. I think it's going to elevate things like space exploration even more.
I get it though as slave exploration is quite an advanced mod to players. It's a long playthrough and can be confusing.
It would be pretty cool if the space platforms as seen in the blog post (or similar) could be used to land on a planet. You could have a ready made base wherever you go.
this is fair. I'm still looking forward to this. I think they will force a space logistics by making some processing mandatory on planet, due to inability to transfer raw materials. I never got into SE, but I'm looking forward to SA as a next step. I do agree that they need to do something to the core automation mechanics to distinguish the expansion. But for a mid game player like me, I do like the idea of each planets having different enemies/biomes.
17:50 I totally understand that after moving from a pure developer position to a leading position. I hope I can be in the place kovarex is someday with my tech company.
I was hoping to have multiple layers to explore on Nauvis. Have an underground area, undersea/water areas and above water, maybe have something in orbit or sky. Making it about space and multiple planets feels kind of eh. Changing the tech tree around also seems kind of like they listened to much to the Space Ex dev.
Me too, going underground or underwater seems like it would mesh better with vanilla game, plus the idea of exploring different biomes in z level a la dwarf fortress always appealed to me. Still I am looking forward to the expansion (and what the new tech can enable the modders to do).
As a nerd who often tries to get through limitations I can't help, but heavily disagree with you on not being excited about the improved robots and trains. It's always been my dream to allow trains to do more advanced routes and things that are impossible in the vanilla game. Recently realized that a train needs a straight path. If you have a Z shape and two-way locomotives, the pathfinder won't actually manage to go forward and then backward to navigate the zigzag. Also robots are often very painful to use with certain base designs causing you to lose large quantities of them. Sometimes bots get stuck in a recharge loop being unable to go through the way they want to use and would keep flying until running out of energy making the delivery extra slow.
I completely disagree with the disappointment around Space Age not showing anything completely unique and new. Firstly, we really haven't seen anything in terms of in-depth features or content, and the post is basically nothing more than an announcement of the project.
Secondly, I still play Factorio after all of this time because it's perfect for what I want it to do. I would hate to see all this time pass and the DLC to drop just to discover they broke the mold and tried something like Dyson Sphere Project or Satisfactory. Those games are neat, but they're not _factorio._ I'm excited to see what the DLC actually includes, when the time comes. Even if it's just an incremental, predictable step into space, I know it'll have all of the heart and polish that comes with factorio.
Those grabber arms sure are weird, though. The biomechanical feel is a big change from the classically brutal, industrial diesel punk vibe of the classic buildings. I wonder if they'll update other structures like the rocket silo or the reactor to fit in.
i am 100% sure that they will drop a HUGE bombshell on us which will explode into so much new content, not just Space related but a possible full rework of the base game with so many new features. Factorio devs NEVER do anything halfheartedly
honestly, multi-level belts in particular will clash heavily with factorios 2.5D graphics, if it should still be one-block-wide
I actually don't mind the cliffs. They add an extra challenge to the earlier part of the game. And can give the factory a funky look
Same. Their presence also removes a bit of abstraction, which makes the world feel a bit more natural rather than just tabula rasa.
@weaponized666 good point. I've played maps with and without the cliffs. No cliffs makes the planning easier, buti like the abstract look of a factory with them
well the cliff is the space argument. you lose space due to cliffs right that's a limiting factor.
22:30 we got high expectations from following the development of dyson sphere program XD the changes they have made are great.
Wish this wasn't still a year out as they are saying, but I'm looking forward to playing it and appreciate you bringing this to my attention.
Wow ! Just asked you on twitter and the video popped up. That's fast haha
Nilaus, if you build a factorio, they will watch.
Regarding more Factorio content, I am of course looking forward to see the self-expanding base continue, but you were planning that anyway.
I also enjoyed the story missions and was a bit sad to see those discontinued. Not sure which format would be best if you were to continue at some point though...
when they talked about it early on it really sounded like they were doing something significant, and a lot of people thought you know, a more 3D type/Dyson Sphere kind of engine redesign. But it really is just a more accessible SE. I thought that's what they meant when they talked about the NEED to separate it into two different playable versions that wouldn't interact with each other
I like the new blueprint upgrades, it's easier to see ghost blocks now, sometimes it was hard to see if the wall was build or not. Also like that you can edit inserters and assemblers as prior building it, that has annoyed me a bit before.
Introduce more critter types- and via "asteroids" etc;
(critter type: blob)
It comes from a meteor impact & slowly assembles a faux base by harvesting nearby organic material.
Change it's sprite usage for pipes/belts to something appropriate, like pulsating goo.
Make the central blob core then send out growth pods.
Spawn various blob-type critters from pods depending on resources harvested.
Make blob-types feed off the default biters & pursue a new evolution type.
Make the central blob capable of 'farming' biters somehow.
The central blob continues to try & grow and take over large areas.
That's just a potential new "blob-type" critter...
The concept is easily expanded on.
Try to get all critter types to interact with each other somehow..
Something like if they can outnumber & overpower another type they'll try to pursue some goal with it, such as blob-types farming biters
Look at the nesting strategy of teleuteromyrmex schneideri for example..
Ok, then have "alpha critters";
Look at those tentacle-grabby arm things harvesting the floating space debris in the video,
Hook these into a large submergable-type alpha critter like a mutant octopus that lurks in water and GRABS NEARBY STUFF!! 😂
To eat, of course..
Make it get bigger..
Make it's arms get longer?
Make it pop out a swarm of horrible little babies every now and then,
Like little turtle things maybe,
Have another critter type feed off them, yeah?
...
Make an interactive flora & fauna system indigenous & balanced for every planet type..
Then make methods for other-worldly life forms to get introduced & upset the established pecking order in bizzare & entertaining ways..
Awesome mods they've cooked up, tysm
More critters plz
And a living interacting universe
I feel about the same, cliffs sound like a bad idea locked behind a tech wall that isn't unlocked on the main planet. The overall community seems really happy to just get more content of any kind but I can't help but feel a little underwhelmed. Hey still a year to go so hopefully some good reveals and no doubt a surprise or two on launch so here's hoping.
Earendel's whole design philosophy is about taking away choices from players and inserting a time sinks for marginal gains.
@@keith5615 I agree, it does seem that way. I truly hope not but it seems like a space exploration lite at this point..
Map generator. Terrain tab. Move sliders to the left under 'Cliffs'... or they removing those tools? A lot of complaints for sake of complaining for now, one FFF post, year plus of development, testing and polishing yet to come.
@@mindaugasstankus5943 1000+ hours in game. I know the controls. My point still stands... As a side note, lots of blind fan boys just defending wube to defend wube.. If the expansion turns out to be great then great but until then I'll voice my concerns whenever I want.
I don't get the hate about cliff explosives. Well, you clearly hate cliffs and you can disable them at the game start. Problem solved. 🤷♂
I feel like my desire for cliff explosives earlier entirely depends if I can see a preview of the other planets on map gen. It's no good getting 25-30 hours into the game to find that your 2nd planet is a mess of cliffs.
Appreciate your opinion on this, especially as someone who has definitely taught the community to truly min/max the current game. However "optimizing and redoing all of the designs" vs "rethinking how a base would be built" are two fundamentally different challenges. I'm interested in your prespective on the latter one. From my perspective I wouldn't go wow because now I can stack belts on top of eachother to make things smaller- faster-more efficient ... I'll go wow when I see a new planet I need to conquer, fit into my current base and new technologies I need to unlock somehow. Imagine your home planet has a lot of cliffs you can't clear until you've launched your first rocket to a certain planet... You won't be able to rely on pre-fab designs to min/max everything from your first belt onwards. You'll have to go back and redo things until they are as efficient as you want them to be.
And yes, we're all impatient ... But if you have the luxury of funding to truly develop a refined and polished game - why would you deliberately stop at "releasable V0.1" ? Think about what Larian released with BD3. Let them cook, it will pay off just like with Factorio vanilla today I'm very sure!
Honestly. I've been so addicted to factorio that I have to play pyadon just to feel anything anymore. So nothing wube could possibly do would change that for me.
Thank you for the update. Guess Satisfactory is beating them to release then seeing as Satisfactory is aiming for 1.0 release after Update 8. Time to put Factorio back on the back burner.
Totally agree with you about Space Exploration mod. Announcement is not a surprise at all when all you do is port an existing mod into the game as a DLC.
Finish the Factorio Story missions, I enjoyed those, you stopped at mission 7 if I recall.
Yes More Factorio, How about a guide on how to figure out how many factory elements needed to produce n resources? I still don't get it. You have talked about it a lot but I dont use any calculators or any of that in game. Is there a way to figure out what you need to build to produce a certain quantity of resource per time unit that is more casual?
I just started Exotic Industries, so far (~20 hours) it has been great, second favorite mod right after SE. Would like to see Nilaus playthrough of it.
It's about a year until a polished product release. I hope (no pray) that between now and then, we will get experimental releases.
Want to see you do a space exploration playthrough before Space Age release !! 🤣😆
in a way they could do resources. imagine if they made uranium significantly smaller in quantity in nodes on Nauvis, but overly abundant on some distant planet. That's one way I could see "resource incentive" working
Edit: Not specifically uranium. I was using it as an example to help build a picture for what I was saying.
Now I really want to see an @Nilaus space exploration playthrough.
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
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You said to yell in the comments if we want more Factorio content.
they could've go into the planet and core it out, with space restrictions, maybe it would've changed the way we extract resources, and the added verticality would be super nice
Yeah why not massive ore harvestors that you build and these are sent out and you literally colonise new worlds that feed into a massive mega tech base of NANO tech. Drone harvestors. On a smaller level until you get like in the Matrix those massive sentimel drills.
A lot of great points. I'm about to have a baby, so the wait will fly by for me. Love your content, appreciate your opinions, and super excited for the expansion.
Maybe the incentives to these new planets could be energy productivity, passive buffs for players, less enemies to worry about, maybe certain special resources have a passive productivity bonus when being produced on the planet its gathered from. Modules can have a stronger effect. Enemies have new base structures and attacks. I know space exploration is super difficult because of the many complicated resources. There is no incentive to build another large base on the other planets in SE. Maybe these passive buffs will give these planets more value instead of "make a mining base and bring all the resources to Navius". There can also be minor debuffs too. Beacons, bots, and turrets can be made stronger
Personally I'm exited for it, as I'm more of a casual player, as space exploration is way to hard for me so being able to basically play a "space exploration light" mod get me really exited
I don't think multi level belts are the way to go, belt weaving and undergrounds already accomplish the same as multi level belts. I guess I'm open to the idea, and the most recent FFF as of today shows that there is a possibility given that train ramps introduces the concept of Z levels, but I don't think multi level belts would add nearly as much as you think it would.
All the other games you listed aren't doing as well as Factorio is, even Satisfactory which I think most folk instinctively think of as Factorio but 3d.
Great video, you make some interesting points, personally when I read it wasn’t going to release this year I was fine with it. In discord awhile back they said they didn’t think it was releasing this year so no big deal I can wait. They have already put a ton of effort into the base game but I’ve always felt the base game was too short so getting a expansion is gonna be awesome! I’ve played SE multiple times but unfortunately never have finished it but gotten really far in it, but I’m glad to hear the expansion isn’t going to be as hardcore as SE.
Yes, I'd like to see another Factorio series if that's something you want to do.
"Fast, good, cheap, pick any two". Sounds like the Factorio team has chosen good and cheap. And I don't mean that as a dig, far from it. Creating software is expensive and trying to do it fast and still keep the quality high sends an already high price through the stratosphere. Unless you have _very_ deep pockets trying to do it fast and good usually ends in a train wreck.
Confirmed Nilaus square earther 🌏
I would guess that the constraint that's intended to get you to build a whole new base on another planet would be *stack compression.*
Let's assume for the sake of argument that one of the planets offers titanium and the recipe for low density structures is changed from copper+steel+plastic to titanium+steel+plastic.
Now, if *each stack* of low density structures takes *5 stacks* of titanium plates (which is kind of the opposite of how it works now), and if the cost of flying one stack of material back to your home planet is expensive, then it would be "more optimized" to set up steel production and plastic production on the titanium planet, in order to ship the titanium back in the form of low density structures (or maybe even in the form of titanium-colored science), because it would cut down on the size of the rocket fuel production that you have to set up on the titanium planet.
Nothing would keep you from just setting up 5x as much oil refining on the titanium planet in order to ship the titanium as titanium plate (or 25x as much rocket fuel production in order to ship the titanium as titanium ore). But firstly, the average Factorio player will not feel good about that. And secondly, more oil production means that you need to liberate more land, and if you have that land, then why wouldn't you just use the iron patches in order to smelt up some steel.
Or as a third strategy, you could send the rocket fuel for the "titanium planet to home planet" trip from the home planet - but only if you don't care that the rocket equation scales exponentially.
I would love more factorio content! I only recently got into factorio so I missed all your original series livestreams on twitch etc.
I hope the devs watch this. Well said.
21:00 I would argue it is one of the most well known and interesting mods. but when you hear people say "I wouldn't be surprised if it has a
I think a more interesting expansion would be adding one (or more) underground layers, changing how drills and buildings work would be cool and not something I think mods would be able to do (at least not in a good way).
Did they fix fluids yet? I want my reactors in megabases.
To each their own, we have nearly opposite views on the topics you touched on. I really love the concept of space exploration but I found it very tedious to play so I'm very excited to see what WUBE has in store for us since they said that they'll bring in features that couldn't be made before with mods. I'm a big fan of making things simple and approachable, but with a ton of depth to it, this is what vanilla Factorio is. I'm also very happy with the train improvements since I spent a lot of time designing train systems and the current option for train management start to get very restrictive for me.
On the other hand I'd hate belt stacking because it would visually clutter the base even more and it would solve a space problem in a boring way. I can't really imagine underground trains working either, it's just trains but with less complexity.
Space is the most logical and cool continuation after launching a rocket for me, and I love the first gif they published. We'll see in the next FFFs what they have to offer, there are more than 50 coming up!
For the lore there wasn't really a whole lot that could be done other than go into space. You can't really go underground and build factories. The only other place is up. And that is space. And what else can you do in space other than move to different planets. To combat the shipping of resources to the main base, you can make the cargo rockets, space fuel, and space elevator extremely expensive to build, and would require you to build a base to build the infrastructure and fuel. And the first time you get to the planet you physically do not have enough space on your person or on the single use landing module to build everything required for the space elevator or cargo rocket. And because it's extremely expensive to move large amounts of material to space no matter the structure, it would be far more efficient to condense the material into its final form before being shipped off. This would naturally intensive building an intermediary base, but other materials should require the raw and some intermediary products of other planets, which will naturally rewards a proper central processing station in space.
thee announced they want to go to space before the space mod was even in tought.. they also released pictures of sort of a platform long before the mod.. the mod was clearly inspired.. so they just do what they started after the change from beta.. the mod was just faster out.. ;)
Everyone is worried about cliff explosives.
I'm worried about them adding in robot attrition or some other meme decisions that Space Exploration has.
As a guy that's doing his first Pyanadon playthrough, I'm almost 800 hours in, and still don't have cliff explosives. It is a major drag. I wish I'd have done a little research before starting the run, because I'd have definitely disabled cliff generation.
Yes, I must admit, being about 200 hours into an SE run through, I was a little disappointed by the Space Age announcement. It does feel a lot like SE-Lite, which rightly or wrongly I feel is not as ground-breaking as I had anticipated following 3-4 years of time that will have passed since the 1.0 launch. I get that the excellent modding community has made life difficult for the Devs by being so good which is why I had not expected them to go head-to-head as it were but to delve into places that modders cannot go.
For example, one of the most innovative mods I have ever seen was "Train Tunnels" by Godmave which was really pushing the envelope of what a mod could do by introducing a whole underground world. However, it was so bleeding edge that it was very temperamental and could be broken by the simplest of changes. That said, I played an island map with the islands joined by undersea train tunnels that was both very challenging but also rewarding. I think the Devs could have embraced that (and maybe they have and/or will) to create a whole new layer for Factorio where pollution behaves differently, solar panels don't work, underground minerals could be mined that were not available for surface mining, tunneling biters, cave-ins, the need for supporting pillars, etc etc. In that way Factorio 1.x is played on a single surface whereas Factorio 2.x would be played on two surfaces. The transitioning from one layer to another and the interactions between layers are beyond a modders reach (though never say never) but in my opinion would be perfect for the Devs to introduce, thus creating a whole new environment for modders to "explore".
That said, I still have faith in the Devs. They have created a game that is just so wonderful and I look forward to learning more about what features Space Age will incorporate but am hoping I am more excited as things are revealed in future as I am currently feeling a little underwhelmed.
i think space age will be for easy mode chillin', just having fun with ships and planets without much work
space exploration is if you really want to hate yourself for 5 years... at least...
Right now my robots 30 min trying to cross "logistic space" betwen my outpost stantion and main base. They are passing half a distance, turning back, recharging and repeating secuence. If this is 11:54 pretty damn good already, I assume that we are playing different games.
Just wondering if Story Missions comes back? 😅
One thing UA-camrs who play games all day long and get paid for it don't understand is that the vast majority of us can't do that. I, for one, do want SpaceExploration Lite. I played SE and it took time I couldn't afford. Its exactly as the blog post says: SE is geared for a minority of extreme players (with extreme amounts of free time I'd add), while Space Age is lighter. I can't wait for it and unlike Nilaus, I'm super excited.
I want SE Light as well, but it sounds like a mod and not 4 years of development
Perhaps there's way more than meets the eye. I'm sure we can't really judge one way or another based on a single blog post and insufficient detail. Perhaps you'll be pleasantly surprised as the FFFs start pouring all those details in.
Edit: I think the devil is in this detail that speaks of hidden gems and mechanics not even SE had: "The expansion contains 4 additional planets. Each of which has its own unique theme, resource, challenges and gameplay mechanics. Most of them also have different military targets."
Totally agree... I bit disappointed that we've waited so long and nothing really innovative.
That being said... I would love to see a SE play-through.
My personal opinion is that Space Age expansion is the sane Space Exploration mod. Which feels more vanilla+ in term of gameplay. You know I absolutely adore K2 for the same reason: it's an overhaul mod that feel like vanilla. I hope Space Age achive the same effect.
As someone who came back many... many times in anticipation for the expansion it's been amazing to know that it'll be coming next year. However I won't be watching or reading more related content. Did this same mistake with Minecraft as I watched the snapshots and all new stuff without ever trying them out myself. Would suggest you guys do the same. Preserve future information for your own surprise when you actually explore the expansion. I'm sure there's a whole lot of new cool features that we haven't yet seen so you still have time to preserve yourself.
I think the better trains and robot behavior might also just be driven by running simulation on four planets simultaneously. They’ll be extra CPU time an extra demands on what you’re sending where.
I basically agree with everything you said. What I have seen so far is nothing bad, but also nothing that makes me excited.
Hi a bit late but can relate a lot of the cliff thing, the only thing I like about the cliff-mechanic is that can be turn off
I love the current content; however, I do miss Factorio as well. Maybe one or two more playthroughs before the DLC drops?
I just hope that along with making the game attractive and fun for the average player, the potential and reward for building 'mega bases' and investing huge amounts of time into a playthrough beyond just the standard game direction is a consideration in this and any updates / dlc. Sure if factorio ended right now after launching a rocket i would play it. But the fun starts for me when automating scaling up and taking on stupid levels of infinate research trees takes place. I can partly blame Nilaus for this 😜 Heck i enjoy watching other people do playthroughs on youtube to this aim
Can't wait to see your playthrough 😉
Also now that i think of it, how the heck are gonna bus 10 science packs into the labs?
Better engine support for multi surface mods, as those have been some of the most successful IMO, warptorio, factorissmo, Space Exploration, etc... and they all suffer limitations based on resources crossing surfaces and memory/crash/performance issues that revolve around them.
Other engine improvements can help make mods bigger, more involved, alter deeper functionality, and aid overall performance, such as being able to leverage even more resources of the host machine rather than hitting technical limits and slowing down.
I agree, there's plenty to be excited about, but not necessarily anything surprising. But the time delay is quite disappointing as it doesn't sound like an enormous amount of content, and considering they have already been working on this for a year or more?
The Stacked Belts or the Dyson Belts mods. (Y)
Is his name Nilaus or is it nick? Will be there Master class with LAN party experience later on available to watch? And will be required to attend the class room which kills creativity or is it necessary to watch series to be able to play the game? 😊😊😊
Well wanting multi layer belts is different from being able to have multi layer belts. It would be very inconvenient in this game surely? You can't see through the top layer. How would you actually do it?
Finally someone saying that the trains are already really reakin' great.
Waiting for a Game to release in its full Potential? Sure, why not? I like that aproach.