FACTORIO SPACE AGE; How Does It Compare To 'Space Exploration'-Mod ? | Reaction

FACTORIO SPACE AGE
Factorio: Space Age continues the player's journey after launching rockets into space. Discover new worlds with unique challenges, exploit their novel resources for advanced technological gains, and manage your fleet of interplanetary space platforms.

SOCIAL:

Livestream VODs:
All livestream VODs are available on my second YouTube Channel: @NilausTV

#Factorio #StayEffective #SpaceAge

[CurtisDyer]

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).

[snowts]

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

[Scubbojj]

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!

[simonschliesky]

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 :)

[killzone]

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?

[dakon]

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)?

[Tennouseijin]

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.

[clarkdenman]

"My will is flat and square"

[MrJoshua]

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.

[andybrown]

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.

[Akhunrah]

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 :)

[ebmusicman]

I've never even played with cliffs turned on, so I couldn't care less where cliff explosives are locked haha

[arneczool]

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 ❤

[leduke]

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.

[MGerdtell]

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.

[deanlawson]

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.

[asdfasdf-mniu]

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.

[Gemoron]

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.

[supernenechi]

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.

[TheBubblegumgirl]

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!