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Games can help you figure out parts of your personality in weird ways. I used to do swimmingly with the early game with all the hack and slash building techniqu

Games can help you figure out parts of your personality in weird ways. I used to do swimmingly with the early game with all the hack and slash building techniques all the way up to ~500 spm. Then the whole set up for trying to get to mega base got me anxious and such. I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious. I knew a few different people who struggled early on a lot. They would be stuck handcrafting too much and rarely have those hack job factory setup. But once they got their early base with ~50 spm and robots going, they would start scaling up with neat little blueprints and what not. Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours.

Deestan 6y ago
> Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours. It's even below 2 hours now: https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#Any https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#Any
awalton 6y ago
> I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious. If there's a major criticism to be had over Factorio, it's that power generation in the game is rather boring, and the Power poles and Light classes are designed somewhat poorly. Solar just doesn't scale in Vanilla - it costs too many materials for too little power, when really it should be one of the easier scalable techs (but should still require lots of research since it's a no-consumable power technology). You can get through an entire game of Factorio on nothing but coal power if you're diligent about when you expand, but most seasoned players will just burn the excess oil as power, since it's rarely a real bottleneck and oil's one of the most economical resources in the game to get setup - you build it once and... you're done. Forever. And then there's the super ridiculous late gamers who have to build nuclear because once you start talking in tens of gigawatts, there's just no way to squeeze that out of anything else and remain even close to efficient; the nukes take an absurd amount of concrete, but you're usually swimming in excess stone anyways. Trying to get there on solar is an exercise in actual pain, since you'll mine most of the map just trying to build panels and batteries... so you have energy to mine the map... The bootstrapping never ends. Some of the mods have done real work to make this better. There's a mod that has fusion as a late game tech which feels like cheating, but then there's modpacks like Seablock where you're forced to continuously rebuild power through your tech generations as there is no coal, your starting wind turbines don't make enough to get you past the first 10 hours, and each successive science step unlocks a new power generation technology that roughly feels in scale with that level of technology (from harvesting low grade algaes for biomass, to growing trees, to farming alien plants and extracting oils, and then to nuclear in the latest parts of the game). But no amount of modding can fix things so you can have a power pole that is also a lamp, so you can use Brave New World and see things through the stupid unfixable dark night without also spamming the map with build-wrecking lamps (since that mod removes your character and thus your ability to build night vision goggles).
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  You can install the mod that merges lamps and power poles or the one that makes it always day.

Deestan 6y ago

> Then there were the speed runners who launch the rocket in a few hours. It's even below 2 hours now: https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#Any https://www.speedrun.com/factorio#Any

awalton 6y ago

> I found most of my bottleneck to be electricity. Since I played on deathworld, placing solar was tedious. If there's a major criticism to be had over Factorio, it's that power generation in the game is rather boring, and the Power poles and Light classes are designed somewhat poorly. Solar just doesn't scale in Vanilla - it costs too many materials for too little power, when really it should be one of the easier scalable techs (but should still require lots of research since it's a no-consumable power technology). You can get through an entire game of Factorio on nothing but coal power if you're diligent about when you expand, but most seasoned players will just burn the excess oil as power, since it's rarely a real bottleneck and oil's one of the most economical resources in the game to get setup - you build it once and... you're done. Forever. And then there's the super ridiculous late gamers who have to build nuclear because once you start talking in tens of gigawatts, there's just no way to squeeze that out of anything else and remain even close to efficient; the nukes take an absurd amount of concrete, but you're usually swimming in excess stone anyways. Trying to get there on solar is an exercise in actual pain, since you'll mine most of the map just trying to build panels and batteries... so you have energy to mine the map... The bootstrapping never ends. Some of the mods have done real work to make this better. There's a mod that has fusion as a late game tech which feels like cheating, but then there's modpacks like Seablock where you're forced to continuously rebuild power through your tech generations as there is no coal, your starting wind turbines don't make enough to get you past the first 10 hours, and each successive science step unlocks a new power generation technology that roughly feels in scale with that level of technology (from harvesting low grade algaes for biomass, to growing trees, to farming alien plants and extracting oils, and then to nuclear in the latest parts of the game). But no amount of modding can fix things so you can have a power pole that is also a lamp, so you can use Brave New World and see things through the stupid unfixable dark night without also spamming the map with build-wrecking lamps (since that mod removes your character and thus your ability to build night vision goggles).

BlueTemplar 6y ago
You can install the mod that merges lamps and power poles or the one that makes it always day.