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Briefly mentioned in this and rendered: space exploration is an incredible factorio mod and the deepest game I've ever played. In Factorio you launch a rocket
by AnotherGoodName 3y ago
Briefly mentioned in this and rendered: space exploration is an incredible factorio mod and the deepest game I've ever played.
In Factorio you launch a rocket and win. Space exploration takes that and continues. You end up developing a base across multiple worlds in the solar system. After developing the solar system from the different unique resources on each planet you expand to interstellar space and then other solar systems. The game has a 'quarter of the way through' victory screen but there's another victory screen as you explore a mystery that spans the known universe and takes a reasonable amount of math knowledge figure out.
It's 100s of hours of gameplay and really well done. They modified the game so that you can fly spaceships between planets with a star and solar system maps and it all works really well.
Just make sure to turn the biters way down. The mod requires a level of patience and the intensity of combat runs counter to that (in fact the mod itself has a popup telling you to turn biters down on start).
- fermentation 3y agoI actually prefer to completely turn off biters. They’ll still be there on other planets, but the anxiety on the home world is gone
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoAgreed. The difficulty creep that was demanded by vocal experienced players has made Factorio much harder for newcomers to get into. Factorio is a brilliant Zen garden and an absolutely terrible real time strategy game. Since the beta there's been more and more biter types and a gradual ramp up in how frantic you have to be to keep up. It's tremendously off-putting and completely opposite to what makes Factorio what it is. Hopefully the developers realize this at some point and knock it off. Make a 'frantic mode' toggle for the experienced players but don't make it the default. I can handle needed a turret or two at key points but I can't handle needing to race the tech tree to keep up. I don't get why they made the defaults so hostile to new players. I'm not even that new to Factorio but it's still waaaay too frantic with default settings.
- Aardwolf 3y agoMany of my fun memories of Factorio do involve biters though, both defending against them, and attacking them by building power lines and quickly building and then un-building laser towers near their bases (and later just by having super strong armor and a shotgun). But I guess a toned down offense on your base, while still allowing the same kind of attack, would work just as well. Also, the biters are somewhat boring at end of game, it's just the whole world map full of the exact same evolved bases everywhere.
- pmoriarty 3y agoI actually liked having the biters on my first couple of playthroughs of the game. It added a sense of urgency and a feeling that this was a dangerous alien world. After that I started playing mods that in and of themselves increased the difficulty of the game, and having the biters on top of that was just way too much. Also, in a vanilla game, once you're more or less invulnerable to the biters they become just an extra annoyance, and I'd rather just focus on building. On the other hand, without the sense of urgency that biters give the game can become kind of boring...
- z3c0 3y agoI agree. It adds pacing, as you can't simply dive down one branch of the technology tree. You're forced to always be developing your offense and defense, pushing you down branches you would have ignored otherwise.
- november84 3y agoI second this. Played with a friend some 150hrs and eventually started a new game with more mods and crazier biter levels ultimately increasing complexity and build formulas. It was so nerve wracking I felt like progress was so much slower due to all the fighting. After maybe 50 hrs in we realized the krastorio mod want being called correctly, so when we fixed that we learned all the new complex recipes were obsolete and all our defense were useless due to the restructuring of ammo types So I guess my point is. Bitters have a time and place and I'm over them.
- TOMDM 3y ago
- candiddevmike 3y agoWhat's the best faster-start mod? I want to start with robots instead of remaking my base midway through.
- srgpqt 3y agoHaven’t tried it, but this seems like something you can customize ingame at any time with the builtin map editor. See the “setting up research” on the editor wiki page: https://wiki.factorio.com/Map_editor#Setting_up_research https://wiki.factorio.com/Map_editor#Setting_up_research Edit: you’d probably have to give yourself the necessary modular armor, roboport and initial bots.
- coremoff 3y agoTry Companion Drones (don't have a link to hand) - gives you a pair of very capable personal drones that can attack/defend as well as filling in blueprints.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoSame, but that's true for most base building and RTS games, the base building / turtling is more fun than the attacking / combat part.
- hesdeadjim 3y agoI've found the other planets to be the real PITA that got old quick. Biter asteroids in particular. I love Space Exploration, but when you hit late game man it starts to get tedious fast. I've gotten to naquium and the higher end space sciences, but I get bored with the logistics of keeping it all running and have quit both times I've reached this point.
- FeepingCreature 3y agoCan confirm; I've gotten two (multiplayer!) SE games stalled out on Naquium now.
- louwrentius 3y agoI’m playing Space Exploration right now and it is epic. But beware, a professional YouTuber Dosh Doshington who seems to be one of the best Factorio players in the world (in my opinion) took 300 hours to complete SE with some help. I think SE is amazing but it’s an incredible time sink. I’ve gotten 3500+ hours in Factorio, I think I have a problem. Anyway, seeing Factorio in 3D was amazing though, really cool
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoYes that's why I think you should turn biters waaaay down or off for SE. It's a game that can take a few years to play through if you have a full time job+other things. Still a worthy distraction, just understand you'll be playing for years.
- louwrentius 3y agoYes, as part of SE you are already strongly encouraged to turn down the evolution factor growth if I'm correct. I myself do keep on playing with biters as I feel personally no enjoyment if there would be no biters.
- newZWhoDis 3y agoI just absolutely despise the (lack of) visuals in Factorio. Satisfactory might only be 80% as deep but it being in 3D and gorgeous more than makes up for it. If Factorio looked anything like this model visualizer I’d take it seriously.
- pests 3y agoI agree Factorio does not look the greatest. It looks like a giant smear of muddy washed out colors. I've tried to watch some content on YT and its so hard to tell whats going on or to see anything as a newcomer.
- ben-schaaf 3y ago> I've tried to watch some content on YT and its so hard to tell whats going on or to see anything as a newcomer. That might have more to do with YT's encoding and color grading. I've had the same experience when watching videos, but not when playing the game.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoAh, thanks, I was completely puzzled by OP's experience...
- concordDance 3y agoTry Dyson Sphere Program then. Not as repayable as factorio but still good fun.
- dmarinoc 3y agoOr add Shapez2 to your wishlist. It hasn’t been released yet, but the team is publishing a highly interesting devlog: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2162800
- epiccoleman 3y ago
- naikrovek 3y ago> takes a reasonable amount of math knowledge figure out hard pass. I do not enjoy when a video game makes me feel like a failure because I don't know trigonometry or calculus.
- remarkEon 3y agoWeirdly I actually like games that make me alt-tab and then look up some equations and open excel for a bit. (No, I will not try EVE)
- phist_mcgee 3y agoEVE is bookkeeping disguised as a game.
- evandale 3y agoYou don't even have to alt tab out to use Excel, they've added to the game. Seems like it doesn't fit your criteria for games you'd like anymore so there's no reason to try! :P https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/8165207770524-EVE-Online-Excel-Add-in https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/816520777052... (I mean this in jest)
- BlueTemplar 3y agoAmazing, but why not something open source like LibreOffice instead ?!
- remarkEon 3y agoOh my goodness. ... wait, how hard would it be to do something similar for Factorio?
- naikrovek 3y agothere are likely mods which already do the calculations for you.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoYeah, but I'd only pick up Space Exploration if you've played through the base game a few times and just want more. What I've found is that it rebalances the game so the 'base' takes less parts (i.e. for modules), but it goes harder on complexity. Like, the number of factories / production lines you have to build for the next stage just goes up and up. I think I got to a point - probably nearly 100 hours in - where I finally had two lines of products coming from other planets to do the next tier of science. Another tip that I'd add is that you should increase the science cost, I found it easy to run out of things to research while it still took hours to expand things for the next tier, which in practice meant your factory just stops doing anything because it doesn't need to do anything.
- fphhotchips 3y agoI think a lot of people in the community recommend Base game -> Krastorio -> Krastorio+SE. I've done the first two, and I'm quite early into SE. Just an incredible amount of complexity and I'm loving it.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> Another tip that I'd add is that you should increase the science cost, I found it easy to run out of things to research while it still took hours to expand things for the next tier, which in practice meant your factory just stops doing anything because it doesn't need to do anything. That's not a wrong way to play, but the intent of the default balancing is that you make those expansions smaller and faster. If a new resources has 5 steps to make, you can slap down 2-5 buildings per step with absolutely minimal planning/routing and feed it into a launcher. There's no need to spend hours on an expansion until your science production needs that much. And an orbital base can go very far with one assembler per recipe.
- 130e13a 3y agoanother modpack that should be mentioned here is pyanodons [0]. similar to space exploration it also extends the game significantly after the rocket launch, but it also adds additional content before (in fact, the rocket launch itself becomes rather unimportant and is an at first optional blue science tech) pyanodons adds very realistic ore processing chains, petrochemical processes (the main developer, pyanodon, is a chemical engineer by trade), energy generation mechanisms, electronics overhauls, and also farming components including both plants and animals. overall, a full py run will easily take 1500+ hours. it's probably not particularly enjoyable for most vanilla players, but if you liked mods such as space exploration or nullius, you might find some enjoyment in py [0]: https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon https://mods.factorio.com/user/pyanodon
- kfrzcode 3y ago1500 plus hours.... people sure have different philosophies on life
- tiffanyg 3y agoWhat, you'd rather spend that time working "for the man"? ;) To be honest, I used to be much more critical about how people spent time - particularly how I spent time ... Then I learned to stop worrying and love the reality: there is no 'purpose' (which is, itself, open to as many interpretations as you're able to and comfortable entertain[ing])...
- EMM_386 3y ago> another modpack that should be mentioned here is pyanodons For the sake of anyone's sanity, I wouldn't mention that.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoSpace Exploration moves the rocketship even earlier (considering the extra complexity, still earlier than in vanilla).
- rcxdude 3y agopyanodons really does seem like grind for the sake of grind. It's great if you're basically a utility monster for factorio's core gameplay and want as much of it as possible without any regard for repetition, or you really get a lot out of the satisfaction of achieving ridiculous goals, but most people are not likely to find it very fun, even if they liked seablock or SE.
- CGamesPlay 3y agoI got pretty far into a Seablock run before eventually giving up (I think it was around the 4th or 5th science color). I ended up stopping because the factory design started getting tedious. I had all the requisite ingredients coming in on neat belts (city blocks / LTS delivered) and the lines were modeled in Factory Planner, but just assembling them for each science pack was a larger and larger amount of tedium: not any new challenge, just tons of belt weaving and inserter adjusting. I'm willing to be told I'm just doing it wrong, but does vanilla + Space Exploration have a different sort of challenge curve, or would it end up being pretty similar to Seablock (which includes SpaceX, dunno if that's the same or different).
- BlueTemplar 3y agoThe old and the new SpaceX are completely different mods, by different people.
- rcxdude 3y agoyes, space exploration (which is a different mod entirely), aims to introduce new automation challenges instead of simply extending the same kind of challenges as in the base game (though it also does a little of that: it'll probably take you a bit longer to launch a rocket than in vanilla and that's more or less the start of SE, but it's nowhere near as slow as seablock). It basically requires use of the circuit network, for example (though the required use is relatively simple, it benefits from more advanced usage).
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoIt has tedium in the science imho but it's low enough bandwidth that I solved that with logistic chests without ever falling behind on science. The larger aspect is effectively restarting repeatedly on new worlds which have unique new resources until they too are shipping rockets of stuff into space. Each new world has different properties. Some have almost no solar, others no water, some have no bugs, but others have bugs dropping in from space anywhere on your base so it's not the same thing each time. I don't mind this aspect. It is a bit like playing Factorio on repeat but it has reasoning behind it. And each restart you get to bring a cargo rocket of stuff with you and the ability to build anything you've already researched. My outpost worlds are often messy and do the bare minimum to send up rockets of stuff to space. But it works. I'm finding it fun but I'm only a couple of hundred hours in.
- Arubis 3y agoIf “interplanetary Factorio” is your thing, also consider Dyson Sphere Program: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog...
- dave_sullivan 3y agoI actually prefer it over Factorio, spent a fair bit of time in both.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoThe biggest issue with biters, IMO, is that their density continues to ramp beyond you capping out your ability to efficiently eliminate them. In my (normal level biter) space exploration run, my buddy and i didn't run into any problems clearing out a large swath of space to build by rushing artillery and flamethrower turrents. The problem became the tedium of expanding our territory to keep the pollution cloud contained by manually firing artillery. IMO, the problem should be solved by giving the player better tools for artillery automation. The auto-firing artillery is both too short range, and has a tendency to anger a bunch of nests at once. Instead, it should focus on eliminating one nest cluster at a time, and maybe allow for circuit-controlled timing of when to move into the next cluster.
- rollcat 3y agoWith SE you don't need that much space on Nauvis. You should be targeting 10-30SPM in your first playthru; you will get bottlenecked on extraterrestrial resources as soon as you try to ramp up space science. There are people who beat the game off of a single core drill on Nauvis - what makes this mod take so long is designing all the solutions, rather than waiting for the science to trickle. Artillery (as well as basically everything from the base game) should be considered early game tech: you will later unlock stuff that would make Palpatine salivate. If anything, you very suddenly run out of things worth shooting at. > [...] maybe allow for circuit-controlled timing of when to move into the next cluster. You can achieve that in the vanilla game by blueprinting the artillery outpost (which would include all the necessary supporting defences, like walls/turrets/roboports/etc). Train rolls in, unloads gun+flamethrower ammo, once ammo buffers are ready set a signal to load ammo into artillery, which will start shooting. Set a timer, every time you load a shell reset it, once timer runs out + there are still shells left - you can set off an alarm that the outpost is done. Use a filtered deconstructor to pick the pieces up and move it all over. Bonus: use a blueprint deployer (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/recursive-blueprints https://mods.factorio.com/mod/recursive-blueprints) to automate the "move to the next sector" part. Check out this guy on Reddit to get some ideas: https://old.reddit.com/user/Drogiwan_Cannobi/submitted/ https://old.reddit.com/user/Drogiwan_Cannobi/submitted/