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meowmeowmeowmeow posted:I'm in the camp of SpaceEx sounds like it's got some interesting new mechanics buried under a couple hundred hours of added complexity and while I'd love to give it a go I know I'd never finish a 500+ hour playthrough and it's prob not a good idea to start and burn out on. I don't know, I enjoyed my first 40h SpaceEx run where I got to space, fooled around a little bit, and set it aside. I just considered it an AAI Industry run with an enormous endgame if I didn't want to set it down. I didn't want to come in and copy/paste old vanilla blueprints - with AAI you're forced to spaghetti since the recipes are unfamiliar. There are more nudges to use the circuit network and there's a novel stone production chain. But it's not really that complicated, it ends up replicating the feel of your first factorio run. It seems like Earendel is trying to open up and force you to use the design space that can easily be skipped over in vanilla and it's fun for a change of pace.
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Dec 4, 2023 22:04
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Arrath posted:I wonder if you'd be able to bring along some charged accumulators, or a steam wagon or two. The blog also seemed to suggest there is a degree of assuming the player could become cut off from other planets - so there'd need to be some on-planet way to kickstart. That doesn't preclude being able to bring stuff from off planet to make the process smoother, but I'm not sure you how you'd bring a steam wagon along?
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Dec 4, 2023 23:35
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Oxyclean posted:That doesn't preclude being able to bring stuff from off planet to make the process smoother, but I'm not sure you how you'd bring a steam wagon along? Why, isn't it obvious? A railgun 
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Dec 5, 2023 02:11
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Arrath posted:Why, isn't it obvious? God, that'd actually be really funny if an absolute endgame tech was basically just a cannon that let you shoot stuff from planet to planet rather then ferrying it with the space platform. I do actually wonder if there will be a planet-to-planet logistics that isn't just using the space platform? Automated (advanced) rockets maybe?
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Dec 5, 2023 02:17
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Does Space Ex still add those meteors you can't turn off?
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Dec 5, 2023 02:35
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Magus42 posted:Does Space Ex still add those meteors you can't turn off? Yeah but they're also not really a problem. Early on the chances of one hitting your base are slim and later the defenses are cheap and on the low chance one slips through the bots will just rebuild. Think I had one hit my miners early before defenses and nothing else before later planets. The first* (technically second as one is at the beginning of the run) solar flare will do far more damage but should only realistically get one before defenses are built for that too.
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Dec 5, 2023 03:14
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Worst part of space ex is how he specially prevents mods that fix the bad parts (like robot attrition)
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Dec 5, 2023 12:21
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You can eliminate the robot attrition with a two-character text file edit.
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Dec 5, 2023 18:25
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Began my first Space Exploration game. Default SE recommended settings.. man these biters. I was minding my own business, polluting the planet. I walled off my base and dicked around, since I'm not a very good Factorio player. Then I realized enemies attack.. so I set up a large walled area with turrets and ammo on belts. Welp, they're getting through - upgraded to red ammo. OK all this ammo needs more iron and steel. So I had to setup train infrastructure, automate train builders, power poles, railroads etc.. well then things began to get really dicey. I ran in panic around the base, fixing up damage caused by attacks. I installed turrets next to each other, and installed solar panels all around, this helps so my boilers won't pollute during daytime. I looked at modules which reduce pollution, well those would be nice, but they require oil based products. Haven't had time to setup oil yet. What I'm going to do, die and lose? My SMG with red ammo, some nades and a car aren't going to cut it.. how I'm going to carve a path through enemies to get some oil? Enemies keep attacking all around. And they construct bases closer and closer, thus increasing the amount of attacks. I had to build a bunch of more ammo factories to keep the ammo belts fed... I look at videos where people go on extermination spree, and kill everything in pollution range. Now how on earth is that possibe 
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Dec 5, 2023 18:55
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If you have 10-20 turrets and 500-1,000 red ammo, you can take out most early bases and only lose a turret or two at worst. plop them down and give them some ammo and they'll destroy everything in their radius. There are lots of other ways, but that's the simplest and most direct. Once you get rid of a few nests in an area, you'll get a lot more breathing room, especially if you keep building solar panels and (soon) accumulators. Good luck!
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Dec 5, 2023 19:34
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It took me a long time of complaining about SpaceEx to realize that all the stupid stuff is either so negligible (robot attrition, meteors, solar flares) as to not matter except for slice, or to be a kludge against breaking some of SpaceExs own kludges to get the engine to do what it does (Teleporters and the many different ways Surfaces are abused) Its less Minecraft idiot than originally portrayed
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Dec 5, 2023 19:35
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Ihmemies posted:man these biters. Kinda looks like you just got unlucky with the starting area. Even in vanilla there is a huge difference in pollution for forest/grass chucks than desert/water chucks. Pollution spreads much further over those because sand and water barely absorb any in comparison
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Dec 5, 2023 19:37
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Hmm. So inventory full of turrets and ammo, and inch towards the nests.. didn’t realise I could use turrets in combat like that too. Doh. I saw I could wield flamethrowers if I had oil, so I’ll try to secure the oil next, set up flamethrowers there so I won’t lose the base, and then go clearing the nests nearby with help of turrets. Maybe that will help…
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Dec 5, 2023 19:38
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For any unfamiliar mod based around the idea of a Really Long game, you want to both tweak biter settings to be less intense and make an early beeline for turrets and walls so that you can completely block all the approaches to your factory on every side. Use that breathing room to automate production of trains and source oil before things get really bad, build your first outposts with enough defensive positions that they’ll be ok for several hours. Locate a set of choke points which leaves you with even more secure real estate and establish an army train which carries replacement defenses as well as ammo: initially you can just unload ammo into the local feeds but once you have bots up you should be automatically maintaining stocks of extra turrets, poles, inserters, walls, etc. Once you’ve got oil up add flamethrower turret positions behind your existing defenses, between this and red ammo you’re good for quite some time. Deffo investigate pollution mitigation or escalating into better ammo and better weapons positions.
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Dec 5, 2023 19:48
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Ihmemies posted:Hmm. So inventory full of turrets and ammo, and inch towards the nests.. didn’t realise I could use turrets in combat like that too. Doh. I saw I could wield flamethrowers if I had oil, so I’ll try to secure the oil next, set up flamethrowers there so I won’t lose the base, and then go clearing the nests nearby with help of turrets. Maybe that will help… Yep, just make sure you bring lots of turrets & ammo. Just because of the way things work out when assaulting nests, often if you put down, say, three turrets, one will get blown up and the other two severely damaged, but if you put down six, nobody takes a single tick of damage (hypothetical numbers).
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Dec 5, 2023 19:48
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"lots" in this case being like 50 turrets, 100 walls, and 2000 ammo. No need to fill your inventory. If you die that's a pile of resources you have to go retrieve. Bring fish for health and repair packs. Those are still fairly small nests.
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Dec 5, 2023 20:37
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Something that can also save you a lot of turrets and ammo is making sure there's at least one tile of free space between each turret, since a worm's acid splash can hit 2 or 3 turrets if they're touching each other. Basic combat robots are still underrated in vanilla IMO, just having 10 of them following you around and a basic modular armor with 2 shields (only needs a little bit of blue tech) is good enough to run through and clean out most medium biter bases. Not sure what that part of the tech tree looks like in spaceex though. e: Also you're in an area that is mostly desert; pollution is going to spread farther just by being over desert and additionally because there's little to no trees to absorb it. While trees are, in general, the enemy, they can be really helpful for preventing your cloud from getting too big before you can handle clearing larger spawns. I usually look for starts that have at least two directions from the start with large amounts of forest so the amount of area to defend early is minimized. The water also doesn't absorb much pollution, but there's not much you can do about that, and it's less of a problem than the desert because the biters will path around the lake and will generally funnel into a single chokepoint on each side. Xerol fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Dec 5, 2023 |
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Dec 5, 2023 21:15
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Ihmemies posted:Hmm. So inventory full of turrets and ammo, and inch towards the nests.. didn’t realise I could use turrets in combat like that too. Doh. I saw I could wield flamethrowers if I had oil, so I’ll try to secure the oil next, set up flamethrowers there so I won’t lose the base, and then go clearing the nests nearby with help of turrets. Maybe that will help… Some advanced combat tips: 1) Don't carry some grenades. Make a hundred and aggressively toss them into Biter crowds. The materials for 1 grenade can kill 50+ biters simultaneously in an instant. Compare that to the red ammo cost and time firing. 2) Hotkey turrets and ammo, spread a crescent of 4+ turrets, select ammo, use single drop(Z) and wave your mouse over the crescent until it feels good. Do it again and leapfrog forward, deconstructing a wave only when two are covering each other. 2a) If you drop 2-4 turrets ahead of everything else they can soak worm spit and early aggro as you get an actual crescent set up and manually SMG down the worms. 3) Carry fish. 4) If you're within a few tech jumps to get modules(though you've got no oil...) putting greens in your entire base really shrinks the cloud. 5) Expansion parties are much smaller than consecutive staggered nests so walling far past your cloud with radars and turrets pays off in the long run. Having radars in empty space near your base lets you run out and kill a 2-4 nest expansion as soon as it spawns too.
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Dec 5, 2023 21:28
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Doomykins posted:2) Hotkey turrets and ammo, spread a crescent of 4+ turrets, select ammo, use single drop(Z) and wave your mouse over the crescent until it feels good. Do it again and leapfrog forward, deconstructing a wave only when two are covering each other. Make sure to put the fish in your hotbar too. You can also add more hotbars to the list that you cycle through (out of the 10 total you get) so you can have more quickly available items. Midgame (about when I'm getting logistics bots online) my hotbar usually looks something like this:  (Don't ask why my #1 bar is like that, I started doing it that way back in 0.8 and haven't seen a reason to The stuff on the right side of the combat bar is for setting up radar outposts, something you'll often want to do after clearing biter nests. Later I will replace the robots with destroyer capsules, the ammo for uranium ammo, and the grenades for cluster grenades, but for the most part this is what I use until the end of the game. Getting military 3 for the combat shotgun is also an upgrade I often go for quickly in high-combat games - with 3-4 levels of bullet damage it can take out a large worm in a couple hits at close range, and those hits are very quick.
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Dec 5, 2023 21:41
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Xerol posted:The stuff on the right side of the combat bar is for setting up radar outposts, something you'll often want to do after clearing biter nests. Later I will replace the robots with destroyer capsules, the ammo for uranium ammo, and the grenades for cluster grenades, but for the most part this is what I use until the end of the game. Turret creep can solve a lot of problems but as Xerol mentioned previously combat robots are extremely underrated and yet are absolutely the "intended" and effective solution and a surprising number of people just don't bother automating them because of an aversion to spending consumables. Likewise with grenades! The general process behind people ditching combat robots goes something like handcraft a couple, throw out one or two when attacking a biter nest, realize they're consumable, and never mass-produce or ever use them again. It's a mistake; automating defender capsules makes clearing bases fast and reliable in a way that even bot-supported turret creep can't manage, and it's only improved with the use of grenades, shotguns, and rocket launchers. Defender robots are basically* a gun turret with red ammo that follows you around and even without blue science running you can have 15 of them active at a time. It's essentially a more mobile turret creep that you don't have to micromanage! It is also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, way faster to use combat robots than to do turret creep.
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Dec 5, 2023 22:45
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Imma preach the gospel of the Helicopter mod again, cause it is hilarious to put rocket fuel into it and strafe biter hives at mach 3 with explosive rockets.
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Dec 5, 2023 23:27
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Arrath posted:Imma preach the gospel of the Helicopter mod again, cause it is hilarious to put rocket fuel into it and strafe biter hives at mach 3 with explosive rockets. I don’t think that would help in the pre oil game! But yes it is fun when viable
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Dec 5, 2023 23:37
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I am in the camp of never hosed with the combat bots but I'll try them next time I have biters on
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Dec 5, 2023 23:45
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For SpaceEx specifically the jetpack + bots + rocket launcher lets you just blitz through hives dodging spitters. Seriously mass produce rockets. It's nuts.
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Dec 6, 2023 00:38
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Does raw fish even work in SE? Either that or Krastorio requires you to make medipacks to heal.
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Dec 6, 2023 00:47
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I didn't know you could catch fish, much less eat them, until I was flailing around trying to build a spidertron and had to look up how to get one 
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Dec 6, 2023 00:53
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In K2/SpaceEx fish still heal you. Using them as an ingredient for better healing items stretches them out, though.
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Dec 6, 2023 00:55
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I have to craft medpacks from wood and fish. It works, but fish are hard to catch. I cleared “all” the nests with your tips and turrets. I’ll produce combat robots next. Too much stuff to automate, not enough time. I need to design some kind of copy pasteable manufacturing designs, and unlock bots. I got some oil now so I can make light blue science with red cards. This game has so much stuff.. It feels like my factory does nothing because I’m not fast enough to utilise myself all the goods the factory provides.
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Dec 6, 2023 02:34
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Is using bots+deconstruction to catch fish a vanilla thing or a mod thing?
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Dec 6, 2023 03:42
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Olesh posted:Turret creep can solve a lot of problems but as Xerol mentioned previously combat robots are extremely underrated and yet are absolutely the "intended" and effective solution and a surprising number of people just don't bother automating them because of an aversion to spending consumables. Likewise with grenades! The general process behind people ditching combat robots goes something like handcraft a couple, throw out one or two when attacking a biter nest, realize they're consumable, and never mass-produce or ever use them again. It's a mistake; automating defender capsules makes clearing bases fast and reliable in a way that even bot-supported turret creep can't manage, and it's only improved with the use of grenades, shotguns, and rocket launchers. I didn't bring this up originally but I did the math way back when bullet damage and robot damage were separate techs* (it's probably in this thread somewhere), but even then the DPS effectiveness of the materials that went into a defender robot was potentially something like a dozen times more effective than the equivalent amount of red bullets. Obviously you can't use these to defend a static location** so you're still going to want bullet production for those. *The current way still annoys me because defenders and destroyers use different damage techs (bullet and laser, respectively) so if you've invested a lot in getting your defenders buffed (which certainly helps with defense since it upgrades gun turrets too), switching to destroyers can be a little painful. **This is very high up on my wishlist for vanilla, although I get that they probably would never do it because they don't want all the varied combat options becoming samey, but having some kind of combot deployer would be pretty great. Maybe if they want to keep it distinct from static turret defenses, it could be an armor module that you can stick in spidertrons. Slickdrac posted:Is using bots+deconstruction to catch fish a vanilla thing or a mod thing? This was always in vanilla as long as I can remember. Any unfiltered deconstruction planner dragged over water can get you all the fish within construction robot range. Recommended to do this over lakes you plan to landfill if you're endgaming at gigabase scales since having a large stock of fish in the logistics network really helps with getting spidertrons automated.
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Dec 6, 2023 03:54
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Ihmemies posted:I got some oil now so I can make light blue science with red cards. This game has so much stuff.. It feels like my factory does nothing because I’m not fast enough to utilise myself all the goods the factory provides. This is normal if you don't have a very motivated and knowledgeable plan for what to build or expand next. Don't sweat it and let your factory build chests full of useful goodies that will be ready when you need them, assuming your ore isn't about to tap out of course. Hell, it's why everybody makes a mall. You never know when you'll want to do 3k wall tiles worth of border work but I'd much rather pull it from a long forgotten chest and furnace line then go set it up and wait/do something else when I know I want that project now.
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Dec 6, 2023 11:27
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Chests are super useful for both storage and buffering. I don't know how many oil refineries I'll need later but better to have a chest of 20 now than have to sit there hand crafting them in the middle of a build! I'm really leaning into Loaders since they are a part of K2 (I know there are standalone mods too) and they kinda feel cheaty since they are zero power and run at belt speed but it makes chest buffers more effective. I can have a backup fuel chest for my steam engines and a brief brownout won't starve the boilers. I can also have buffers after my smelter lines to help them keep running consistently and absorb the impact of a big build draining the bus.
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Dec 6, 2023 21:36
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I have no idea what I am doing. Mostly I just pick something interesting from the recipe list, and try automating that. Research gives more stuff to automate. Can’t wait to unlock requester chests for inventory management, and robots to make construction for me. When robots will do stuff for me, then I imagine I can utilize the resources a lot better. Next I need to figure out how to wire the water from Pulverizers so that it will be used first, only then the water from pumps. Something like “take water from pump/other pipe if this pipe doesn’t provide enough water”.
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Dec 6, 2023 21:44
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Ihmemies posted:
You can't directly hook a wire to a pipe, but a tank works. So the condition you want is 'activate this pump if the tank is below X amount of water'
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Dec 6, 2023 21:51
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Hmm, that makes sense. So I will install a fluid buffer, which the 1st pipe supplies. If buffer falls below a defined level, like 50%, 2nd pipe supplies more water until buffer has enough. That way I can get rid of some pulveriser water.
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Dec 6, 2023 21:53
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The one thing I really miss from angelbobs is the overflow/underflow valves. That's 90% of the use cases for pumps, way more convenient to have it as a single entity. That plus the variable sized tanks were really nice.
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Dec 6, 2023 23:08
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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misguided rage posted:The one thing I really miss from angelbobs is the overflow/underflow valves. That's 90% of the use cases for pumps, way more convenient to have it as a single entity. That plus the variable sized tanks were really nice. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/underground-pipe-pack This has overflow and top-up valves (plus a bunch of underground pipes that may or may not be considered cheating because you can do turns and intersections in a single square, which allows for builds that are impossible with normal pipes)
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Dec 6, 2023 23:40
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There’s also flow control https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Flow%20Control
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Dec 7, 2023 00:20
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Is anybody else nonplussed with the expansion plans? I don't care for SE. As another comparison, in Oxygen Not Included Spaced Out, the rockets are moderately fun, but trying to manage different planets just doesn't flow well gameplay-wise. You're either switching back and forth in a way that breaks my train of thought, or you're just ignoring one or the other I guess. I guess in factorio if the base you're leaving behind is actually self-sufficient and not like suicidal dupes in ONI, you are free to ignore it. But on the other hand I'm not sure I want to? I guess another way to phrase it is, I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't think it's managing X smaller bases simultaneously. I would just play different games. As-is it sounds like they're making science and such split across planets so you're forced to engage (ONI moonlets sort of works like this, and it's not great). I suppose mods might eventually make it possible to just play separate games through on each planet. But I guess SE must have been pretty popular for them to just make the expansion be fancier SE? So I think I'm in the minority here.
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Dec 7, 2023 03:19
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| # ? May 23, 2024 12:56 |
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I think the big thing that people buying a Factorio expansion are looking for is "more Factorio".
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Dec 7, 2023 03:50
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