Space platform is weird

[Anna]

It's ok for a mod, but 2d platform with brick walls and stationarry turrets in space?
Without roof, without farms to support solar panels.
With magically working transport belts ignoring both lack of gravity and added acceleration.
With asteroids moving and rotating only in 2d

It's ok for the mod. But that is way too silly for the base game. The game used to be semi-realistic. But this platform is nothing plausible. I wish they could came up with something that is remotely realistic. turrets mounted inside the walls, different type of belts that wold clamp the goods, different material for the walls for sure.

Walls being integrated with the rest of the hull instead of being some sort of medieval fortification.

Is it only me, or do you also think they played with the mod a tad too long and get a bit too used to it and just can't see anymore how silly that is.

[Mike Garrison]

IIRC, the guy who wrote the mod is on the dev team. No surprise if some of the features of the mod get into the expansion.

[malogoss]

You are giving a lot of weight to its realistic stuff, whatever it is, if you consider the game is semi-realistic.

EDIT: seriously, what part of the game is realistic to you? Getting wood from chopping down trees I guess? Is chopping them down in 1 second and 2 axe strokes realistic? Is one tree being enough to craft 8 power poles in 2 seconds realistic? Is carrying around 1000 such power poles realistic?

[ciel]

this complaint is too unrealistic

[ShutEye_DK]

Originally posted by malogoss:

You are giving a lot of weight to its realistic stuff, whatever it is, if you consider the game is semi-realistic.

Hang on. I'll just empty my pockets for train engines, while I try to grasp that "realistic" part...

[Alshain]

When has this game ever been anything close to realistic?

[Mike Garrison]

Originally posted by ShutEye_DK:

Originally posted by malogoss:

You are giving a lot of weight to its realistic stuff, whatever it is, if you consider the game is semi-realistic.

Hang on. I'll just empty my pockets for train engines, while I try to grasp that "realistic" part...

They are right there under that nuclear reactor you are carrying around.

[Alshain]

Originally posted by Mike Garrison:

Originally posted by ShutEye_DK:

Hang on. I'll just empty my pockets for train engines, while I try to grasp that "realistic" part...

They are right there under that nuclear reactor you are carrying around.

Forget about the reactor, how about the piles of raw U-235 you've got in your pocket.

When I leave for work every day I go through my checklist...
Do I have my keys? - Yep
Do I have my wallet? -Yep
Do I have my phone? - Yep
Do I have my lunch? -Yep
Do I have my weapons grade uranium? - Yep

Got everything, I'm ready to leave.

[Alshain]

Aww crap, I forgot my army of autonomous AI powered drones. It's always something.

[Skorj]

Originally posted by Alshain:

When has this game ever been anything close to realistic?

The game has a (somewhat) visually realistic art style. Sure, everything's maybe 1/3rd scale, but it's largely the mechanics that are unrealistic, not the visuals. But they seems to have abandoned that style in the expansion (or perhaps with spidertron), to go for something a bit more cartooney. I've not been a fan since we saw the space platform rocket engines.

[Chindraba]

As soon as you add space to a game reality is tossed into the disposal. There is so little, if anything, about the reality of space which works in a video game. Even landing a space craft is too long to enjoy. (The Apollo mission took 13 minutes just for the landing phase.) Asteroid are around 600,000 miles apart (75 earths side by side to fill the gap). It takes years (or decades) to travel between planets. Making it a bit cartooney, and completely non-realistic, is to be expected and for my vote, accepted. Even the perpetual motion belts making 90 degree turns at 5 miles/hour without anything falling off is "cartoony". Play what you like, ignore what you don't. If that means playing Unreal Tournament of Factorio without space, fine. For those who demand the ultimate in realism, there's always grass to touch.

[knighttemplar1960]

Magnetized belts work for anything with a dipole moment (like water ice) and for ferrous asteroid chunks. Ferrous bands or clamps for silicon asteroids can be role played as under the stone and hidden from view. Since there is little gravity in space the platform can take what ever shape the devs want it to take.

With the asteroid density in this star system it may be possible to maintain a 1 g thrust for half the distance to the next planet and then rotate and decelerate at 1 g for the remainder of the trip. This would allow a planetary trip the distance of Earth to Mars to take 2 days.

The star is probably smaller and cooler than our sun and therefore the system is older. This would explain the extinct civilization on one planet and why the highest evolution on Nauvis is large insects.

If there are no gas giant planets (or the dense asteroids are the left overs of one or more destroyed gas giants) you could have multiple rocky planets inside the habitable zone of the star (like TRAPPIST-1) and those planets could act as gravitational shepherds for the asteroids. They could also be quite close together (like TRAPPIST-1 these planets have orbital periods ranging from 1.5–19 days, at distances of 0.011–0.059 astronomical units (1,700,000–8,900,000 km)). So quite close together compared to the Sol system.

Its possible to RP the expansion in the same way that you RP and ignore the physics in the base game.

[The_Mell]

Factorio is a 2d game and its belts have been always magic devices which do not need energy to transport stuff.

Things like a roof may sound like a nice & logic idea but i played enough Cosmoteer in recent months to tell you that a lot of time is spent in 'magically see through roof'-mode because you build your vessel or manage it.

Yes, the Kerbal Space Program part of me has a twitching eye when looking at those space platforms because they scream 'unrealistic' but so does so many other stuff of Factorio.
A placed assembler has a size and cannot be walked through but on a belt it's way smaller and you can step on it...with an inventory packed with hundreds of assemblers...

The space platform and its mechanics are to me a continuation of Factorio's way of gameplay.
They are close enough to be understood easily while different enough to bring new challenges - and i'm fine with this.

[juliejayne]

Excluding the "realistic" part, I do feel that the OP has a point.

Originally posted by Anna:

Is it only me, or do you also think they played with the mod a tad too long and get a bit too used to it and just can't see anymore how silly that is.

No it is not only you. I think that in desperation to A. Do an expansion and B. Expand to space. that the Devs have somewhat taken their eye off the ball.
Maybe this is what people were wanting, but not all of us.
Personally I would have much preferred an underground expansion, but there we are.

I will be getting the updated version with the new features, but I will NOT be buying into the multiple planets silliness.

[Chindraba]

Originally posted by juliejayne:

Excluding the "realistic" part, I do feel that the OP has a point.

Originally posted by Anna:

Is it only me, or do you also think they played with the mod a tad too long and get a bit too used to it and just can't see anymore how silly that is.

No it is not only you. I think that in desperation to A. Do an expansion and B. Expand to space. that the Devs have somewhat taken their eye off the ball.
Maybe this is what people were wanting, but not all of us.
Personally I would have much preferred an underground expansion, but there we are.

I will be getting the updated version with the new features, but I will NOT be buying into the multiple planets silliness.

I can't say what I "wanted", but the theme of the mod is not what I was expecting. I was thinking something like underground or underwater. Maybe even more levels, like cities in the sky. Not building in 3D like stacking assemblers into towers or something, but platforms on floating islands in the sky, still on Nauvis. I don't have a bunch of game exposure, but I think that's something not done yet even though it is in many books - even old ones like Laputa in Gulliver's Travels (1726).


All that said, I'll take what's available. I will also be getting the expansion myself, and I will play the Space Age mod at least once, hopefully finishing it. If it wasn't for elevated rails, I could be happy with merely the host of QoL updates to the base game, but I love the trains and "have to have" the elevated rails, so expansion pack purchase is going to be a fact for me.

Owning it I might as well explore all it has to offer. I won't go so far as to call it "silliness" since A) it was planned to be in the game before 1.0 was released, and B) it seems to be as well connected and balanced as the base game. Moving to underground, under water or floating islands in the sky would all have involved wider departures from reality than the base game has, so I'd not rate any as more silly than the others. And, for me, the game is about solving the challenge and puzzle of logistics and planning, not the graphics, or "reality" of it. I appreciate the artwork, very much, but I could enjoy the game with simple graphics like I've seen for things like Open TTD. The images, however nice they are, are just placeholders for some concept they represent.

So, one time at least, the full game of space will be played. Then I can say from my own experience, rather than 'from what I hear', what the expansion mod is all about. I fully expect that I'll be content, however, to settle back into the base game - with elevated rails.

[Anna]

There is no way I would skip the DLC, and wouldn't take a vacation to play it, but I still found it goofy that they didn't change the assets at least. Take RimWorld for example, you can't ever see the roofs, but you well aware they are present. In Space Haven you could use the mode to see roofs, but you mostly play like it's a room/platform with walls.

Factorio was always only semi-realistic game with mechanics way more important than realism and it's great. My problem is - they had dozens of ways to have almost the same space experience without taking it that far into cartoon logic. I'm totally fine with the SE mod, because it's a mod and the author didn't have much options, but the base game could have adapted the idea with less siliness.

I respect developers too much to think they can't came up with anything better than a machine-gun turrets firing over a brick-wall in space.

I'm confident people will get used to it just like Wube did, but I hold this game to much higher standards to think they did the right thing. They spent months apon months to have high-def textures in the base game, a lot of time to create music for DLC, even though the game would be fine without it, so I don't beleive they also think that gameplay is everything. It's the most important part, sure, but making the same game with less silly logic would have definitely improve the experience.

They probably don't like the idea to introduce new entities just for that, and they are right about it. But again, if I could came up with solutions without added entities from the top of my head, then they can definitely do even better.