Space age

[Lordly Cinder]

Is a fairly average player able to handle this dlc? The trailer makes it look colossal and intimidating. On one hand its exciting to have a lot of content to play and explore but I do wonder if it maybe a bit beyond my meager capabilities?

[Hurkyl]

You might want to watch the trailer for the base game again. :)

The expansion will be more complex -- but they did want to avoid making it overly so. They say

Originally posted by FFF #375:

Space Age is targeted at all Factorio players with better approachability in mind.

They also say

Space Age has a lot of different challenges but they never get too extreme and the usage of combinators is quite lightweight, so we expect that most players will be able to complete it.

These quotes were contrasting with the Space Exploration mod, which, I believe, has a reputation for being extremely complex and complicated.

[Fel]

It is expected to add about the same amount of content as the base game, so it looks about as intimidating as the base game, maybe more due to the various planets making things look quite different on each.

The devs have adhered to a design principle of keeping the vanilla game (and the expansion in this case) simple enough to be within reach of nearly anyone that actually tries.
So if you were able to get to launching a rocket in the current version then there is no reason to fear the expansion.

There will be new challenges with the platforms and planets but you will be able to get through it after a bit of fiddling around, figuring out a solution that works out even if it's neither efficient nor pretty.
It will require different designs compared to what you have been doing until now of course, since the whole point of the expansion is to bring more diverse challenges.

If you are unsure (since this is all speculation based on the FFFs so far after all), wait a couple weeks after the release of the expansion and there will be plenty of data for you to decide if it might be too complex for you or not.

[RiO]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

These quotes were contrasting with the Space Exploration mod, which, I believe, has a reputation for being extremely complex and complicated.

Case in point, there's a particular game mechanic in SE that requires you to know about linear algebra; and how to implement equation solving into combinators.

But no such madness in Space Age.

[Kawaiian Pizza]

Originally posted by RiO:

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

These quotes were contrasting with the Space Exploration mod, which, I believe, has a reputation for being extremely complex and complicated.

Case in point, there's a particular game mechanic in SE that requires you to know about linear algebra; and how to implement equation solving into combinators.

But no such madness in Space Age.

Its my best case scenario as I absolutely LOVED SE but am far, far too dumb to actually play it. Took me 150 hours just to get to space and only then did I realize that I'm far from smart enough to actually make more progress.
So excited about SA basically being SE but for regular people.

[Maltsi]

Originally posted by Kawaiian Pizza:

Originally posted by RiO:

Case in point, there's a particular game mechanic in SE that requires you to know about linear algebra; and how to implement equation solving into combinators.

But no such madness in Space Age.

Its my best case scenario as I absolutely LOVED SE but am far, far too dumb to actually play it. Took me 150 hours just to get to space and only then did I realize that I'm far from smart enough to actually make more progress.
So excited about SA basically being SE but for regular people.

And SA has far more quality over quantity compared to SE. In SE all planets feels like pretty much the same. Nothing fancy, just more of the same. While SA goes for entirely different approach. Granted SE is still in early developement, so that will most likely change in time.

[Lordly Cinder]

Originally posted by RiO:

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

These quotes were contrasting with the Space Exploration mod, which, I believe, has a reputation for being extremely complex and complicated.

Case in point, there's a particular game mechanic in SE that requires you to know about linear algebra; and how to implement equation solving into combinators.

But no such madness in Space Age.

What is SE?

[Fel]

SE stands for Space Exploration, one of the large overhaul mods and one of the only mods that really goes for the space and other planets thing.

It is also a controversial mod to some extent because unlike most mods that allow the player to customize things to a great extent to suit their taste, it forces all sorts of things on the player (hard limits on logistics bots and such) and goes for a lot of recipes that demand a whole lot of resources to craft more so than complexity in the recipe chains in many cases.
It also pretty much forces the player to use relatively advanced circuit network, which limits the players to people that know their way around it (logic gates and programming in general).
The devs of the mod are very uncompromising, going out of their way to disallow mods that would allow to bypass or negate some of the limitations they impose.
Basically, you play it in the exact intended way or not at all, which is a bit of a foreign concept in Factorio where both the base game and most mods allow for a lot of freedom in how to play.

So there is a love/hate thing with the mod for many people, as well as some concerns around the balancing of the expansion when the main person behind SE was added to the Factorio team for the expansion (for the art, not for the development itself).
Those concerns seem mostly unfounded with what we know now thankfully.

[ShutEye_DK]

Originally posted by Lordly Cinder:

Originally posted by RiO:

Case in point, there's a particular game mechanic in SE that requires you to know about linear algebra; and how to implement equation solving into combinators.

But no such madness in Space Age.

What is SE?

Space Exploration - a mod for the game.

[Maltsi]

Originally posted by 2DSLITARCHIVER:

Multiplayer won't be able to handle it if anyone is hosting the game client-side. Just vanilla mid-late game UPS is getting pushed to the limit. Being forced to pay for a server to have a stable experience is BS.

Time to upgrade your potato, or the potato the other person is using when connecting to your game. Because there are zero issues in mega base scale with friends.

[Galileus]

Originally posted by 2DSLITARCHIVER:

Multiplayer won't be able to handle it if anyone is hosting the game client-side. Just vanilla mid-late game UPS is getting pushed to the limit. Being forced to pay for a server to have a stable experience is BS.

Thankfully, it will come with free quantum computing upgrade. Tomorrow's lottery numbers are 45, 30, 78 and thee thousand five hundred eighty twelve. You drive a red Pontiac and your plates are IM-FLL-OF-BS.

Want to play some more making-stuff-up, or are we good?

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by 2DSLITARCHIVER:

Multiplayer won't be able to handle it if anyone is hosting the game client-side. Just vanilla mid-late game UPS is getting pushed to the limit. Being forced to pay for a server to have a stable experience is BS.

Minimum specs for your computer has not changed ever. The game was even successfully ported to lower end consoles. The game still runs well on old potatoes and the programmers have made several passes for extra optimizations.

The expansion is going to be even more optimized for things that were memory hungry in the base game (smarter robots and fluid mechanics). My rig was a high end gaming rig when I bought it 9 years ago. My wife and I play together on LAN with 2 people from other countries with me hosting and we have been able to build a 2.5k SPM base with 50 UPS and all 4 of us playing. Driving cars can be a pain for everyone other than the host (also fixed in the expansion) but once you are working on mega bases you have spidertrons which always solved that problem.

You'll still be able to play 2.0 without the extra planets and you'll get all of the optimizations for 2.0. You should be able to have an even better multiplayer experience in 2.0 than you do now.

[Fel]

That's not entirely true, the game used to support 32 bits OS, quite a while back but still, so the minimum specs did change a bit.

[Maltsi]

Originally posted by 2DSLITARCHIVER:

Originally posted by Maltsi:

Time to upgrade your potato, or the potato the other person is using when connecting to your game. Because there are zero issues in mega base scale with friends.

We have 2k+ plus PC, so potato. One hosts and has 1gb speed but when I connect I only get 200kb to download the map. A google search shows there's lots of people getting the same 200kb, when I join a community server that's hosted on a dedicated server, I'm not getting 200kb download.

oh yeah the map download can take some time if its huge, but the gameplay itself has no issues.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Fel:

That's not entirely true, the game used to support 32 bits OS, quite a while back but still, so the minimum specs did change a bit.

OK, OK it lost 32 bit support when it went from ver 0.14 to 0.15. WAAAY early in the EA phase of development (2017). I bought it shortly after 0.15 so I don't remember the change.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by 2DSLITARCHIVER:

Originally posted by knighttemplar1960:

Minimum specs for your computer has not changed ever. The game was even successfully ported to lower end consoles. The game still runs well on old potatoes and the programmers have made several passes for extra optimizations.

The expansion is going to be even more optimized for things that were memory hungry in the base game (smarter robots and fluid mechanics). My rig was a high end gaming rig when I bought it 9 years ago. My wife and I play together on LAN with 2 people from other countries with me hosting and we have been able to build a 2.5k SPM base with 50 UPS and all 4 of us playing. Driving cars can be a pain for everyone other than the host (also fixed in the expansion) but once you are working on mega bases you have spidertrons which always solved that problem.

You'll still be able to play 2.0 without the extra planets and you'll get all of the optimizations for 2.0. You should be able to have an even better multiplayer experience in 2.0 than you do now.

From other countries huh? Then how do people who are states away deal with insane ping issues? I've looked up the solution and it's all been buy a dedicated server to host the game.

For US players if you have a national ISP you can connect to a different node that may be farther away but has less traffic. You can run a trace route to see if there are problems and where they are and use a node that skips the problem locations. Where I am I have 4 different local options and several options 1-2 states away. It also depends on when you are trying to play. Internet traffic changes between 4:00 PM-6:00 PM local time Mon-Fri and most ISPs modify how many servers they have online and where they are based on typical traffic. If you play around with it often enough you'll be able to figure out those patterns yourself and take advantage of them.