Bobs + Angels sucks?

[Your Majesty Padded Gamer]

I'm sorry to say, but Bobs + Angels is not a good mod pack for anyone.

I have about 150 hours into this game and I've beaten factorio one time. Got the rocket launched and everything. And I just can't get any enjoyment out of Bobs + Angels.

The problem with this mod pack is that the early game is fairly terrible. I don't know if the middle game is any better. But god, using filter spilters was a pain in the *** and wasn't much fun.

Then you have one of the biggest problems with Angels specifically. So you finally got iron and copper working. Simple right? Then you quickly realize that the copper is never used on anything and you don't have iron because it's being backed up. So you look for recipes that require copper. The problem is that every recipe that needs copper requires iron. Well that's a paradox, isn't it?

So basically, the mod creator uses vanilla recipes for a lot of items. The problem with vanilla recipes is that they obviously aren't balanced for modifications to the game. For example, all the mod creator would've had to do would be to double the rate at which you need copper for a lot of the recipes. That would be so bleeping simple to do, a blind programming monkey with a keyboard could've done it.

And then you get to mk 2. Which the ability to make a single resource by combining two ores together. The problem with this system is that it expects the player to rip their entire factory they spent hours on apart and start over from the begning. This was the point where I quit the mod forever and stopped playing.

Then you have the slag issue. The slag issue requires you to get sufuric acid which is the ninth circle of hell. Alternatively, you can crush the slag into crushed stones. But wait, crushing the slag will back up your stone supply and cause your iron/copper to halt.

There's just no winning at this modpack. Personally, I would rather pull my eyes out then play this again. And yeah, I can google tutorials and stuff. But honestly, I don't really feel compelled to. With the original vanilla Factorio, I felt encouraged to play more of it. But with Bobs + Angels, I feel disatified most of the time because 90 percent of the game isn't rewarding to the player.

[Richard]

Just Play Bobs/Angels with Seablock, you will enjoy it much better as no need to use any miners for ore and you can never have enough slag or crushed stone...

...As you need it for that lovely mineral water which u need to get green algae with gives you cellulose which you can turn to wood chips which gives you fuel so you can power the electrolysers so you can get slag and crushed stone....

[Your Majesty Padded Gamer]

Originally posted by richard.hills:

Just Play Bobs/Angels with Seablock, you will enjoy it much better as no need to use any miners for ore and you can never have enough slag or crushed stone...

...As you need it for that lovely mineral water which u need to get green algae with gives you cellulose which you can turn to wood chips which gives you fuel so you can power the electrolysers so you can get slag and crushed stone....

I'd personally much rather never touch bobs/angels again. And any possible method of getting rid of slag requires so much complexity that I'd rather not attempt.

[Richard]

A shame as i am really enjoying seablock with the added "Puzzles", just think as slag as the one ore to rule them all, with it you can do pretty much anything. I havnt played Bobs/Angels outside of Seablock so cant comment on how bad it is in "vanilla" games

[𝓝𝓪𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓫𝓸𝓲]

Well, Angel's and Bob's mods are supposed to make the game incredibly difficult with a lot of acclimation to logistic setups. Going from 1 victory in vanilla to modded can be a very large step. It took me about 30 hours of playing the "Sea Block" mod pack to understand the difficulty of both mods. Those two mods certainly take some research and messing around with to understand how they work together and how optimized setups can be achieved. I can agree to an extent though, the early game is tough with those two. Mix in some of the otehr mods from Angel and Bob and you have.. well a fluster cluck :D

Shame you didn't enjoy it! It adds a massive amount of complexity that is missing in vanilla. To each their own though.

EDIT: forgot to mention that in Sea Block, going to blue science packs was worse than an entire vanilla playthrough AND all the time i spent up to that point in Sea Block. It was... Nightmarish.

[Your Majesty Padded Gamer]

Originally posted by 𝓝𝓪𝓬𝓱𝓸𝓫𝓸𝓲:

Well, Angel's and Bob's mods are supposed to make the game incredibly difficult with a lot of acclimation to logistic setups. Going from 1 victory in vanilla to modded can be a very large step. It took me about 30 hours of playing the "Sea Block" mod pack to understand the difficulty of both mods. Those two mods certainly take some research and messing around with to understand how they work together and how optimized setups can be achieved. I can agree to an extent though, the early game is tough with those two. Mix in some of the otehr mods from Angel and Bob and you have.. well a fluster cluck :D

Shame you didn't enjoy it! It adds a massive amount of complexity that is missing in vanilla. To each their own though.

EDIT: forgot to mention that in Sea Block, going to blue science packs was worse than an entire vanilla playthrough AND all the time i spent up to that point in Sea Block. It was... Nightmarish.

The problem is that the majority of the diffculity comes from poor balancing. I often feel cheated most of the game. With vanilla Factorio, I felt that the challenge was definately fair and justified.

But some of the things like why you don't just start with combining ores right off the bat baffles me. The poor excuse of an early game with the limited ability to do anything expect watch your factory shut down is a sign of poor choices in basic balance.

[gatherer818]

I haven't played with Angel's extensively yet because I have heard it's much more complicated than anything I've done in my 600 hours with the game (I did a co-op Seablock for a few hours once, that's it) but I thoroughly enjoy Bob's mods. I'm only playing vanilla right now to get some achievements, and then I'm going back to my heavily modded Bob's+.

600 hours + more than 450 of that running Bob's = still afraid of Angel's complexity.

[Grossout]

I love these mods, I felt like the vanilla was missing the complexity even before I had automated the blue circuits first time so I went straight to bobs mods and launched my first rockets with bobs.

[Jordan]

I have not played with Angels yet, but me and a friend of mine did a 2 man playthough of Bob's with a few extra mods thrown in, and I thought it was very fun. Bob's and Angel's mods were meant to independently increase the difficulty and complexity of the base game, so I can imagine combining the two would lead to a very, very difficult playthrough. As I said, I haven't tried Angel's mods yet so I cannot reccomend them myself, but Bob's was a very fun experience that I recommend if you are finding the base game to lack complexity and difficulty.

[Heathy]

I've been playing it and my first game was going ok but i ran out of coal and i had the aliens multiplying i think you have to play with less aliens or lowered so you can focus on the factory.

the bit that gets me is that you just end up with so many dead ends on progression, you might have one gas, that you can't do much with yet, but then you'll eventually have 4-5 gasses that just pipe to storage for some later point. aghh. I had to lay so much underground pipe, some of the production paths are quite intuitive and easy to grasp but its the gasses/acids/chemicals that get me.

making bricks isn't so bad thats one almost self contained production line that outputs various things sand/mud/lime and ends with bricks and some gases like chlorine and hydrogen, thats one place where the trail of chemicals starts quite early, after that its natural gas and oil those break down into an even greater entanglement. maintaining order is difficult in the chaos.

i'm not sure what can make things easier, i have to just have some things drop to chests until i can figure out what to do with them, larger production chains end up being warehoused, crushed stone piles up but its possible to pipe it out, thats the smallest issue when it comes to this mod combo. its just the sheer amount of things going on and new things opening up. I don't mind it so much your always busy adding new stages of production or making things more efficient. for example I just recently moved to floatation cell and you get a bunch more ores at the same time so by the time your able to actually upgrade to flotation cells your factory has to either undergo a massive overhaul, or you pipe the new ores out to a new line of processing, this is where the mod gets complex, around the time you are able to split the ores further your suddenly dealing with 6+ new ores that need to be processed in some way that is where it gets tricky its figuring out whats important and what isn't i've probably not got the best research priorities. my factory is a mess but it works for the most part or at least until i need to change it all.

[fractalgem]

Well, if you hated bobs+angels, whatever you do, don't play the pycoal mod. If you had a hard time dealing with slag and excess copper, you'll pull your hair out trying to deal with the bajillion byproducts in pycoal!

I'm sorry to say, but Bobs + Angels is not a good mod pack for anyone.

Nooooo, it's just not a good mod pack for YOU.

I like it. I consider it the entry level to the really really hard modpacks.

The problem with this mod pack is that the early game is fairly terrible. I don't know if the middle game is any better. But god, using filter spilters was a pain in the *** and wasn't much fun.

Filter splitters? Those are new, aren't they? You should be able to get by without them, as there are plenty of clever ways to sort the early-game byproducts you get that do not require filter splitters or filter inserters.

Then you have one of the biggest problems with Angels specifically. So you finally got iron and copper working. Simple right? Then you quickly realize that the copper is never used on anything and you don't have iron because it's being backed up. So you look for recipes that require copper. The problem is that every recipe that needs copper requires iron. Well that's a paradox, isn't it?

You will eventually be able to make pure-iron and pure-copper recipes that don't output both. You can also, instead of using the sorting recipes, use the raw crushed ore directly. You can also make a massive warehouse to stockpile the extra copper. You have solutions available, use them.

And then you get to mk 2. Which the ability to make a single resource by combining two ores together. The problem with this system is that it expects the player to rip their entire factory they spent hours on apart and start over from the begning. This was the point where I quit the mod forever and stopped playing.

Oh, you are so wrong.

You are expected to do this repeatedly as you progress, mwahahahahah!. Except, uh, you're not expected to replace the ENTIRE factory, only your ore processing. If you really have to rip your entire factory apart just to make room for the change in ore sources, then you've, uh, failed at organizing your factory. You should be able to seperate your factory out into initial ore processing, ore smelting, and then your "main bus" as it were, with side areas for the extremely complicated petrochems, and maybe another area for dealing with byproducts like slag and geodes.

That said, many people toss in the nanobots mod to make this process significantly easier.

other unsolved problems

TLDR

Everyone who's told you about that pack combo has almost certainly warned you that it's an extremely difficult combination. You were warned and didn't listen. It is clear this pack isn't for you, since you could not solve these problems on your own, but there are definitely people who enjoy it and can solve those problems.

[Your Majesty Padded Gamer]

I get that it's hard. But the difficulty and complexity comes from an unfair lack of balancing.

If this mod pack was adjusted to have a better early game where I wasn't constantly struggling to get anything done. Then I might have a better time with it.

Also, having to rebuild ore processing is not a fun challenge. I'd rather eat a ghost pepper then ever have to rebuild my ore processing stations. I find it boring to not constantly be making progress in some shape or form. And redoing yet and still, another ore system is BS.

That's the problem with this mod pack, fun. It lacks any amount of fun that motivates me to press on. For me, I found that the difficulty of the mod was alright. I didn't have many problems with Tin. But the problem is that it's not fun to play with the mod pack enabled.

The other load of BS is the recipes. Unfortunately, the developers behind the mods never bothered to make a TMI mod for Factorio much like you have in Minecraft. Unless there is a mod I haven't heard of that does this. I'm unsure at the current moment. This becomes an issue when you have to phsyically google how to make sulfur and the like.

There is the foremen program but it's not usable on Linux Ubuntu which is a problem. There really should just be a TMI mod instead of using an external program in my opinion.

And yes, I did find a recipe site online. I'll be perfectly honest, the person in charge of this site, didn't do the best job. It's a bit weird at times to find what you're looking for. The interface for that site overall needs an overhaul.

Look at this site. https://factorio.rotol.me/pack/bobmods-f11/i/item/silicon-wafer

You see, when I hear difficulty, I don't expect challenge that comes from many of the systems being unbalanced and vastly broken at times. That's the difference between vanilla and modded.

[KatherineOfSky]

@Padded Gamer -- If you are unsure of how to play the mod, there are quite a few excellent YT series where you can learn.

Otherwise, it sounds like you are complaining for the sake of blackening the mods' reputations, which is not cool. These major mods have been balanced to the creators' desires, and are meant to be a puzzle to solve. They are not impossible, and MANY people enjoy playing them.

[fractalgem]

The other load of BS is the recipes. Unfortunately, the developers behind the mods never bothered to make a TMI mod for Factorio much like you have in Minecraft. Unless there is a mod I haven't heard of that does this. I'm unsure at the current moment. This becomes an issue when you have to phsyically google how to make sulfur and the like.

"what is it used for".

Shows what a thing is used for, and what recipes are available to make it. Installs within factorio like any other mod.

[Richard]

This becomes an issue when you have to phsyically google how to make sulfur and the like.

Have you tried the "FNEI" mod?. It helped me a ton when i first started playing seablock

Edit, Post above me beat me to it with another alternative

[fractalgem]

Another thing: what you call "unfair" and "unbalanced" the rest of us call "byproducts". Angels mods come with a warehouse which stores a TON of stuff. Use them until you can process a given byproduct, or blow them up occasionally to get rid of the byproduct in question.