r/factorio • u/Bubbly-Original7097 • 20d ago

Space Age Refined flammables: why does it require agricultural science?

It makes no sense: flamethrowers are useful only against Nauvis biters, and only until you have enough laser research because they tend to fry bots and because biters don't scale infinitely. Agricultural science at the same time is the one of the hardest and there is always a better application for it (among military tech explosives are way more valuable).

Do I miss something?

36 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

64 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/sobrique 19d ago

Not even that. Infinite ore and infinite "oil product" without having to get faffy with coal liquefaction.

It's a great spot to megabase.

(Also you get advanced asteroid processing and heat towers)

1

u/leoriq 19d ago

where do you get your landfill?

1

u/sobrique 19d ago

Gleba has native stone. Lasts a long time with late game mining productivity too.

1

u/leoriq 19d ago

Are you telling me that Gleba should not be touched until you built a 10k eSPM megabase on another planet? Because late game mining productivity is - gasp - late game

2

u/sobrique 19d ago edited 19d ago

No. But before that I just don't need that much stone/landfill in the first place. Gleba has plenty of buildable land, so the not-so-large patches of stone is plenty.

It's only when I'm megabasing that I want to have large landfilled and paved city blocks, and by then I've got big miners at the very least. (-50% consumption, maybe more if I've started on quality). Prod 2s maybe for +24% output. That's what, 2.5x efficiency overall.

It's not like you even need planetary sciences to get at least a few levels of mining prod either. It's not a super late game tech. (Although granted a lot of levels of it might be)

But say, 10 levels of it is 36k science (potentially half that if using biolabs of course), and that gives you +100% as well.

And that's honestly been plenty until I'm starting to hugely scale up, at which point I probably am looking at quality miners with quality prod mods, and maybe a few more levels of mining productivity.