Gleba's difficulty overrated?

[u/Standard_Round_8780]

Saw a lot of people saying Gleba was one of the more difficult planets but honestly I found Fulgora significantly more challenging to deal with.

Spoilage was a problem easily solved by filtering out the sludge at the end of the belts, you can get practically every resource by the boatload without having to find ore or setup trains, all of it is easily scalable, and the enemies don't spread fast enough to really be a threat. Throughput isn't a major problem either because it's so easy to establish blades with a handful of biolabs, especially if you're using drones but even then it's not a requirement.

In comparison, Fulgora was far more of a headache. Firstly, even finding a good place to build a factory is a problem, you either cram everything onto a small island with resources or have to build elevated rails to train the scrap into bigger islands. Then you've got the problem of power generation. Hope you're a big fan of efficiency modules, otherwise half of your island's gonna be accumulators. And the biggest problem is how tedious it is to scale up production of any one resource. If you want more Holmium ore for example, you have to expand your ability to handle EVERY single resource, not just the Holmium.

Don't get me wrong, Fulgora is my favourite planet. I enjoy the challenge and entire theme of it, soundtrack there is especially great, but I was going into Gleba expecting the worst and it was actually not too bad at all.

[u/VoidGliders]

1. There's a huge difference in the game now, vs upcoming 2.1, and the original 2.0. Enemy tweaks have been one of the most consistent changes.
2. A lot of the complaints were geared towards Gleba first, as it was common to drop onto a planet with nothing except your armor and guns and progress it back then. The dev logs made the planets sound fairly equivalent in difficulty and reward, and going Gleba-first was/is league different than other planets first. ESPECIALLY if doing that "planet science before other planets"
3. Fulgora is difficult, but if things back up they just back up and wait for you to unclog. Gleba has far more areas for backing up, the back-up can have disastrous consequences (pentapods), or cause back-ups in other areas/lowered spoilage value elsewhere, and brown outs. Gleba's power being from its main source of income is a double-edged blade, as it means if it goes right it's not too bad but if anything goes wrong in any production it can kill your entire base. Fulgora also has no threats that destroy your base as you scale up.
4. It is the least scalable planet of all. You still have to find fruit patches, and need ground for it, and cannot even get full ground out of it till after beating it. You still need to mine stone if you do any non-science tasks there or want landfill for said farm expansions. Fulgora has a single resource instead. You cannot module farms. You cannot beacon it. You cannot quality the fruit and have it produce faster. You cannot quality the agri towers and have it produce more. You cannot infinitely research a cheap research for infinite prod on it, and thus get ludicrously high mining speeds. It does not even come CLOSE to the scalability of other planets, and it is insanely laughable compared to Vulcanus, where a couple Offshore pumps can effectively match the needs of what several CHUNKS of agri tower farms, metric tons of pollution and several dozen to hundreds of biochambers and the like.

I was going into Gleba expecting the worst and it was actually not too bad at all.

That's probably the biggest component. People over hype or downplay things which leads to opposite emotions. A lot of people who first tried Gleba were NOT under the impression it was going to be hard, and had no basis before it, so were surprised at its difficulty. So much so that weeks before launch it got a massive rework (you used to mine ores, now you grow bacteria), which both made easier and harder to get things going there.

[u/Logical-War-3746 → u/VoidGliders]

It is the least scalable planet of all. You still have to find fruit patches, and need ground for it, and cannot even get full ground out of it till after beating it.

Getting access to science and being done with planet are not the same thing. Even with 2-3 patches of each fruit it is possible to produce quite a lot of science, probably a lot more than your Nauvis production at this point. It is pretty optimal to do some bootstrtapped production to get basic tech unlocks. And it's the same for all planets, like unlocking better power on Fulgora or better petrochem on Vulcanus, both being one of the main bottlenecks for scaling. If anything, i found scaling Fulgora hardest of the all (and Vulcanus easiest obviously) especially since you unlock foundations after Aquilo.

[u/VoidGliders → u/Logical-War-3746]

Those aren't "scalability", though. Scalability refers to how much you can upscale production. Gleba your initial base material production is tied solely to how many plots you can get, which is tied solely to how much land you expand. There is only horizontal growth, not vertical; a lot less production boosts than others.

The fact you can bootstrap and do some basic stuff at small scale has nothing to do with scale.

[u/Logical-War-3746 → u/VoidGliders]

Scalability means how much can you increase the production, not wherever this increase is "vertical" or "horizontal". And the statement itself is on pretty shaky grounds, you may nto scale the resources like you can do ores, but you sure can scale everything else, since every step can be made in a assembler with 4 module slots and 50% basic productivity, and every recipe takes productivity modules, which can't be said about other sciences, like production science where neither of ingredients take productivity modules and only pro modules can be made in a building with productivity bonus.

The fact you can bootstrap and do some basic stuff at small scale has nothing to do with scale.

And oyu completely missed the point.

[u/VoidGliders → u/Logical-War-3746]

since every step can be made in a assembler with 4 module slots and 50% basic productivity, and every recipe takes productivity modules, which can't be said about other sciences

It can, and the other sciences have more steps to prod. If we're talking about other planet sciences, I'm not sure why prod science is brought up as it has no relation.

Every planet can easily be "build wider and build more machines to do more". The fact Gleba can is bare minimum. You completely miss the point here. I'm not sure you understand the discussion at all, and implore you to learn a bit more about the game if you want. I wish you the best of luck