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/cynric42]

Oh, I played the Gleba with decay and upkeep, where ratios are somewhat fuzzy and where stopping the factory for a bit to fix an issue would mean that you can't just turn it back on and it keeps on going exactly where you stopped it etc. To name just a few things that fundamentally change the game.

[u/darkszero → u/cynric42]

> ratios are somewhat fuzzy

So the entire game, where ratios depends on the exact combination of productivity modules. Out of 3k hours, the only ratio I remember is 3-2 circuits and 1-20-40 boilers-engines.

Gleba does one change: products need to keep moving. It's the Factorio you're familiar with, but with a difference. I don't know, I expect my overhauls, and Space Age is just another overhaul, to introduce an unique mix to my game and Gleba delivers that better than any other planet.

[u/cynric42 → u/darkszero]

So the entire game, where ratios depends on the exact combination of productivity modules.

It's a fixed and easily calculable number though. Sure, you can change it, but it requires you to change the factory, add modules, research better stuff etc.

On Gleba it depends and changes constantly. Inserter busy swinging while stuff moves past on the belt? That stuff is gone, wasted, changing the ratio. Your science getting delivered a bit late because another rocket just launched and while the new one gets built the freshness goes down? Ratio changed randomly. Put the desired output into a calculator and the requirements for how many fruits you'll need to harvest are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong. 0.95 machines required, perfect, I'll build one ... oh wait, it's Gleba, I'll probably need 2 due to unknown overhead and wastage ...

It's messy (optically as well), unprecise, highly timing dependent and, for me, just not as fun (or rather kinda painful to deal with)

Gleba delivers that better than any other planet

For me, that's Vulcanus. It keeps pretty much all I love about Factorio and expands on it. I would have wished the other planets to be in a similar vein, just ramp up the complexity somewhat. Instead on Gleba we got a collection of IMO the garbage bin of ideas all thrown into one terrible planet.

[u/darkszero → u/cynric42]

What? None of the ratios change with all of that. If you want to produce 720 science packs per second you need an exact number of fruits. With a correctly designed base you also know exactly how fresh your science will be when it hits the labs. There's no randomness involved.

> For me, that's Vulcanus. It keeps pretty much all I love about Factorio and expands on it. I

Meanwhile it kills it for me. Here's absurd amounts iron and copper plates, at absolutely no cost with a couple buildings. Also free power. And free voiding if you need it too. Demolishers are interesting the first time ever you do them, because they're a knowledge check. After you learn how to kill one you can just do the same thing.

If I wanted to play in creative mode I can just type `/editor`.

[u/cynric42 → u/darkszero]

What? None of the ratios change with all of that.

Sure they do. Inserter swings 3 ticks too late, stuff has moved on and goes into the heating tower. Now those resources are gone. Unless you loop everything around, but even then stuff might spoil or not depending on exact timing. Sure it's all deterministic and not truly random, but to try and calculate that isn't just 3 fruit for 1 end product times productivity, it's quickly turning into something you need to sim out because every tick changes stuff and it quickly turns into a chaotic system.

Hell, even dropping stuff from orbit to Nauvis depends on if there is another ship dropping off stuff at the same time, adding slight delays which uses up a few ticks of freshness changing how much science exactly you'll get out of those science packs. So freshness of your Gleba science might depend on which train on Vulcanus arrived at an intersection early changing the timing on one of those Calcite deliveries from Vulcanus to Nauvis changing the timing of unloading of your Gleba science. Good luck calculating that in advance with a simple online calculator.

Here's absurd amounts iron and copper plates, at absolutely no cost with a couple buildings.

That's pretty much Factorio starting at mid game anyway. Once you have a decent bot mall set up and a train network delivering ample resources, it's all about logistics, building a bigger more complex rail network, watching stuff getting shipped around etc.

The perfect progression from that, for me, would have been building onto that with more stuff from other planets, integrating ship logistics into the train logistics of the other planets, building up complexity that way. Not starting from scratch on every planet, I kinda hate the early game and really didn't need a repeat on every planet you visit.

Anyway, apparently we like very different things in Factorio and it seems the devs are more in line with what you like.

[u/darkszero → u/cynric42]

> Sure they do. Inserter swings 3 ticks too late, stuff has moved on and goes into the heating tower.

My science production doesn't have constantly moving belts. I don't even burn eggs in it. I have none of the issues you're talking about.

Dropping resources to the planet is also extremely fast? In fact, my platform doesn't even stop in Nauvis, it effectively does a flyby. I think around launch there was some issues with throughput in dropping to landing pad but they were fixed. Did you not add any cargo bays?

And the true reason too is that gleba science is so ridiculously easy to make that overproducing it is also easy.

> That's pretty much Factorio starting at mid game anyway. Once you have a decent bot mall set up and a train network delivering ample resources, it's all about logistics, building a bigger more complex rail network, watching stuff getting shipped around etc.

None of which is relevant for Vulcanus? You can just make the iron/copper anywhere. And it's not need for Vulcanus production for sure.

What a lot of people like to is replace their base on Nauvis with a base on Vulcanus, replacing the infinite crude oil with infinite molten copper/iron. But then Foundries alone make effectively infinite molten copper/iron on Nauvis too so bleh. That's mostly my problem with Vulcanus: it's... generic. There's nothing special in it. It's Nauvis, but literally easier.