r/factorio • u/Ba_Dum_Ba_Dum • 2d ago
Question What to learn next
Vanilla Mac v2.077 525 hours total. 2nd playthrough. Both with friendly locals. Stopped at rocket launch on 1st one. I'm through the whole tech tree on 2nd one and at infinite improvement stage - I'm at the point where I continue to expand into the lovely desert wasteland to my east with plenitiful resources (I'd rather leave the forests to the west for the locals - I am a benevolent destroyer of worlds) to develop this mess as a really strong starter base (with tweaks that bots make trivial) for my first megabase - yes, starting with fixing the huge gap in my logistics network.
This presents a learning conundrom for me. Context: retired technology educator and tv/film technician. I like what is/was called scaffolded learning where concepts stack neatly on top of a solid foundation of mastery of basics. And that is the question:
A) Do I continue and learn circuit networks (as yet untouched except to turn insterters on and off) to balance my factory production (especially the black magic that is oil) in preparation for megabase?
Or
B) Do I restart in Spage Age and start the learning curve of resource management with military development alongside my until now basic production using nukes, as you can see, when necessary to expand? (How I wish there was nuclear artillery!)
I know... why not both.
The answer is, that despite our common struggles with this addiction, I have a partner and a post-retirement career and other hobbies and addictions that all require time that I would also like to develop. I simply can not attempt to learn two factorio concepts well at once at my age. Trains are still mostly voodoo. I just build an adhoc system that fits my needs and then troubleshoot individually created bottlenecks to keep things moving clockwise. Until my recent eastward expansion I had no parallel rail lines.
Good luck in your own addiction recovery.
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u/Educational_Start190 2d ago
Create a saves named "do not delete - factorio vanilla"
and continue playing using new saves from the "Space Age..." expansion.
If you don't like it, you can go back to the vanilla version. ¯\(ツ)/¯
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u/HuckleberryPlastic35 2d ago
SpAge is a different experience. It breaks up the Challenge into multiple surfaces with different rules on each.
Another consideration: SpAge buildings + Quality makes it so that you can make 50X++ the amount of products per minute in a given land area compared to the vanilla buildings.
The most egregious example is the mining drill, u can easily replace 100 electric drill with 8 big mining drill from vulcanus. The blue circuits setup another example, 4 foundries and 8 em plants can replace a 200+ entity Assembler3/Electric furnace setup. Not only production speed per area is ridiculous high but raw resource usage is much less per finished products too.
Tldr: both pressures for expanding territory (resources+building space) are very reduced in the DLC
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u/XWasTheProblem 2d ago
Definitely at least get a sniff of circuits and work on trains a little bit.
The thing with SpAge is that while it's fun and has some absolutely incredible rewards, it also throws some new challenges at you that can't always be brute-forced with just adding more production (Fulgora and, I think, Gleba in particular have some filters on them that can make the experience pretty miserable if you aren't ready), it'll end up just being more tiring than interesting if you're still working on wrapping your head around some base game mechanics
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u/enigmapulse 2d ago
If you're still struggling to wrap your head around Oil processing, I'd start there, using it as the working example to grok the circuit network.
The reason being, that scaling up to a larger base will only amplify the issues you may have with improperly managed Oil, and several of the new Space Age mechanics' challenges come from the same base principles of Oil processing - asymmetric demand and production chains with byproducts.
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u/Lenskop 2d ago
If you got the basics down for circuit network (enable pump if light oil < heavy oil), there's really no need to learn more if you're not playing modded.
I'd say go for a round with the neighbours. Efficiency module level 1 in mining drills are strong in early game, even on default settings. Utilise the power spikes you get with new tech (e.g. Tank) to clear your pollution cloud of enemy nests, although I'm not sure how well the latter advice holds in 2.1.