Hello,
We are a bit busy this week hosting a small LAN party with some fans and community members to playtest the Space Age expansion, so this FFF might be a little bit shorter than normal.
As with every major update, there are a few tweaks and balancing changes we have made. With new enemies and changes to existing enemies, we took some time to look at the current balancing.
In the early game spawners are pretty tough, you need to take a good bit of time to focus fire them. As the game progresses, biters, spitters and worms all get stronger, but the spawners stay the same.
When the end-game comes around, spawners just melt the first instant you look at them with personal lasers and upgraded ammo. In some ways this is satisfying and gives a feeling of how powerful you have become, but in other ways it is just strange.
So we have added the feature to spawners that their health will increase as evolution factor goes up:
From 350 health at 0% evolution factor, rising up to 3,500 health at 100% evolution factor. This makes them feel more in-line with the power of the player, and prevents them being entirely too squishy.
During one of our playtestings we actually underestimated them a little bit, and were pleasantly surprised when the mid-game nests were giving our tanks some trouble instead of being steam-rolled like before.
At the same time we made a few other tweaks related to biter bases:
Combat robots were a little bit too weak, especially given how expensive they were. It is a shame because the automation of the flying combat robots is a fairly interesting set of recipes, so we buffed them a little bit:
We also changed a few things with offensive player combat, nothing in particular, just trying to make it more fun:
So there is nothing too groundbreaking, but we hope over time we are moving towards a better place.
Do you ever encounter the situation... You're there surveying your factory, and out of the corner of your eye you spot something exceedingly suspicious...
How is this possible? What could it be? Sabotage? A bug?
There is actually a clue if you look really closely.
Thats right, there are little stone items on the ground... But how did they get there?
It is actually, believe it or not, a feature! When a rock is destroyed, it spills some stone on the ground as loot.
It may sound like a rare occurrence, but given how big some biters bases are and how much they get blanketed by artillery or such, these little stone droppings can become a surprisingly frequent sight.
Once on the ground, if a transport belt is built on-top, the items are not marked for deconstruction or anything. So these little stoney friends make their way happily along the belts as if they are innocent little creatures...
And end up causing chaos!
There were a few ways to solve it, we could mark the items on the ground for deconstruction, or make belts collide with the items so the robots would pick the up before building. But in the end we went with the simplest option: they just don't drop the stones any more.
Did the little stone poops make the game fun? Is rock droppings a core part of the game design? Does removing them betray the vision of what we want the game to become? These are the questions that keep me up at night.
We are hosting a small LAN party these past few days going into the weekend. We have invited a number of community members, Factorio content creators, modders, and more.
The main goal for the event is to have it as a last 'big playthrough' before the upcoming release in October, so we have time to fix any problems and balance the expansion for the Space Age release.
While we can't say much about the result as of this moment (the playtesting is going on right this minute), we can share a few photographs from yesterday:
You might also see some news or videos from some of your favorite creators about the event in the coming days and weeks.
As always, balance your thoughts at the usual places.
