Recently completed Factorio: Space Age with my weekend gaming group . This is a group who have been playing games together for many years, and we tend to rotate through various games.

While on Nauvis, two of our group kept biters in check, while one worked on the main factory parts and I often worked on resources. Once we were ready to expand to space, we each took a planet to be in charge of. I was in charge of Vulcanus which we tried to setup reasonably quickly, due to a few achievements we were also trying to go for this run.

After we were in good shape there, we did Gleba and Fulgora mostly in parallel with Aquilo being naturally last. For most games, our weekend sessions run about 3 hours, but for Factorio our sessions often hit 5~6 hours, with plenty of additional hours during the week experimenting on our own designs and testing blueprints in preparation for the next session.

Most of the changes for Space Age were quite fun. Trying to design new ships and routes for the planets created an interesting challenge as did some of the planet specific mechanics. Spoilage was not quite as bad as I expected (though that was not the planet I was in charge of) and in general I think there was a lot of good design that went into each of the new mechanics.

The one area I liked least however is the quality mechanic. While there were many times our designs were saved by adding in an uncommon or rare version of a solar panel or assembler in a design, overall I felt like I did not appreciate the added complexity. To get better quality modules, you end up having to over produce everything, and have more complicated filtering to upscale to the items you need. Rather than quality, I think I would have preferred to have a few more building upgrades like how assembly machines had levels 1, 2, 3, or some recipes from chemical plants had upgrades from the cryogenics plant or other recipes could be upgraded using planet specific buildings like the foundry or electro magnetic plant.

Having cleared the main campaign in just over 60 hours, and hit most of the achievements we were hoping for, I’m very satisfied with our result, which can also be seen on the galaxy map.