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Comment by psyc | Hacker News Reader

Only 1500 here. Although I enjoy the early game very much, I agree that making a base as big as possible is where it’s at. One thing I notice is that most players talk in terms of SPM. I find this curious because I find it hard to get excited about the infinite science sinks, so I think in terms of launches per minute. I guess those numbers don’t sound as impressive?

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SPM and launches per minute are just different ways of saying the same thing unless you are launching so many rockets that space science is no longer the bottleneck for research. I haven't gone super far into the endgame, but in my experience this is pretty uncommon.

also personally, I find rocket launches to be too abstract to care about as a goal. I get where you're coming from with the infinite science, but I find it a lot more satisfying when every new tier tangibly improves the efficiency of my factory.

I think there's a bit of history involved; there's also quite a bit of added complexity from the different science packs vs just launching rockets (though I've barely planed any unmodded since the current science pack recipes came out).

I see what you mean, but the SPM number is very easy to track, those rocket launches, much less so. Maybe with a mod, there was one but it died with the new Factorio upgrades a long time ago.

In 1.0 there is small window you can add to the GUI that displays your rocket launch count at all times.

SPM depends on LPM, but LPM doesn't depend on SPM if you just throw away the white science. So SPM is a more holistic measurement.

Ok, this actually makes sense to me. I forgot that the rocket factory is only a subset of total production.

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