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This is a weird perspective. The middle planets can be approached in any order. And mods allow near-infinite variety - especially those that build on the platform of custom planets.

> there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.

Sounds to me like you are caught up in trying to chase optimization and bemoaning the fact that there's only one optimal strategy. Do a no trains run! Or a no bots run. Or a 1000x science modifier run, or Lazy Bastard, or Death World, or... there are plenty of constraints, both programmed-in or self-imposed, that can push you out of the "standard" optimal strategy.

The system for moving between planets is locked down. It is rockets or nothing. And that system is deliberately designed to defeat scaling. What really killed me was the message saying I was only allowed one of a specific key building on each planet. That was very anti-factorio imho. As I said above, as an indi developer moves forwards they add constraints to focus and guide progression. I simply do not want that. So I disabled all the planet stuff and play like it never existed.

That restriction is needed in some way to prevent that building being a way of teleporting stuff across the planet. They did relax this in 2.1 and allow you to build extensions to that building where you can add inserters and use belts/trains.

you can't teleport things with it. the landing pad allows only withdrawals, not deposits.

I'm going to restrict my commentary to the base game, both because you're deliberately ignoring the stuff in the Space Age expansion, and because I've not yet gotten to the new stuff in the expansion. While the following might sound like a "gotcha!", it isn't:

> I get bored whenever there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.

There is only one way to process iron ore: put it in a furnace. There is no way for the player to invent alternatives. There are only three ways to make electricity, and two of them require you to boil water. There's no way for the player to invent alternatives. There are so many examples of places where stock Factorio permits you only one way to do a thing and prevents you from inventing alternatives.

> The system for moving between planets is locked down. ... And that system is deliberately designed to defeat scaling.

All of the systems for transporting materials are locked down... it's hand-transport, belts, bots, trains, or nothing. Hand-transport's godawful scaling is why you build everything else. Bots are deliberately designed to scale incredibly poorly and belts to scale pretty badly, which is why you're -as it seems like you'd say- forced to use trains to transport materials over very long distances.

> The tech tree become more rigid. Exploration must happen in a more specific order. And then the graphics department takes over, adding more and more objects until a previously huge and open world is a tightly cluttered mess.

That hasn't happened to Factorio in the thirteen years that Wubi has been working on it.

yes, one landing pad per planet a really obnoxious restriction I really hoped they'd remove in 2.1, but they did a half-measure instead. their rationale is uncharacteristically misguided, intended to prevent using rockets for on-planet logistics. first of all, it would be a cool option. second of all, that option would be impractical and very expensive both in terms of resources and UPS, so people would only use it in very niche scenarios. it's an overwhelmingly unpopular design decision.

I also dislike that they moved some base game tech to space and other planets to discourage extended stay on Nauvis. which again makes no sense because an extended stay on Nauvis itself makes no sense when each inner planet offers overwhelmingly powerful tech that renders every single assembly line you can make without leaving Nauvis utterly obsolete. not having cliff explosives before Vulcanus, which may not be the first planet you visit, is a minor but obnoxious inconvenience even if you do decide, deliberately or due to inexperience, to stay on Nauvis for a while. artillery being moved there is equally pointless -- the best defense in the game are landmines, and they can be still unlocked in less than an hour. I don't remember what else had got moved, but I do know that if I wanted to build a 10K SPM kilobase without ever going to space, I still could. and even if there weren't these hamfisted disincentives, the #1 advice for noobs would still be "go to space ASAP", because the incentives alone are more than enough.

that all being said, these are my very only gripes with Wube and I played the game for >1000 hours, 200 or so after the DLC came out. except for maybe not being able to choose the output lane for inserters, but that limitation is as old as the game itself, and I don't know whether it's a misguided design decision or simply a limitation of their extremely optimized belt system.

I don't think there's ever been a game I've been more satisfied with. for every game I ever played that seriously, my list of complaints had much more entries than <10 with Factorio. it exceeds even the old Blizzard's level of polish.

> I do know that if I wanted to build a 10K SPM kilobase without ever going to space, I still could

Yeah, not everyone plays with the expansion.

oh, neither of those two complaints apply to the base game. vanilla gameplay is still largely what it's been since pre-1.0. 2.0 changes like the simplified fluid mechanics imo had only positive impact on it.

> except for maybe not being able to choose the output lane for inserters, but that limitation is as old as the game itself, and I don't know whether it's a misguided design decision or simply a limitation of their extremely optimized belt system.

I think I might have some good news for you, this was added this summer with the extension of the “flip” mechanic

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-442

sadly, that only applies if the belt is perpendicular to the inserter, not parallel (i.e. you can pick left-right, not near-far), so it's only half-great. it addresses the major inconsistency with non-trivial belt configurations breaking when flipped rather than rotated. the minor inconvenience of assembly lines requiring a small lane-switching segment on their output belts once one lane is full still remains.

Output lane switching is possible - some mods (e.g. [1]) add it, as well as even wilder options. Not offering it in the base game is a deliberate choice.

As far as belt lane management goes, another interesting option - which is also present in the engine, but not used by default! - is lane splitters [2].

[1]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quick-adjustable-inserters

[2]: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/lane-balancers

It's a deeply philosophical question in many ways - if you don't enjoy the direction a studio takes its game, is that their problem? Earendel who designed Space Age has a rigid take on game design that was absent from the original Factorio. In the base game if there was some aspect that you didn't like it was totally fine to disengage with it. In Space Age there is a lot of mandatory requirements down to the bizarre approach to prescribing weapons for particular maps (in hindsight it is actually a bit weird that they didn't make the use of flamethrowers mandatory at some point; they may change that eventually).

Space Age doesn't respect the people who played Factorio as a light a-la-carte design sandbox experience. But it isn't obvious that is worse as opposed to just different. Wube doesn't have to build games for those people, they have many players who clearly wanted different things.

I agree. I played Space Age once, and don't plan to ever play it again. The devs approached things from the angle of wanting to generate new logistical puzzles, but that's not what I wanted. I wanted the expansion to play much like the base game, but with more stuff added. I did like Vulcanus (the most vanilla-like of the new planets), but otherwise the expansion was a big whiff for me.

Do you play Space Age just on Nauvis or are you playing without Space Age entirely?

Space Age is intentionally a different game. They did not discontinue the original game. Space Age is a mod. You can play it or not, just like you can play Bob's/Angel's or Pyanodon's or not.

But space age is now the focus of development.

And when Age of Empires came out, Age of Empires 2 became the focus of development. You could still play Age of Empires.

I loved my first 100h (maybe 200h?) of Factorio and thought it was like crack, reached a point where I started designing city blocks as monads because I wanted to solve the game - or well, tried, because the blueprinting system becomes unwieldy once you try to do some advanced blueprinting and things that should have been easy to became just deep time sinks to iterate on.

One can't really point the finger at an hugely successful game - on the other hand I think it's another example of how bad architectural decisions in the underlying systems creep up and cripple future development.

The following is from the point of view of the "end-game" stage, of when you're doing things because you're trying the limits of the system - not your first runs, those were fun and I guess it's reasonable to expect a game to have a finite life.

With blue-prints you can't really customise them beyond parameters - which in turn are limited in the number of them that you can use, don't have any way of ordering, don't have any way of copying/applying them, don't have any way of relating them to other aspects of the blueprint itself (besides very basic stuff, that sometimes was broken too).

You can't apply "sub" blueprints inside a blue-print, making the whole idea of "blueprinting" quite limited. Like if you want to make a city block with train stations that can either take liquids or solids, you end up having to create 2 (almost identical blueprints), or 3 (a general layout city block and 2 "internal" for the stations).

To work around the parameters limitations you need to create monstrous circuitry abominations, that can be fun the first time you're implementing them, but are just horrendous in interface afterwards - doing a simple circuit change can take an hour and endless clicking, keeping memory of it all, double checking it and so on... The same to updating them if you have plastered N city blocks on your way to factorio greatness and realised later it needs a "slight" change in the circuitry control/flow.

The train system was also severely hampered by (although better in v2) their underlying choices - even the "wildcard" improvements of v2 still show those design issues popping up all over their interfaces and makes you reach for awful designs due to the way wildcards work with the stations naming, connections and many other details. Part of it is due to - from what I read - the way they implemented IDing the train/wagons - and other is just the inexistent connection between the seemingly connected aspects of trains, stops, and stations, resources, and units.

The network/automation (bots) was also pretty limited in functionality, yeah, it felt like a great advancement once you get to it, and then you have a learning curve until you master it but it just ends on a cliff - you can't really program the network in ways that seems obvious you should.

Some of this might be to keep the game "flow" mostly manual, but to me, that I don't like doing click & run endlessly and like games that progress further, it all got old at some point and reaching those hours of game-play others consistently talk about looked like subjecting yourself to endless punishment rather than enjoyment. I tried and in part succeeded to create city blocks that you just had to paste and pick your inputs, choose your outputs, place some trains and choose the type of input and output, and it all worked - no stuck trains, not the highest throughput by space area, but just endlessly expandable without bottlenecks - at that point I considered the game solved and moved on but would have spent (probably quite many) more hours on it optimising and testing designs if it didn't end on that functionality/UI/flow cliff once you reach a certain stage (and blueprint bugs too, like them disappearing after being saved and so on). And I had to use the map editor mods to be able to design the blueprints and iterate on them otherwise impossible...

In the end, I feel like the game provided me enjoyment worth its cost (and that's what matters) but at the same time, paradoxically, was a bit of a let down because the more "engineering", "architecture" like aspects of the game were not really fleshed out or deep at all. Like all the ingredients are there, but... It's mostly aimed at spreadsheet min-maxing and I prefer other sorts of puzzles.

https://postimg.cc/gallery/C0Nfj2f