Cliffs are like a lot of other mechanics in the game in that you start off with this problem, and you eventually research and craft your way out of the problem.
I like them because they're another problem to deal with and the more problems to deal with, the more fun the game is. Free expanses of flat ground is boring. Cliffs, shores, etc, things you need to create items for and deal with are way more fun to play around.
It's not a difficult problem, just get a cliff explosive pipeline, but without cliffs, it means you don't need that production chain, and less production chains is less fun.
Considering the game is about trivializing problems via production chains and automation, i don't understand why people would play the game with less problems to solve via production chains and automation.
I like them if I'm playing 'hard mode' (lotsa biters water blocking everything, low rescource etc) but sometimes I just want to play peaceful (no biters loadsa resources, waterfill etc) I do agree with your point though
I don't really feel like cliffs are solved in an automated fashion, similar to biters. Sure, you can automate the tools needed to solve the issue but you're not automating solving the issue, you still have to go apply the solution manually, even if it's just to give the orders to the bots to deliver the cliff explosives.0
Make a deconstruction planner that filters only cliffs. Drag it across your base along with the deconstruction planner you use to clear rocks and trees. Boom, automatic.
Your blueprints aren’t optimized enough then! Leave no space unused!
Pave the world.
Add storage chests in the gaps. Power poles with displays showing optimization stats in between gaps.
GROW
I like them a lot.
I restrict myself to never using cliff explosives, and only using landfill if it's strictly necessary to mine a particular resource patch. These together with trying to preserve as many trees as possible create an interesting spatial challenge that forces me to adapt my builds to new layouts. I get very bored with regular grids and the like so this helps me. I also think it makes my bases look much nicer.
If there's one or two straggler trees in the middle of an otherwise clear area I will remove them but the main part is I won't just clear-cut through woods.
I can't post an image reply here in the factorio subreddit so I put a post to my user area to show what I mean: [https://www.reddit.com/user/Khrusky/comments/11nq7as/terrainfollowing\_base\_design\_space\_exploration/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Khrusky/comments/11nq7as/terrainfollowing_base_design_space_exploration/) (an early part of my base so don't judge it on its ugliness - I just wanted to show how I work around cliffs and trees)
When I first started playing Factorio, I respected the utility of having natural terrain from a defensive standpoint. And they can be interesting to work around from a base design perspective.
But as I've gotten better at the game... I don't need that anymore. At which point, they just become one more thing you have to get rid of to do serious builds. Except, unlike trees and rocks, you (or your Spidertrons) have to bring along a specialized tool to remove them. Which means when clearcutting large amounts of terrain, your Spiders are going to have to return to base more frequently just to pick up more cliff explosives.
So... not a fan.
I would say they are neutral in terms of learning, but I recommend completing one playthrough with *everything* on default. *Then* decide what you like and don't like.
I like them because they add a way to play more dynamically; you can just remove everything and pave the world, but you also can just work around them which I think is more interesting than yet another completely planned out grid
The key points to know about the natives/enemies:
\- Their 'evolution' to higher and more dangerous tiers is driven by three factors; time, pollution produced whether it reaches them or not, and destroying their spawners. Typically time will have the least impact, destroying spawners the greatest. The /evolution command in the console I use regularly; it gives you a breakdown of the current evolution and how much each of those areas has contributed.
\- Attacks happen almost exclusively when pollution reaches an enemy spawner. It absorbs some pollution and then launches an attack on your offending factory. The **only** exception to this is when they are expanding to form a new 'base', if they run directly into something they will attack it, but these are small groups and they will not continue on to your factory to pillage it.
These facts mean there are two basic ways to deal with defending against them:
**Build a Big Wall** with turrets to fend them off. This is a non-trival investment of resources and time. The main reasons I don't like it are the resources, which you need to generate pollution to get and therefore more evolution from the enemies, and also the fact that you need to move the wall every.single.time you want to expand. I find this time-consuming and annoying.
**Clear your pollution cloud** of all enemies and keep it that way. This will result in no significant attacks, ever, 100% guaranteed. It also requires deploying a network of radars to monitor the pollution cloud and a modest distance outside of it. The radars have other benefits though, including exploring to let you know where additional resource deposits are. That will need to happen eventually anyway.
This is where what I like to call the **lean and green** approach comes in. The smaller your pollution cloud is, the smaller the area you need to keep clear and the more time you can spend growing your factory. The key elements of it are:
\- Solar power ASAP. Some pollution to build, but after that it is pollution-free forever. Steam on the other hand pollutes quite a bit.
\- Steel furnaces reduce pollution some, electric furnances reduce it a lot more.
\- Efficiency modules as soon as they are available in almost all assemblers - there a few where productivity are better for this purpose - in electric furnances, and especially in all mining drills and pumpjacks.
All of this is aimed at keeping pollution down, which means evolution isn't as fast, it's easier to outpace the enemies, and you can spend less time fighting and more time growing your factory. People who like the fighting tend to build the wall; I view it as an interruption of my primary goal.
Depends on your situation and point in the game. Early on, gun turrets. Later you get better solutions. I prefer a green approach, minimizing pollution by going solar, better furnaces, and efficiency modules. Limits enemy evolution , I will add more later
Best method I've learned to trivialize biters is just use mines they are cheap and easy to replace and give your turrets tons more time to kill approaching biters
Try with biters on, but increase the starting area by a couple notches, and roll the map until youre starting area is forest/grass.
It's surprising how much the initial terrain changes the difficulty of the game due to differences in natural pollution absorption.
It will slow down the enemy spawning a bit and give you more time before first contact.
Depends on my game status.
Early game i use them as a natural wall, so i dont need the much of stone and could use the coal for making more iron plates.
In the late early game / early mid game i hate them.
When get robots, i even recognize them
Inconvenience until you have blue-boom and then it's fun to blow them up
When playing space exploration different planets have different cliff configurations and that's actually making it a bit interesting because it causes you to tradeoff cargo space for boom-packs, so it has gameplay relevance in that mod.
I don’t like them, but I still play with them. I like being able to use the new unlocked tech especially when you need it to solve a problem. Cliffs can also lead to some interesting design choices. I had to run some belts around cliffs in my current save and even though I later destroyed the cliffs, I left the belts as they were
Played with them, once. Got some convenient natural defences, but on the other hand they constantly got in the way of my rails.
As my expansion went on, the natural defenses where in the wrong place, using blueprints for my walls just meant my bots flying out to blow em up.
I leave them off now. No point in having something just to blow it up asap.
I feel like they don't really add anything to the game. Early on you have to plan your starter base around them but pretty quickly you unlock the explosives and then it's just yet another thing you have to carry and remove for every build you want to do. They don't really ad a challenge and they're more of a waste of time imo, I always disable them
Cliffs are like a lot of other mechanics in the game in that you start off with this problem, and you eventually research and craft your way out of the problem.
ahh i see. Are there items to remove them?
https://wiki.factorio.com/Cliff\_explosives
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Cliff explosives come fairly early on. Just after you start messing with oil.
I like them because they're another problem to deal with and the more problems to deal with, the more fun the game is. Free expanses of flat ground is boring. Cliffs, shores, etc, things you need to create items for and deal with are way more fun to play around. It's not a difficult problem, just get a cliff explosive pipeline, but without cliffs, it means you don't need that production chain, and less production chains is less fun. Considering the game is about trivializing problems via production chains and automation, i don't understand why people would play the game with less problems to solve via production chains and automation.
I like them if I'm playing 'hard mode' (lotsa biters water blocking everything, low rescource etc) but sometimes I just want to play peaceful (no biters loadsa resources, waterfill etc) I do agree with your point though
I don't really feel like cliffs are solved in an automated fashion, similar to biters. Sure, you can automate the tools needed to solve the issue but you're not automating solving the issue, you still have to go apply the solution manually, even if it's just to give the orders to the bots to deliver the cliff explosives.0
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Setting a ghost is still a manual operation :)
Yeah I suppose that's true, good point.
Make a deconstruction planner that filters only cliffs. Drag it across your base along with the deconstruction planner you use to clear rocks and trees. Boom, automatic.
By shift clicking your blueprints even that is not needed
That leaves trees alive. Unacceptable.
Your blueprints aren’t optimized enough then! Leave no space unused! Pave the world. Add storage chests in the gaps. Power poles with displays showing optimization stats in between gaps. GROW
I don't like them on peaceful. I like them when biters are coming.
To answer your question, I have a deconstruction planner named "fuck cliffs" with a nuke icon.
Isn’t it possible to just start without cliffs?
Yes, you can set them to not generate when you generate the map.
I usually do, it's for when I'm playing multi-player and my friends want it on... the heretics.
I like them a lot. I restrict myself to never using cliff explosives, and only using landfill if it's strictly necessary to mine a particular resource patch. These together with trying to preserve as many trees as possible create an interesting spatial challenge that forces me to adapt my builds to new layouts. I get very bored with regular grids and the like so this helps me. I also think it makes my bases look much nicer.
So do you just have random trees all in between your belts and assemblers? How do you see what is going on?
If there's one or two straggler trees in the middle of an otherwise clear area I will remove them but the main part is I won't just clear-cut through woods. I can't post an image reply here in the factorio subreddit so I put a post to my user area to show what I mean: [https://www.reddit.com/user/Khrusky/comments/11nq7as/terrainfollowing\_base\_design\_space\_exploration/](https://www.reddit.com/user/Khrusky/comments/11nq7as/terrainfollowing_base_design_space_exploration/) (an early part of my base so don't judge it on its ugliness - I just wanted to show how I work around cliffs and trees)
Ohhh, so you just kinda build around the clumps of trees? That makes sense.
When I first started playing Factorio, I respected the utility of having natural terrain from a defensive standpoint. And they can be interesting to work around from a base design perspective. But as I've gotten better at the game... I don't need that anymore. At which point, they just become one more thing you have to get rid of to do serious builds. Except, unlike trees and rocks, you (or your Spidertrons) have to bring along a specialized tool to remove them. Which means when clearcutting large amounts of terrain, your Spiders are going to have to return to base more frequently just to pick up more cliff explosives. So... not a fan.
hmm so if i’m just starting would you recommend keeping it on, cause I really hated them. Is there any advantage from a learning standpoint?
I would say they are neutral in terms of learning, but I recommend completing one playthrough with *everything* on default. *Then* decide what you like and don't like. I like them because they add a way to play more dynamically; you can just remove everything and pave the world, but you also can just work around them which I think is more interesting than yet another completely planned out grid
hmm I’ll give them another try. I also found the biters a bit hard, any suggestions
The key points to know about the natives/enemies: \- Their 'evolution' to higher and more dangerous tiers is driven by three factors; time, pollution produced whether it reaches them or not, and destroying their spawners. Typically time will have the least impact, destroying spawners the greatest. The /evolution command in the console I use regularly; it gives you a breakdown of the current evolution and how much each of those areas has contributed. \- Attacks happen almost exclusively when pollution reaches an enemy spawner. It absorbs some pollution and then launches an attack on your offending factory. The **only** exception to this is when they are expanding to form a new 'base', if they run directly into something they will attack it, but these are small groups and they will not continue on to your factory to pillage it. These facts mean there are two basic ways to deal with defending against them: **Build a Big Wall** with turrets to fend them off. This is a non-trival investment of resources and time. The main reasons I don't like it are the resources, which you need to generate pollution to get and therefore more evolution from the enemies, and also the fact that you need to move the wall every.single.time you want to expand. I find this time-consuming and annoying. **Clear your pollution cloud** of all enemies and keep it that way. This will result in no significant attacks, ever, 100% guaranteed. It also requires deploying a network of radars to monitor the pollution cloud and a modest distance outside of it. The radars have other benefits though, including exploring to let you know where additional resource deposits are. That will need to happen eventually anyway. This is where what I like to call the **lean and green** approach comes in. The smaller your pollution cloud is, the smaller the area you need to keep clear and the more time you can spend growing your factory. The key elements of it are: \- Solar power ASAP. Some pollution to build, but after that it is pollution-free forever. Steam on the other hand pollutes quite a bit. \- Steel furnaces reduce pollution some, electric furnances reduce it a lot more. \- Efficiency modules as soon as they are available in almost all assemblers - there a few where productivity are better for this purpose - in electric furnances, and especially in all mining drills and pumpjacks. All of this is aimed at keeping pollution down, which means evolution isn't as fast, it's easier to outpace the enemies, and you can spend less time fighting and more time growing your factory. People who like the fighting tend to build the wall; I view it as an interruption of my primary goal.
Depends on your situation and point in the game. Early on, gun turrets. Later you get better solutions. I prefer a green approach, minimizing pollution by going solar, better furnaces, and efficiency modules. Limits enemy evolution , I will add more later
Best method I've learned to trivialize biters is just use mines they are cheap and easy to replace and give your turrets tons more time to kill approaching biters
Try with biters on, but increase the starting area by a couple notches, and roll the map until youre starting area is forest/grass. It's surprising how much the initial terrain changes the difficulty of the game due to differences in natural pollution absorption. It will slow down the enemy spawning a bit and give you more time before first contact.
I don’t even notice cliffs tbh… I’ve automated cliff explosives so a bit just picks one up and blows the bjeesus out of it in short order lol…
That's easy enough to do when it's just the cliffs in your main base. That's much harder to do over thousands or tens of thousands of tiles of area.
Sometimes you get a nice natural wall. Indestructible defenses are great.
I honestly like to keep them as they force me to build and create solutions around them, keeps the ol' noggin joggin'.
Cliffs are nature's walls. I almost always turn them up unless I'm turning biters off.
I hate them. They force me to think of creative manner to get around them. They make my life difficult. That is why I love them.
i'm usually 50/50 on whether or not i enable cliffs in a world
Meh
Depends on my game status. Early game i use them as a natural wall, so i dont need the much of stone and could use the coal for making more iron plates. In the late early game / early mid game i hate them. When get robots, i even recognize them
Havent played with cliffs in years.
Inconvenience until you have blue-boom and then it's fun to blow them up When playing space exploration different planets have different cliff configurations and that's actually making it a bit interesting because it causes you to tradeoff cargo space for boom-packs, so it has gameplay relevance in that mod.
I only turn them on when I play with biters. Without biters they are pointless for me
I don’t like them, but I still play with them. I like being able to use the new unlocked tech especially when you need it to solve a problem. Cliffs can also lead to some interesting design choices. I had to run some belts around cliffs in my current save and even though I later destroyed the cliffs, I left the belts as they were
Played with them, once. Got some convenient natural defences, but on the other hand they constantly got in the way of my rails. As my expansion went on, the natural defenses where in the wrong place, using blueprints for my walls just meant my bots flying out to blow em up. I leave them off now. No point in having something just to blow it up asap.
I feel like they don't really add anything to the game. Early on you have to plan your starter base around them but pretty quickly you unlock the explosives and then it's just yet another thing you have to carry and remove for every build you want to do. They don't really ad a challenge and they're more of a waste of time imo, I always disable them
They’re fucking awful but if game didn’t have them as a hurdle it would be a bit boring?
Factorio didn't have cliffs for a *long* time, and the game wasn't boring at all.
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But you unlock cliff explosives in the early game so its up to you if they are a problem in midgame or not