Every Item, Entity, and Equipment has 5 possible qualities now, and each quality tier gives an improved bonus value, used for most of the stuff
What are your feelings about this addition to Factorio? (Will be part of coming expansion and optional)
I think it adds another thing to do as you progress to the end game and finish the tech tree. The infinite research was good, but this will allow people to scale their megabases even further before the UPS drop chokes it.
Producing the “epic drops” steadily will require having separate factories for it.
To me that sounds like you are going to hit the UPS drop sooner then (?)
I’m making some assumptions, but I think as you increase the general quality level of your production lines that it becomes easier (not easy), to get the higher quality items. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think they stated what a higher quality intermediate product does (like a higher quality iron plate). My assumption is that anything produced with it has a boost to it’s quality.
If this is true, then by thoughtfully focusing on where quality is being produced and how high quality items are being used that it should be possible to get reasonable chances at “epic” items.
My point about scaling was that once you have a large supply of epic mining drills, assemblers, labs, etc that it will be possible to achieve the same SPM with fewer machines operating, and therefore could build a higher SPM factory to achieve the same UPS as without quality. You’re probably right that it will take awhile to get sufficient number of epic items to do this, but playtime for this game have never been small numbers.
