I really like the idea of this single player campaign. Thank you for the work.

Two things

1) I have all difficulties unlocked from the beginning, before finishing on normal. Wasn't this supposed to be not possible?

2) How do you actually play on hard? On mission 2 I get attacked by big biters (practically immune to turrets) from the start, before I could even make green sci. I die before I could even go to red ammo. You can't even do the grindy hand mining - smelting in different sectors low pollution way, coz the starbase just pollutes everything. I'm curious if there is a supposed strategy.

Hi,

1) well, maybe some factorio updates just unlocked this permanently. Im not sure right now ;)

2) about the hard difficulty, it wasnt really properly tested before but I ve got many feedbacks that it is possible to beat it. I guess you must be just fast and mobile in this mission (and also have a luck to not find any high lvl bitters).

Thank you for the replies. I will see if I have better luck next time :)

2) How do you actually play on hard? On mission 2 I get attacked by big biters (practically immune to turrets) from the start, before I could even make green sci. I die before I could even go to red ammo. You can't even do the grindy hand mining - smelting in different sectors low pollution way, coz the starbase just pollutes everything. I'm curious if there is a supposed strategy.

As a person who finished all mission on hard I would suggest to look more on your pollusion clouds. Some times you can orginaze small automation of something you need without producing to much pollusion. And priorities is always the same - flamers, rockets. Don't try to build 120 SPM base, instead make it 5-10 SPM but with less pollusion

Spoilers

I built a mini-base at the gate of the Space Port, letting ally's flamethrower protect me until I got my own fire, almost everything was hand feed with minimum automation.

You could also cheese it by rerouting resources from the Space Port, sense the gates are destroyable.