Hello, in space age compact beacon should have same efficiency as wide area beacon of same tier.
Basic tier has 10x0.75 = 15x0.5
To keep up with the increase of 0.2 on wide beacon compact needs 0.3 to stay relevant, since legendary is 10x1.75 != 15x1.5. To make it same it needs to be 10x2.25 = 15x1.5.
I do not remember values for MK2 variants, but I assume some adjustment will probably be needed there as well, maybe even giving them separate setting so they can be adjusted independently.

Hello! Thanks for your comment.

There is already separate settings (one per beacon type: the same bonus applies to wide/wide-2 and compact/compact-2), but you're right that I should change the default values.

In your opinion, this is what makes most sense?

1. Regular beacon: 0.2
2. Wide beacon: 0.3, even though it might make more sense to have it at something like 0.32 or 0.35 considering the steep price increase
3. Compact beacon: do you have any idea what it should be?

Basic beacon and wide 1 has same efficiency because wide takes in much more modules and covers larger area. The increase should probably stay same. Compact 1 has 33.3% less modules so it needs to be 50% more efficient per level.
I do not have access to SE now and wiki does not list them in detail so I can't comment for mk2.
Can you list their values here?

I made a formula sheet to visualize the impact of the various bonus values:

https://i.imgur.com/UIPsbk6.png

Basically, the bonus scales heavily based on the number of modules (which is completely logical). This makes the wide beacons much more powerful than the compact beacons, and also mean that I need to split the bonuses because even though compact-1 and compact-2 have the same module counts, wide-1 and wide-2 don't.

I think these values would be the most "reasonable":

https://i.imgur.com/urezm4A.png

Which results in the following total boost value at legendary quality:

• Beacon - 12
• Wide beacon 1 - 15
• Wide beacon 2 - 20
• Compact beacon 1 - 20
• Compact beacon 2 - 25

Let me know what you think!

If you want to look at the base game beacon, if we ignore differences im mechanics, it has efficiency of 1.5 and increase of 0.2.
If you were to keep same relative increase since, basic and wide 1 have only third of the efficiency of base game it should be 0.066 and 0.099 for compact. Those values are admittedly a bit underwhelming.

What you need to look at is the final bonus, which is the base efficiency + bonus * 5 (because legendary) * modules count.

If you count like this, in regular Factorio a legendary Beacon has a final efficiency of 5.
Using the same bonus value (0.2), this already shoots up to 12 for the Space Exploration's beacon (all while using much less beacons and modules 😄).

So yeah I think I really need to change the values else it's really bonkers.

This is solvable by cross-multiplication, I'll make Google sheet with the equations.

Here are the updated values after thinking about it: https://assets-mod.factorio.com/assets/291e7ca30cd4230fd743146ae3749f8ed39c8cb4.png

The reasonning is based on what you can achieve in regular Factorio:
- Using a 12 legendary beacons setup, you achieve a boost equivalent to 17.28 modules.
- Using a 8 legendary beacons setup, you achieve a boost equivalent to 14 modules.

Base beacons are nowhere near that good and without quality, even with the advanced beacons, you won't match this, unless you use legendary tier 2 beacon, which nets you a boost equivalent to 15 modules.

In the end it doesn't really matter, they are just suggestions and can be changed at anytime in the settings :)

Here is the table I have added annotations where neccesary. There are several possible values to be used.

If you have some questions comments are enabled.
If you want to make some changes, make a copy and share that version.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MjKYHuZYnDyyCo642xu4cFZ4P8SEp4ogRLtPG2M09ac/edit?usp=sharing