The game is essentially won once you have a steady supply of resources, land, bots, and defense (usually obtained before purple and yellow). This results in yellow and purple science feeling more like victory laps rather than real challenges. This works great for longer, 16-40h games (developer intended length), but in speedruns these victory laps feel like a ball and chain stuck to your legs right before the finish line. I’ve been playing 0.14 factorio recently and, honestly I kind of love it. The tech tree feels much more… beckoning speed over new player friendliness. It’s not just the tech tree either, things like medium and big poles not having any iron in their recipe makes them much easier to fit in the mall, robots being pre-blue science, and increased starting area just to name a few. Splitters kinda suck though, and mapgen.
Tl;dr 0.14 factorio tech tree NOT BEGINNER FRIENDLY but really really speed runner friendly.
