If you haven't played Factorio, please play it! It is one of the best games for those who enjoy logic, order and building. Their dev team is incredibly, incredibly dedicated and I'm so happy they...
If you haven't played Factorio, please play it! It is one of the best games for those who enjoy logic, order and building.
Their dev team is incredibly, incredibly dedicated and I'm so happy they got success out of the game.
This is perhaps as good as a time as any to bring up a few criticisms I have with the game. That said, I have enjoyed the shit out of this game, having clocked a number of hours in the game....
This is perhaps as good as a time as any to bring up a few criticisms I have with the game. That said, I have enjoyed the shit out of this game, having clocked a number of hours in the game.
Combat.
Location factors.
Factory size.
These all tie in with one another, and give a cohesive alternative vision of what the game might be.
First, combat. You're mostly playing defense. Defense is usually quite static, only in more modern times has defensive warfare become more dynamic. The crucial aspect of a modern defense is to retreat when needed, such that you can orderly get back to a still-defensible position. Defense in depth. Read more here, thanks to whoever posted this blog on tildes. The enemy has to assault not one layer, but many. Ideally, they take casualties, and more importantly, exert themselves a whole lot and get disorganized.
In factorio, this can't happen. The mechanics of how your turrets work dictate that the only real strategy to use them is to get as many of them firing as possible, and try to not lose a single one. Kill the enemy wave, HARD. This is not helped by the fact that penetration of your defenses usually means complete destruction of your factory. This is, naturally, a problem. How could we fix this? Mostly, by biter AI, and maybe some adjustments to the way turrets work. Probably also want to adjust the way biter waves spawn, making them form occasional bigger waves too. Biter AI should select a location in your walls for breaching, and then should probably disperse after breaching the wall. So they poke one hole in your outer layer, and then they swarm over everything they can find. Maybe one can play around with walls blocking spitter projectiles and turrets having less health. That way, a breached wall means that the swarming biters don't completely get clobbered by a few strewn around turrets on the inside of the now-breached walls. Biters should also seriously focus on military stuff and maybe power poles once they're inside, just to make sure a complete breach doesn't lead to a complete wipe of your factory, but only substantial, but repairable damage.
Second, Location Factors. In factorio, it is generally advisable to have one big blob of a factory. This can make it hard to grow the factory. This is because there is very little in terms of location factors that would make it advisable to have a distributed network - or to have your main factory not in the starting area. In the consequence, long-range logistics is usually limited to bringing in ore into a massive smelter column which feeds the rest of the factory. Location factors in our world are the presence of customers, employees, resources, business partners, etc. Beyond resources, these don't exist in factorio, and resources are easily transported by train. A possible solution would be to make trains more expensive, while making some ores harder to transport. Assume, for example, that a train car could haul 50t of ore or 100t of iron plates. Assume also, that 50t of ore yields 10t of iron. You have the option of hauling home 500t of ore in 10 cars and smelt it into 100t of plates at your main factory. Or you can smelt it near the mine, only needing 1 car for the same throughput. Make trains expensive enough for this consideration to be notable, and you've got a factory that is dispersed for other reasons than "I want to expand, so I'm leaving myself room".
Messing with map generation (create larger-scale patterns to resource generation, such that distances get longer if you mess up your factory placement) and introducing more resources that are hard to move or immovable can also help here. Introducing the Logistic Train Network mod into the main game in a bit more user-friendly way can help manage the resulting increase in the number of products traveling through your train network. This makes it more advantageous to make several smaller factories, which leads me to my
Third point: Overall factory size. Generally, you'll build one big factory, as we have seen. And generally, after your second try or so, you'll try to leave yourself plenty of room to expand later on. This means that the overall area of your factory is quite large. You can't keep it compact, so walking distances within the factory are huge. The surface area that you need to defend is huge too. And it's generally a rather unsatisfactorio and unaesthetic way of building your factory. This ties in with my concern about combat again. My idea here is to make smaller bases easier to defend. They'd draw in fewer attacks. Generally, you could make the biters life off of land area. If they have their land, and it isn't too polluted, they're happy. If you take their land by walling it off or exterminating them, they're unhappy. They'll draw in biters from nearby nests, assemble a force and attack, trying to take back their land. You can avoid the worst by building small outposts. Sure, they'll be peeved. But they won't be pissed off enough to make a big effort. Oh, and of course they wouldn't want to attack power poles and rails. That way, you can coexist with them somewhat, and it also leads to less cheesable biter mechanics I hope.
Anyway, this has gotten long enough. I'll leave it here. What do you think?
Yeah, I love playing factorio but the game has grown organically and it shows. My bigger issues are: Enemies: They are mostly a bother. Originally they were a source of high tech stuff but...
Yeah, I love playing factorio but the game has grown organically and it shows. My bigger issues are:
Enemies: They are mostly a bother. Originally they were a source of high tech stuff but manually killing them was not fun and didn't really fit the "automate everything" mantra. Now they are just there, as an excuse to do military stuff.
Terrain is very bland: Everything is flat. Enemies don't really affect your expansion. There are fake cliffs and water, but cliffs don't provide much landscaping and just mess with blueprints. Water is better at landscaping but cannot be traversed, so it is just a wall. Both water and cliffs can be removed during the game.
Expansion: Going far away from spawn is good for getting better resource amounts, but beyond expanding the factory and some enemy killing, you only need to explore in a straight line in any one direction.
Goals: You build a factory that produces science 1 to build a factory that produces science 2 and so on until you launch a rocket... that produces science ...7? There are no bosses, no landmarks with distinct characteristics, no trade, no npcs to interact with, no decisions. Tech is the only real gating mechanism and that just translates to how much time / space you want to put into your build.
This one is minor, I'm kind of sad that nuclear stuff is so much better designed than the rest of the processes. Mining uranium ore requires resources. Then they are refined on expensive machines until you get critical mass and can use a better refinement process. With enough refined fuel you can make cells to heat reactors. How you arrange the reactors affect output. Compare it to most other resources where you just drill them, cook them and put them through a series of assemblers.
The positive? The engineering part of factorio is very fun. Figuring out ratios, designing the factory, refining your build to get to key techs faster / with less refactoring. There are also lots of scenarios / mods that change the game in many interesting ways.
You don't really hit the complaints until you play for a long while.
Shallow water could be traversed sooner already, I think, no? Spidertron added the ability of traversing even deep water, so long as there is enough land nearby for the spidertron legs. So you can...
Shallow water could be traversed sooner already, I think, no?
Spidertron added the ability of traversing even deep water, so long as there is enough land nearby for the spidertron legs. So you can have for example scattered tiny islands, and spidertron will walk across like it's nothing.
Excellent reply, thank you very much! On enemies, I think Bob's mods does an awesome job here. They add 6 or so elemental types of enemies. They reintroduce the alien artifacts, in size and...
Excellent reply, thank you very much!
On enemies, I think Bob's mods does an awesome job here. They add 6 or so elemental types of enemies. They reintroduce the alien artifacts, in size and elemental variants. Elementals drop their elemental type, and mobs drop small while buildings drop big artifacts. These artifacts are used in crafting powerful weapons and upgrades to equipment. I think they can also be used to some extent for high-end modules but I'm not sure. Great addition, but it could still do with a bit more love.
Terrain: That's the problem with perlin noise. At some point, you have to cut off your process and choose a lowest frequency as the base for your noise. Open the new game screen. Set water to high-frequency. Open the preview. See how it's all very uniform? Baaaaad. I'd love some very-large-scale detail. Ideally in such a way that resources too vary. Basically, for any configuration you can set up in the map settings, there should be an area somewhere that has that. And now we just need a targeted way of finding the right spot. Radars maybe? Long-range radar variant that gives you a veeeeery coarse view of the map maybe? Launched satellites?
Maybe we could also help this and the expansion point by the following: More different resources to achieve the same thing in different ways. Add zinc ore. smelt brass. Make bronze gear wheels. Make them equivalent to iron gear wheels (or just make one item called gear wheel). Stuff like that. If you now set the map gen up that you can always find something to make all basic processes work, actually selecting a valid location for your factory isn't a binary choice of "this spot good, this spot bad."
The goals part I don't mind that much. I can keep myself busy on that, but I can see how all of these could be interesting. I'd hope the additional supplementing resources would make for interesting decisions though.
On the nuclear stuff being really well done, absolutely. It's also the last resource that the game introduces, (both in-game and in-development chronology) so they can afford to make it a lot more complicated. It's also largely optional, which justifies more complexity. However: With the other resources, a good bit of complexity emerges from how you set up your factory lines, once you have beacons and modules. Gotta love emergent gameplay. Suddenly, we have interesting choices to make about the tradeoffs between power, resource efficiency and factory size. Bonus points if you add circuitry to disable power-hungry high-productivity plants at night. Sad that it comes in the late game only, though.
Oh, and I'd love to see the modding community do better. Lots of great stuff, but some of it really doesn't respect your time. Some other parts have such missed opportunities. Bobs, for example: I have a bazillion metals at my disposal. How come I have to use iron gear wheels for everything? How come I can't put my excess brass in there? Everything built of metal needs one metal and one metal only. Angel's smelting offering a way to add some stuff into other metals as alloys only helps this a little.
Yea the idea of many smaller factories is something I keep trying to do, but it gets cumbersome to try and travel between them. I'm interested to see how the addition of Spidertron and being able...
Yea the idea of many smaller factories is something I keep trying to do, but it gets cumbersome to try and travel between them.
I'm interested to see how the addition of Spidertron and being able to remote control it changes that dynamic.
Sounds like you would prefer creative mode—or, at least, no-biters mode (different from peaceful mode; this makes it so there are no biter nests in the first place).
Sounds like you would prefer creative mode—or, at least, no-biters mode (different from peaceful mode; this makes it so there are no biter nests in the first place).
Nahh, absolutely not. I've tried it, and it can be nice. But usually biters are a must to me. I just don't like the way they force you to organize your defenses.
Nahh, absolutely not. I've tried it, and it can be nice. But usually biters are a must to me. I just don't like the way they force you to organize your defenses.
I haven't played since 0.16 I think. My big problem these days is just getting started, I start playing, get through the initial setup phase of getting iron and copper plates up and then I just...
I haven't played since 0.16 I think. My big problem these days is just getting started, I start playing, get through the initial setup phase of getting iron and copper plates up and then I just run out of steam. I think the 1.0 release deserves another go!
Picked up this game a few years ago and kinda just stopped playing after the initial set up. Jumped back in like a month ago as I was working through old steam games and had a lot of fun! Got to...
Picked up this game a few years ago and kinda just stopped playing after the initial set up. Jumped back in like a month ago as I was working through old steam games and had a lot of fun! Got to the 4th tier science pack before giving up (had like 400 solar panels and a ton of batteries and was still running out of power, got burnt out waiting for solar panels), might have to have another go to try out 1.0.
I also had a large factory back in 0.16 with a ton of solar and found I eventually had to cave in and add in nuclear reactors to the mix. After spending a bit of time figuring out the optimal...
I also had a large factory back in 0.16 with a ton of solar and found I eventually had to cave in and add in nuclear reactors to the mix. After spending a bit of time figuring out the optimal layout and doing the Kovarex enrichment process I found it fun to program the belts to loop in the uranium 238 and also alerts when the supply of uranium was too low for the reactors. That made it easier to not have to rely entirely on solar and accumulators to power the entire base.
One if Bob's Mods updates the power system to add higher tiers. So in addition to Solar Power 2, there's also Steam Engine 2,3,4, and etc. Makes it more feasible to use solar, are even just to get...
One if Bob's Mods updates the power system to add higher tiers. So in addition to Solar Power 2, there's also Steam Engine 2,3,4, and etc. Makes it more feasible to use solar, are even just to get more oomf out of a single steam engine.
If you haven't played Factorio, please play it! It is one of the best games for those who enjoy logic, order and building.
Their dev team is incredibly, incredibly dedicated and I'm so happy they got success out of the game.
But don't play it if you want things to be neat and are anxious enough to freak out when things can't be easily arranged, like I am. :P
I played it a whiiile back and it felt too much like work to me. Maybe I'll give it another shot.
This is perhaps as good as a time as any to bring up a few criticisms I have with the game. That said, I have enjoyed the shit out of this game, having clocked a number of hours in the game.
Combat.
Location factors.
Factory size.
These all tie in with one another, and give a cohesive alternative vision of what the game might be.
First, combat. You're mostly playing defense. Defense is usually quite static, only in more modern times has defensive warfare become more dynamic. The crucial aspect of a modern defense is to retreat when needed, such that you can orderly get back to a still-defensible position. Defense in depth. Read more here, thanks to whoever posted this blog on tildes. The enemy has to assault not one layer, but many. Ideally, they take casualties, and more importantly, exert themselves a whole lot and get disorganized.
In factorio, this can't happen. The mechanics of how your turrets work dictate that the only real strategy to use them is to get as many of them firing as possible, and try to not lose a single one. Kill the enemy wave, HARD. This is not helped by the fact that penetration of your defenses usually means complete destruction of your factory. This is, naturally, a problem. How could we fix this? Mostly, by biter AI, and maybe some adjustments to the way turrets work. Probably also want to adjust the way biter waves spawn, making them form occasional bigger waves too. Biter AI should select a location in your walls for breaching, and then should probably disperse after breaching the wall. So they poke one hole in your outer layer, and then they swarm over everything they can find. Maybe one can play around with walls blocking spitter projectiles and turrets having less health. That way, a breached wall means that the swarming biters don't completely get clobbered by a few strewn around turrets on the inside of the now-breached walls. Biters should also seriously focus on military stuff and maybe power poles once they're inside, just to make sure a complete breach doesn't lead to a complete wipe of your factory, but only substantial, but repairable damage.
Second, Location Factors. In factorio, it is generally advisable to have one big blob of a factory. This can make it hard to grow the factory. This is because there is very little in terms of location factors that would make it advisable to have a distributed network - or to have your main factory not in the starting area. In the consequence, long-range logistics is usually limited to bringing in ore into a massive smelter column which feeds the rest of the factory. Location factors in our world are the presence of customers, employees, resources, business partners, etc. Beyond resources, these don't exist in factorio, and resources are easily transported by train. A possible solution would be to make trains more expensive, while making some ores harder to transport. Assume, for example, that a train car could haul 50t of ore or 100t of iron plates. Assume also, that 50t of ore yields 10t of iron. You have the option of hauling home 500t of ore in 10 cars and smelt it into 100t of plates at your main factory. Or you can smelt it near the mine, only needing 1 car for the same throughput. Make trains expensive enough for this consideration to be notable, and you've got a factory that is dispersed for other reasons than "I want to expand, so I'm leaving myself room".
Messing with map generation (create larger-scale patterns to resource generation, such that distances get longer if you mess up your factory placement) and introducing more resources that are hard to move or immovable can also help here. Introducing the Logistic Train Network mod into the main game in a bit more user-friendly way can help manage the resulting increase in the number of products traveling through your train network. This makes it more advantageous to make several smaller factories, which leads me to my
Third point: Overall factory size. Generally, you'll build one big factory, as we have seen. And generally, after your second try or so, you'll try to leave yourself plenty of room to expand later on. This means that the overall area of your factory is quite large. You can't keep it compact, so walking distances within the factory are huge. The surface area that you need to defend is huge too. And it's generally a rather unsatisfactorio and unaesthetic way of building your factory. This ties in with my concern about combat again. My idea here is to make smaller bases easier to defend. They'd draw in fewer attacks. Generally, you could make the biters life off of land area. If they have their land, and it isn't too polluted, they're happy. If you take their land by walling it off or exterminating them, they're unhappy. They'll draw in biters from nearby nests, assemble a force and attack, trying to take back their land. You can avoid the worst by building small outposts. Sure, they'll be peeved. But they won't be pissed off enough to make a big effort. Oh, and of course they wouldn't want to attack power poles and rails. That way, you can coexist with them somewhat, and it also leads to less cheesable biter mechanics I hope.
Anyway, this has gotten long enough. I'll leave it here. What do you think?
Yeah, I love playing factorio but the game has grown organically and it shows. My bigger issues are:
The positive? The engineering part of factorio is very fun. Figuring out ratios, designing the factory, refining your build to get to key techs faster / with less refactoring. There are also lots of scenarios / mods that change the game in many interesting ways.
You don't really hit the complaints until you play for a long while.
Minor correction; shallow water can be traversed using Spidertron which was added in 1.0.
Shallow water could be traversed sooner already, I think, no?
Spidertron added the ability of traversing even deep water, so long as there is enough land nearby for the spidertron legs. So you can have for example scattered tiny islands, and spidertron will walk across like it's nothing.
Excellent reply, thank you very much!
On enemies, I think Bob's mods does an awesome job here. They add 6 or so elemental types of enemies. They reintroduce the alien artifacts, in size and elemental variants. Elementals drop their elemental type, and mobs drop small while buildings drop big artifacts. These artifacts are used in crafting powerful weapons and upgrades to equipment. I think they can also be used to some extent for high-end modules but I'm not sure. Great addition, but it could still do with a bit more love.
Terrain: That's the problem with perlin noise. At some point, you have to cut off your process and choose a lowest frequency as the base for your noise. Open the new game screen. Set water to high-frequency. Open the preview. See how it's all very uniform? Baaaaad. I'd love some very-large-scale detail. Ideally in such a way that resources too vary. Basically, for any configuration you can set up in the map settings, there should be an area somewhere that has that. And now we just need a targeted way of finding the right spot. Radars maybe? Long-range radar variant that gives you a veeeeery coarse view of the map maybe? Launched satellites?
Maybe we could also help this and the expansion point by the following: More different resources to achieve the same thing in different ways. Add zinc ore. smelt brass. Make bronze gear wheels. Make them equivalent to iron gear wheels (or just make one item called gear wheel). Stuff like that. If you now set the map gen up that you can always find something to make all basic processes work, actually selecting a valid location for your factory isn't a binary choice of "this spot good, this spot bad."
The goals part I don't mind that much. I can keep myself busy on that, but I can see how all of these could be interesting. I'd hope the additional supplementing resources would make for interesting decisions though.
On the nuclear stuff being really well done, absolutely. It's also the last resource that the game introduces, (both in-game and in-development chronology) so they can afford to make it a lot more complicated. It's also largely optional, which justifies more complexity. However: With the other resources, a good bit of complexity emerges from how you set up your factory lines, once you have beacons and modules. Gotta love emergent gameplay. Suddenly, we have interesting choices to make about the tradeoffs between power, resource efficiency and factory size. Bonus points if you add circuitry to disable power-hungry high-productivity plants at night. Sad that it comes in the late game only, though.
Oh, and I'd love to see the modding community do better. Lots of great stuff, but some of it really doesn't respect your time. Some other parts have such missed opportunities. Bobs, for example: I have a bazillion metals at my disposal. How come I have to use iron gear wheels for everything? How come I can't put my excess brass in there? Everything built of metal needs one metal and one metal only. Angel's smelting offering a way to add some stuff into other metals as alloys only helps this a little.
Yea the idea of many smaller factories is something I keep trying to do, but it gets cumbersome to try and travel between them.
I'm interested to see how the addition of Spidertron and being able to remote control it changes that dynamic.
Sounds like you would prefer creative mode—or, at least, no-biters mode (different from peaceful mode; this makes it so there are no biter nests in the first place).
Nahh, absolutely not. I've tried it, and it can be nice. But usually biters are a must to me. I just don't like the way they force you to organize your defenses.
I haven't played since 0.16 I think. My big problem these days is just getting started, I start playing, get through the initial setup phase of getting iron and copper plates up and then I just run out of steam. I think the 1.0 release deserves another go!
If that's the problem, you need one of 3 things: More boilers, or more water pumps or coal mines to feed those boilers.
Wait, Steam can run out? How does that work? Can you still access your games?
Does Valve know about this?
/s
Picked up this game a few years ago and kinda just stopped playing after the initial set up. Jumped back in like a month ago as I was working through old steam games and had a lot of fun! Got to the 4th tier science pack before giving up (had like 400 solar panels and a ton of batteries and was still running out of power, got burnt out waiting for solar panels), might have to have another go to try out 1.0.
I also had a large factory back in 0.16 with a ton of solar and found I eventually had to cave in and add in nuclear reactors to the mix. After spending a bit of time figuring out the optimal layout and doing the Kovarex enrichment process I found it fun to program the belts to loop in the uranium 238 and also alerts when the supply of uranium was too low for the reactors. That made it easier to not have to rely entirely on solar and accumulators to power the entire base.
One if Bob's Mods updates the power system to add higher tiers. So in addition to Solar Power 2, there's also Steam Engine 2,3,4, and etc. Makes it more feasible to use solar, are even just to get more oomf out of a single steam engine.