Factorio - a factory building game

[anvi]

There are loads of more complex games, not building games though. And it's not what just I want, it is what lots of people want. Visit the official forums of the steam forum and look at the posts. People want lots of stuff. And its not true that it never tried to do this stuff, it did. They added aliens all over the map, with their own bases, that attack you, and they even added defending against waves scenarios in the latest update. That "you wanted it to be what it never tried to do" argument is retarded.

The game will probably never turn into what you want it to be (without mods at least) so maybe just forget about it and play whatever type of games you enjoy?

If people thought like that we would still be living in caves. You should go and enjoy the game if you think it is perfect and stop whining at people who have some standards.

 

[Juggie]

Give me an example of your high standards then. I'm not impressed by FortressCraft Evolved. Talking about how the game is shit and simple crap for casuals is fucking pretentious.

People always wanting stuff in games that doesn't belong there or wanting to turn games into something else is nothing new. I don't like platformers but I don't go to threads/boards about platformers and complain that some platformer doesn't play like JA2 because there are easier ways to make myself look like a complete retard.

The game currently has a specific focus. By slapping on arbitrary features you, or any other crybaby from steam forums likes, it would turn into mess. Biters provide some sort of challenge and limits to what players can do and shape their progress without distracting from the primary focus of the game too much. The combat has to remain simple otherwise it would no longer be a game about automation, optimization and solving logistic puzzles.

The devs adding wave defense mode doesn't mean shit. Did you know that Blizzard released racing custom map for Warcraft 3? They are just using the engine creatively.

I don't see Factorio as perfect and I'm not trying to defend the game from critique. I got bored by the game at some point as well. But you shitting on it without providing examples of how it could be oh-so-easily-improved just to discredit Blaine or whatever is silly.

 

[Juggie]

Regarding 0.15 and mods: I've returned to the game and played a bit of 2-man MP. In our first game we were still a bit rusty and underestimated biters thus ending up behind with tech too much. So we decided to try out some mods. Bob's mods seem to be the most popular choice to add complexity and extend the time it takes you to reach the point of boredom. And rightfully so. But to my surprise there is another set of mods, fully compatible with Bob's which adds even greater complexity to the game. It's the Angel's mods and they are to Factorio what Factorio is to Tetris.

Example:
In Factorio you mine ore using drill, insert it into furnace for smelting and retrieve plates for use in industry. Angel's mods add between 1 to 5 additional steps to this process, before you even reach smelting, each increasing yield of the process but adding logistical complexity, space requirements and a lot of time to design working and extensible patterns. Smelting can be done traditionally (for most metals) but has an alternative consisting of another 3 or more steps depending on the metal. Different metals have their own specifics and require their own setups.

In this mod, processes output multiple resource types. So the complexity increases by increasing number of input resource types, output resource types or both. Some recipes even produce as many as 6 types of output resources. Filter inserters are finally useful.

The interconnections and specifics of different recipes are absolutely crazy and make it much harder to plan stuff or find solutions that are perfect fit for all situations. Petrochem is completely bonkers. You last too long or get very far with simple designs.

The mod adds some new problems you have to deal with in your production and often forces you to think outside the box if you want stuff to be compact. One of my favorite aspect of Angel's is that many recipes have low value byproducts which you have to take care of or they will clog your prodction. And with proper setup you can actually use them for relevant resources.

After playing for about 40-ish hours in 2-man MP we designed some decent non-spaghetti setups, but we didn't even get to implement production for half of the stuff we need to and we're very far from producing science pack 3.

Bob's + Angel's mods is a great combination to massively extend your enjoyment of the game if you're into the core gameplay. It sort of reminds me of Caveman2Cosmos mod for Civ4. It surely seems excessive, but it's surprisingly well designed.

 

[anvi]

Talking about how the game is shit and simple crap for casuals is fucking pretentious.

I never said any of that. Try to not be a 12 year old.

The devs adding wave defense mode doesn't mean shit.

luls

 

[adrix89]

For Mods Factorio doesn't need more crafting complexity.

What it needs is crafting utilization.

All that awesome shit you crafted is wasted if you aren't going to use it. Constantly chasing the next science pack level is a waste.

Have mechs and tanks go pewpewpew and explosions!

 

[Jaedar]

For Mods Factorio doesn't need more crafting complexity.

What it needs is crafting utilization.

All that awesome shit you crafted is wasted if you aren't going to use it. Constantly chasing the next science pack level is a waste.

Have mechs and tanks go pewpewpew and explosions!

I tend to agree. Especially in the current build, there's a huge gap in terms of progress between making high tech science packs and the fuckhueg logistics required to do it quickly and at the same time as you are building rockets. More goals in between would be nice.

 

[anvi]

Have anything other than the dumb mass producing of science packs would be good. It is unlikely though because the fans are over excitable plebs like Blaine. Have to wait for some better mods.

 

[Destroid]

Most crafting utilisation outputs are one-off items that are not suited to the production chains that Factorio does.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

I just spent a few hours writing a program to analyse some data for a (totally pointless) project I thought of. I think the actual construction will be relatively straightforward, it's just figuring out how to get everything to fit that was the reason for the burst of autism. I'm sure it'll be totally worth it.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Aaaand it's finished

Boring details below

Spoiler

While this may seem simple compared to the music video creation, it does have issues that the video player does not. In the Sandstorm video, each "pixel "was actually a pair of lights attached to a combinator, which means a single wire (or interleaved wires) can carry signals for an entire line of such lights. In this one, all the lights are next to each other, leaving no room for neat signal tricks: each one must be directly wired, and each wire can only carry a single pattern. Since wiring every single light individually would quickly result in running out of space (as wires have a limited range), I made a program to analyse the frames in the gif to see which lights have matching patterns (the white lines linking squares) with neighbouring lights, or did not change colour (the squares with no numbers).

It also highlighted whichever pixel I was currently working on (with the white outline), its grid co-ordinate, what that pixel's pattern was, and what values the constant combinators needed (2^Frame for each frame that colour is needed). This vastly reduced the amount of combinators needed.

Completely pointless, but an interesting challenge.

 

[Blaine]

Wow dude, just play The Sims or something.

Hang on, WHO CHANGED THE BASE SIGN TO READ "BURDELSON AIR FORCE BASE" WHILE I WAS AWAY AT COMMENCEMENT?!?!

 

[anvi]

There are some weird people in this world.

 

[Jaedar]

Truly factorio is the savior of gamekind. I tip my hat to you sir.

 

[Blaine]

I just finished our 1.12GW nuclear reactor array with near-perfect ratios, efficiency, throughput, output, and plenty of space to walk and reach pretty much everywhere needful within.

Automated fuel cell production, Kovarex refinement, and uranium ore delivery isn't set up in this location yet, but it's pretty trivial since we've already done it and is only a matter of logistics.

 

[Mozg]

I wonder what percentage of people that buy Factorio are the "casuals" that they made the "launch a rocket and win" core game for. Even that takes a pretty long playthrough, about what you would expect for a 20 dollar one and done indie game.

 

[Blaine]

I wonder what percentage of people that buy Factorio are the "casuals" that they made the "launch a rocket and win" core game for. Even that takes a pretty long playthrough, about what you would expect for a 20 dollar one and done indie game.

I don't know that I'd call them "casuals" per se—because no genuine casual could make it past the finish line—but their tastes and priorities are certainly different than mine. It's only when these types of players bitch and moan about their personal lack of desire to accomplish anything more than the minimum required that I take umbrage.

The thing is, doing more than the bare minimum in Factorio isn't just jerking off and building more rooms and deluxe TVs for your houseful of people. In Factorio, when you decide that you must have the best, fastest, most powerful, and most efficient design possible—that you want to excel, in other words—you are presented with real, actual engineering and logistics challenges (simplified compared to real life, of course) that are above and beyond the usual in terms of complexity and how it "feels" to solve them. You can't just plonk some shit down and put wallpaper on it. You have to break out the calculator, plan carefully, experiment, and think.

Anvi is the perfect example of someone who is cut out to play Factorio, but lacks any motivation to do more than the bare minimum to reach the win condition. Before Dirk and I launch even our first rocket, we will already have the infrastructure in place to very efficiently launch a great many rockets very rapidly, compared to someone who spaghettis their way to just squeaking one out as soon as they can. Such a player will have missed out on all the challenges and puzzles involved in going full-bore autism factory tycoon style.

As for what percentage, it's probably a fairly large percentage, but there are also quite a few people who go much, much further than I ever will in scale and complexity and create veritable rocket machineguns.

 

[Grif]

I'm probably what would fall neatly into the "casual" category. I haven't made anything past the green science packs and in fact still puttering around with one of the campaign levels just learning how to make plastics, despite me owning the game for more than two(?) years at this point. I get distracted easily, I guess.

Anyway, I can definitely see the appeal of this even to casuals who wouldn't even make it to the rocket, but like to fuck around with logistics and manufacturing in general. And it does make me appreciate all the autism people put into the game. I may not be able to build any of those fancy factories, but I sure as hell can admire them from afar.

 

[anvi]

It is just The Sims in a different skin.

 

[Lazing Dirk]

It is just The Sims in a different skin.

Yes, placing an oven down in The Sims and ensuring they have enough chairs to sit on is exactly like building an 8 bay train station with buffers and balancers to guarantee throughput to your 300 beaconed furnaces that require 10 lanes of output to avoid having inserters wait to place things on the belts which are then carefully split off to hundreds of different assembly machines that were placed according to how quickly their outputs can be crafted given their current modules to supply enough products to further assembly machines and various outputs controlled through circuits that ensure certain products are not over-produced to save on wasted resources and...

"But you don't have to- "

Oh do shut up. Most games can be completed by doing the bare minimum and simply running to the end as fast as possible; it means nothing. You're complaining that a carefully prepared 5 course meal could be more easily consumed by pouring it all into a blender and drinking the result, then comparing it to some ham sandwiches with a side salad which is just as easy to eat once blended. If you think all cookery is pointless given it can be shoved into a blender, then go ahead and subsist on ready meals and vitamin pills while we enjoy cooking our roast dinners.

Why do you even still visit this thread? Your opinion is neither insightful nor constructive; you're just parroting the same moronic shit over and over. If it's a response you're after, then well done, you got one. Now piss off.

 

[Blaine]

He probably thinks he's trolling at this point.

 

[Jaedar]

I'm definitely a "casual" factorio player. Never played a game in which I launched more than one rocket, although my current one might be it. With the added science packs, the demanded throughput is a lot higher, so I'm already being "forced" to do things I never had to before (like multiple expansions for all raw materials, more than one line of iron plates etc). Since I've already scaled up, I might wind up doing it properly for the rocket too. Nuclear also helps, since the massive space requirements for solar always annoyed me.

It's sort of a lack of motivation for me. Launching a rocket is a nice milestone to aim for, but after that there's no clear next goal (other than make it bigger just 'cus).

 

[Mozg]

It's annoying that hooking up resource patches is fundamentally hard to automate. You can make blueprints for rail chunks, miner lines, train loaders, highly automated train unloading stations, etc. but even once you've got everything well-blueprinted and roboported it still takes a fair amount of time and tedium to do each one (and it's even worse if you have heavy biter settings, where you have to add walling/turrets and their repair and supply logistics too). I never did a real megabase because of that; I ended up just thinking of little projects I wanted to figure out and I did them in the creative mode mod where you can magic up a blue belt of whatever.

 

[Jaedar]

Also, since we're sharing: here's my modest attempt to automate the kovarex process

Spoiler

I will be the first to admit it's not a very good design. The overhead in terms of used good uranium is abysmal. The design is fairly simple, it requests fuel from outside, reads the contents of the entire network and outputs uranium if there's more than necessary to keep the process going. The massive flaw of course, is that it can't keep track of how much is actually in the centrifuge. I'm sure there's a way to solve this, but I am also sure it requires way more circuit wizardry than I can currently do.

 

[Leechmonger]

I made a program to analyse the frames in the gif to see which lights have matching patterns (the white lines linking squares) with neighbouring lights, or did not change colour (the squares with no numbers).

Good shit man.

 

[Blaine]

Lazing Dirk and I have decided we're through with Factorio again this year, having exceeded 1.21GW on the power grid, launched several dozen rockets in one afternoon session, and stockpiled nearly 1,000 atomic bombs.

And so we say goodbye to Wormy, lone survivor of Moscow; to the second zoo that was built after the briefly-extant first zoo was blown up by Dirk; to the Gay Bar, the Armory, and the nuclear power plants; to General Jack D. Ripper and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake; and finally to Burpelson Air Force Base. May they all RIP in peace.

Wormy

http://vaporburd.ytmnd.com/