Factorio

[sherbz]

Ive had my eye on this for what seems like ages now. I was waiting for a full release. Played the demo, instantly liked it and bought it.

I have to say it is rather excellent. Its a sort of mash up between Satisfactory, They are billions and most high end management sims. Ive briefly looked at whats possible in this game and its honestly quite mind boggling.

Basically you crash land on an alien planet similar in style to Starship troopers, with similar sorts of alien life. Your goal is to build a factory thats sophisticated enough to build a rocket which will win you the game. Trouble is all that tech and machinery causes pollution, which the native lifeforms of the planet really dont like. So they begin to attack you. And as your colony gets more and more sophisticated and pollutes more and more, the aliens ingest the pollution, mutate, and become even more powerful. This offers a rather unique difficulty curve IMO. Because the difficulty adapts to your playstyle. If you are super slow (like me) then you will pollute less, and consequently anger the native life forms less, so the difficulty curve is flatter. The same is true the other way round of course. But it has the unique benefit of not being too punishing for beginners.

The second great benefit of this game is that once you have a process nailed, like electricity or smelting ore, you have the tools to automate production and then literally just leave it to do its thing whilst you move on to the next thing (theres always a next thing trust me). This means there is no dead time. So no chance of you getting bored or not having something to do, unlike in most RTS/strategy games.

The maps are huge - necessarily so. And a single game could take hundreds of hours. If you look at the steam reviews 2,000 or even 3,000 hours clocked on the game whilst it was in early access is not uncommon. Fortunately, as its been in beta for a while now, it has a well developed Wiki and theres numerous videos on YT for you peruse. I would suggest however you try and find the lions share of whats possible out for yourself as its very rewarding. But it is useful to see working examples of self sufficient energy production (for instance).

Trailer below:

 

[salty mud]

I've had my eye on this for some time but something just stops me from pushing the button. I guess the way it's described as a "factory builder" just sounds a bit... eh. That said, it's one of, if not THE, highest rated game on Steam so that must count for something.

 

[sherbz]

2nd only to Portal 2 i believe. I think its the crack cocaine of gaming. Its so hard to put down. You will look at some of the screenshots and think to yourself "I could never build anything like that ". Then you play, play some more. And then you zoom out and your factory looks like a giant orchestra and you are the mozart making it dance to its tune. And then you think "wow - did i really build all this". Then you realise that you have barely scratched the surface. Its main plus point is that its easy to get into for beginners. It doesnt swamp you with stuff and the learning curve feels organic. Even though its a very steep learning curve (but a very long one). Eventually you will be splicing atoms, even though all you start with is a mere pick axe.

Worth noting that the devs have stated that they are NOT allowing a sale on the game for the foreseeable future. They seem to really care about what they have produced and take time to iron out bugs and stuff. So they are asking a fair price and not dropping it. Its well worth it though. Best game i have played in years.

 

[Quintillus]

I can't believe there wasn't already a Factorio thread here.

Fantastic game. I have found myself dreaming about conveyor belts after playing it. There really is always something else to build, something else to tweak, something else to research, or a resource that's almost depleted, necessitating finding a new source.

I will note that I recommend having a few hours the first time one tries it. I introduced it to a friend in January, but we only had about an hour, and that wasn't enough time for him to get into it. But we tried it again the following Saturday, and the next thing you knew, the sun had come up. We wound up playing it off and on for a couple months, until we'd researched every technology... and one of the neat things about playing it with a friend was that we'd iterate on each other's improvements to the core bottlenecks in the factory; have one person working on exploration while another built; occasionally team up to take out the native life forms when a large cluster was blocking a critical resource; and generally have somewhat different styles of play. It's great solo, but also great with friends.

 

[PhroX]

Factorio is one of those games I was kinda unsure on whether or not I would like, so I held off on buying it for a long time. Then when I bit the bullet and picked it up about 6 months ago, it took one play session, which lasted about 7-8 hours, to realise that I was an idiot and I should have bought it much earlier. Utterly brilliant and addictive game. It's kinda like Civ's "one more turn", but instead it's "I'll just link up this ore patch then I'll go to bed", but then you see that you haven't got enough furnaces, and then now that you've met your iron needs, your realise that you're bottlenecked on plastic so you need to expand that, which needs more oil refining which means that it's 7 in the morning and I need to start work in an hour.

And one day I'll get round to trying some of the big mods (I use some smaller QoL ones), but the base game still has me hooked.

 

[sherbz]

Its an easy 1,000 hour game IMO. I find it astonishing just how much some people have played it though.

https://steamladder.com/ladder/playtime/427520/

3 People have over 20,000 hours in it. Thats insane. It is a huge time sink. But you dont really realise you are doing it. Which i suppose is the hallmark of greatness haha.

Im trying to figure out nuclear at the moment. I could probably have launched a rocket by now but i keep wanting to start again and do it better this time

 

[PhroX]

Nuclear is the one thing I gave up trying to work out myself and looked up some guides. I like nilaus's layouts (he's a youtuber who has some very nice tutorials). I did do Kovarex enrichment manually though.

 

[sherbz]

Yeah, its tempting to do that, i must admit. But then i think to myself that the puzzle aspect is a part of the game. Ive worked out most things for myself so far. Watched a few videos just get some ideas. I found Katherine of Sky to be an easier watch than Nialus. The one thing i will definitely need some help with is in working out how combinators and the logistics network can work. That stuff is super complicated. Pretty amazing what people have managed to get their logistics network to do though. Like this guy:

 

[PhroX]

Hah, yeah, the stuff people can go with the combinators is insane. I sometimes look on the Factorio reddit, and there's basically three types of posts showing off factories:
"I'm new and here's my first try."
"I'm experienced and here's my massive megabase"
"I'm an electrical engineer and heard that this game has logic gates..."

 

[Quintillus]

I've done a couple nuclear buildouts. Used the Factorio Wiki as a reference, and spend quite awhile building it, but it delivers an insane amount of power once it's up. Although in my multiplayer game, we managed to consume enough power that I had to add a second reactor to my site...

I've only touched the very basics of logistics networks and combinators. Probably my favorite mistake with combinators was when I thought I had my electric network set up so that if my generation capacity (in that game, dependent on coal) ran low, it would use some of my battery charge, and then disable the less important parts of my factory. Turns out it did do that when a few of my coal mines ran out, but turning off the less important part of the factory resulted in demand falling below the reduced-but-not-zero generation capacity, and it happened at night, so it wound up producing a strobe light effect.

 

[sherbz]

Ive been playing quite a lot recently. I started again (for like the 20th time) but this time had native life turned on with default settings. I have got a question though. When you start to run out of resources, whether its iron, copper or whatever. When you venture out beyond your starting area (which presumably you have walled off with a ring of turrets and a conveyor belt of ammo running round the perimeter) do you burn all the nests and then expand your perimeter, or do you just put down a small block filled with your mines or pumps and then rail the goods back to your base for processing? And if you do the latter, how do you defend the outposts? Im finding with oil outposts its not too bad. Just stick down some flame turrets and hook them up to your pump jacks. But what about a single iron or copper deposit? You cant really manufacture ammo at the deposit. So your only recourse it seems to me is either fill them up manually, or have a designated wagon on your train that carries the ammo. But that doesnt seem like a great solution to me because you will eventually get to a point where theres too much ammo in the outpost and when that happens your wait condition in the train scheduling screen will never be fulfilled. Belting it all the way also seems risky as the bugs will chew on belts. I suppose ideally you would just have robots do it for you. But thats not possible until quite a bit later in the game and im looking for a more early game solution. I have only just got the ability to produce plastic as although i had an oil deposit in my starting area it was pretty small and only really enough to manufacture sulfur.

 

[Quintillus]

It depends. When I first played solo, I tended to only expand cautiously as needed, e.g. adding a nearby copper mine to my base, adding walls around it, and only taking out the nests that would be inside that wall, sometimes extending the wall less than I normally would to avoid antagonizing a nest. This approach generally made it feasible to simply extend my ammo belts and add some turrets. In one case, I put walls, turrets, and belts on each side of the rail line that ran out to my copper mine.

But when I needed uranium that was far away one time, that wouldn't work very well. In that case, I built pipes to take sulfuric acid to the uranium mine, and belts to take uranium ore back. Then I put solar panels, batteries, and laser turrets in the uranium base to have local defenses without needing to take ammo all the way out. The path out was through a forest, so one belt + one pipe was a minimalist way to get resources relative to a train. I think eventually I connected the base to the main grid with large power poles, too, but left the solar panels and batteries in case bugs attacked the power lines/belts/pipes. Surprisingly they never did; they always went for either the uranium base or my main base, probably because those were the places generating the pollution, not the connector between them.

By contrast, when I played co-op with a friend, he favored a take-out-all-the-nests-and-add-large-swathes-of-territory approach. The downside is you get bigger bugs sooner. But you do get plenty of land and resources to develop with. Whole railroads would be inside the base, with land all around. It does require significant capital investments in turrets, lasers, and/or flamethrowers, though. Tanks help, too.

If you do use trains to take ammo out, it should be possible to set the train to wait until it is full of copper/iron/etc. to leave that area, and to wait for e.g. 60 seconds or until it is out of copper at the main base. That should allow more than enough time to load ammo into the secondary wagon, and you should be able to ignore ammo on the scheduling because if you need more ammo than copper, you have a major problem and need to take out the nearby nests. Eventually you'll wind up with a whole wagon full of ammo, but ammo is cheap so it probably isn't necessary to micro-manage that. I can't remember if it's possible to limit the storage of a wagon, but if it is I'd probably favor that on the ammo wagon over trying to work it in to scheduling.

 

[sherbz]

Finally beat the game. Had to resist the urge to start again when i started to struggle for circuit boards. People werent kidding - you really do need a tonne of them. Most of my solutions were also sticking plaster fixes. Mostly because my factory was too congested at its start for me to plug stuff into it later. I guess thats where forward planning helps - which i will be aware of next time around. My map:

Main smelting and power generation:

Oil processing:

Research and starting factory:

Main circuit processing:

Rocket:

And finally - victory screen