Factorio

Purchased. Not watched much of what looks like a whopping Factorio playlist as yet, but the KoS vids do seem really helpful. Watched some of her Oxygen Not Included and Kingdoms and Castles series too recently when pondering purchases, as you say Jarpy charming.

All this talk got me to fire the game up again. My map this time hasn't any oil deposits.

*sigh*

There was once a mod I liked that revealed a much bigger swath of map on start, it was nice for ensuring you had basic resources without having to wait for radar. Im not sure if its still valid though.

Assuming you didnt limit the size of your map they should be out there somewhere, you just have to decide if its worth it to set up a long pipe/powerlines.

The current version of the game allows you to preview a fairly large chunk of the map before starting the game, and lets you keep regenerating the map until you see one you like.

Yeah, it's a game where you generally want to abuse the map preview until you find something you like. It's like Minecraft, it doesn't make any particular attempt to give you a winnable layout.

I've been considering a few facts recently:

  • Factorio can be a multiplayer game, given a dedicated server.
  • The GWJ community is a shining beacon of loveliness.
  • My "pocket money" recently got some wiggle room.

Given these facts, who among The Factorians of Greater Goodjerstan would be interested in a "community server"?

I freely admit that I don't know how it would scale. If we get a bunch of people on there who proceed to build a CPU crushing death machine of a megabase, then the cost of the server may exceed my means. On the other hand, it could be a nice place to hang out, to build together, and to share and collaborate on designs.

Alright, I grabbed the game while it's still at the lower price. Not sure when I'll get to it, but the base building and logistics seem like they are right up my alley. How long did it take to click for the rest of you?

I felt I had a good basic understanding of the game within a couple of hours, but while the systems aren't that complex, they can interact in some fairly surprising ways. I've got at least 250 hours in it now, and yet every playthrough will always expose me to a bunch of new ideas, whether mine or someone else's.

For instance, that Kovarex refinery I posted here a few months ago was probably the best-designed Factorio machine I've ever seen. It's minimalist (cheap and easy to build, even manually), perfectly efficient, and stackable to pretty much any size you want. My solutions all worked, but that one is just so much more elegant than anything I came up with. I don't think I would ever have created anything that pretty, I would have just limped along on my overly complex solution.

I think of Factorio as being several games at once, in a sense. In many ways, it's a game about scaling, and you end up learning it several times, for the different levels you're working at. There's at least three or four scale levels between banging individual rocks out of the ground and watching your acres-wide machine digging up and transporting 15,000 ore a minute, which is about where you're ready to start building rockets. And that's kind of the minimum level to win; you can keep going quite a bit further, at least one more order of magnitude. At each different level, all the problems change, and you have to learn new principles and ideas to work at that size.

I've always liked games where I could automate systems to do things for me, from Empire in the 80s on forward. Watching my Empire economy assembling and delivering new weapons to the front line(s) was a surprisingly large amount of the fun, and I've liked that mechanic ever since. Factorio scratches that itch more thoroughly than any other game ever has.

The basic mechanics of Factorio are dead simple. You get resources from the environment. You have recipes which can turn items into other items. You can make buildings that move items around, and which can automate the crafting for you. At a surface level, this is what the game is about at its beginning, and it's what the game is about 100 hours in.

But, when I first started playing, it did not take long for it to be clear that you really need to design the factory at a higher level, with some consideration towards what you want it to be doing as a whole. The mathematics of Factorio are more complicated than they may at first seem, and eventually you'll start to think of everything in terms of rates. It isn't merely that you need three copper cables to make a circuit board, it's that you need to produce copper cables at such-and-such a rate in order to meet your overall demand.

In my first hours with the game, I started taking written notes in which I tracked which items depended on which other items and at which rates. After filling most of a notepad, I started automating the process with a computer. The current result of those efforts is this calculator, which people seem to like.

I'm not sure there was a moment when the game "clicked." In a sense, it's akin to those Zachtronics games: The basic components of the game are very simple, but you can do endless very clever things with those parts, and you'll just get better at optimizing your factories over time.

I've gotten OK at building small blocks, but what I have no grasp of yet is how to organize them with buses or whatever. That'll come with time. I got Factorio because I enjoyed Factory Idle originally, but that's just the kiddie pool before the ocean.

I started watching KatherineOfSky's videos, but there's some "sticker shock" there- 92 videos at 30-45 minutes each is a hell of a commitment.

I'd recommend watching a few, learn a couple things, apply them to your factory, move forward a little more on your own, watch a few more videos, rinse, repeat.

Also, I like Tuplex's video series in addition to KoS'. Tuplex really reasons aloud why he is doing stuff which I think is important. Sometimes KoS just does stuff without explaining - I get it, doing 1M Factorio videos means a lot of that thought process is internalized but it also means new watchers/players don't know they whys and wherefores of a thing.

My biggest problem with Tuplex is his voice is very soothing and it tends to make me sleepy.

MightyMooquack wrote:

But, when I first started playing, it did not take long for it to be clear that you really need to design the factory at a higher level, with some consideration towards what you want it to be doing as a whole. The mathematics of Factorio are more complicated than they may at first seem, and eventually you'll start to think of everything in terms of rates. It isn't merely that you need three copper cables to make a circuit board, it's that you need to produce copper cables at such-and-such a rate in order to meet your overall demand.

Interestingly, this is also true of the production part of high level Starcraft play.

Fortunately in Factorio, you don't have to click like a maniac unless you want to.

I love the way the visual and cognitive scale zooms in and out too. From huge strategic decisions right down to the efficiency (and even aesthetics) of a single-tile entity. The flow of play pretty much ensures that you'll be constantly "distracted" by small things that need to be just so, all in the service of a much grander vision.

I particularly enjoy those zoomed-in moments when you are trying to make something elegant and pleasing. For the software people in the house, I like to call this mode "Refactorio".

Gorgeous train-grid based base:

http://imgur.com/a/xIQ9O6e

I've made some good progress toward my 2018 gaming goal of launching a rocket. I started a new peaceful railworld a little while ago, so I could speed through research without having to worry about defenses, and eventually build a large train network. Last night I finished my battery production, built automated bot production, put some roboports down around the factory and finished off my mall blueprint. Put a lot of passive provider chests in my mall, to so the bots can go shopping. Bots are so much fun. Also laid down my first ever solar panels and accumulators. Those are pretty sweet. Next items on my list are

  • Build a small field of nice looking solar blueprints
  • Mine a new nearby coal deposit, my original is running low
  • Expand iron smelting and probably setup my first train route from a large iron deposit nearby
  • Military science
  • Blue circuits
  • Power armor and personal roboport

https://factorioprints.com has become a pretty amazing resource, especially now that you can login with Google and mark your favorites.

It's January, and it's time to dust off the ol' Factorio thread.

0.17 is fast approaching. We still don't have a release date beyond "January," or an exact changelog, but I'm excited anyway. We do know about a whole stack of changes already.

Perhaps the largest, from a gameplay perspective, is an almost total overhaul of the science recipes, as discussed in the latest development blog post. Overall I think these changes seem good: Resource costs are reduced for science packs after red and green science, which flattens out the difficulty curve at the precise point where most people seem to start having trouble with the game (the introduction of oil). I think the most interesting change here is using solid fuel as an ingredient for blue science, which gives some interesting options with how you use your oil products prior to unlocking oil cracking.

0.17 is going to be making a bunch of other changes, as well. Off the top of my head, we're going to see more high-resolution graphics, lasers that look like lasers, an overhaul of how fluids move through pipes, an overhaul of how the statistics for drills work, significant changes to the tech tree, and more.

(I also got a shout-out in the latest dev blog, which was really great to see. Maybe I'll actually start work on the huge pile of changes I need to make in the calculator in order to support 0.17, heh.)

MightyMooquack wrote:

(I also got a shout-out in the latest dev blog, which was really great to see. Maybe I'll actually start work on the huge pile of changes I need to make in the calculator in order to support 0.17, heh.)

I saw that, that was pretty great! Congrats!

I am also really looking forward to the new stuff, the dev diaries have been fantastic in the lead up to 0.17.

Joke all you want about this game being a time-eater, but I'm genuinely scared to reinstall this because it CONSUMES me. In the same way I stay away from Dota, I've started to avoid Factorio because days just pass while I play.

That being said...Sure, hell, I'll reinstall for this new patch. I've got a few more weeks of holidays left. I'd love to see how far the game has come. I've forgotten almost everything.

I'm looking forward to starting again with .17. My last play through stalled out at the usual place - science pack production just coming on line. Not quite sure why I keep stopping when I do...

I recently started a new game in 0.16 but with 0.17 coming soon I don't think I'll continue. I'm at one of the speed bump points anyway- I have a starter base running but don't yet have volume smelting or a bus.

So, thoughts about starting conditions? I've been tending to go with large, rich deposits to minimize the sprawl but I'm wondering if that may have something to do with me spluttering out. I've also never played with railways - or autos/tanks - as my radar has always been able to spy out the pockets of uranium and oil. So maybe I'm missing out on some key gameplay.

Also wondering whether "main bus" is still state of the art for base building.

I tend to use large, rich, and infrequent deposits as well. That's a style that's pretty much intended to require rails, but I think it's a more interesting challenge. How you build your outposts, if you have them- whether they're just mining or if they produce some intermediate output instead- is an interesting decision.

I'm still planning on using a bus, though there are some interesting ideas I've seen on youtube about replacing a bus with a grid of trains, adding a new simple module as necessary. That might be a fun change- I worry a bit about if I'll stick to building yet another similar complex.

Though in my last start there were no extra deposits of any kind in a significant distance from my starting zone (2-3x original radius), so that's a potential risk. I have a car so I've got some more exploring to do. Maybe I should have used the Resource Spawn Overhaul mod to make the setup more rational.

I wonder offhand if there are detectable evolutionary lines in Factorio players. For example I learned to play from Katherine of Sky videos so there are certainly identifiable things I do that trace to her (aside from obvious stuff like using her starter base blueprint). Someone who learned from another video or on their own would have different apparent features in their base.

All my Factorio games end up becoming Model Train Simulator at some point. I'd say if you are not playing with those, you are missing some of what the game has to offer. I usually play RailWorld settings, so that might explain it though.

How do you guys play? Unmodded? Heavily modded? Somewhere in between? I will vary what I use but generally just quality of life stuff like Even Distribution, AutoFill, Long Reach, etc. I will also usually use a set of blueprints I have grabbed over time to make setting things up somewhat easier.

I have done Bobs+Angels a couple of times but man I am not nearly smart or patient enough for that so those games have fizzled out somewhere after 30ish hours where I realize I totally made a huge mistake about hour 10 and don't feel like cleaning up and fixing it. Interesting games though.

One of the best things about this game is its variety. It is fun vanilla (my current game) but with mods it can be whatever you want it to be.

I also play both, usually unmodded if Im playing multiplayer with someone from work or my brother, but I grab a lot of Quality of Life mods like Long Reach, Nanobots, and Squeak through on my own and I tend to try out a content mod with each run. I havent stuck with any of the content mods though.

I also end up playing the Train game. While the steam sale is still on (for the next day) maybe look at Railway Empire. It scratches the logistic game + trains itch and sort of saved me from playing another 30 hour Factorio base when all I really wanted to do was play with trains

I usually play the vanilla game, on a railworld map with alien expansion enabled. The railworld settings make it impractical to expand using belts, and I like the resulting emphasis on trains. I see defending from the aliens as an important part of the game, and disabling expansion makes it too dull.

Grumble, grumble, filthy enablers.

MightyMooquack wrote:

I see defending from the aliens as an important part of the game, and disabling expansion makes it too dull.

I flip-flop a lot on this.

As for mods, I've not played with any since a playthough using DyTech a long time ago. Never finished that one either!

It's nice to see this thread producing again.

MightyMooquack wrote:

I also got a shout-out in the latest dev blog, which was really great to see.

Super happy for you. People all over Reddit and YouTube have really accepted your work as the de-facto standard. Bloody nice work!

Moggy wrote:

So, thoughts about starting conditions?

Vanilla, no biters rail world is my comfortable place, but I'm really tempted to do an "ultra vanilla" map when 0.17 comes out. Like, just accept the defaults for everthing to see how it all balances now (and to see the new biters and lasers). I also want to get "Steam all The Way" (on Steam, heh) which requires biters.

Yeah, one thing that's never really worked well in Factorio is the biters. If they can tune up this new stuff and make the enemies more interesting somehow, I'd call that 1.0-ready.

Granted I never got too far (just started on drone automation before I stopped playing), but I always enjoyed the biters! Balancing defense and offense was a lot of fun. It felt like one of the few games that scratched that "turtling" in an RTS itch. I love watching them run mindlessly into a wall of lasers!

Though it definitely got annoying when I was forced to expand. There's probably a good middle-ground.