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What is interesting about Factorio

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Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#261

Post by pmoriarty »

ivankirigin wrote: post #35
Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #18

This game made me empathize less and less with environmentalists. Forests are an impediment to a transport network. Wildlife are pests. Renewable energy has extremely low ROI.

Solar + storage lowers your pollution and the pests. I wish there were a way to restore the environment like planting trees in order to also remove the pests.

"I wish there were a way to restore the environment like planting trees in order to also remove the pests."

There are mods that will let you plant trees.

Planting trees will reduce pollution, and that in turn will lead to you getting bothered less by biters, the native life forms of the planet.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#262

Post by pmoriarty »

debaserab2 wrote: post #217
Faark wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Rimworld is easier to get into for many. "Survive" is a way more obvious and natural goal. But once I got more and more into the details, Rimworld was the one frustrating me. I probably just despise this kind of "Storyteller" aka Event choosen by Wealth & RNG. This ruined the fun for me and is probably the reason I played Factorio easily 10 times as long as Rimworld. The closest Factory has to that is the pollut…

Perhaps you can answer this for me then: what is the goal in a game of factorio?

Factorio is a sandbox game where you are free to set your own goals.

As a new player, my goal was to explore everything the game had to offer, and that meant researching all the technologies in the game and learning how to use them effectively.

A secondary goal is to make efficient use of space, which is limited by biters, base layout, and resource layout.

Another goal is to automate as much as possible instead of hand-crafting.

Yet another goal you might have is to defend your base against the biters to go after them pre-emptively. If you enjoy the combat in the game there are a wealth of ways to get more of it or increase the difficulty. On the other hand, if you don't like combat you can dial it down or even get rid of it entirely.

Mods increase your options exponentially, and give you much more new stuff to explore and use.

Like any sandbox, what you do with everything you're given is up to you. The limits are: your interest, your skill, and your imagination.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#263

Post by nlfwhulsdhouv »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #5
jfim wrote: post #2

> It's also extremely addictive to engineers. Quite the understatement. Pretty much every engineer that I've introduced to the game has played for at least 40 hours.

Interesting. I used to play video games but now I mostly 3D print stuff and design robots for fun. I don’t think video games are a bad use of time generally, but I feel so good about doing actual engineering for fun that I’m always a little surprised with games that are supposed to be fun for engineer types. I kind of wonder why actually doing engineering for fun isn’t more popular?

Few reasons:

- Variety. I'm an EE at work and a lot of my personal projects are EE-related because that's what I'm good at. Sometimes I want a break from that. Alternatively I'll work on more mechanical projects, but video games are often a fun change of pace.

- It's nice to work in a space with no real consequences. When I'm working on physical projects there is always a bit of a sense of cost and waste. With 3D printing and similar it's a smaller issue, but it's nice to play around in a game where you can continuously optimize without really 'wasting' anything.

- Access to equipment. I'll play factorio on planes, or on work trips where I don't have access to my 3D printer or a computer set up for CAD or PCB design. Even if I can afford it, I don't have that much space. Sometimes working on a project means cleaning up something else or finishing a different project I'm no longer excited about. It just adds a barrier to entry that is sometimes difficult to overcome if you're not feeling particularly motivated.

That being said, I did quit my last factorio world when I opened up a spreadsheet before thinking if I was going to go to those lengths for optimization I may as well do something 'real'.

Doing engineering for fun is fairly popular, it's just hard, intellectually draining, and (often) expensive, so people look for other related things to do.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#264

Post by JakeTheAndroid »

kccqzy wrote: post #67
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously struggle with factorio, You have to have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti. I always end up having to scale up things and then having no room. I find text based programming to be much much simpler. If I need to add more somewhere, I can, my text editor will push everything else out of the way.

> have a seriously good planning ability to create something that doesn't instantly turn in to a spaghetti If you only design factories from scratch by yourself, that's akin to being handed an assembler programming manual as your only reading material and building up every programming abstraction yourself. You likely won't discover the best abstractions. After a while playing factorio I decided to watch experts play…

That's why I love it. I just went back to play last night and I got my Red and Green science built in a way with zero excess. All the miners lead straight into a furnace which fed straight into an automation factory which fed straight into the Red and Green science. The only thing I used belts for was getting the sciences to the Labs.

Then I unlocked the the next level of science and it all instantly became spaghetti and belts were backed up across the board.

The thing that makes the game easier is understanding the ratios. There is a golden ratio for basically anything. And it's actually harder to get the right ratios at a smaller scale because you end up with a lot of decimals that throw everything off. If you can get clean whole numbers for a majority of your ratios, then you have a nearly perfect automation process even if it's all spaghetti belts.

I need to learn how to use trains and the circuits because I have NEVER used them. IDK why I'd want things to turn off and on, or why I'd want to use a train to bring mats, but I assume these are critical things stopping my megafactory dreams.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#265

Post by nlfwhulsdhouv »

jfim wrote: post #27
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I guess the idea behind engineering at home for fun is that it doesn’t have to be boring tasks. And I tend to work on completely unnecessary things such that there’s no time pressure. That makes it a lot more fun and rewarding than working at the office. Like I recently designed a pair of headphones from scratch. They sound better than any of my other headphones which are all a bit cheap. It totally didn’t need…

That's pretty cool with regards to the headphones. Do you have a link to your project? I agree that it's really enjoyable to build physical things. I have one 3D part that I've been meaning to print for a while, but without a 3D printer at home it's a bit trickier to get it done. I wish I had a home workshop, but Silicon Valley prices make that a rather expensive proposition. There's no more TechShop either. :-(

FWIW, I have a fairly small 1 bedroom SV apartment I share with my girlfriend and I still keep up a good number of physical projects. The 3D printer sits in an enclosure in the living room :).

Obviously I wish I had access to a proper shop, but I still get a fair bit of enjoyment out of it.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#266

Post by Tyr42 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #260
Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #18

This game made me empathize less and less with environmentalists. Forests are an impediment to a transport network. Wildlife are pests. Renewable energy has extremely low ROI.

" This game made me empathize less and less with environmentalists. Forests are an impediment to a transport network. Wildlife are pests. Renewable energy has extremely low ROI." It's funny you should say that. I noticed that nuclear energy in Factorio is waste-free, and (at least without mods) there's no risk of a nuclear reactor suffering a meltdown and massively damaging large areas of your base. Also, it was inte…

>"No risk" Well if a biter manages to kill the reactor while it's hot I think it explodes. But that's unlikely to happen unless lots of things go wrong.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#267

Post by sanderjd »

kryogen1c wrote: post #142
piercebot wrote: post #124

> Isn't it amazing that someone could do something for 100 hours and not think about obvious improvements, and not even wonder if they've been setup? I have co-workers like this: people who don't bother to learn the tools of* their trade and waste dozens of minutes every day. Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit and, at the risk of sounding inflammatory, is the type of activity that creates "…

> Taking the time to master your tools is a COMPOUNDING benefit this is problematic, and the problem is made obvious when you take this fact to its natural conclusion. are you juggling credit cards to simultaneously maximize the benefits of opening new cards with promotional offers, limiting your interest rates, and maximizing your credit score? have you investigated the air quality of your working and living spaces?…

Thank you for this comment. I often have trouble articulating why I would rather not put any time into certain things, and this "limited bandwidth" argument is exactly the right one.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#268

Post by pmoriarty »

xemdetia wrote: post #197
debaserab2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the exact same way. It's interesting that you mention Rimworld - I dived into Rimworld when I first got it and came to appreciate the way little things add up in that game and make the simulation more interesting (be it positive or negative). The complicated UI is slowly unraveled and becomes intuitive as you learn the game because there are simple feedback mechanisms for actions that affect your colonists. Ev…

I feel like I didn't get the same satisfaction out of factorio until I turned the difficulty up enough to feel like the bugs were a threat so I could lose. Admittedly I turned it up too high to get that feeling and had to restart with a bit less difficulty. Then I had a reason to build walls/turrets/etc because I couldn't maintain safety without them and planning for mining expansions.

I highly recommend the Rampant mod. It makes the biters smarter (they'll seek out the weaknesses in your base defense), let them use pheromone trails and conduct pre-emptive raids on your base, and makes them tougher in general.

Depending on what you have to fight them with, the default settings of Rampant might be too difficult, in which case the mod has lots of options that'll let you dial that difficulty down. Also, you can get various other mods (like improved weapons, far reach, or tweaked evolution rates) to make fighting them easier.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#269

Post by Faark »

scotty79 wrote: post #231
Faark wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope I'm not even half the way to my deathbed and already regret how much time I spend on games (and the knock-on effects). It's not that playing games (incl Factorio) doesn't feel satisfying. But the time we have is pretty much the only finite thing in life and thus what we can do is limited. Spending time somewhat deliberate seems like a good idea. Again, that doesn't mean playing games is bad. It can be a great…

You regret it now when you have more than half of your life ahead of you. But when you have nearly all of it behind you do you think you'll still regret it? I don't think I will.

What do you think you will regret? Is it not something that could have been changed with more time? Or are you trying to imply you won't have any regrets... and wouldn't that make the question kind of meaningless?

As for me, that depends... I might end up a lonely bitter old man who constantly/wistfully mourns the wasted potential cause of all the whishes/goals I had but never worked on. Getting away from spending that much time on games should make this scenario less likely. Thus my attempt to get on a different path.

But yeah, your constraints of only thinking about past and present is kind of interesting. That can pretty easily lead into the meaning(-lessness) of life, but lets not open this can of worms for now.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#270

Post by Netcob »

I've played it for many hours, and the thing that still asthonishes me the most is how incredibly efficient the code must be. While I haven't played with that specific purpose in mind, I've never managed to create a factory big enough where you'd notice a slowdown in the simulation.

Thousands of grabbers, trains, drones, belts, factories, aliens, environmental effects, different sorts of networks, all with their own logic, and somehow this game simulates it all like it's nothing. And it never crashed on me. You can make amazingly intricate factories all you want, but the truly great piece of engineering will always be the code that runs it all.

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