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What is interesting about Factorio

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Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#271

Post by TeMPOraL »

sdegutis wrote: post #234
TeMPOraL wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's find a way to reduce or eliminate the need for personal hygiene while we're at it. Definitely. It's another maintenance time waster, another upkeep you have to pay. What's worse, only a fraction of it is needed for survival, the rest is just an elaborate social signalling game with almost unbounded costs in time and money. > We could theoretically still have sex virtually, too. Only if it offers improvement o…

This philosophy would eventually do away with art and music.

Why? Art and music is something you do because you want to, not because you have to.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#272

Post by pmoriarty »

notthemessiah wrote: post #182

One thing notable about Factorio's game mechanics is that crafting is idempotent: the tech tree is a directed acyclic graph. If one is looking for a different experience in which one thinks about closing manufacturing loops, I would recommend Oxygen Not Included, where you have to sustain life amidst an asteroid colony.

I tried Oxygen Not Included, after watching some Let's Plays of it that seemed interesting. However, once I actually played it I found it to be really boring compared to Factorio. Unfortunately, I didn't keep track of the time so played for more than 2 hours and so couldn't get a refund from Steam, otherwise I would have refunded it. Haven't touched it since.

By contrast, I've played hundreds and hundreds of hours of Factorio, which I just can't get enough of, especially with mods, which increase the scope and possibilities of the game tremendously.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#273

Post by klmadfejno »

_jal wrote: post #237
klmadfejno wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads pointlessly pedantic to me. You're throwing out examples of things that might actually be important, but most people probably don't think is that important. This is very different from things which people know are important and do frequently, but don't care to learn how to do it properly. Plenty of people choose not to learn their tools, and would not choose to do so even if time were unconstrained. The in…

But that is precisely the point. You're complaining that people don't meet some arbitrary level of expertise in their tooling, which is your personal metric. Not everyone shares your concerns. They may well be concentrating on posture, because _that is a very important thing to concentrate on_ if one has certain issues. Or they may just not consider their job taking them 5 more minutes to perform to be a problem, and…

That is a separate point. The point I was saying was not relevant was "no matter how smart you are, youve got finite bandwidth and a finite time to spend it." This implies that people are not improving on things because of finite capacity to do so, which is sometimes true, but really just an edge case.

You're saying people don't need to care about X, which is true. However, if you choose to spend 10 hours building a pile of blocks, every day, rather than spending 10 minutes learning how to turn on the BLOCKMASTER 9000, you're just being obstinate. Hyperbole and arguments to your personal choice of block building aesthetic aside, there's a large class of problem for which the effort required to both improve one's capabilities and execute the task is much lower than the effort require to execute the task to begin. No matter how much you care about your kids, and how little you care about building blocks, if you must build that tower, it is beneficial to learn how to use the BLOCKMASTER 9000.

Pursuing the latest and greatest tooling mastery for incremental gains usually doesn't fall into this category. You don't need to pursue improvement endlessly. But say, people who refuse to learn how to use a debugger, but spend a great deal of time debugging? People who only share code over email while the team tells them to use git? People who only use global variables in painfully uncomfortable circumstances? If you're coming to work and refuse to invest in such things... it's fully plausible that you are a 0x or -1x programmer. Same for almost any other domain of work.

You don't need to care about anything. The reason you improve is because you want to be better. If you don't want to be better, and are currently bad, there's at least going to be a large social reason why you may want to change.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#274

Post by pmoriarty »

7777fps wrote: post #225
beesbuzz wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing notable about Factorio's game mechanics is that crafting is idempotent What do you mean by this? You craft a thing once, you have one thing. You craft it again, you now have two things. That doesn't sound idempotent to me.

I think idempotent wasn't a good word but I think the idea being described is that crafting is acyclic. For example Copper Wire + Iron = Green Circuit. There's no recipe chain that takes in Green Circuits and produces either Iron or Copper Wire. So once produced, you need to find a higher function for your products. You can't 'unmake' through a cyclic recipe. Contrast that to ONI's water cycle, where clean water gets…

"There's no recipe chain that takes in Green Circuits and produces either Iron or Copper Wire. So once produced, you need to find a higher function for your products. You can't 'unmake' through a cyclic recipe."

There are Factorio mods that will give you access to recycling machines that will let you get back the ingredients that went in to making whatever it is that you put in to them.

So Factorio's recipes can be fully cyclic, if you want.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#275

Post by Filligree »

Netcob wrote: post #270

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…

The developers frequently blog about how they're doing it, often going into immense detail.

Without spoiling too much, I have no qualms about calling them some of the best in the industry. The entire industry, that is, not just in games.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#276

Post by klmadfejno »

diegoperini wrote: post #188
waynesonfire wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least on the initial play through, i think that would ruin the game for me. i personally would prefer to discover the patterns on my own, or at least to the best of my ability. it's tempting, but i've become aware that reaching for the strategy guide tends to be a huge spoiler. I picked up Pillars of Eternity a while back and couldn't get past the character creation screen without looking up strategies for charact…

It's really hard to play a hardcore CRPG[0] like PoE if you haven't been playing some similar games lately. PoE gives you everything the moment you launch the game, then leaves you alone. This is intentional and really fun if you already have the muscle memory for theorycrafting[1]. I find RPGs which let you rebuild your characters in the middle of the game very approachable. They are good gateway drugs to get some f…

Divinity 2 is a really interesting one. The beginning of the game is utterly terrible when you're just starting out. Almost all of the battles are out of your league, there's very limited opportunity to get stronger, and if you're not interested in stealing the most basic scraps of equipment, it's hard to get anywhere in the game if you're not familiar enough with the battle mechanics.

Great game, but probably one of the most unreasonably difficult starts of any I've seen (relative to what seems to be the intended level of difficulty in the game). I nearly dropped it because I couldn't find the few stupid crocodiles that were killable after hours of walking around getting thwomped by everyone. Which was really annoying because the characters have strong personalities, so they say shit like along the lines of "let's go kill them all" and then be pathetically underpowered.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#277

Post by Faark »

slothtrop wrote: post #203
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…

I believe difficulty can be adjusted right? If you're not much for unforeseen attacks.

Not sure it would be fun for me with something like a peaceful-mode.

Combat is a useful "problem" to solve/prepare for. But having understood those are just randomly selected, totally interchangeable events (that btw, actually change after reloading a save) made them feel arbitrary to me.

Added to this, the difficulty of those events is fully determined by some arbitrary "value" of all the stuff in your settlement combined together. Build a big wall around the settlement? Value just went up. But not if those were natural mountains. Thus to beat the game, you want an effective defense while keeping that arbitrary value low. And this just kind of killed the immersion for me.

Thing is, I also don't see a good way to avoid such value driven systems when designing a survival-game that is supposed to keep being challenging. There is little risk of "game over" in Factorio or Oxygen Not Included once you got past the initial challenge and it becomes more of a SimCity than survival. Civ becomes a chore. Games like Don't Starve have a high skill floor and the restarts made me loose interest just about when I had learned enough to get through winter. "Go to harder area"-games just incentivize not taking risks. Time-based difficulty is an OK compromise at best...

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#278

Post by Filligree »

pmoriarty wrote: post #249
tryptophan wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont mean like a literal loop, but gameplay loops that you cant automate. This includes things like plopping down yet another mining base, plopping down yet more production, etc... You can make blueprints for all theses things, but you can't automate the blueprint placing. Sometimes you need to reconfigure circuit stuff for special train stops, so they get the right products, and as far as I know this can't be done…

"You can make blueprints for all theses things, but you can't automate the blueprint placing" You can, actually. Check out the "recursive blueprints" mod.

And yes, someone made an automatically self-expanding base using said mod. It's impressive.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#279

Post by pmoriarty »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #168
013a wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satisfactory is interesting in its own way. It'd be easy to initially think that its the better/easier game to get into for someone who hasn't played a game like this before, but I'd argue the opposite. The three-dimensionality introduces logistical insanity that is startlingly difficult to wrangle, and the first person viewpoint makes planning the factory floor very difficult. The terrain is also a constant challeng…

> " The three-dimensionality introduces logistical insanity that is startlingly difficult to wrangle, and the first person viewpoint makes planning the factory floor very difficult. " As a former player of the Tekkit mod for Minecraft, the three-dimensionality is what I miss. As good as it is, Factorio is so disappointingly planar , despite the tools they give you to manage belt intersection and materiel transfer.

"the three-dimensionality is what I miss. As good as it is, Factorio is so disappointingly planar"

For me it's exactly the opposite. I very, very rarely enjoy a 3D game. Factorio's 2D world is a huge plus for me.

I'm definitely an outlier in this opinion, but for me the games industry took a seriously wrong turn in its embrace of 3D games, and I really appreciate it when I can find a solid 2D game like Factorio.

Re: What is interesting about Factorio

#280

Post by sdegutis »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #271
sdegutis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This philosophy would eventually do away with art and music.

Why? Art and music is something you do because you want to, not because you have to.

In your philosophy, music and art do not serve a necessary function, and eventually, even liking things will be made "more efficient" by using chemicals via pills to adjust the brain chemicals until the liking is added or the desire for liking is removed.
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