Forum Overview :: Fuel

Factorio - Positive by Last 08/07/2014, 9:34am PDT The game is still in beta, so it's got some missing pieces but overall it's a lot of fun satisfying to play. It's pretty good but it strays DANGEROUSLY close to being work. It's aimed at people who enjoy min-maxing and optimizing processes. I'm not a stickler for min-maxing but it still feels pretty good to get a nice factory up and humming. You start as the only human on an alien planet populated by bear-sized angry locusts. The world is a free-roam top-down map with sprites for different resources. The map is dusty sand with some old forests. Picture Nevada or Australia I guess. You dig up the resources and craft all sorts of tech. Your initial goal is to find a way to protect yourself against roving bands of locusts (called 'biters') and once you've solved that problem I don't know what the goal is. You keep unlocking stuff in the tech tree though so I guess the goal is to build a bunch of stuff? I'm not sure if you eventually build a rocket to take you off-planet but that'd be sensible. The map is dotted with nests of giant cockroaches. They tend to mill about their nests and only attack if you come near. BUT, your factory gives off pollution, and that angers the cockroaches so they attack more the bigger you get. For defense you set up turrets and they do a pretty good job but you have to keep them stocked with ammo. Meanwhile you are setting up conveyor belts all over the motherfucking place up down and sideways, underground, this way that away. Belts to carry coal and ores to your base, shuffle them around to the different buildings, take away the output of the buildings, etc. This is where 99% of the game takes place - figuring out how to get stuff from building A to building B without mixing in with the shit from building C going to building F, except building G requires output from B,D and F so you have to split your conveyor to feed that factory, etc. There's missions and freeplay. I did the first couple of missions but then they got ass-blastingly tedious. The missions are good for explaining the first simple concepts of how to make a nice base, but the win conditions can be fucking unbearable. It's unfun when you are making 30 widgets a minute and the mission goal is to have 2500 widgets in your inventory AND 3000 widget components AND 5000 widget component components AND 7000 widget component component components AND 10000 smelted copper plates AND 12000 iron and copper ores. In your inventory, at the same time. uhgghghghghghghghghghhgggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......... I guess I'll leave the game on overnight, shall I? Because that's some mind-numbing motherfucking drudgery. You try to speed the process by making more widget factories but that drains your supply of components and component components and metals and ores, so it feels like you are kicking yourself in the nuts. For NOTHING, by the way. When the mission ends all that shit disappears and you start fresh somewhere else. So, can I just make like 100 widgets to prove I can and then advance to the next fucking mission already? (no) Freeplay is nice because you can gain access to every tech and it's not bugging you to fulfill a certain win condition. Just build what you want and shoot cockroaches. Notes: 1.) It's really easy to hem yourself in with conveyor belts early, making it nearly impossible to expand in the mid-game. My advice is, once you get guns or turrets then expand your conveyors way way way way beyond what you think is a reasonable footprint. You'll be shocked at how fast you fill the gaps and get hemmed in. 2.) The game demands you viciously aggressively rape the entire planet dry of resources. I am used to playing conservatively with resources in games, but in this game that means you die during mid-game. The only feasible method is to plunder the planet like a fucking maniac, right from the beginning, yank all that shit out of the ground ASAP. Open up the ass, walk in, leave snicker wrappers everywhere. Fuck your planet. Be Exxon, bitch. So if you play it, I recommend you start out with 50 coal extractors, 50 iron extractors, miles and miles of conveyor belts right off the bat. Because if you try to get by with a measly 20 extractors (ha!) or 8 (ha! ha! ha!) then a cockroach will bite you in fucking half. So, that stuff is neither good nor bad. It was just a learning curve I was not expecting. The GOOD thing is when you automate everything that used to be a pain in the ass. You start out mining coal with a pickaxe like a fucking idiot. So you put in a rudimentary extractor, meaning you only have to sit back and wait to pick up the coal it extracts. But, what are you, an asshole? Put a conveyor down so that the coal comes to YOU. Now you're cooking with gas! Pick up the coal from the belt and put it in your power plant to start making electricity. But on second thought fuck that noise. Put a robot arm at the end of the belt to automatically pick up the coal and put it in the power plant as needed! Now you can focus on extracting iron, etc. Eventually you're like "Um HELLO am I expected to replace the plutonium in my nuclear maglev cargo train BY HAND? What am I, a *slave*? Ha ha, no, I'll just make a robot to handle that menial shit." It feels nice to be sitting in the middle of the base sipping chamomile that your tea robot servant brings to your deck chair and meanwhile the perimeter of your base has a moat of exploded cockroach guts thanks to your iron curtain of nuclear gatling turrets going DAKKADAKKADAKKADAKKA non-stop and never running out of ammo thanks to your ingenious conveyor system. But the part that's less fun is when you have unintended consequences, like you are sending coal and copper ore down the same conveyor (so that the kilns can be automatically replenished with ore and coal to make copper plates) and then you put an arm in the wrong place and it puts steel beams on the same conveyor and now your kilns get all clogged up with steel beams that they can't use, which means you aren't making copper, so your robot factory stops producing ammo, which means you are no longer feeding your turrets, etc. Then your base collapses while you try to gum down the works. Another downside is that the game doesn't really explain what the buildings do before you build them. I build a chemical plant only to find out that I need to build four other buildings in order for it to work, and then it produces sulfur for me. To use in what?? The game doesn't explain, you have to use the wiki. Another downside is that sometimes a robot will stop doing what you expect it to do, and it's unclear why. You can usually figure it out but there's no symbols or alarms to inform you what went wrong. I mean, that's KINDA fun, but it borders on actual troubleshooting work for no pay. In conclusion, I've spent the past week playing this for at least two hours a day. It's fun to build yourself up from zero, and the rough spots will almost certainly get ironed out before it's fully released. Easily worth the $15. Positive! Here's a video of a recent build of the game with the newest sprites, so you can see what it plays like.

Factorio - Positive by Last 08/07/2014, 9:34am PDT