Because this is video game crack!


Links:

• - Factorio Website
  - Factorio Steam page

You are on an alien planet and the goal is to get to space.
Getting to space means staying alive from the local aliens, crafting, and researching.
Researching requires such an immense amount of resources that you are going to have to scale way up...
Sure you can click your way to victory but that will take a life time, in order to succeed you are going to have to automate as much as possible and build factories!

The good:

• - This game has a demo? What year is it?
  - The best $20 you will ever spend.
  - Easily the most active developers I have ever experienced and they communicate with the community constantly. They have implemented soo many fan request it's insane.
  - Tons of modding. The game allows for in game Lua scripting as well as console commands.
  - The game is VERY well optimized. I play on my super old machine and there are a ton of in-game automation happening.

The bad:

• - It's currently in Steam Early Access
  - The developers are so active that changes might occur faster than you might like.

The verdict:

• Go play this game asap. It's 20 well deserved bucks and the cost to time played/fun ratio is through the roof.

I love Factorio. I do wish it was more singleplayer-friendly. I find the persistence of the bugs early on to be really frustrating. I spend more time doing damage-control than making progress. With two people, things are much more manageable.

So far I only played single player and enjoying it.

Does the game play change when you play with multiple people OR is it the same single player experience but with more people running around building stuff?

I have 160hrs in and the only bug I have come across was in an intricate blueprint where the direction of 1 belt piece wasn't going in the direction it should have been. Outside of that it's been perfect. I run a slow machine and all the automation runs smoothly.

What version do you remember playing? I'm @ v.15.4

Hahaha, other kind of bug. The aliens that attack your base are way too persistent early on, making the game a tedious exercise in juggling rather than a manufacturing/design game. I think they're a necessary component of the game, as it would be too easy and there'd be no pacing without them, but every map I've played on has them distributed far too densely at the start and then spreading far too rapidly from there. I end up spending probably 60% of my time killing hives and 40% actually working on my factories. Very broken gameplay balance, especially where you are (by design) not particularly adept at combat, even when well-equipped. Even with strong walls and lots of turrets, I still end up having to run around fighting fires when the bugs show up.
Basically, I think the bugs are too numerous, too tough, and too powerful. That, or the defenses are severely underpowered. Having to keep turrets supplied with ammo adds another layer of tedium; you either waste resources building ammo supply lines and factories, or you run around fighting fires. But in reality it ends up being both. I'd like the game to turn the bugs WAY down and treat them more as an impending threat that can ruin a poorly-planned factory than a constant nuisance no matter how prepared you are.

Multiplayer plays the same as singleplayer, but with more people running around, the early game (before automation and robots) has a much smoother progression curve. It also severely reduces the annoyance levels of the bugs, though, since one player can focus on constructing and reinforcing defenses as well as proactively killing hives while the other works on the actual factory. But even that feels tedious, as the game is Factorio, not Exterminatorio.

Still, I love the game. Definitely one of my favorites. I've sunk a lot of hours into it.

Ahh the biters...I agree.

In factorio the fun is building and coming up with awesome systems to make everything just work so any in-game system that distracts from that is definitely a hindrance. This goes for all games really. The bad news is now the bugs evolve and grow their territory over time. So even if at first things are fine, concentrate on the fun for too long and boom you got a problem.

The good news is that the game now has sliders for how fast they evolve, how dense they can become, if they attack on site or only when provoked, and whether the insects are even in the game at all. Also now they have laser turrets powered by electricity so no more ammo runs. Problem with laser turrets is too many go off with poorly designed power setup and you can shut everything down including the defenses.

Either way I hope they keep flushing this game out and release the complete game some time soon.

Huh. I wonder how I missed the sliders. I definitely need to take another look.

So some one made a raycasting engine in Factorio.

Insane skills right there...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lVAFcDX4eM

I remember playing StarCraft and Wacraft way back for the first time. Games can be too damn addictive sometimes. Gonna check this game tomorrow.