[m0ngr31]

I've seen this said literally hundreds of times and can only imagine that these comments are hyperbole now.

I've given Factorio dozens of shots now, and have played for hours and hours with people who are great at the game, but it just isn't for me. I get bored in the monotony of the early game, and I'm too stupid to keep things going in the mid game.

[Jakobeha]

When I first picked up Factorio I loved it for about ~12 hours. Then I just felt, everything is too hard and there isn't a sense of purpose.

For me, I think it would me a fun game if there was more strategy or something else to do besides build the factory. It seems to me the progression system is actually really linear.

> I get bored in the monotony of the early game, and I'm too stupid to keep things going in the mid game.

This is my other big issue. I don't like putting in much effort when playing video games. It seems like just getting blue science takes hours of work, and those hours were fun for the first factory, but now it's just repetitive.

[kzrdude]

The invading bugs sort of are the purpose, to defend against those. But I find it tedious, so I like to turn them off, and then yes, the game is even more noticeably lacking purpose.

I think though that making train networks is my big pleasure with the game. Very satisfying.

[js8]

My recipe to monotony of early game was to design a really small starter base (~20 red/green/black/blue science per minute) with the explicit target to produce construction bots. With bots, things become easier.

That being said, I understand the sentiment. I have been playing lots of modded Minecraft and Factorio over the past decade, and lately I felt a bit of guilt because I feel I could be working on some other, more meaningful, project.

[scrollaway]

I don't think there's a statement in there about enjoying the game, just the shared skillset and mindset. :)

[m0ngr31]

Maybe that's why I don't enjoy it... Feels like I could be getting work done on any of my side projects when I play. Don't have that same feeling when I'm playing other games.

That being said, I do enjoy it at LAN parties because I just build walls and hunt biter nests

[scubbo]

The comment that really made it click for me is that there are two diametrically opposed responses for engineers playing Factorio:

* "This game is scratching the same itches as my day job, but with more dopamine and less bureaucracy - how can I play this all the time?" * "This game requires me to expend the same brain-effort as my work/side-projects, but I don't even get anything tangible out of it? Why would I ever 'play' this?"

Neither of them are wrong - and I suspect that the same person might even have different reactions at different points in their life.

[imiric]

I'm square in the second group. Factorio is fun for a while, but after somewhere around mid-game you realize that it's much more frustrating and less enjoyable than actual programming.

I can't easily "refactor" parts of my factory without fearing it will break some pipeline that depends on the changes. I wish there was a way to "write" "tests" or do mass changes safely. Blueprints and robots help automate things, but it's not that flexible.

I wish I could use a "debugger" and step through the execution and play with changes to see how it affects the factory.

And then I finally get to the conclusion that this would all be easier from a text editor using proper programming tools, and more enjoyable to work on a real project that could have tangible benefits (and then never finish that either...).

[vbezhenar]

Most of my games ending when I realized that I have to rebuild half of my base because of some thing and I don't want to spend so much time with inactive base. And my internal perfectionist can't live forever with quickly-hacked sub-par solutions.

Robots at least make it somewhat bearable.

[scubbo]

I absolutely understand where you're coming from. The closest thing I found to "tests" was that you could hook up alarm klaxons to belts/containers that would alert you when a certain resource was below a given level - but that's very much a in-production canary of "tell me when things are going wrong", not a mid-development "tell me how this change will end up looking".