maybe this means im not a real engineer but the game became tedious for me after a while, and i was too lazy to set up the really intricate contraptions
I'm also too lazy to set up really intricate contraptions so I just grab other people's blueprints and I glue everything together. That's basically what I do at my day job and my title has "engineer" in it so I'm just going to keep on pretending.
I think the thing that really made factorio fun for me was deciding early on to NOT look at anyone else's designs online. Having the "correct" or "most efficient" answers handed to you removes the design part of the game and turns your base into a carbon copy of everyone else's base. I spent days figuring out how to make loops with train signals that would allow a train to spin endlessly in a circle at full-speed waiting for the path to become clear. I could have just looked up how to do that, but then I'd get no sense of accomplishment.
Exactly this. I use other people’s blueprints for balancers because I find those complicated and not particularly interesting, but for everything else I’ve deliberately avoided looking at other designs. Creating something mediocre and inefficient and then inventing better ways to do it is half the fun.
I also highly recommend playing with a non-engineer friend. It’s an interesting way to watch someone gradually develop an intuition for abstractions and service-oriented design.
One of the Factorio devs (kovarax?) has a blog post about regretting the introduction of copy-pasteable blueprints. I feel like balancers are where the devs become complicit in that cycle. They could have 3+ lane balancers as single structures in the base game, but by sticking with only two, they're forcing people to build their own higher order balancers. Few people have the interest or ability to design a 7-to-5 balancer, so we blindly copy designs - and build a habit of getting our designs online.
I submit that with more useable balancers, importable blueprints never would have made it into the base game.
Very few designs are actually that difficult to reproduce. The important thing is knowing the ratios of resources/buildings that need to be made to stay efficient. You can pretty easily calculate that by hand (but why would you) but there are tools online where you can do that.
Ya same. Though it’s not that I was lazy but it felt like work where I’m like “wait I have a side project in the real world that’s just as much work and just as much fun” then I never got back to the game.
i felt the exact same way. why work on a fake factory in a video game that no one will care about, when i can work on an actual thing in the real world?
it was fun for like 4-5 hours (I think I got to solar panels? or nuclear power plants? i forgot) but once that simple fact began to sink in, i was never able to pick it up again.
maybe its different if you're playing with other people
Were you aware that you can just copy/paste parts of your factory and have robots automatically build where you pasted? The blueprint system takes all the tedium out of the game.
Once I have to “refactor” my base the fun was gone for me. I like building stuff, but going back and doing janitor work is not fun for me.
Currently, you build a base from the very lowest tech all the way up to the highest tech in a single go. What would possibly make the game less tedious for me is if a single play through was split up into different levels with mini objectives. Once you complete the level mini objective you move on to a different map and start a new base at a higher tech level. That way you can just throw away all of the “tech debt” of the old base while starting at a higher tech level.
I imagine this would be a different game mode, but it would make the game more attractive to a wider audience in my opinion.
For experienced players of factory or strategy games, Mindustry starts out really easy. You can just build a wall at a choke point near the enemy spawn, stack up turrets, and go about your business.
At higher levels, it gets more challenging and complicated. You need to produce power and coolant, and you need to use a mix of defenses. And you also need to defend vulnerable sectors against counter-attacks, and build offensive units to attack enemy sectors. And it has a cute little system for programming units in "assembly", although the documentation is almost non-existent.
So even if it seems weirdly easy at first, it might be worth playing at least the first few campaign levels. Overall, I'd say it's my favorite mobile factory game, just edging out Refactory.
> Once I have to “refactor” my base the fun was gone for me. I like building stuff, but going back and doing janitor work is not fun for me.
That's entirely a chore you have decided to do.
It is entirely fine to just leave your spaghetti base producing stuff in its little corner while you go build the next step somewhere else.
I've did that few times, basically leave the old base to act as "mall" (just produce building to furnish the new base) while I build bigger and better, once I hit construction robots and can freely blueprint everything.
Hell, once you get to robots you can "just" erase it entirely easily if it displeases you, blueprints make it easy to change your mind.
> What would possibly make the game less tedious for me is if a single play through was split up into different levels with mini objectives. Once you complete the level mini objective you move on to a different map and start a new base at a higher tech level. That way you can just throw away all of the “tech debt” of the old base while starting at a higher tech level.
Not exactly that but look up at Warptorio 2 mod. You basically have limited sized base that teleports every XX minutes to a new planet, so you carry a small base with you but have to rebuild every warp. It is pretty hectic on default settings tho
> That way you can just throw away all of the “tech debt” of the old base while starting at a higher tech level.
The classic way to do this is to load up a train full of supplies and drive somewhere further from the start, with more enemies and better ore patches. Or if you don't have trains yet, take the car.
You really don't need too many intricate contraptions. Your groundwork needs to be reasonably solid (mining, smelting, green electrical), but the later stuff can be done more quickly with botches and tech-debt instead of intricate setups. Insisting on a beautifully laid-out factory that looks good is a surefire way to make your playthrough take ten times as long.
Figuring out which parts are worth refactoring into better solutions as demand increases is also quite fun imho.
You can add a lot of variety and interest through Factorio's mods (there are hundreds of them).... however, eventually even that may not enough to stave off boredom because ultimately Factorio is just one game.
Still, I encourage everyone to try some of the mods. I'd personally never play unmodded Factorio after my first playthrough. They make this great game so much better.
That's the point where it gets tedious for me. At some point it's just painting with MS paint. I have drones that can build anything i draw, i have supply lines for the resources to build those things, I've launched the rocket already, even the turrets and walls are auto repaired/replaced and the bugs are irrelevant.
It was fun to get there and i always had some goals to acheive. But at some point it's done and dusted with 0 replay-ability.
I will never understand the mindset of those that build Megabases.
An endless megafactory is just placing blueprints someone already created for 'optimal X' from online. I could come up with my own but it's not motivating when there's already better out there and it's not motivating to play 'MS paint bucket fill' endlessly.
I launched the rocket. Went "that was fun" and now cannot be bothered to go back.
Me too, and yet I feel immense satisfaction from building out terraform deployments. I think that might be part of it -- a TF deployment is actually doing something so the payoff feels huge. Making a counter go up in a video game just doesn't compare...
Interestingly enough I did sink a ton of hours into Rimworld, though, which has some factory like parts but more of a human simulation element to it.
that's just imposter syndrome talking. different people find different things fun, and as long as you're capable of planning and building an efficient factory, the fact that you don't find this fun means it's just not your thing. doesn't make you any less of a real engineer. I'm sure there's some nerdy thing that you like that I don't care for.