[dragontamer]

Meta doesn't mean metagame.

"The Meta" is how most other people play. The "standard" set of designs that experienced players have all discovered (and rediscovered) as you play the game. Ya know, 3-wire assembly machines feed into 2-green circuits kinda things.

There's patterns of play between players. We all got our own style, but some designs are universally deployed across all experienced players, because those designs are just so good.

[leetbulb]

You've just described what "metagame" is; "meta" means metagame.

[dragontamer]

There's no "metagame" in Factorio because its not a PvP game.

The "metagame" in Magic the Gathering or Starcraft revolves around the game before the game is played. For example, if I see that my opponent in Starcraft is a Terrain player (and I'm a Zerg player), I can study their games and see that they prefer to open 8-rax 3 marines very early harassments.

I then decide to practice 9-pool / 6-ling and make sure I'm good at that before the game even starts, so that I'm well practiced against what they like to do. That's the "metagame", decisions you make before the game even starts.

Or in MTG, its knowing how good Rakdos decks are (or whatever is popular today) and finding counter-cards. You play the game before you even start the game, because you have to prepare your deck.

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So there's no real "metagame" in Factorio. There is a "meta" however. (IE: what most players tend to do).

[leetbulb]

The game being PvP is not relevant. PvP games have a goal, beat the other player(s) or team(s). Factorio has a goal, launch as many rockets as you can. Not to mention, within the community or your own imagination there are an infinite amount of niche game styles encompassing goals of their own. For example: speed runs, smallest footprint, highest efficiency, most advanced automation, most chaotic pipes, CPU design, actual PvP mode (yes it does have PvP, but in the spirit of my argument I'll ignore this)...the list goes on and on, and permutations of all of the above.

Regardless of the goal you choose, you're competing, expanding knowledge, and defining standards with yourself and/or the community in some way, be it by playing co-op mode or sharing your results / optimizations / innovations on forums. Similar to PvP games, reaching that goal requires extremely nuanced strategic planning and making tactical decisions, even before starting the game, drawing from personal and/or community experience, understanding and adapting to game patches that may affect strategies, etc.

Regarding "meta" vs "metagame," I still assert the former is simply shorthand for the latter.

[Qwertious]

I'm gonna disagree with you - accepting your definitions, Factorio has both a meta and a metagame. Because co-op can have a metagame, except instead of needing to know what your opponent will do in order to best hinder them, you need to know what your friend will do in order to best help them.

Point in case: try joining a deathworld server (with experienced players), and then spamming burner miners. Once you're immediately kicked, please ponder your statement that "there's no real 'metagame'".

[BlueTemplar]

That's still game, not metagame : burner miners are bad because polluting, that's just game knowledge, you would have trouble if you tried to do that yourself in your own Death World game.

But great point, co-op might require modifying your tactics to better work with teammates - in case of Factorio I know that you have to be WAY more careful to not make spaghetti in MP, which might also depend on the familiarity between the players - so I would say that you can potentially have a metagame as soon as you have MP, even without PvP.

But now that I think of it, you can potentially have a metagame even when playing against AI. It's just that it needs to be advanced enough to be able to play rock/paper/scissors and remember previous games against you. AFAIK these games exist, but because it's much less effort and better reward to support basic AI + MP, they tend to be vanishingly rare, especially for more complex games.