First I want to say thank you for the devs and for the community. As a pretty new player (and a software dev myself), it is nice to see how close everyone seems to be and the positive attitude everyone seems to share...
I came here from Satisfactory. While playing that game, I watched a couple YT vanilla megabase series by KoS and Tuplex. They really helped me understand how to play this game before I even purchased it.
One of the biggest attention grab to me was not just the factory building (I can get that in Satisfactory), but how the game is an RTS game at heart. You have to expand your base, have to deal with continuous waves of an external threats, you have to deal with resource entropy, you also have to go through the process of building and upgrading new tech. RTS games hold a special place in my heart as they are some of the first games that I started playing.
I am absolutely loving it.
As a new player, here were my expectations:
Freeplay is free play. This was my first introduction to the game through the YouTubers. It provides an open sandbox world with a virtually never-ending map, created just the way you want it. You are free to play the way you want. This reminds me of multiplayer maps or "skirmishes" in games like Command and Conquer or Age of Empires. The map and AI are totally customizable. Most players will exclusively play this mode...
The campaign, I thought, was going to be more of a mission based, long form tutorial-esque story mode, much like other RTS games (Think warcraft 3, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, Stronghold). You start out with simple mechanics and each level adds more mechanics while adding more to the story and increasing in difficulty.
After playing a couple missions in the .16 campaign and finishing the .17 campaign, here is my review:
I highly enjoyed the story telling in .16. When I got to the part where you start with a run down base that you have to repair and manage, I felt the the game did something right. This is when I upgraded to .17, so I didn't finish this. I'm planning on downgrading soon to go back through it.
I highly enjoyed the .17 crash start. It makes sense to give a new player some sort of jumping off point before showing them the whole picture. However, I don't know if I would call it, as a whole, "new player friendly"...
I went through the first couple of stages following the instructions. When the whole map opened up, I immediately felt overwhelmed. My science and labs were not in ideal locations, my ammo was on the wrong side of the base to where I couldn't get it around my other buildings and belts (as we are not given underground belts or splitters) and worse of all, I didn't have enough defenses in place for the biters, which seemed to get increasingly difficult out of nowhere..
I was left to either restart and get more prepared and better plan for the last wave, or continue and completely change my base around while micromanage the numerous turrets I needed... I went with the restart.
The second time around, it went much more smoothly. I had enough turrets in place before setting off the last attack, the ammo production was able to be looped around my base to feed the turrets, and I had enough room to expand the science. After "completing" the campaign, I continued to play it to explore the map and found, to my delight, a couple of goodies. That was quite fun.
Here are some of my suggestions:
- Give us different maps and locations after each 'mission' like in .16, don't just keep expanding the map. I've played my fair share of RTS/base building games, and although none have as much building potential as Factorio does, rebuilding the base from scratch in different locations/environments was part of the fun. It forced me to work around different environments and use the world to my advantage. It allowed me to rethink my base layout from the previous mission and improve it. It also allows for more expanse story telling. The name of the game is factory building, and a way to learn to do something well is through repetition. Personally, I have spent hours on single missions in other RTS games expanding my base and creating multiple bases that provided some end-mission/game advantage.
- If you really think players would not like having to rebuild their production and supply lines in every level, give us a campaign blueprint book. I am thinking that the only blueprints that are allowed in the campaign are the ones you create in the campaign, but perhaps that blueprint book can be saved/exported to be used in freeplay? This way, not only are you learning in the campaign, you are building designs that can be reused anywhere. Or perhaps, some missions have a starter base already set up for the player. This can be justified through the use of that robot-on-wheels character, or through the use of the story line like it was in .16
- Change the building menu to match the freeplay's menu. Having building listed under things like "logistics", "production", "combat", may help the player get familiar on what each building's intended function is.
- Slowly introduce the different biter units, and increase their difficulty through the stage level. Again, I have to go back to my experience with other RTS games I have played. The enemy evolves with you; when you get new tech, they get new tech.
- I suggest to pull inspiration and aspects of games like the original Stronghold (which has a hint of supply/production) when it comes to how the campaign should be laid out. I understand Factorio is different, and it should be, I am not suggesting to make a replica. Just, when I think of a campaign in an RTS, that style of campaign is what I expect.
Cheers!