Have Some Questions Before I Buy.

[Ranger_Aurelien]

You don't need Steam at all, it will only slow you down when you will want to run one Factorio folder per game !
(and maybe multiple Factorios in parallel, it can sometimes be helpful for comparing stuff...)
https://factorio.com/buy

Ah, but Factorio is so awesome if you bought on steam KUBE will give you a non-steam version free, and vice versa!

[BlueTemplar]

WUBE is awusomeness KUBED !
(That's why it's better to buy on their wubesite, they get a bigger share !)

[Shinsuke]

hi im thinking of buying and i was wondering how much "action" is there in this game.
i love the logistic part but what i love more is having both a logisic part and a real part in defending/attacking.
am i just a lil human being that must stay behind walls and shoot an auto aimed weapon? or is there a buildable mech or vehicle i can use?
and if there isnt now, is it planned?
or maybe is there a mod for it?
id take everything , the whole logistic/action combo is hella rare and im STARVING for it.
im downloading the demo as i write this post.
thank you in advance for any answer to my whimsical question.
cheers <3

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into "Questions before I buy" topic.

[PanTobi]

Shinsuke

Click

hi im thinking of buying and i was wondering how much "action" is there in this game.
i love the logistic part but what i love more is having both a logisic part and a real part in defending/attacking.
am i just a lil human being that must stay behind walls and shoot an auto aimed weapon? or is there a buildable mech or vehicle i can use?
and if there isnt now, is it planned?
or maybe is there a mod for it?
id take everything , the whole logistic/action combo is hella rare and im STARVING for it.
im downloading the demo as i write this post.
thank you in advance for any answer to my whimsical question.
cheers <3

Vanilla Factorio -> Boring, no Action Fights
in my opinion biters are pretty usless, they are stupid as fuck and only difficult to kill them is that fking big amount of HP and DMG...

But Factorio also have -=THE MODS=- You can download for free and play ...
Half of them should be already added to Vanilla Game, cause they are too good and Factorio Style

example: -> Helicopters

If You are looking for "Vechicle" / "Mech" Fights

1) Download Vechicle Grid
2) Download Vechicle Mods ( there is few rly cool vechicles )
3) Waste around 30 hours to build Your Dream Vechicle and lost it on first enemy ...

You can also download "Avatars Mod" and "Power Armor MK3" + "Power Armor MK4"
so you can build "Mechs", You can use them to anything you want


But if You are looking for some kind of "Epic Looking Big Mech" or "Super Powerful Gigantic Flying Machine" etc.
there is no stuff like this, even if you download Mods they are very simple


also to have fun from Mech / Vechicle Fights first You have to build them, and Power Armors and Equipment is End Game stuff

if You want You can try everything on my server, its oldest anarchy server in Factorio xD
once You join Factorio will download every single Mod You need and You can try them on our Biters and Our Map ...


You can also just download Creative Mod and try everything on your own biters and your own save ...


Here You can see best Vechicle Mods:

Helicopters:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Helicopters
Insane Powerful flying machine, with Vechicle Grid Mod can be used to fish and cut trees

Aircraft:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Aircraft
In my opinion bad mod, Vechicles are not balanced and look pretty ugly !...

Hovercraft:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Hovercraft
Great Mod, and Great graphics, Hovercraft may seems weak but its first Vechicle you can use ON WATER :O !...

AAI Vechicles group
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-vehicles-miner
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-vehicles-hauler
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-vehicles-warden
Those above are probably useless for You, im not using them too

Those below are probably usefull for You, great bettle tanks, im using them for my "Wars" on server ...
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-vehicles-laser-tank
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-vehic ... me-tumbler
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-vehicles-flame-tank

[Stormrage]

I want to get this game and I've read that if you purchase from the website you also get a free steam key which must mean that regardless of where you purchase Steam gets a cut. Am I correct in assuming this? If so then what about Humble Bundle and GOG, are they more profitable for the developer? I'm asking because I really appreciate the developer's work and want them to earn as many profits as possible from my purchases.

[BlueTemplar]

a free steam key which must mean that regardless of where you purchase Steam gets a cut. Am I correct in assuming this?

No - Steam does NOT get a cut in these situations.

You'll have to check what kind of cut Humble and GoG take - note that the Humble Widget cut (which, I assume takes the least ?) might be different from Humble Bundle.

[ondrii]

I want to get this game and I've read that if you purchase from the website you also get a free steam key which must mean that regardless of where you purchase Steam gets a cut. Am I correct in assuming this? If so then what about Humble Bundle and GOG, are they more profitable for the developer? I'm asking because I really appreciate the developer's work and want them to earn as many profits as possible from my purchases.

Devs recommends to buy through Humble Bundle - I guess they say so because they have best return from there.

[nelske]

Game looks pretty cool, as I'm into these type of games. I was wondering if you guys know if there will be any type of steam sales because I've done research and haven't seen any history of a sale on the game.

[Loewchen]

Game looks pretty cool, as I'm into these type of games. I was wondering if you guys know if there will be any type of steam sales because I've done research and haven't seen any history of a sale on the game.

No, see: https://www.factorio.com/faq.

[jacozilla]

Read great reviews on steam and really like survival - base building games, so downloaded demo before buying - I had already decided to buy but thought might as well do the free demo first. Now that I've barely gotten past 4th mission, I've reversed the buy decision and came here to ask my title question.

Does actual live game get easier or are these tutorials disproportionately hard for new players? Or perhaps instead of speaking for others, let's just same for me only. So far I found the demo missions immensely difficult, frustrating to learn some processes, and feeling drained of fun rather than elation at 'winning' the mission.

TLDR with details below - by ~4th tutorial mission was starting to dread playing more of the game. While it continues to intrigue me, and I do enjoy building things, some combo of the tutorial difficulty and my lack of knowledge had me feeling like it was more frustration than fun to play, especially certain vague in key areas (e.g. tutorial led me to believe I needed to make a steel furnace to smelt steel and took forever to finally figure out I could do it in stone furnace. Made the mistake of pausing game and looking up wiki article and it showed progression of stone, steel and electric furnace and was stuck with no way to make steel furnace despite researching the techs the googled articles I read said I needed.)

Not sure how many tutorial missions there are, but while 1st mission started out great - fun and learning at same time, went downhill from there rather steeply. Tbh - I enjoy sims at the most difficult settings normally like deity play with Civ, etc but Factorio tutorials ironically had the effect of reversing my almost 100% certain to buy decision and just play the demo first, to now putting that buy on hold.

The 4th tutorial mission was particularly hard and frustrating - the one where you build up quite a lot of resources while learning how to research things for first time with final goal to build car, pack it with lots of resources and take off. After many attempts at redoing this mission, finally succeeded but by then all the fun had been drained out of me and I just wanted the mission to be over. That's not in my .02 cents how a tutorial should try and sell a prospective buyer to the game.

Key areas I was frustrated and led to vague paths with -

1. First wave of biters came so fast, still only had my pistol and hadn't built submachine gun yet. Even after getting submachine gun, getting to point of having walls with turrets behind them to optimally hold off the north and north west attack fronts was pretty difficult while trying to learn how to build stone walls in the first place, much less automate the stone pile --> stone furnace --> inserter to stone brick making process.

Imo, a tutorial ought to be about how to learn to build stone into bricks into walls, not race to stay alive with the margin between death and survival sometimes just shaving a few seconds off in the first mad start to rush building turrets and walls.

2. Mentioned the steel furnace thing above but this almost had me quit and not even bother coming here to post. Every wiki and googled thread I read said I had researched the correct techs, but seems like tutorial is hard coded to only allow stone furnace. But I didn't know that for quite some while and kept getting stuck trying to find some way to make steel in order to progress down the parts list for the car.

3. Even the very first step of the research tutorial which said to "research labs" was astoundingly confusing. Kept looking for some building to research instead of eventually trial and error into the red/green bottles of science things.

4. This mission in particular seemed to gloss over the important step if teaching how to use automation machines to automate things. Prior tutorial missions taught the stone --> stone furnace -> inserter to pick item up automatically out of furnace and deposit it somewhere like a box or belt line. But I was stuck for awhile figuring out how to setup a proper assembly to use the automation machines. This was a tutorial but it completely skipped over how to make those automation machine assemblies and just told you to go do it instead of show how to do it. If this was a campaign mission after the tutorial, would be fine, but maybe the devs shouldn't label it a tutorial if there is no actual teaching involved.

Ended up manually making circuit boards and inserters to manually deposit into automation machines rather than figure out how to rewire the existing belt lines into a sort of working production line. If I had built the base from scratch, maybe would have been easier but with the existing lines for copper, sprockets, etc already in place, it was more frustratingl to try and redo it all while trying to survive the still coming biter waves than just do it manually.

Won't go on and on with this list but basically mission 1 was fun and easy, #2 was sort of harder to understand but trial and errored through it, by #3 I was feeling put off the game, and by this 4th tutorial, despite finally succeeding and driving off in my finally assembled by manual process car and stocked up to drive off, it felt more like losing than winning.

Anyway, I'll watch a few more let's plays on youtube, already watched a few from KoS and looked really fun on video, but like I said, from playing the demo tutorials, all the fun went away fast.

[DerGraue]

Does actual live game get easier or are these tutorials disproportionately hard for new players?

You can setup the difficulty of the normal game to any difficulty you like. That includes biters (enable, disable, increase, reduce), amount of available resources, obstacles (water, cliffs, trees) and some other things. The tutorial is not the strength of factorio, the freeplay is.

It will get more complex though, you can't expect to build a rocket with just an iron plate and a brick.

I would advice to not watch any more videos and just play the game until you launch your first rocket, that way you figure out stuff on your own and you will appreciate the new ways of doing things throughout the game. Just remember to read the tooltips, scale up your factory and just rebuild stuff if something does not work out.

[Koub]

I'll be honest : I had several hundreds of hours of playing Factorio when I tried the tutorial in the demo, so I can't really imagine what it is to discover the game with it. I bought the game after seeing a few let's plays, and directly dived into freeplay. Only way later, i had the idea to try the tutorial and puzzle missions the game comes with, so I didn't learn anything, but it was fun to try.

I would say that once you have grasped the main mechanics the game is immensely fun (easy to learn, hard to master kind of fun), but I'm totally biased, as most of us here probably.

Anyway, your feedback on the tutorial is interesting, I'm sure it will be useful to the devs if they want to give this part of the game a second shot.

[Serenity]

1. First wave of biters came so fast, still only had my pistol and hadn't built submachine gun yet.

Completely normal even in the regular game. The first biters are generally very weak and few. Unless this was some scripted larger wave. The pistol is bad, but you can defeat a handful of small biters with it. Technically you can hit biters with your axe to

Otherwise the game tells you exactly what what you need to produce something you hover over the item:

Steel.jpg (10.11 KiB) Viewed 7957 times

I agree that once you understood the basic principles of the game it's not going to be an issue anymore and you can focus on larger scale problems. I think I watched YouTube videos before getting the game and had no problem getting things done right away

[jacozilla]

Well for what it's worth to devs taking feedback, I'll certainly keep game on steam wishlist and check back, but not buying atm purely due to how the demo tutorial seems to make the game so hard and vague in some areas.

Youtube intros like Katherine of Sky's videos made Factorio seem super fun and confirmed my buy decision. The demo tutorials 100% reversed that decision.

If I had more free time I might pick it up as a risk worth it for $30, pretty fair price given all the positive feedback (my personal opinion doesn't change that I accept a great many do indeed love the game as-is).

But with so many competitor games available, will just check back later and see if the impression given by demo tutorial gets any better.

[Aliquid Novi]

I had a very similar experience, I was very intrigued by the game, downloaded the demo and was totally put off by the biters. They kept interfering as I was trying to work out what to do. It was not until I learnt from KoS that biters could be turned off that I bought the game. Now I have several thousand hours and am playing with Pyanodon's mods at the moment.
I love to take the time to admire the factory as it grows, watch the belts and inserters moving, check on bottlenecks and so on, so my factories grow much slower than most peoples.
This game is far and away the best value in a video game, and the devs are the best in the world. Their support and encouragement of mods is absolutely outstanding. Anything they do in the future will be bought immediately by me, no matter the price.
Thank you devs and mod makers.

[Impatient]

@jacozilla: If you are only put off by the difficulty of the "tutorial", then I recommend to you to get the game. You will be pleased. Factorios main game mode is the Freeplay in both single and multiplayer. And you can customize the Freeplay to your liking (eg. play without biters). That way you can explore the game at the pace and difficulty you like.

I personally never play campaigns or tutorials. I just don't like them. I don't like to be forced into someone else's thought structure. Also I don't like being limited. ( I also was conditioned in the times of commodore 64 and Amiga, when there were a lot of copied games but no manuals and no internet to look something up. So figuring out a game on my own always has been part of the challenge. I kept that attitude - at the risk to miss something important though.)
So I never had the unpleasant experience, like the one you describe. I learned the basics in Freeplay and a lot more in multiplayer. I want to stress multiplayer, because seeing what other/experienced players do, is the biggest and most powerful resource for learning the game imo. once I started to play mp I was awed by what I saw and I spent hours of just studying designs and asking about and discussing the ideas behind them.

[5thHorseman]

Now that I've barely gotten past 4th mission, I've reversed the buy decision and came here to ask my title question.

I had a similar experience about 4 years ago. I started what I thought was the default game, and it was the tutorial. Actually I think back then they were called missions or something. Anyway, I absolutely hated it and didn't play for another few months. I found a "For beginners" series on YouTube and watched the first couple episodes, and was shocked at how fun the non-tutorial game was.

I tried it, and with few exceptions have never looked back. Over the years they've talked about redoing the tutorials and the "New player experience" but I've never bothered, I hated the original tutorial that much.

[karezza]

Played the demo, loved the game! Ready to buy except for one thing:

I found myself leaning towards the screen to be able to see the character screen popup. (Potential for eye strain)

Is it possible to resize this? Everything else on my computer is good to go, and games, so it's just a size associated with this game.

[DaveMcW]

Settings -> Interface -> UI Scale -> Custom