Just bought the game; What were Your first impressions?

[Gull2112]

I've played it a few weeks now and really like everything about it except the goal of building a rocket ship. Building all that just to leave seems pointless, other than as a side scenario. I am also not a shoot em up kind of guy. The attraction of this game is so positive (building something).

I would enjoy a mod that involved building the infrastructure to support a colony. Instead of doing research, you start with all, or most, of the techs. Your base attracts colonists. You build a variety of bio-domes. Some are habitation, others are research, etc. They request research packs (beakers) and it is your job to supply them.

The goal is to build the largest, happiest, most productive colony.

Maybe there is already a mod like this and I haven't found it. Please let me know! I am old and minimally tech savvy, so building my own mod is beyond my skill set.

Thanks for listening!

[azairvine]

HOLY CRAP!

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I've never really played crafting games that resemble anything like this - and I've found it to be ridiculously addictive. At first I was hugely overwhelmed, then I checked out Katherine of Sky and I've been working my way slowly through her Megabase play through. Probably the most intense play through to start on - I feel like I've been playing forever and I'm only up to ep 7 or something!

[zOldBulldog]

HOLY CRAP!

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I've never really played crafting games that resemble anything like this - and I've found it to be ridiculously addictive. At first I was hugely overwhelmed, then I checked out Katherine of Sky and I've been working my way slowly through her Megabase play through. Probably the most intense play through to start on - I feel like I've been playing forever and I'm only up to ep 7 or something!

I completely agree. KoS megabase tutorial helps a lot to understand the game. The other "must watch" series is Nilaus "Base in a book". They complement each other very well. The combination and few differences between them helped me progress from "copying a blueprint design" to "Modifying a design and improve it a bit".

What I have not yet found is a good "overall layout" tutorial. All the tutorial series recommend using a bus, and to place your smelter arrays at one end (either on one side of the bus or on a T shape, with green circuits as your first production line and red/green science next. But there are few clues as to what lines are important to go in what order. Also, what things should go a little away from the bus (oil and chemical production?), Where to leave room for rail near the bus (man, I hate running back and forth for supplies and can't manage to drive that car safely), and where is a good (far but not too far) place for your power plant. These are important things. If you get them wrong you end up getting forced to make some spaghetti designs ornworse, end up having to constantly run back and forth.

Another thing that screams for a tutorial is how to use the new splitters. Not just the simple "this is how to use the new splitters" (there are plenty of tutorials for that), but rather how it affects strategy. The new input and output priority features are game changing and blow away the bus lane balancing and other strategies.

[Deadlock989]

What I have not yet found is a good "overall layout" tutorial. All the tutorial series recommend using a bus, and to place your smelter arrays at one end (either on one side of the bus or on a T shape, with green circuits as your first production line and red/green science next. But there are few clues as to what lines are important to go in what order. Also, what things should go a little away from the bus (oil and chemical production?), Where to leave room for rail near the bus (man, I hate running back and forth for supplies and can't manage to drive that car safely), and where is a good (far but not too far) place for your power plant. These are important things. If you get them wrong you end up getting forced to make some spaghetti designs ornworse, end up having to constantly run back and forth.

Space. Always leave extra space, if you have it. You ask where to leave room: leave it everywhere. If you're playing on a very constrained map that's another story, but if you have space, claim it all. Don't be seduced by designs that pack as much into as small a space as possible, that's min-maxing and it has its own appeal but it will bite you on the arse eventually. I usually organise the main factory on a very large grid, and maybe 25% or more of that grid is empty:

Map

Also, buses don't have to be linear. They can fork (very easily with the new splitters, but you could do it before). They can even be circular with branches coming off them (mega-sushi). Combine this with the extra space, and "order" is much less important. Forgot to leave space for advanced circuits? Just fork the main bus through some space you left and bring them back onto the main bus.

Also, buses are not the only way to play. It's a very adaptable design, but kinda brute force. I've made more "modular" maps with sub-sections linked by train. Again, order or layout stops mattering because trains can pathfind anywhere.

One of the brilliant things about this game is the large number of multiple routes to the same end. That is why I would be against too much in the way of hand-holding prompts, while it would save the player time, it would also stop them thinking for themselves and encourage a subset of play styles.

[Heckett]

I don't remember what day of the week it was, only that it was a week day. I was playing Warcraft 3 when my friend started messaging me on steam telling me I had to get my wallet out and buy a game. I had the steam store page open on my second monitor trying to watch the trailer and read the description on what "fat oreo" was about as I was trying to play my other game. After I lost I figured I would buy it just to please my friend and waste the last few hours I had before I went to bed.

A fast download later and I was still up at 2AM figuring out what was going on, hand crafting red and green science so we could build more on our spaghetti base. When we finally figured out what assembly machines did we really got in trouble. We ended up having something like 10K in red science crammed in chests. After a few hours things kind of started going good. we had something that kind of resembled a bus going, and we had managed to hack together a factory that ran on the "just in time" manufacturing ideals. Absolutely no excess production, not for a lack of trying.

Then we ran out of coal and iron. So we called it a day and I went to bed. I remember asking myself what I had gotten myself into. Haven't regretted it since.

[zOldBulldog]

I can't say "I just bought the game"as today I launched rockets. But I do have what I think is important feedback:.

Once you get far enough you end up spending too much time setting up more and more mines. All that busywork gets very boring. Perhaps the core game needs to learn from the RSO mod and make ore fields progressively bigger as you move away from the spawn area. That way even though you have to build rail you won't have to spend 3/4 of your time in drudgework to get more ores.

[kovarex]

But the ore weins gets more rich as you get from the center in vanilla. And you also have the mining productivity research, which can multiply the amount of resources you get from the mine.

[zOldBulldog]

But the ore weins gets more rich as you get from the center in vanilla. And you also have the mining productivity research, which can multiply the amount of resources you get from the mine.

In 0.16 I have not seen the ore veins getting richer as I move farther from the spawn. I'll have to make an extremely long straight line away from spawn to see if they get any better.

EDIT: Nope, no better. I got in my tank and drove for a long distance North (a full stack of solid fuel each way)... and although I saw maybe 2 or 3 large deposits all the rest were still not impressive.

[Dooces]

But the ore weins gets more rich as you get from the center in vanilla. And you also have the mining productivity research, which can multiply the amount of resources you get from the mine.

In 0.16 I have not seen the ore veins getting richer as I move farther from the spawn. I'll have to make an extremely long straight line away from spawn to see if they get any better.

EDIT: Nope, no better. I got in my tank and drove for a long distance North (a full stack of solid fuel each way)... and although I saw maybe 2 or 3 large deposits all the rest were still not impressive.

I assure you they get much bigger further from spawn (in vanilla, which is all i play). My basic strategy is run 20k+ tiles away from spawn before I drop the first burner miner drill (or once I launch a few rockets and get the tech to fight through the biters if they're enabled) and setup a main base there. My current base is 30k tiles from spawn, and has ore nodes in the 300mil range, they get to 1g+ if you keep going, but with mining producitivy, 1x 300 mil ore patch lasts 3k+ hours @ 5k/min science.

ALL the nodes arnt always bigger, I still see a random ~3mil ore patch here and there, so I would suggest drive as far as your patience allows, then explore radially out. I would rather take 30 mins to setup 1 large ore deposit that lasts virtually forever, than 10 minutes setting up a small one that lasts a couple of hours. (I build each science around suitable ore patches, so I only have to move science packs back to labs, instead of all that ore, and with resonable sized ore patches they never have to be moved - but thats a matter of playstyle).

[zOldBulldog]

Ty Dooces..

It might be that I got no serious improvement on ore deposit size because in my current map I have a lot of water and it is extremely fragmented, so chances are that the ore deposits are ending up mostly under water.

I will try the "go far away" thing again when I make a new map.

You mention 20-30k away.... How do you measure distances that big?

[Dooces]

You mention 20-30k away.... How do you measure distances that big?

Press F5 / F6 / F7 for debug profiles, F4 lets you edit each; "show-detailed-info" shows you distance from spawn. And looking around my base now, I see plenty of 1m ore patches, though 150-300 mil+ (just shy of 400 mil is the biggest) are not uncommon at all. In the path revealed from spawn I can see the patches (on average) get bigger, but there are random anomalies all over, so keep searching!

[theolderbeholder]

darn, 3 ´o clock already.


Again.

[Diceus]

My first impression is....Wow man, it seems we are stuck here for the next few years...
Cheers,Diceus

[Ranakastrasz]

First Impression? Large scale, 2D Modded Minecraft (Industrialcraft/Buildcraft/other)
Actually playing? I think it was the point where I realized just how much you could automate, and the sheer scale of it compared to Minecraft that was interesting.
Follow that up with realizing it actually had a quality modding framework on top of that, and I was hooked.

[jony1771]

goooooooooooooood

[Traveel]

My first impression is that I need to rebind the controls to something more like Minecraft. I keep right clicking to go into the machine GUIs....

HOW DOES ANYTHING WORK? Okay, just finished level one of campaign, this game is 2 ez. Level 2: HOW DO TRANSPORT BELTS WORK? Level 3: I’m too lazy to do anything. Level 4-The end of campaign: okay... First free play world: what do I do? Later, if only everything weren’t such a pain to automate. When that thing you need to make something is on the other side of your factory, and you don’t have logistic system tech yet was painful. Oh, and I still don’t understand train systems.

[doww]

Hi.
Short story, saw a comment on a game trailer saying "hey, this is factorio in 3d" and that got my attention.
Great game so far.
My only issue is, alt mode is a must, but really bad for the eye health - because the icons on wagons and assemblers etc. are just upscaled & blurry versions of standard icons. Even on high display settings and zoomed out it is still noticeable. Hope this will get improved in the future. Thanks devs for creating this game.

[pookeeshtron]

Bought the game a few days ago. I heard and saw it about a year or two ago, but didn't like how it looks and never recalled it. But a few day ago I had a chance to play Factorio and after 2 hours I certainly decided to buy it. For these 2 or 3 days I played really a lot since I have days off. Factorio is really addictive and very complex. I saw a few letsplays, but then I found it boring, becuse in my opinion this game should be fully explored by myself. Now in the midnight I am sitting in a chair with a laptop with google sheets opened to examine the most efficient way to use my science packs assembling machines. I love this game. It makes me think a lot while playing and even while not playing.

[Lurind]

I first thought that it was the most complex game I had ever player. But eventually I got used to it

[g-box]

My first impression was heading into a 4 night cabin trip with my brother where we take our PC's in case it rains and sometimes it rains a lot. We made sure Factorio would work over lan(no internet in the forest) and had figured out the very basics prior to this trip. It worked nicely. It worked very nicely. I have no idea what the weather was like for that first trip... and a number of trips since. Now, I host a server game for us and when we do another trip, it gets saved and loaded onto my system... in case it rains. My total time played on steam should probably be double what it says.

In that first game playing multi, my brother just naturally slid into the role of defensive coordinator... and offensive coordinator to collect purple fluff, research director and power management while I increased iron ore production and developed the manufacturing systems and increased iron ore production. Such a fantastic game that has come a long way and has always seemed to head in the right direction. Seriously, beautiful work.