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As someone who has recently got back into games, Factorio is a ton of work—and I love strategy games like Civilization. Playing Factorio is not unlike doing en

As someone who has recently got back into games, Factorio is a ton of work—and I love strategy games like Civilization. Playing Factorio is not unlike doing engineering work itself. Initially, I was hooked. After a while, the brainpower it takes to build and refactor large factories felt too demanding. It began to feel more like work, than enjoyment.

thu2111 7y ago
Definitely. The article is pretty subjective; I'd say there are lots of glaring flaws in Factorio. I played it for a while, stopped when I hit a major problem, but when I came back the game had changed quite a bit and I couldn't get back into it. Flaws of Factorio in no specific order: • The car has maddeningly terrible physics. The OP claims this yields "comic fun". It doesn't. It just means you're constantly crashing into trees and needing to repair the car. • At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle. No way to make the game easier, no way to beat them, I was even reduced to looking for cheat codes or ways to hack the game files (there weren't any). So I just dropped the game. The sudden cliff-edge in difficulty made no sense and felt like they hadn't play-tested their own game properly. • The GUI is terrible. I have no idea why he thinks it's good. 1. Placing rails is an exercise in frustration because it's so easy to mis-align things and end up with two pieces of rail that don't quite line up, forcing you to then dig it all up and try again. 2. Placing signals and stations is an equally frustrating exercise in finicky nitpicking. There are lots of ways to set up a railway line such that it simply doesn't work, with no hints about why or what you did wrong. It feels like debugging an embedded system. 3. The article cites "TIL I learned a shortcut" being a meme - that's because the GUI doesn't help you learn any shortcuts. 4. The icons are very small yet high detail, making them difficult to distinguish sometimes. There's no way to zoom anything to make this better. The colour schemes are washed out. The art is just unattractive. • Randomly generated maps mean you may often end up with an unusual shortage of resources, or things in weird locations. • The core mechanic is extremely hard to actually improve at. Although I enjoyed making factories at first, I pretty quickly realised this was too much like programming to actually be enjoyable long term. Factories quickly end up drowning in 'tech debt' if you aren't experienced, so you're constantly tempted to restart levels and try again to make a more sustainable factory, but then you end up stuck again later when you obtain some new bit of tech and realise your factory is wrongly structured for the next part of the game again. The article hints at this last problem. He says "As tempting as it is, don't restart a new factory when you want to rebuild. Just learn how to use bots to deconstruct, and fix it. It'll be more fun that way." Er, great. And how do I learn how to use bots to do that? The game did eventually get a few half-hearted tutorials that I found actually more confusing than the game itself, but I don't recall any about bots. You quickly realise that most of the information you need to learn the game is on random user-written wikis. Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways. I'd definitely recommend checking it out for the novel conveyer-belt mechanic, but if you like building games Cities: Skylines will be much more satisfying and a far more professionally built product.
- Vvector 7y ago
  >> At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle...... The research tree gives you many different ways to kill a biter nest: * Flame Throwers * Turrets / Laser Turrets * Personal Laser Defense * Combat Robots * Tank * Artillery * Atomic Bomb >> Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways. Maybe the game is not for you. But you are way off base here. The Factorio team has built a very solid product here.
  - mden 7y ago
    Just want to second how solidly built the game feels. There's definitely a learning curve which keeps on going for many hours (and I think that's a big part of the appeal) and there's some missing in-game information that I've found myself having to look up online - that much is true. But the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish. Different sized hitboxes for different components, often really favoring playability makes navigating bases really handy. Live map view with the ability to zoom into a location you're not currently near to get a real view of the factory at that point. Unrealistic long reach. Smart notifications on events happening in the base. Graphs diagramming pollution generation and electricity use by factory component type spanning the whole game period. Map layers showing which zones are protected by your defenses, or the extent of spread of pollution, or the routes and locations of your automated trains. And dozens of really useful shortcuts as mentioned. The game would be perfectly playable without any of these and still be really fun but the love and attention put in by the devs is very clear. And the most amazing thing is seeing all of these things happening all at the same time with thousands of moving pieces updating at 60hz and the game still runs smooth as butter. As a developer I've been very impressed by how smoothly this game runs. And as a gamer I have seen much much simpler games put computers to the test to achieve much less.
    - pmoriarty 7y ago
      "the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish" I agree so much with this. The UX seems so incredibly well thought out.. much more than virtually any game I've ever played. There are some wrinkles and annoyances here and there, but virtually everything I've had complaints about while playing the vanilla game I found mods for later that solved it. The only major complaint I still have about the UX of the game is the circuit network and combinators, which are a very clunky attempt at visual programming that don't provide enough feedback to keep from descending in to spaghetti code when doing something of even moderate complexity, and debugging these things is an absolute nightmare.
taneq 7y ago
That's exactly what happened to me. I played it obsessively for a few weeks and then it just started feeling like I was solving the same kind of problems I already solve all day for money, and if I was going to be doing that I might as well be getting paid. Which I guess shows how much I love my job (or at least the fun bits of it) but also kind of took the wind out of my sails in-game. Edit: Also I got to the endgame point where you spend 99% of your time just setting up new mines and rail depots to keep feeding the beast. That was a fair while ago though so maybe there's more to do endgame, or maybe I'd just finished the game which is also OK.
tryptophan 7y ago
I go through a cycle like that every so often. I start a new game of factorio after a long break, get super addicted for a week or two, and then get a feeling that its just work, and I'd rather be working on some python project because I don't have to deal with biters attacking me in VS code. Late game factorio feels exactly like coding, except you can't copy paste as well and make loops and other time saving abstractions.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "Late game factorio feels exactly like coding, except you can't copy paste as well and make loops and other time saving abstractions." I'm not sure what you mean by "as well", but Factorio does have various rather sophisticated methods of copying and pasting. For instance, there's the regular Control-C sort of copy, which allows you to rotate the entities before pasting, should you prefer. Then there are blueprints, which let you select which entities in a copied blueprint to store, what icon(s) to assign them, and let you have a library of blueprints and folders of blueprints even. That's more sophisticated than some text editors' copy/paste features. As far as loops go, you can actually create loops in Factorio. First, there's the simple belt loop. Those can be pretty useful (like with Koravex enrichment process, and coal-powered coal miners powering themselves or each other are also pretty popular). Inserters can also be used in loops (from box to box, for instance). Then there are more sophisticated loops involving trains and entire factory groupings. Then there's the circuit network and combinators, which provide a visual programming language in which loops are possible. Some mods provide combinators will expose the full power of Lua programming to you in-game. This is not to mention the possibility of writing your own Factorio modules in Lua, which literally is programming in text in a traditional language, and where you can write loops to your heart's content. As for "time saving abstractions", with the Factorissimo2 mod, you can even abstract away parts of your factory and reuse those parts as modules. These modular parts can themselves be abstracted or nested as submodules of other modules, etc.
  - tryptophan 7y ago
    I dont mean like a literal loop, but gameplay loops that you cant automate. This includes things like plopping down yet another mining base, plopping down yet more production, etc... You can make blueprints for all theses things, but you can't automate the blueprint placing. Sometimes you need to reconfigure circuit stuff for special train stops, so they get the right products, and as far as I know this can't be done via blueprint. It just gets tedious after a while, especially because it doesn't take all that much to build a rocket, making it unnecessary if you just want to beat the game.
fomine3 7y ago
Factorio is a game to automate things. So finally I thought that watching Factorio play on YouTube is ultimate automation.

thu2111 7y ago

Definitely. The article is pretty subjective; I'd say there are lots of glaring flaws in Factorio. I played it for a while, stopped when I hit a major problem, but when I came back the game had changed quite a bit and I couldn't get back into it. Flaws of Factorio in no specific order: • The car has maddeningly terrible physics. The OP claims this yields "comic fun". It doesn't. It just means you're constantly crashing into trees and needing to repair the car. • At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle. No way to make the game easier, no way to beat them, I was even reduced to looking for cheat codes or ways to hack the game files (there weren't any). So I just dropped the game. The sudden cliff-edge in difficulty made no sense and felt like they hadn't play-tested their own game properly. • The GUI is terrible. I have no idea why he thinks it's good. 1. Placing rails is an exercise in frustration because it's so easy to mis-align things and end up with two pieces of rail that don't quite line up, forcing you to then dig it all up and try again. 2. Placing signals and stations is an equally frustrating exercise in finicky nitpicking. There are lots of ways to set up a railway line such that it simply doesn't work, with no hints about why or what you did wrong. It feels like debugging an embedded system. 3. The article cites "TIL I learned a shortcut" being a meme - that's because the GUI doesn't help you learn any shortcuts. 4. The icons are very small yet high detail, making them difficult to distinguish sometimes. There's no way to zoom anything to make this better. The colour schemes are washed out. The art is just unattractive. • Randomly generated maps mean you may often end up with an unusual shortage of resources, or things in weird locations. • The core mechanic is extremely hard to actually improve at. Although I enjoyed making factories at first, I pretty quickly realised this was too much like programming to actually be enjoyable long term. Factories quickly end up drowning in 'tech debt' if you aren't experienced, so you're constantly tempted to restart levels and try again to make a more sustainable factory, but then you end up stuck again later when you obtain some new bit of tech and realise your factory is wrongly structured for the next part of the game again. The article hints at this last problem. He says "As tempting as it is, don't restart a new factory when you want to rebuild. Just learn how to use bots to deconstruct, and fix it. It'll be more fun that way." Er, great. And how do I learn how to use bots to do that? The game did eventually get a few half-hearted tutorials that I found actually more confusing than the game itself, but I don't recall any about bots. You quickly realise that most of the information you need to learn the game is on random user-written wikis. Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways. I'd definitely recommend checking it out for the novel conveyer-belt mechanic, but if you like building games Cities: Skylines will be much more satisfying and a far more professionally built product.

Vvector 7y ago
>> At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle...... The research tree gives you many different ways to kill a biter nest: * Flame Throwers * Turrets / Laser Turrets * Personal Laser Defense * Combat Robots * Tank * Artillery * Atomic Bomb >> Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways. Maybe the game is not for you. But you are way off base here. The Factorio team has built a very solid product here.
- mden 7y ago
  Just want to second how solidly built the game feels. There's definitely a learning curve which keeps on going for many hours (and I think that's a big part of the appeal) and there's some missing in-game information that I've found myself having to look up online - that much is true. But the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish. Different sized hitboxes for different components, often really favoring playability makes navigating bases really handy. Live map view with the ability to zoom into a location you're not currently near to get a real view of the factory at that point. Unrealistic long reach. Smart notifications on events happening in the base. Graphs diagramming pollution generation and electricity use by factory component type spanning the whole game period. Map layers showing which zones are protected by your defenses, or the extent of spread of pollution, or the routes and locations of your automated trains. And dozens of really useful shortcuts as mentioned. The game would be perfectly playable without any of these and still be really fun but the love and attention put in by the devs is very clear. And the most amazing thing is seeing all of these things happening all at the same time with thousands of moving pieces updating at 60hz and the game still runs smooth as butter. As a developer I've been very impressed by how smoothly this game runs. And as a gamer I have seen much much simpler games put computers to the test to achieve much less.
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    "the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish" I agree so much with this. The UX seems so incredibly well thought out.. much more than virtually any game I've ever played. There are some wrinkles and annoyances here and there, but virtually everything I've had complaints about while playing the vanilla game I found mods for later that solved it. The only major complaint I still have about the UX of the game is the circuit network and combinators, which are a very clunky attempt at visual programming that don't provide enough feedback to keep from descending in to spaghetti code when doing something of even moderate complexity, and debugging these things is an absolute nightmare.

taneq 7y ago

That's exactly what happened to me. I played it obsessively for a few weeks and then it just started feeling like I was solving the same kind of problems I already solve all day for money, and if I was going to be doing that I might as well be getting paid. Which I guess shows how much I love my job (or at least the fun bits of it) but also kind of took the wind out of my sails in-game. Edit: Also I got to the endgame point where you spend 99% of your time just setting up new mines and rail depots to keep feeding the beast. That was a fair while ago though so maybe there's more to do endgame, or maybe I'd just finished the game which is also OK.

tryptophan 7y ago

I go through a cycle like that every so often. I start a new game of factorio after a long break, get super addicted for a week or two, and then get a feeling that its just work, and I'd rather be working on some python project because I don't have to deal with biters attacking me in VS code. Late game factorio feels exactly like coding, except you can't copy paste as well and make loops and other time saving abstractions.

pmoriarty 7y ago
"Late game factorio feels exactly like coding, except you can't copy paste as well and make loops and other time saving abstractions." I'm not sure what you mean by "as well", but Factorio does have various rather sophisticated methods of copying and pasting. For instance, there's the regular Control-C sort of copy, which allows you to rotate the entities before pasting, should you prefer. Then there are blueprints, which let you select which entities in a copied blueprint to store, what icon(s) to assign them, and let you have a library of blueprints and folders of blueprints even. That's more sophisticated than some text editors' copy/paste features. As far as loops go, you can actually create loops in Factorio. First, there's the simple belt loop. Those can be pretty useful (like with Koravex enrichment process, and coal-powered coal miners powering themselves or each other are also pretty popular). Inserters can also be used in loops (from box to box, for instance). Then there are more sophisticated loops involving trains and entire factory groupings. Then there's the circuit network and combinators, which provide a visual programming language in which loops are possible. Some mods provide combinators will expose the full power of Lua programming to you in-game. This is not to mention the possibility of writing your own Factorio modules in Lua, which literally is programming in text in a traditional language, and where you can write loops to your heart's content. As for "time saving abstractions", with the Factorissimo2 mod, you can even abstract away parts of your factory and reuse those parts as modules. These modular parts can themselves be abstracted or nested as submodules of other modules, etc.
- tryptophan 7y ago
  I dont mean like a literal loop, but gameplay loops that you cant automate. This includes things like plopping down yet another mining base, plopping down yet more production, etc... You can make blueprints for all theses things, but you can't automate the blueprint placing. Sometimes you need to reconfigure circuit stuff for special train stops, so they get the right products, and as far as I know this can't be done via blueprint. It just gets tedious after a while, especially because it doesn't take all that much to build a rocket, making it unnecessary if you just want to beat the game.

fomine3 7y ago

Factorio is a game to automate things. So finally I thought that watching Factorio play on YouTube is ultimate automation.