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>> 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 resea

>> 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 6y 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 6y 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.
thu2111 6y ago
This was during some sort of story-driven tutorial in which biters would swarm a base after a few minutes of play, so research wasn't relevant. There was no way to get past them except by just beating them out action style. I did search pretty thoroughly.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "This was during some sort of story-driven tutorial in which biters would swarm a base after a few minutes of play, so research wasn't relevant" I have heard of this issue, and have seen a screenshot of someone else in the demo where the game placed the biters way, way, way too close to the player's base. That's just unfair, especially for a newcomer to the game. I'd consider this a bug in the demo, and would report it as such to the developers. In my own playthrough of the demo, about a year or two ago, I did not have this issue. The biters were well away from my base, and I had ample time to research the technology I'd need to beat them by the time they became a serious threat. I think they must have messed up the demo sometime after that. The workaround for this is to play the full game, and forget the demo. There are plenty of tutorial videos on youtube which you can watch which will help you with any part of the game you don't understand, and in the full game you can choose a map that doesn't have any biters near by (or even make them peaceful so you don't have to worry about them at all).
  - thu2111 6y ago
    I was playing the purchased game, so it wasn't a demo. It was on a level where you had to reach a computer in some crashed rocket, if I recall correctly. You had to build turrets and keep them filled with ammo, but you started in a corner of the map with no base or raw materials, so you really had to move quickly before the ammo the game gave you to start with ran out and you became overwhelmed. You also had to use grenades to take out a biter nest so you could get to the rocket, and had a limited number of those too. So it was basically an action game rather than a building game at that point and a very badly balanced one. But like I said I felt there were a lot of other issues. I really wanted to like the game, but "solid" wasn't the impression it left me with.

mden 6y 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 6y 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.

thu2111 6y ago

This was during some sort of story-driven tutorial in which biters would swarm a base after a few minutes of play, so research wasn't relevant. There was no way to get past them except by just beating them out action style. I did search pretty thoroughly.

pmoriarty 6y ago
"This was during some sort of story-driven tutorial in which biters would swarm a base after a few minutes of play, so research wasn't relevant" I have heard of this issue, and have seen a screenshot of someone else in the demo where the game placed the biters way, way, way too close to the player's base. That's just unfair, especially for a newcomer to the game. I'd consider this a bug in the demo, and would report it as such to the developers. In my own playthrough of the demo, about a year or two ago, I did not have this issue. The biters were well away from my base, and I had ample time to research the technology I'd need to beat them by the time they became a serious threat. I think they must have messed up the demo sometime after that. The workaround for this is to play the full game, and forget the demo. There are plenty of tutorial videos on youtube which you can watch which will help you with any part of the game you don't understand, and in the full game you can choose a map that doesn't have any biters near by (or even make them peaceful so you don't have to worry about them at all).
- thu2111 6y ago
  I was playing the purchased game, so it wasn't a demo. It was on a level where you had to reach a computer in some crashed rocket, if I recall correctly. You had to build turrets and keep them filled with ammo, but you started in a corner of the map with no base or raw materials, so you really had to move quickly before the ammo the game gave you to start with ran out and you became overwhelmed. You also had to use grenades to take out a biter nest so you could get to the rocket, and had a limited number of those too. So it was basically an action game rather than a building game at that point and a very badly balanced one. But like I said I felt there were a lot of other issues. I really wanted to like the game, but "solid" wasn't the impression it left me with.