4 ms·

I guess Factorio is an idle game as much as Age of Empires, Sim City or Roller Coaster Tycoon is? That is to say, not really very much at all. Sure, when I go a

• dragontamer 5y ago
  > I'm playing to make my city/civ/themepark/automated factory. And I'm just playing to improve my team composition in Clicker Heroes. They're all management games from my perspective. Some are better than others. I've personally have played a lot of older, text-based management games as well, and the idle game-loop has similarities to the text-based games IMO, where things are a bit more abstract. -------- Like, we all had Tamagotchi / Digimon / Pokemon Pikachu growing up, right? Those were idle games for sure, with some clicker-elements even.
  • the_af 5y ago
    > They're all management games from my perspective That's too broad a perspective in my opinion. From a far enough distance, CounterStrike is also a management game, as is StarCraft and even Street Fighter II. Are they idle games?
    • dragontamer 5y ago
      "A Dark Room", "Universal Paperclips", and "Clicker Heroes" are all clicker/idle games. But you'd be hard pressed to find any shared mechanic if you've actually tried all three. I guess you move your mouse to click on a button sometimes, but all three games obsolete actual physical clicking pretty quickly. ------- The biggest thing about idle games is that the "state" of the game changes while you're not playing. But so does Animal Crossing and MMORPGs. And "Universal Paperclips" is actually only going while you're sitting at the computer, no "away" element in that game at all. So even that rule isn't perfect.
      • the_af 5y ago
        I'm not challenging your assertion that idle games may be hard to define. I agree with that (sort of). I'm challenging the assertion that any game that has a "watch and see"/management component is an idle game; Factorio is definitely not one, for example. Neither is StarCraft, even though it has the "build resources" component, where you are not actively building those resources but waiting till they build themselves. A management game is not necessarily an idle game; that's too broad a perspective to be useful.
        • dragontamer 5y ago
          Perhaps its because Universal Paperclips is an idle game about building a paperclip factory, so its in fact quite similar to Factorio in a storyline level. In fact, the core gameplay loop is around mining (Factorio) or building wire (Universal Paperclips). Mines make ore, ore makes plates, plates make circuits, circuits make mining machines, mining machines make more ore. Universal paperclips: wires make paperclips, paperclips are sold for money, money buys autoclippers + auto-wire. Auto-wire makes more wire, and autoclippers make more paperclips. In both cases, you're building out your factory for explosive, super-linear growth. Good decisions and good management (including researching technology in both games) can lead to more and more inventions that allow for more efficient processing (Factorio), or faster autoclippers / megaclippers in Universal Paperclips.
          • the_af 5y ago
            The gameplay between the two seems fundamentally different though. Also, you mention above that Universal Paperclips is not really an idle game anyway. So are we focusing specifically on Paperclips or on idle games, especially if Paperclips is not the best exponent of the genre? I still struggle to understand the conflation of management games with idle games. Not that Factorio is really a management game either, since it's actually a programming/automation game (where you have to do the actual programming, not click to tell someone to do it for you).
            • dragontamer 5y ago