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Among the design decisions that Satisfactory made meaningless by poor balance, Weapons is solidly middling. It would make sense if you had to clear areas of ene

Among the design decisions that Satisfactory made meaningless by poor balance, Weapons is solidly middling. It would make sense if you had to clear areas of enemies to unlock the ability to build on them, and/or if higher-tier weapons were required to defeat higher-tier enemies (the kittens). As it stands now, it's such a non-mechanic - You get Xeno Basher and are more or less set until enemies are made completely meaningless by rifles. They've just reworked the system and it's even more meaningless by the addition of new ammo types and cool things to do with them, which I hope is a precursor to making you use those ammo types. There is the potential and even promise of such - See the "Crab Battle" trailer. What really bothers me about Satisfactory is how inefficient rails and other modes of transport are compared to just running a long conveyor of advanced products. If you compact even two tiers onsite, a single T2 conveyor can handle a large area's worth of resources. Capacity and throughput for trains are limited by their limited input slots, too. Nested hub and spoke factories make a lot more sense than trying to ship everything raw to a central location, but all of the tier upgrades are around shipping more further.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
Factorio seems to have a similar issue with its OP Flame Turrets available in early-mid game already... but perhaps it's even worse in Satisfactory ?
- munk-a 4y ago
  It's less a question of balance and more a question of whether the feature actually properly fits the rest of the game. Factorio is designed around the attack waves being a motivator to get better tech quickly - you want to bee-line flame turrets and develop the tech to get self-refilling turrets and self-repairing walls... In satisfactory the enemies only exist to gate off certain map areas and they do that very poorly with sky bridges, instant building (to box in enemies or give yourself cover) and other mechanics that can't be trivially removed clashing heavily with combat.
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    If they wanted combat to be a thing, they could use it as a gate - "You can't build here, enemies are nearby". I think they could actually make combat a fun part of exploration in that way, by giving you a limited area you can build in initially and giving you rewards in new buildable land from combat. It would vastly change the game, though, which is perhaps not a bad thing.
    - munk-a 4y ago
      I think a big problem you'll hit here is that a large number of gamers are generalists - we enjoy playing a variety of games and have a variety of skills accumulated from that experience. That means that the FPS portions of the game are either going to match our challenge level and discourage factory builder specialists or it's going to be extremely underwhelming for FPS players. Factory builder specialists - those folks who absolutely adore DSP and Factorio but who, when dealing with the threats in Factorio, leverage creeping turret walls and artillery to clear the creep and who try and avoid fighting on foot outside of the very earliest game stages. Building multi-genre games is a really hard problem.
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
        That's why Factorio has a Death World game preset (self-explanatory) and a Rail World game preset (which among other things, makes it so that enemies never expand and never attack you first).

BlueTemplar 4y ago

Factorio seems to have a similar issue with its OP Flame Turrets available in early-mid game already... but perhaps it's even worse in Satisfactory ?

munk-a 4y ago
It's less a question of balance and more a question of whether the feature actually properly fits the rest of the game. Factorio is designed around the attack waves being a motivator to get better tech quickly - you want to bee-line flame turrets and develop the tech to get self-refilling turrets and self-repairing walls... In satisfactory the enemies only exist to gate off certain map areas and they do that very poorly with sky bridges, instant building (to box in enemies or give yourself cover) and other mechanics that can't be trivially removed clashing heavily with combat.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  If they wanted combat to be a thing, they could use it as a gate - "You can't build here, enemies are nearby". I think they could actually make combat a fun part of exploration in that way, by giving you a limited area you can build in initially and giving you rewards in new buildable land from combat. It would vastly change the game, though, which is perhaps not a bad thing.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    I think a big problem you'll hit here is that a large number of gamers are generalists - we enjoy playing a variety of games and have a variety of skills accumulated from that experience. That means that the FPS portions of the game are either going to match our challenge level and discourage factory builder specialists or it's going to be extremely underwhelming for FPS players. Factory builder specialists - those folks who absolutely adore DSP and Factorio but who, when dealing with the threats in Factorio, leverage creeping turret walls and artillery to clear the creep and who try and avoid fighting on foot outside of the very earliest game stages. Building multi-genre games is a really hard problem.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      That's why Factorio has a Death World game preset (self-explanatory) and a Rail World game preset (which among other things, makes it so that enemies never expand and never attack you first).