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One of the things that makes Factorio so great is how solid it is, not just in its programming but also in its game balance. (At least pre-Space Age; I can't sp
by rmunn 4mo ago
One of the things that makes Factorio so great is how solid it is, not just in its programming but also in its game balance. (At least pre-Space Age; I can't speak to its Space Age balance from my own experience, though I'd be surprised if it was badly unbalanced).
To give just one point of evidence in support of the idea that Factorio is a well-balanced game, there is a guy who goes by "The Spiffing Brit", whose Youtube channel is all about breaking games by finding an exploit, or a bit of unbalanced interaction between two different game mechanics, and abusing that exploit or unbalanced interaction to the maximum extent possible. Armies with a million archers in Heroes of Might and Magic, that sort of thing.
When he did a video on Factorio, I wondered what exploit he had found in the game. Then I watched it. It was about how quickly you could win the game if you got 50 people to play multiplayer with you. That's it. No exploit, no broken game mechanics, just a game mechanic working as intended (yes, any job can get done faster if you can divide it between 50 people who can work on it more or less in parallel). I'm pretty sure that if there had been an exploit to be found, he would have shown it off in his video.
That doesn't prove there are NO software bugs in Factorio. But it's pretty good evidence that any remaining bugs are quite hard to run across.
- laughing_man 4mo agoThat video was hilarious, with fifty people running around destroying alien nests with pickaxes.
- kzrdude 4mo agoHere's one of their many impressive software dev stories: making transport belt update multithreaded https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364#:~:text=Multithreaded%20belts https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-364#:~:text=Multithreaded...
- pdpi 4mo agoThat one will never cease to impress me. Belts are basically the “Turing complete” of parallelism — I expect that every single data dependency pattern imaginable can be expressed as belts.
- Ferret7446 3mo agoIsn't that just channels in Go?
- pdpi 3mo agoKind of, but not really — Channels are FIFOs, and there's approximately zero work happening inside. Factorio belts can have insertions/removals at arbitrary points along the belt (including players grabbing stuff off the belt whenever they choose), and require simulating movement of items along the belt. They also come in much more complex topologies than Go channels ever do in practice.
- mattas 4mo agoThere's another guy who I love watching (@MichaelHendriksLIVE) that exploits the heck out of biter mechanics. But it's generally in the context of difficult modded playthroughs.
- bombcar 4mo agoNext time He exploits the game in a different way - entertaining if you know a bit about the tooling. It’s great watching him bring out minor side effects that don’t normally matter - until you’re on a 1,000x science run.
- supertroop 4mo agoI play on an 8 year old MacBook Pro and with 10k logistics bots it still has smooth graphics and zaro boogs. It reminds me of how good blizzard was in the 90s.
- AmericanOP 4mo agoSpace Age is superbly balanced because it’s dynamic, offering multiple paths. You can mega Nauvis with molten foundries, but that requires importing Calcite. You can mega Gleba for just-in-time and resource generating blades, but how do you handle stone? Vulcanus offers limitless resources- yet other planets may actually offer more. Fulgora offers much if you learn modular design. How do you handle quality? Dedicated factories, or integrated with production? How much footprint reduction do you want, and how much input efficiency via production modules. But that requires circling back to Nauvis…