Al_B on 14/8/2020 at 15:14
Although I don't play nearly as many games as I used to, one that has occupied a sizable chunk over the last few years is Factorio. Started playing in 2015 or so and has been consistently the most polished, well featured and stable early access game I have played. Developers have been highly responsive to issues and very supportive of mods.
If you don't know what it's about then it is essentially an automation game where you start off hand crafting items but very quickly scale up equipment to obtain resorces, ship them to where needed and build further items. The "goal" is to launch rockets but really the fun is optimising designs and strategies in the name of efficiency (or you just build a tangled pile of conveyors- either works :))
Now released at 1.0 I recommend checking it out if you haven't already
[video=youtube_share;BqaAjgpsoW8]https://youtu.be/BqaAjgpsoW8[/video]
driver on 14/8/2020 at 16:50
So good you posted it twice!
I've been playing Factorio for a while now, I'd forgotten it was still in early access. I was surprised to see it announced on Steam, most of the latest updates were minor tweaks and more polished higher res buildings (Which are a welcome touch). It's a great game but it eats your time up without you noticing it. One minute you're optimising your copper output, then you realise you need to increase you oil production to match the plastic production so you can increase your circuit board manufacturing, that's going to require balancing your distillation so you don't back up your light and heavy oil output... Then you realise it's 3am and you've lost another evening to it.
And now, once I've finally managed to ween myself off it, it's finally released and Satisfactory is on Steam too as well. Oh dear.
Al_B on 14/8/2020 at 19:28
Oh bugger - other's double-post, I double-thread (now deleted) :)
It's a horrible game for the "just one more thing" syndrome - worst I've encountered since I last played Civ. I've also played Satisfactory but it doesn't quite scratch the same itch. Perhaps because in first person it's hard to get the same overall scale of strategy but it also is more manual in terms of building (at least as far as I played it). In Factorio you can blueprint designs, paste them in and let your bots do the build for you so you get less and less involved with the minutia as you progress.
driver on 14/8/2020 at 20:39
Satisfactory does go more for an aesthetic design, you can really spend a lot of time placing your machines and conveyor belts just so to create a beautifully laid out factory, plus being in three dimensions you can create some interesting layouts. It currently doesn't have an end-game, the tech tree does just stop so building the mega factories doesn't have quite the same appeal as Factorio where you can try to increase the speed at which you launch rockets and thereby increase the efficiency of your factory (theoretically) forever, but there's a solid game in there and I'm looking forward to their next update (whenever that is), and who knows, maybe blueprints could be added at some point.
But yeah, for sheer sense of scale Factorio is hard to beat since there's technically no limit to the amount of raw materials you can mine/sec.
