Tag Archives: Factorio

I don’t like Factorio: Space Age

I started, stopped, and started this post several times. I just want to get it out the door so I’m posting it now regardless of that it’s not the greatest. I’ll have more to post on Factorio after this, but my thesis remains: I loved Factorio on it’s own, I don’t like Factorio: Space Age. I don’t think it’s a good expansion pack and I don’t think you should buy it.

Let me ramble about science in the base version of Factorio.

Red science was so simple you could craft it in your inventory. But the long time it took encouraged you to figure out automation to make that unnecessary. Green science was a step up, but it not only tested your automation skills, but also encouraged *and* rewarded you for successfully doing it. To explain: green science needs inserters and belts, which are two things you’ll make a *lot* of in Factorio. If you want to succeed, you’ll need to automate them so might as well do so since they’re also needed for green science. Conversely once you do get over the difficulty hill of automating them, you can split off the inserters and belts you’ll need for your factory, because you probably are building more than what your green science needs. So green science encourages you to automate the things you’ll need to automate anyway, but also rewards you since automating those things is a necessary step in growing the factory.

From there, blue science tests a whole new subject: fluid mechanics. Blue science needs plastics, which needs petroleum gas, which needs oil. If you’ve never dealt with factorio fluids before, blue science demands you learn how. But you’re also rewarded with bots, because blue science unlocks the construction and logistics robots that make the second half of the game so much easier.

Purple science doesn’t feel much different than blue science, but I think the name “production science” is fitting because it’s a real step up in total materials if not complexity. For the most part purple science uses all the same inputs as blue science, but no matter how much I feel I overbuild, I *always* seems to run out of steel for it! Purple science tests your ability to scale, and scale big, because you always need more steel than you think you need.

Finally, yellow science really feels like a final exam. Like purple science you’ll need to have an overwelming volume of inputs, this time copper instead of iron/steel. Blue Circuits and Batteries both require you to have completely mastered the game’s liquid input systems, with multiple steps where chemical plants feed into assemblers and vice versa.

When you finally master yellow, white science is strangely underwelming. It’s mostly “the same but more,” if requires blue circuits and low density structures just like yellow science (plus extra green and red circuits before Space Age came out), but then adds rocket fuel on top of that and a huge space launcher that needs to be built. Not exact a great leap in difficulty, but by then you’re probably just ready for it to end, so it’s in a good place overall.

The thing is, Space Age doesn’t feel like it follows this kind of progression, or any progression. Each planet feels mostly like redoing red and green science. The science pack only demands that you master the basics of automation on this new planet with these new resources. And once you do that, you can leave and never need to return.

It feels… not great. I don’t feel any sense of adventure and progression landing on planet after planet and doing the equivalent of “super simple red/green science, only now with 1 new ingredient no other planet has.”

The space mechanics are like Dyson Sphere Program, in that they aren’t realistic at all and I wish they were. I know making Kerbal Space Program *in* Factorio would have been hard, but at the very least I don’t see why a rocket that runs out of fuel starts slowly sinking back to the planet it launched from, but also doesn’t ever fall into the atmosphere and hit the ground. A rocket that loses fuel just continues to drift on its current trajectory. If you want it to fall back to the planet it launched from, then that trajectory should eventually make it hit the ground. But instead Factorio: Space Age has this worst-of-every-single-world middle ground where things are unituitive *and* unphysical *and* waste your time. My first every space ship didn’t have enough fuel to reach its destination planet, so I had no choice but to wait for it to *sloooooooooooooooowly* drift backwards back to the first planet before I could give it more fuel to try the journey again. I had no way to speed this up, and I had no reason to think it *would even work that way* since that’s not how space travel actually works.

Another thing I dislike, I feel like this game had room for having the planets interact with each other more. The space ships are build off the old system for railroads, but the spaceships aren’t useful as railroads. The game is clear that you should simply be producing your science on each planet and then shipping it all to Nauvis for research. But why does that have to be the *only* option? Why not make it so that we can juggle items and send them all over to each planet? Because the devs decided every challenge in this expansion pack must have *a single specific solution*, rather than letting the player come up with their own solution. That’s bad game design and makes this game less fun.

When I played with rails, yes I would make a starter base for red/green/black science. Then another for blue, another for purple, another for yellow+white. And I’d run a single train line to each of these bases to ship all the science to a single location. But you don’t have to be that lame. You can have train likes running in all directions to ship all raw resources to a centralized location. This can simplify say your green chip production if it all happens in one place and you just siphon those chips to each research that needs them.

Or you can have satellite bases that build intermediate products, say putting all chips in one place and shipping them around. Or a mishmash of both where sometimes you produce everything onsite and only ship the science back and sometimes you’re importing everything just to make science. You can do a lot of things.

You can’t do that in space age because of the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on how much stuff can fit in a rocket. 2,000 green chips can fit in a single rocket, but only 300 blue chips. Blue chips stack a lot more efficiently than that, the only reason for this is the feeling that it would be “too easy” if you could ship blue chips around from Fulgora. But would it be easy, or would it be interesting? They clearly wanted you to engage with space shipping, the entire planet Aquilo punishes you if you don’t, but they didn’t want you to do *enough* space shipping to actually make planet-to-planet production lines like you could with trains in the base game.

And I think that’s a huge missed opportunity, because I’d *love* it if I could be rewarded for interplanetary shipping like this. I’d love to heavily focus Vulcanus on the “low tier” items and Fulgora on the “high tier.” Gleba could specialize in the various oil derivatives with all its bioproducts. Then I could ship whatever I need whereever I need and have an engaging reason to produce a lot of different space ships with different needs.

It feels like the game quite clearly has exactly one way you have to play and doesn’t want you to experiment, rather it wants you to find and accept the “right” way. The most clear version of this is in the asteroids that will hit your space ships. Fighting the biters in the base game gave a huge latitude for experimentation, did you turret creep them? Mass produce grenades and use grenade spam? Drive all around them in a car with autocannons? Go for the defender capsules? There’s a lot of different ways to do things and none of them are wrong. You can use a tank or ignore it completely. You can focus on personal laser defense to kill biters up close, or rush artillery to kill them from afar. Do you even care to try uranium ammo? Or nuclear bombs? Or do you just want to plop down a long line of laser turrets and call it a day? The game lets you play how you want, rewards you for experimenting, and never punishes you for trying something “wrong.”

Space Age punishes you for not playing its way. You need to use turrets in space to protect from asteroids. And you need to build ammo in space to feed the turrets. You can’t use lasers like you could on the ground, because then you’d only need to focus on power, so asteroids have 99% damage reduction against the same lasers that can kill a behemoth biter twice their size. And you can’t ship ammo up to the space ship either, that would be too easy. Instead ammo has been heavily curtailed with how much of it can be shipped to and fro. 25 uranium-coated bullets weigh as much as 1,000 solid iron plates. Check the periodic table and do the math, I assure you it doesn’t add up. Even more crazy is that 25 uranium bullets weigh as much as 50 uranium fuel cells, U-238 really isn’t *that* much heavier than U-235 guys.

And then once you get ammo working, they introduce new asteroids that are 99% resistant to physical damage. All so that you are forced to build rocket turrets instead, which are the new asteroids one weakness. Then finally rocket turrets need to be upgraded to tesla turrets.

There’s no variety here, there’s no experimentation, there’s no reward for trying things your way. You don’t get to try other options like shipping all your ammo up and trying to make it that way. Or focusing on laser turrets instead of gun turrets. Or using walls to ram the asteroids instead of using guns at all. There’s a lot of alternative routes that are just fine to experiment with against biters, but are shot down when you go against asteroids because the devs had a very specific vision in mind for how they wanted space ships to work, and stepping outside of their vision is not allowed.

The game just isn’t fun. The newest planets are hit and miss. Fulgora is nice because it’s a backwards planet, all the most expensive materials are easy to get and all the cheapest materials are harder to get. Vulcanus is my favorite because it actually does something cool: your normal solid products are turned into liquids instead. Gleba is terrible game design and should be deleted entirely. Aquila is unfinished and boring.

And overall even the new planets aren’t fun when I’m just landing, doing 3 things, and then leaving that planet never to return. I don’t feel like these bases are part of “my” base the way I felt when I made an area for purple science and an area for yellow science. I don’t feel like they connect to each other in any way because they don’t.

And I don’t feel like any of the challenges the game presents are worthwhile in their own right, because they’ve all been made with the mindset of “there is only 1 way to properly complete this challenge, find the way the game devs wanted or else.” They’ve specifically put down guard-rails to prevent you from ever having an original thought that wasn’t the solution they themselves wanted, and it just feels lame. Space ship design should be the greatest avenue for player freedom and creativity, but instead everyone’s space ship is *identical* because the devs needed to make the challenges solvable in only 1 precise way. So no one ships ammo to space, no one tries to smash into the asteroids with walls and build up faster than they take damage. No one tries to do anything except the exact solution the devs wanted, and that it such a shame for a game that until now was so focused on player freedom and expression.

Factorio: Space Age is not a good expansion pack. I thought it would rekindle my love for Factorio, but now I never want to play Factorio again. I had been playing for absolute ages, and had recommended the game to friends. But I can’t recommend this expansion pack to anyone I know, it just isn’t what made Factorio so fun to begin with.

Still can’t finish a game of Dyson Sphere Program

I blogged a while ago about losing interest in Dyson Sphere Program before I finished it. Well, I tried again and I still couldn’t finish. My reasons are many, some I think I talked about back then and some I think I didn’t. But they bear repeating because as much as this game is trying to claim the mantle of Factorio, it still comes up short in some important aspects.

First, I still don’t enjoy actually “building” things is DSP. In Factorio you start the game buildings things manually, which means you have to be physically next to whatever you want to build, but at least you can build everything as fast as you can run. Eventually you get little robots who will build things for you anywhere on the map, the only downside is that they’re a bit slower and use energy. DSP unfortunately has the worst of both worlds: you still have to stand next to whatever you’re building, but you *also* have to wait on slow little robots to build the stuff for you. You map out plans, and they *slowly* get to work.

This may seem a petty complaint, but it’s hard to overstate just how much this dampens my enjoyment. I never have the feeling of “let me throw down some massive blueprint that my robots will build, and then go do something else” because I know I’ll have to stand next to them while they build it. I can’t run off and let them do their thing, I have to *stand there*, not doing anything, or nothing gets done. And if the blueprint is big enough, I have to slowly shuffle along it so I can expand the robot’s radius, otherwise the outermost edges of the blueprint never get built either.

I also can’t just quickly build something like a massive transport belt stretching for miles, because I can’t build it at running speed, I have to *wait for the robots*.

OK, that’s a complaint I think I already covered in the previous post, but it bears repeating. What else? Oh yeah, flying in space is boring because again, there’s nothing to do but wait until you reach your destination. Oh, I already said that too?

Well there’s one complaint I’m pretty sure I *didn’t* cover last time but it’s a bit complicated. It has to do with multiple outputs.

In both Factorio and DSP, there are certain things you can build where you can’t build *just* item A, in order to build A you must *also* build an equivalent amount of B. And both A and B must have space to be built or neither can be, if you’re full up on A you can’t build B and vice versa. It’s a bit of a tough balancing act in a game where everything else is build on its own.

But I actually don’t think DSP handles this concept well, even though it has a lot more examples of it than Factorio.

In Factorio, the only time you have multiple outputs is in oil processing. When you start the game the only oil processing you can do is basic oil processing, which takes in crude oil and gives you petroleum gas (think methane and ethane). Basic is the right word for this, because it’s simple and easy with a 1-in-1-out setup. And it’s perfect for making the simple plastics (which you’ll need a lot of) because they require just petroleum gas and coal.

But you quickly research advanced oil processing, and that’s where you get multiple outputs. Advanced processing gives you petroleum gas plus light oil plus heavy oil. And if you don’t find some way to use up the light and heavy oil, you can’t get any more petroleum gas (so you can’t get more plastics). So why would you ever use advanced oil processing, when it complicates your life so much?

Well there are a few items (rocket fuel and lubricant) which *require* light and heavy oil. But also, if you crack all that light and heavy oil down to petroleum gas, you’ll end up with 50% more petroleum gas than what you’d get from basic oil processing.

So this recipe presents you with a trade-off: do you take the simple setup which gets you less total output, or the complicated setup which can get you more? Cracking heavy and light oil isn’t easy, it requires many more refineries and a lot of water, but when oil is scarce and plastic is in high demand, you need as much petroleum gas as you can get. On the other hand when oil is plentiful, maybe you don’t care about efficiency and just want the easier recipe.

DSP has a similar idea, except there’s no trade-off. DSP starts you off with their version of advanced oil processing, which has multiple outputs that you have to find a use for. Later on there are two recipes which can turn one output into the other or vice-versa. This has the same effect as the “cracking” I explained earlier, where it complicates your setup but allows you to have as much of one output as you can get. But in Factorio it’s a trade-off, and in DSP it’s mandatory.

DSP also have multiple outputs in some *exotic* recipes. DSP has all the “normal” raw materials (iron, copper, stone etc), but then it has fantasy ones like “Fire-Ice.” These fantasy materials can usually be processed to yield multiple outputs, at least one of which is a high-level output that normally requires an extremely complicated setup to create. This would be really cool, except on most maps these materials won’t be found in your starting star system, so you can’t even use them until you finish the tech tree anyway. And as I said about multiple outputs, you have to make sure you use up one of the outputs or it will back up your production of the other, and that’s kind of a pain.

I never got out of my starting star system in DSP. I did start launching a little Dyson Swarm and getting power from it. I even appreciated the swarm more this time than last time, as it fixed some of my power issues on my starting planet.

But I really did not enjoy shuffling back and forth between planets to build stuff. In Factorio you can get a bird’s-eye-view of your entire factory and slowly scroll around looking for issues. Or you can just look around for some bare area where you can stamp out more assembly lines. *Or* if you’re busy building that new assembly line, you can glance back at your factory to see how much extra material it can send your way or if you’ll have to make everything this line needs on-site.

I can’t do that in DSP. If there’s an issue on one planet such that it isn’t producing any science, I can’t diagnose that issue without flying all the way there (which takes a few minutes), then looking around for the cause. And perhaps the cause is that I need a few more items which are only produced on my *other* planet. So I have to fly back to the first planet, pick up those items, fly back to the planet with the issues, fix the issues, then fly back to wherever I started when I first noticed the issues so I can get back to what I was doing.

And I can’t build things at a distance, as I said in the first few paragraphs. When I finally got to the last kind of science, what I really wanted was to find somewhere fresh and empty to build so I could get away from the spaghetti I’d already created. There was a planet a few minutes away that I could have gone to. But it didn’t have all the raw materials I needed.

In Factorio that would be fine, I’d zoom to some empty part of the map in my bird’s-eye-view and start carefully planning out whatever assembly line I need to create that final type of science. I can then use a tool to count up how many and what kinds of machines I’ll need to build everything I’ve planned, and figure out what items I’ll need to import to other parts of the factory. Then I load up on machines and send the robots to build. While the robots are building, I can run to other areas and start sending the items needed over to that new area. By the time the robots are finished, everything has arrived and the assembly line can start producing science.

But in DSP this is a time-consuming and *boring* back and forth game of flying to the empty planet, planning out what I’ll build, flying back for machines, bringing them to the empty planet and *slowly* waiting for my robots to build everything while I stand around. Then I fly to whatever planets need to send materials this way and tell them to do so. Then I fly back to that planet where I built everything to make sure everything is working properly.

It’s a mess, it’s boring, and I just couldn’t be bothered to finish the game because of it.

I think if they give a Factorio-style map screen, along with robots who will build stuff when you aren’t standing next to them, the game would be improved just enough for me to finish it. But as long as everything takes so damn long, I don’t think I’ll ever finish it.

I unfortunately just went back to Factorio.

Why can’t I seem to finish a game of Dyson Sphere Program?

I’ve talked a couple of times about Dyson Sphere Program on this blog, and while I’ve enjoyed my time with it immensely, I’ve never managed to actually sit down and finish a game of it. This post will be a sort of ramble on why a game so similar to Factorio just doesn’t do it for me the way Factorio does.

To start with, I’ve already talked about how I feel the game doesn’t “scale up” in the same way Factorio does. Later research goals in Factorio cost exponentially more than earlier ones, but in Dyson Sphere Program the relationship seems more additive or multiplicative than exponential. Then there’s the difficulty with blueprints, I can’t have a nice big blueprint that does everything I want anywhere I want it because since planets have to be spheres, the gridlines get broken up closer to the poles. This means a blueprint developed for the equator doesn’t work at the poles and vice versa, and means it’s not nearly as fun to make and place my blueprints for a big mega-base.

I’m also not to keen on constantly having to move between planets. In Dyson Sphere Program you have different planets that you’re collecting resources from, which should be really fun but the time it takes you to GET to those different planets is very boring. They couldn’t have realistic space travel ala Kerbal Space Program, but they also didn’t do enough to make space travel interesting in and of itself. So sitting there for a few minutes while you travel to another planet is just boring, and you HAVE to keep going back and forth because there’s no way to build things on one planet while you’re standing on another. This was something Factorio dealt with very well, running around was also boring in Factorio but once you build radars everywhere you could go into your map and change things anywhere that you had radar coverage without ever having to move your character. It was fun, it worked, and Dyson Sphere Program should have incorporated it so I don’t have to trek back and forth between planets just to make minor changes.

The lack of enemies is another thing I think I’ve talked about but it bears repeating because in Factorio the enemies actually did a lot for the game. Their attacks kept you on your toes, pushing back their bases gave you something to do while waiting for research, and it was a very fun structural problem to try to figure out how you were going to make everything you wanted to make while still protecting it. Factorio gives you an infinite canvas to build on, but gives you constraints in that you must protect everything from the enemies. That’s more interesting to me than an infinite canvas with no constraints.

Constantly needing to refuel your character (a robot), as well as needing to physically be in the places you want to build, work together to make me not enjoy the endgame. I don’t like running around making sure I have enough fuel or am standing near a charging station, and I don’t like building a giant conveyor belt across a tundra planet if it means I have to march across the planet myself to make sure it gets built. Having the bots build actually makes building long belts go a lot more slowly in this game than it did in Factorio where at least you could build a belt at your running speed.

Unclear benefits to building the actual Dyson Sphere. The Dyson Sphere in literature and science is an idea of harnessing the nearly unlimited energy of a star to do our bidding, and yet I got all the way to the final Research cube and never found myself with the kind of unsolvable power troubles that seemed to require a Dyson Sphere. I built one for kicks (it’s also unclear where you’re supposed to build the launchers but whatever), but I feel like I’d have been just as well or better served building more and more solar grids across the surface of the planet. Land was super plentiful and why should I spent more to build solar grids in space when I could just build solar grids on the ground. The efficiency gains (if there even were any) weren’t worth it and the energy gains for running your planet-wide base weren’t so great that I felt I needed it.

So overall Dyson Sphere Program is still a very fun game, and it’s a somewhat unique way to combine Factorio with space travel. But I’m feeling less and less confident in recommending it to others considering I can’t even bring myself to finish it.

Games that play themselves

There’s a certain type of game I really really like.  It doesn’t have a good category, some games of this type would be called “management,” others would be called “strategy,” but what makes them enjoyable to me is that they’re the types of games where you struggle mightily to do every task the game throws at you, but by the end of the game you have developed systems in which the game basically plays itself.  Let me give some examples.

Factorio is the game that most comes to mind in this.  For Factorio the key word is “automation,” you start the game crash-landing on an alien world and have to hand-mine and hand-craft every single item you’ll need to survive.  Anything you want to build you have to place one by one across the world as well, and so the early game consists of running around mining, crafting, and building hundreds of things by hand.  The goal of the game is to defend yourself from the aliens and launch a rocket ship to escape, but as you progress closer to the rocket everything you want to build or research becomes exponentially more expensive and difficult. 

The trick is that the game gives you systems that you can do to make everything exponentially cheaper and easier.  This biggest game-changer is the ability to create little robots that can perform just about every job for you, and by that point in time the game almost feels like it plays itself.  You can put down big blueprints of what you want to be built and what you want to be crafted and the bots will do everything for you.  Need more resources?  The bots can build mining bases.  Need more science?  The bots can build your labs.  Suddenly everything you had been doing by hand can be done for you and the feeling is just so liberating that I often like to sit back and watch as the bots do everything for me.

The other game that comes to mind is Victoria 2.  Now this game is completely different, it’s not management but more strategy.  Victoria 2 puts you in control of a historical nation starting in 1836 and tells you to guide their destiny from the 19th into the 20th century.  Want to industrialize Japan and become a world power?  You can do that.  What to unite Italy into a single nation?  You can do that.  What to play as France and enact your Napoleonic fantasies?  You do you man, but you can do that. 

The important point is that at the start of the game your nation will normally be poor, illiterate, and un-industrialized, even the nations of Europe were like this in 1836.  This means that there will be tough choices to be made in order to grow your economy, educate your populace, and industrialize your society.  But doing all these things makes the game easier and easier, until by the end of the 19th century you’re likely to be rich, highly educated, and highly industrialized, at which point you can make lots of money even with a fully-funded state apparatus, and capitalists will run around building whatever factory your country needs before you can even ask.  By the end of the game, it is almost playing itself in this way.

I don’t know exactly why I like games like this.  Maybe it’s just about the feeling of liberation you get when something that used to be so hard becomes easy to you, but for whatever reason I really really like games like these and would be happy to be recommended more like them.

Random thoughts about Dyson Sphere Program

So Dyson Sphere Program (DSP for short) is a video game I’ve put way too much time into, and I decided to write down some random thoughts I had on it

I now know why Factorio was helped by having biters: they give you something to do and work on.  I spend a lot of time in DSP just waiting for the next research to finish. I had nothing to lose but time, and no idea of what to do next. Biters in Factorio at least gave you a goal and a thing to work on whenever you were stuck. “I don’t know what to do, well the biters to the west are giving me trouble, I’ll reinforce the defenses or destroy the nests, maybe both.”

It feels like there’s too much research and also it’s a mistake to let you queue it all immediately.  I end up researching a lot of things that I don’t know what they do or why they help. I just queue up everything I can currently research and I end up wondering what the hell any of it did because I wasn’t really thinking about my decisions. The research queue is a QOL feature, but its absence does at least force the player to kind of go back to the tech tree and glance over the techs every few minutes instead of every few hours.

Also I think the research tree could use some UI help.  There are certain techs that require other techs… but those techs don’t directly precede them.  If I MUST research Tech A before Tech B, then Tech A should be linked to Tech B and immediately precede it.  OR AT LEAST if I click on Tech B because I want to research it, then Tech A should get queued automatically before Tech B.  As it stands I found myself wanting to research certain techs and having to hunt around the tech tree to find the required pre-reqs (logistics/interplanetary logistics were where I had the most trouble)

Other times I research a tech only to find that although I can craft New Item B, that item relies on Other Item A which I do NOT have the tech for.  So again I have to hunt through the tech tree to find Other Item A so I can finally craft New Item B like I wanted to.  Again, if B requires A then A should immediately precede B and I shouldn’t be allowed to research B until I have A.

I feel like this game doesn’t really ramp up in scope and scale as much as Factorio did, and because of this I found myself not really needing or caring to expand all that much.  After making an initial spaghetti base I moved on the starting planet to two new spots to set up research lines, and that basically carried me through half or more of the tech tree.  My starting resources never/barely ran out and I didn’t need to go to new planets for more iron or copper, just for the titanium and silicon that didn’t spawn on my starting planet.  Having certain resources only spawn on specific planets is certainly one way to incentivize moving off-world, but I’d also like it more if higher levels of science required massively increased amounts of resources, forcing you to colonize more and more planets to meet the resource requirements much like how Factorio forces you to expand further and further outwards to meet the higher requirements for Blue/Purple/Yellow science.

Blueprints were the opposite of intuitive.  I understood Factorio blueprints pretty quickly, but I could not possibly figure out how to create a blueprint here without going online.

I really like the multiple levels for transport belts, really makes the spaghetti come alive and does at least mitigate my disappointment in not having double sided belts like Factorio. Double sided belts were where you could create a T-intersection with belts with say Iron Gears from the left and Green Circuits from the right, and the result would be a belt with Gears on its left half and Circuits on its right half. DSP doesn’t have that, but at least with multiple layers of belts all on top of each other it isn’t *too* much trouble to get everything where I want it, possibly even easier.

Having liquids exist as little cubes on belts took some getting used to, but since pipes in Factorio were always a little opaque and had strange fail conditions, I really like this system

Why does every single planet have coal?  Is it just to give a player something to mine for energy when they first land on a planet, to make sure they can always get the energy to get back home?  Because coal being dead plant matter on earth makes it seem like ALL these planets were once life-bearing.