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So I asked myself: Can I put water extractors at the top of that gigantic waterfall in the desert dunes starting location? And the answer is: Yes, yes you can. And now I don't ever need to make pumps.  There's absolutely nothing up there, no decorations, just water and elevation so it works quite well to serve areas where there are no easily accessible water. Or worse, water way below. It's just a matter of running pipelines everywhere, which is kinda fun.
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Jul 27, 2020 17:48
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Kurr de la Cruz posted:So I asked myself: Can I put water extractors at the top of that gigantic waterfall in the desert dunes starting location? And the answer is: Yes, yes you can. And now I don't ever need to make pumps. That is brilliant. Make nature work FOR you.
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Jul 27, 2020 17:55
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You're still probably going to need a pump or two based on distance, even if the pipes aren't going "up". Because real fluid dynamics are hard so it just approximates them.
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Jul 27, 2020 18:30
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DelphiAegis posted:You're still probably going to need a pump or two based on distance, even if the pipes aren't going "up". Because real fluid dynamics are hard so it just approximates them. It does, but it's the other way: the game's approximation is really generous in the other direction. Head lift is totally independent of flow rate, and the maximum height value is "contagious" to every pipe it connects to. You can use a single extractor on a high place, or a water tower fed by a single set of pumps, to pressurize an infinite amount of other pipes fed by low-elevation extractors to the same height. videos on the subject one two IRL these would be perpetual motion machines.
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Jul 27, 2020 19:08
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Der Kyhe posted:I don't get why people want to demolish stuff to accommodate new production lines and rebuild from a scratch; just box your old factory floor and make a new one on top of the old one, or relocate to one of the other starting positions and build there. Or go crazy and do the "castle in the sky"-factory. Because my old powerplant looked like this and i don't want people thinking i employ apes. Also i had a power issue and couldn't figure it out but the little hump in the water pipes was starving the left most plants.  MKII is much nicer. 
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Jul 27, 2020 21:59
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I found out there's mods for the game and there's a mod called Micro Manager that lets you precisely reposition any placed building/object and holy gently caress this needs to be in the base game.
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Jul 27, 2020 22:46
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Powershift posted:Because my old powerplant looked like this and i don't want people thinking i employ apes. Also i had a power issue and couldn't figure it out but the little hump in the water pipes was starving the left most plants. A little "secret" when setting down pipes: Press "R" to change the build mode until you get the vertical mode. When mixed with the stackable pipe supports you can put your pipes on top of your conveyor belt lines feeding coal in and let gravity do the work (at least once you get the water up there). The vertical mode will let you also slip pipes in a few tight places the normal build mode wouldn't let you.
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Jul 27, 2020 22:55
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I've reached the point where I keep firing up this game and then just not wanting to play. My initial factory is a rat nest that really can't be pushed any further, and it'd be an obnoxious chore to break everything down. Besides that, I'm not even sure what I want to build - everything is completely obsoleted every time you get more tech, so what's even the point? It feels really unrewarding. I really feel like the design of this game goes out of its way to constantly say gently caress you to anyone who hasn't completely memorized every ratio, building size, etc in the game.
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Jul 27, 2020 23:35
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K8.0 posted:I've reached the point where I keep firing up this game and then just not wanting to play. My initial factory is a rat nest that really can't be pushed any further, and it'd be an obnoxious chore to break everything down. Besides that, I'm not even sure what I want to build - everything is completely obsoleted every time you get more tech, so what's even the point? It feels really unrewarding. I really feel like the design of this game goes out of its way to constantly say gently caress you to anyone who hasn't completely memorized every ratio, building size, etc in the game. If your factory is too messy to keep up with, that's understandable. Especially when you don't know which bits you'll need to expand you end up with a lot of ad-hoc extensions. I've been playing this since it was first available and my factories still end up too convoluted to understand as often as not. You have a couple options. You can try to salvage what your factory is making. Just belt out the highest tier stuff your factory makes, put them in big boxes on the edge of your current factory, and then basically make a new factory somewhere nearby. If you need reinforced iron plates for something advanced down the line, just run a belt out of the boxes you made to your new factory area. You don't need to worry about exact ratios or anything. Buildings will only consume power when they're active, so even if it's not optimized, it won't be an undue strain on your system, and if you already built the buildings, who cares if you coulda done the same thing with less buildings? You might not know how much you can produce if your old factory is a mess, but you can watch and see when the stuff is drying up and expand production of whatever else you need. Alternately, you could not worry about salvaging the old stuff- just take a car and a bunch of materials and look for somewhere new with some basic resources nearby and just make a new factory with the understanding you got from your old one. I like organic messy factories, but if that's frustrating for you, take a shitton of concrete and flatten a huge area to work with to start. You'll be able to organize your stuff better that way. If you end up taking a lot more space than you need, that'll be good to keep things clear and separate. It's fun to be efficient with space but you do not need to be in this game. A one kilometer belt allows the same rate of production as a one meter belt. You could also just wipe the slate clean if you'd feel better that way and start a new game. There's no advantage to this over option two of just going elsewhere, but there might be some psychological benefit to building a clean new foundation. The last thing I'd do is spend a lot of time breaking down your old factory. It's really easy to make a spaghetti nest that's nearly impossible to untangle. And there's no reason to. Space is not a limitation unless you make it one. You can just build more elsewhere, and either integrate your old mess or not.
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Jul 28, 2020 00:45
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K8.0 posted:I've reached the point where I keep firing up this game and then just not wanting to play. My initial factory is a rat nest that really can't be pushed any further, and it'd be an obnoxious chore to break everything down. Besides that, I'm not even sure what I want to build - everything is completely obsoleted every time you get more tech, so what's even the point? It feels really unrewarding. I really feel like the design of this game goes out of its way to constantly say gently caress you to anyone who hasn't completely memorized every ratio, building size, etc in the game. Part of the fun for me is trying to figure out future proof designs to prevent this from happening. Say for example coming up with a modular foundry for steel that can output x per minute that I can replicate and build out. It would be far easier if there were blueprints but that’s early access for you.
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Jul 28, 2020 01:12
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I really couldn't disagree more with almost everything you said. Yes, (almost) nothing goes obsolete, but you absolutely must be designing from mining to output to have everything run in very specific ratios, or you're going to wind up waiting literally tens of hours for production to slowly fill containers before shifting resources to where they're actually needed. Yoloing off a bus and capping production at useful amounts isn't an option in this game, unlike Factorio. Space is really at a premium, because movement in this game is dogshit slow. It takes loving forever to get anywhere, you really need to be optimizing for space unless you like spending the majority of your time waiting to get somewhere. Also another point I would make is that like nearly everything else, the car comes AFTER you need it, not when you need it. Case in point for me right now is the oil bullshit. gently caress you, go build a useless temporary oil facility halfway across the map with literally hours of walking to get the required materials over there. Maybe only one hour if you do it by driving the obnoxiously unfun tractor around and actually guess the path to get there. Then after you produce some poo poo and unlock the tech that actually lets you transport oil, tear it down and make an actually useful factory. That's garbage game design. Belting stuff out of the factory is useless, because the problem is the factory itself. To scale up, I need the resources, which are buried inside a giant mess. You can't come anywhere close to carrying enough stuff to start another base somewhere else. It's taken me a couple inventories full of concrete just to try to build a base where something scalable could sit, but again, since the game says gently caress you I have no idea what is actually useful to build. Half the poo poo is dead ends (at least temporarily) so again unless I want to wait loving forever I have to create a loving spreadsheet to calculate my way back to refinement ratios and exact numbers of each building to lay down so I can get the next tech tier without AFKing forever. I'm really impressed with the technical design of this game. Game design wise, it's an absolute nightmare. Whoever is doing their design needs to spend a good few hundred hours silently watching new players blind play the game, because the experience is completely poo poo.
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Jul 28, 2020 01:21
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If getting the milestones is that hard, use the AWESOME shop to buy what you need. I would definitely prioritise getting the hypertubes unlocked ASAP - makes getting around a *ton* easier. EDIT: What do you mean by that oil thing? You don't need packaging to transport oil, just build a pipe. You should have pipes unlocked already, unless somehow you skipped coal power plants entirely? Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 01:46
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Kurr de la Cruz posted:I found out there's mods for the game and there's a mod called Micro Manager that lets you precisely reposition any placed building/object and holy gently caress this needs to be in the base game. Oh man you got me to look at that one again and I am absolutely gonna install that. I saw that before and thought it was just for scaling stuff, like for people who wanted a mega-factory that didn't consume 5 square miles. But being able to nudge some things to deal with clipping is just what I need. I had already grabbed the mod loader for the Light It Up mod, because it's crazy that they haven't added streetlights. But playing MP a lot I haven't had much chance to use it -- my friend is playing on a potato so adding lights isn't great for him. K8.0 posted:It takes loving forever to get anywhere, you really need to be optimizing for space unless you like spending the majority of your time waiting to get somewhere. Also another point I would make is that like nearly everything else, the car comes AFTER you need it, not when you need it. Case in point for me right now is the oil bullshit. gently caress you, go build a useless temporary oil facility halfway across the map with literally hours of walking to get the required materials over there. Maybe only one hour if you do it by driving the obnoxiously unfun tractor around and actually guess the path to get there. Have you used the explorer? That is possible to get well before oil, it's on the quartz tree in the MAM. All you need is steel. (And if you're exploring for hard drives, you can even find the 5 motors and heavy modular frames to build one early.) The explorer is fun on a bun to drive. I do think the game probably need to be more emphatic about the MAM, to get people to fill in those trees before rocketing up the Hub & Elevator trees. The stuff in the MAM is a lot of QOL stuff that makes building bigger easier. Also, common resources like limestone and iron are common. If I was building a large new factory complex somewhere and needed poo poo-tons of concrete and plates, I'll bring a bunch to start with but also throw down a miner and some temporary constructors. In my nice factory I used the first part of the build to finish the second. The rest of your post I don't feel qualified to judge, because I'm not a Factorio player. But I think you may be trying to pull too many Factorio concepts into this game and they're just not the same. Distance and scale are one of the challenges here, and waste is a non-factor. You can be wasteful, the game encourages you to be wasteful by giving you a giant trash can as a goal. If stuff isn't produced fast enough, build more. Don't produce just enough to carry back a load for your current milestone. Produce infinite quantities of everything. OTOH: quote:Belting stuff out of the factory is useless, because the problem is the factory itself. To scale up, I need the resources, which are buried inside a giant mess.
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Jul 28, 2020 01:53
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Increasingly I feel like the HDDs and the MAM are bad. It is a parallel progress path, with, as you said, most of the QOL improvements hidden in it. The only time the game talks about the MAM is right at the start and a lot of the early MAM research you can do is useless. Oh goody it told be these berries that I have been eating are edible. Wheee! The HDDs hide important techs behind an uncontrollable gacha. I’ve collected half the HDDs on the map and still haven’t gotten the water based smelting tech I want. It is very frustrating.
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Jul 28, 2020 02:40
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Klyith posted:It does, but it's the other way: the game's approximation is really generous in the other direction. Head lift is totally independent of flow rate, and the maximum height value is "contagious" to every pipe it connects to. You can use a single extractor on a high place, or a water tower fed by a single set of pumps, to pressurize an infinite amount of other pipes fed by low-elevation extractors to the same height. You can actually do even more abuse to the fluid dynamics model by not even having a water extractor source up high. Just put a tank up high and run a train full of water up there every now and then. If all the water up high is doing is shoving headlift into other pipes that are amply supplied, barely any of the tank ever drains and a small train easily keeps up. The advantage here is you can run a train up a lot higher than any real water sources on the map and don't need a real water source that's actually up high to do it.
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Jul 28, 2020 02:58
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chairface posted:You can actually do even more abuse to the fluid dynamics model by not even having a water extractor source up high. Just put a tank up high and run a train full of water up there every now and then. If all the water up high is doing is shoving headlift into other pipes that are amply supplied, barely any of the tank ever drains and a small train easily keeps up. That's an awesome way to abuse the mechanics and totally brilliant. I love it.
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Jul 28, 2020 03:14
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Klyith posted:Have you used the explorer? That is possible to get well before oil, it's on the quartz tree in the MAM. All you need is steel. (And if you're exploring for hard drives, you can even find the 5 motors and heavy modular frames to build one early.) The explorer is fun on a bun to drive. I do think the game probably need to be more emphatic about the MAM, to get people to fill in those trees before rocketing up the Hub & Elevator trees. The stuff in the MAM is a lot of QOL stuff that makes building bigger easier. I haven't because I haven't found enough quartz, and because research is entirely blind I had no idea that's where it was. Exploring is one of the things I have found pretty enjoyable (although not the slog back through areas I've already walked through) so I guess I should spend some more time on that. Klyith posted:The rest of your post I don't feel qualified to judge, because I'm not a Factorio player. But I think you may be trying to pull too many Factorio concepts into this game and they're just not the same. Distance and scale are one of the challenges here, and waste is a non-factor. You can be wasteful, the game encourages you to be wasteful by giving you a giant trash can as a goal. If stuff isn't produced fast enough, build more. Don't produce just enough to carry back a load for your current milestone. Produce infinite quantities of everything. If you haven't played Factorio I can't recommend it strongly enough. It's easily in the top 5 best games ever made, and the developers are absolutely obsessed with making the player experience not just good but perfect. Also if you like scale, Factorio is on a whole different level, and mods take it to an insane degree. Factorio is also based on the concept of endlessly scaling things up and expanding over larger and larger distances, but the progression is meticulously tuned to make doing so really fun at almost every step. One of the huge things that Factorio does that Satisfactory badly lacks is that it lets you cap how many slots a container can automatically fill to. The game explicitly tells you how to do this in the tips that pop up when you start the game, so it lets even new players avoid sinking huge amounts of resources into building large amounts of something they don't need much of yet. Not only that, but production buildings are smart - they only suck up enough resources to buffer 2-4 crafts worth of output, and won't fill their output slot to a full stack unless you're feeding them by hand. This prevents the problem Satisfactory has where throwing together an assembler to automate some new item you need a small amount of results in sucking down maybe 30 minutes worth of your resources if you don't output to a container, and potentially dozens of hours if you do. Because of this, where Satisfactory actively prevents you from automating by capping your power early on, in Factorio automating literally everything is strongly encouraged from the very beginning. While there are still huge benefits to optimizing ratios in your base, you really don't HAVE to just to have semi-efficient production. The normal design for Factorio starter bases is to build sets of belts that hold all of your resources and frequently-used components, and your production lines just suck off whatever they need. If something starts starving, you just follow the starving line back until there's input to spare but insufficient output, and build more of that. You never really have to give a poo poo about optimizing ratios and routing the first time you play the game. Because resources are so limited in Satisfactory, and it's such a horrible slog to go get more, you really, really can't afford to not give a poo poo. I have 25 hours on my save file and there are things that have been operational for more than half of that and still not filled their output container. The alternative would be the deliberately terrible hand-crafting - again something Factorio does excellently, letting you just queue whatever you want straight from your inventory where every single thing you can build is shown (even if you can't hand-craft it) and can be infinitely queued and will automatically build all hand-craftable subcomponents, leaving you free to keep thinking about your base, building things, or fighting, as well as making optimizing inventory space a lot less important for new players. I get that the hand-crafting is bad on purpose to discourage you from using it, but if you're going to do that, you REALLY need to make automating things good, and Satisfactory also actively sabotages that with the biomass phase and the tech tree that consistently locks proper tools for your next goal BEHIND that goal. I know it's really not fair to expect anything to be even close to the level of masterpiece that Factorio is, but the more I play the more I think the Satisfactory devs just don't give a gently caress about player experience. I mean gently caress me, you grab fruits not by looking at them, but by looking somewhere under them. It's loving 2020, the last time I played a game with such terrible object selection was probably 15 years ago. Building is chonky as gently caress too, I still have absolutely no idea what method the game uses to decide which way things are going to face by default. Games since Minecraft have given us 10 loving years of examples of good options for how snapping things together can work predictably and well in 3d, and Satisfactory just yeets most of it out a loving window. Sometimes aiming at the loving top of something means "build under this". If I want to build a line that goes over something, I can't just throw the conveyor down and elevate it, I have to build the pole first because the ground-level is an invalid build location. Sometimes the game just obsessively believes that I want every single ramp facing 90 degrees from the piece of foundation I'm aiming it at. Also, with my hotbar swap bound to shift+mousewheel I can't swap hotbars without unselecting a build option, because the spin object function overrides the modifier - entirely backward behavior from... literally every interface that exists. Modifiers always take priority over unmodified functions. I'm sure when you have everything unlocked and you're used to the garbage UI the game is a lot of fun - every manageable project I've done has been a ton of fun - but the new player experience is atrocious. I'm determined to fall in love with this game, but it's so goddamn hard.
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Jul 28, 2020 03:35
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K8.0 posted:I'm sure when you have everything unlocked and you're used to the garbage UI the game is a lot of fun - every manageable project I've done has been a ton of fun - but the new player experience is atrocious. I'm determined to fall in love with this game, but it's so goddamn hard. I agree with a lot of your points here, but keep in mind two things: 1. This game is in Early Access, and they mean it. While Factorio is still technically a "beta" it's been in development for nearly a decade at this point, Satisfactory is more like 3 years and has changed dramatically since initial EA release. 2. Satisfactory is not Factorio 3D. The reason why you're having a frustrating, unfun time is because you're literally just taking Factorio concepts and applying them to Satisfactory for no reason, and expecting it to work even though that's not the ideal solution for Satisfactory gameplay. For instance: megabases. Ask yourself why are megabases so good in Factorio? Beacons and blueprints mainly, but also the scalable main bus, and in non peaceful games the pressure from biters that makes setting up satellite bases inadvisable. The need to constantly set up new mining outposts and to have a central place where those resources can be directed. So... how many of those game concepts are in Satisfactory? None! So why are you building a megabase before you even have the basic tech tree unlocked? No wonder why you're having an unfun, miserable time. The game is trying to tell you "Hey, don't do this!" and you're just slogging on with it anyway because it works in Factorio. Satisfactory is designed to encourage building multiple, small bases centered around individual resource clusters producing specific products. You identify what you want to make out of a resource node, work out the ratios you need, set it up, and forget it. Eventually later on you can use trucks and/or trains to bring finished product to a central location where you can then finish manufacturing space elevator parts, or set up a mall to fuel rapid expansion. Resources are not limited. They never run out. Any production line you build will run until the end of time, and it should be treated that way. When you build your first base, instead of thinking "Ok I'm going to build plates and rods here, and then pivot to making rotors or whatever when those containers fill up" you should be just building plates and rods, and then congratulations you have an infinite supply of plates and rods forever. Never have to think about that again for construction. Need plates and rods for rotors or frames or whatever? Set up a new miner, figure out the ratios, build a rotor production line off the new node. Now congratulations, you have an infinite supply of rotors. Rinse and repeat. There's no need to centralize because there is no benefit to doing so. Let go of the Factorio mindset and you will find the game becomes much more enjoyable.
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Jul 28, 2020 04:16
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One of the things I found is that once you discover manifolds the nature of 3D makes buses require a lot less planning. While it'd be nice to be able to set container size like in Factorio, using a manifold design solves part of this because you can just build/disable buildings without considering ratios until the upstream produces more than the downstream consumes.
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Jul 28, 2020 05:05
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Gadzuko posted:
This is a dirty, filthy lie. Satisfactory is terribly designed for distributed production. It provides you with none of the tools you need to make that work. Trucks are nonfunctional in multiplayer. Source: my wife and I spent 27 in-game hours trying to make them work and we couldn’t. We are both professional engineers who make a living out of forcing interfaces that don’t want to connect to merge into a productive whole, and we finally just gave up on trucks. Trains require a megabase to unlock, and another megabase to produce parts for. Before you can escape the megabase, you have to build it. We’re building our first train now and it has been a multi day effort to build a single point to point track. It was both faster and easier to run belts from halfway across the map. If the game was intended to be played with distributed production then trains should unlock no later than the space elevator, be super cheap, and very easy to build a many to many stop rail network for. Satisfactory could be a good game. It is satisfying to build out a new product line. But right now the game makes you slog through a lot of seemingly deliberately unfun parts to get there.
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Jul 28, 2020 05:36
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Gadzuko posted:There's no need to centralize because there is no benefit to doing so. The main resource sinks in Satisfactory are: New structure construction Unlocking milestones in the Hub Unlocking new tiers in the Space Elevator The literal sink Of these, only one of the four can be performed in multiple locations at once. New construction only occurs near the player and you cannot place multiples of the hub or elevator. Resource extraction can certainly be distributed but resources must always be brought to the hub/elevator and be collected into depots accessible to the player. Folks are building megabases and factories because this is a game about building factories. The comparison to Factorio is slightly unfair but very much warranted. Factorio has different styles and mindsets, nevermind being a 2D procedural world vs 3D 'hand crafted' etc etc but the focus is rightly so on the player experience and tools, broadening in scope and capacity as the player, their factory, and their research progress all grow. Satisfactory has a lengthier period stuck in caveman-mode and currently seems will always force the player to build new capacity by hand, but it is still a game about factories and industry. There are traversal tools (available too late in my opinion) but this is still a big world requiring the player to travel from A to B and C, moving resources along with them. I'm not sure I would say I want a 3D Factorio, but the care and thought (nevermind the technical ability and polish) shown by Wube (Factorio devs) should be an example to development teams everywhere. I want Satisfactory to be better.
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Jul 28, 2020 05:39
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If you feel like power is too much of a bottleneck, learn to love underclocking. 4x as many buildings making an item at 25% speed gives you the same results for half the power cost, and gives you more stimulating layout challenges.
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Jul 28, 2020 05:40
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Phssthpok posted:If you feel like power is too much of a bottleneck, learn to love underclocking. 4x as many buildings making an item at 25% speed gives you the same results for half the power cost, and gives you more stimulating layout challenges. The ultimate bottleneck is the amount of time it takes to align and place buildings, so building 4x as many to use half as much power defeats the purpose most of the time
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Jul 28, 2020 06:20
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LLSix posted:This is a dirty, filthy lie. Satisfactory is terribly designed for distributed production. Yeah but multiplayer is the broken part there, not trucks. I set up my first truck line in like half an hour and it has run forever with no issues. I agree mobility tools and trains should unlock earlier. Teledahn posted:I'm not sure I would say I want a 3D Factorio, but the care and thought (nevermind the technical ability and polish) shown by Wube (Factorio devs) should be an example to development teams everywhere. I want Satisfactory to be better. Also agree. I guess my definition of "megabase" is just different than other people's. I started in the grasslands, I unlocked everything up to t7/8 with maybe 5 or 6 iron nodes, two copper nodes and a pure coal node. Plus a few more coal nodes off in the boonies for power. I used tubes for moving between the distributed nodes in the grasslands and trucked finished products (basically just computers) back from the oil in the southern mushroom forest. I don't consider that "mega". The person I was originally responding to was complaining about taking hours to move multiple full inventories full of concrete and building materials to try to set up their base at a new location, 25 hours into the game, which does not strike me as particularly ideal. Just... don't do that, and you'll have more fun.
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Jul 28, 2020 06:54
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I think some of you are way too focused on what you expect tools to do rather than looking at what those tools actually do, or how limited they might be in early access. I've got 80+ hours in this game and I haven't built a single truck nor a train. Conveyor belts on stackable frames pull in everything I need, and if I need more than 540/min of something I just throw down another stackable frame on top and bring in another conveyor belt. I can then throw stackable hyperloop frames on top and fast travel to my mining platforms or refineries. Maybe it's that one game is still unfinished and in early access and the other has ten years of supported development; maybe it's that they're different games with different setups rather than the exact same game because they both have "Factory" somewhere in the title. But then again, I bounced very hard off of Factorio and thought it sucked, so maybe different strokes for different folks?
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Jul 28, 2020 11:21
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The only reasons to set up train or truck lines over conveyor belts are that building a train track is (potentially) less work than building a stack of multiple km long belts, and one train track can carry multiple trains with multiple cars each. The train does not really move items much faster than a Mk 5 belt, and eventually it'll be a question of throughput rather than latency anyway. One train cargo station can't have higher throughput than two belts. So there is a potential small gain in time investment to set up, that's all. Apart from that, having trains is all about style and fun.
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Jul 28, 2020 11:46
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I just want trains and trucks (not tractors, actual trucks) to unlock sooner so I can expand out with them. Then again I feel there will at least be more to do with them when more tiers are added. Also while this game is still very much in EA I really do feel like the tiers should really be separated off with more Space Elevator deliveries (the early ones obviously being relatively minor). Tier 0 if you do it is it's own thing, then tiers 1-2, 3-4, etc. all just kinda blend together in one tier for me since they're unlocked at the same time.
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Jul 28, 2020 11:51
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LLSix posted:Increasingly I feel like the HDDs and the MAM are bad. It is a parallel progress path, with, as you said, most of the QOL improvements hidden in it. The only time the game talks about the MAM is right at the start and a lot of the early MAM research you can do is useless. Oh goody it told be these berries that I have been eating are edible. Wheee! LLSix posted:The HDDs hide important techs behind an uncontrollable gacha. I’ve collected half the HDDs on the map and still haven’t gotten the water based smelting tech I want. It is very frustrating. This I kinda agree with. There's a hidden way to screw yourself because which recipes show up are influenced by your tech level, so if you for example really want cast screws or stitched plates it is best to research some HDs before you tech up. The lower-tier stuff still shows up later, but you have way more potential recipes to see. OTOH there are more HDs on the map than there are alternate recipes, so it's not like you won't get them eventually. K8.0 posted:Factorio I get what Factorio does and why someone would like it more than Satisfactory -- my friend who I bought this game specifically to play with also plays a lot of Factorio and I've seen his games of that. Factorio isn't for me because the pure factory game isn't what I'm really into. Satisfactory has exploration, cool landscapes, and room for creative / aesthetic building. They're different games and there's reasons to like or prefer each. Factorio's trains would be cool though. nielsm posted:The only reasons to set up train or truck lines over conveyor belts are that building a train track is (potentially) less work than building a stack of multiple km long belts The reason to do trucks and trains is so you don't end up with a 15 fps slideshow as your computer processes and renders a world completely covered in belt lines.
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Jul 28, 2020 13:10
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There's something really important thats different from Factorio that I don't see discussed and short circuit any obsession with a mega base in order to build the logistic multiplexing stuff like trains. The players themselves are a very important logistics mode in Satisfactorio in a way you only see in weird MP speed runs in Factorio. Hauling inventories full of oil products and computers yourself through cannons (or just simple tube lines of you don't like cannons) or even in the explorer is a valid way to bootstrap Hub research and build trains. You don't immediately need steady state especially on your first production line of something. There's a lot of reasons to and ways to splat out across the map in Satisfactory compared to Factorio. It feels like I'm playing a different game than some of the people here. MAMs ok but it could do without obfuscation. HDDs aren't bad but they aren't good either. Some of the lynch pin recipes should be in the MAM instead IMO or otherwise need setting N number of favorites and your HDD always offer a favorite.
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Jul 28, 2020 14:32
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My biggest gripe with hard drives is that the scanner detects crash sites and not hard drives. It's such a simple and obvious improvement to remove the signal (like slugs) when you retrieve the black box.
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Jul 28, 2020 15:18
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Microcline posted:My biggest gripe with hard drives is that the scanner detects crash sites and not hard drives. It's such a simple and obvious improvement to remove the signal (like slugs) when you retrieve the black box. Yeah. It would make sense if taking out the harddrive also just (lore-wise) had you switch off the transmitter in the pod.
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Jul 28, 2020 15:24
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I think the Crash sites should explode after you take out the hard drive, then we can use that land for other stuff. (That's probably a very silly approach, but there's no way of getting rid of them at the moment).
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Jul 28, 2020 15:37
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Tombot posted:I think the Crash sites should explode after you take out the hard drive, then we can use that land for other stuff. (That's probably a very silly approach, but there's no way of getting rid of them at the moment). Omg if you could pick up the crashed pods and make like a pile of them near your base, that would be fun. Pave the planet, and turn it into a scrapyard.
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Jul 28, 2020 15:39
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I think on my long-term wish list is flying drones you can control for delivery. Make them cost a shitload of fuel and have a relatively small-ish inventory so you don't build swarms of em like in Factorio. But it would be nice to just throw down a pad, request like 12 stacks of concrete, and have that poo poo delivered to me across the map a few minutes later.
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Jul 28, 2020 15:41
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Vasudus posted:I think on my long-term wish list is flying drones you can control for delivery. Make them cost a shitload of fuel and have a relatively small-ish inventory so you don't build swarms of em like in Factorio. But it would be nice to just throw down a pad, request like 12 stacks of concrete, and have that poo poo delivered to me across the map a few minutes later. My ultimate dream is for everything to turn into a meta satisfactory where you sit at the HUB terminal and remotely control your factory with drones.
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Jul 28, 2020 15:42
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Vasudus posted:I think on my long-term wish list is flying drones you can control for delivery. Make them cost a shitload of fuel and have a relatively small-ish inventory so you don't build swarms of em like in Factorio. But it would be nice to just throw down a pad, request like 12 stacks of concrete, and have that poo poo delivered to me across the map a few minutes later. Would be a good purpose to put those radio control units to. Presumably you're going to be building something remote-controlled with them. I'm kind of torn on how Satisfactory does its researches. I both like the variety of progression methods compared to Factorio and think there are maybe too many. You've got the elevator which unlocks the hub, you've got hard drives, the other MAM unlockables, and the AWESOME shop. Almost all of which are ultimately just "feed it these items", usually in different ways, though the only real difference between the MAM and the Hub is the UI and whether it's literally or only practically gated by your tier. I think Coffee Stain are still experimenting with all of these progression mechanics, so there will probably be more refinement in coming updates. I don't think we've yet had a major update without some new progression mechanic being added or changed. The MAM shouldn't hide any nodes in my opinion, at least once you've initially unlocked the tree. As it is it's not obvious that your mobility upgrades come from the caterium and quartz researches. I'd like it if, when researching a hard drive, you could optionally feed it an item and get an alt recipe for that item if available. I think the Hub unlocks should get a review, and possibly put more of them out in the MAM or Shop. Leave only core infrastructure in that one. Or possibly combine it with the space elevator entirely somehow - let unlocking a tier give you all the core infrastructure straight off and maybe open new MAM trees for the new tier's products? Hub feels the most redundant to me, anyway, past the introductory phase. There's something unsatisfying about having all this automated infrastructure and your core researches come from dumping stuff into a machine by hand forever. An unrelated gripe but I really wish the inhaler recipes could be automated. You can do all the other consumables. I like having a factory where I put all my forage into a container and have smart splitters sort it all into the appropriate production for their end products, and it'd be way easier for me if I could do that with the nuts and berries too. The Equipment workbench is mostly pretty nice for keeping your more rarely-used tool fabrication away from your regular recipes, but inhalers are in the wrong one in my view. Similarly, miners shouldn't require portable miners, since that always just means I build a temporary equipment bench on the spot to make one/two and it's just needless tedium. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 16:03
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I'm also on the boat with the argument that many of the QoL updates right now are too late in the MAM/SE trees, namely electricity which can be automated, blade runners (which also eliminate deadly fall damage but only from full health), non-sucky gun, easy to manufacture health boosters, crash site scanning and the rover. To make things even worse for the first-timers, the recommended newbie starting zone is actually the worst. Because to get oil and crystals which unlock most of the QoL stuff, you need to do stupid amount of exploration into the actively hostile and much, much more dangerous territories. At this point, you probably have the poo poo-tier weapons, use the nuts as your main health item and drive the tractor which barely makes it to the top of that hill you need to climb to reach the blue crater oil site. For a factory game that emphasizes exploration into the hostile territory, the current design sure as poo poo hates giving you proper weapons, or equipment to defend yourself or travel on the map, especially vertically. It seems that rappelling gun and climbing harness are lost technology in this universe but the parachute isn't. And when you get most of that QoL stuff, you are beyond the "find the oil wells and build the plastic-rubber belt highway"-hump. Giving early access to automated biomass generation and belt-loaded biomass burner (both in crap-tier conversion rate or so to enforce going towards coal), and possibility to turn biomass, water and coal into synthetic oil, with the same crap-tier conversion rate, would help immensely because it would eliminate the early busywork and allow you to build your poo poo up more before needing to go resource hunting. Der Kyhe fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 17:03
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zedprime posted:There's something really important thats different from Factorio that I don't see discussed and short circuit any obsession with a mega base in order to build the logistic multiplexing stuff like trains. The players themselves are a very important logistics mode in Satisfactorio in a way you only see in weird MP speed runs in Factorio. Hauling inventories full of oil products and computers yourself through cannons (or just simple tube lines of you don't like cannons) or even in the explorer is a valid way to bootstrap Hub research and build trains. You don't immediately need steady state especially on your first production line of something. It's a very normal thing to do in your first Factorio playthrough as well, but like everything else it works literally 10+ times better because getting around is far faster. "Far away" in Factorio for a first time player is a minute or two in a 90 km/h car that you unlock well before your starting resources become insufficient. "Close" in Satisfactory is "gently caress you peasant, spend the next several hours building some lovely power lines, belts, and pipes through several kilometers of obnoxious jungle." I just loaded up the first Factorio save where I launched a rocket. On default map settings, the farthest resource patch I went to, my third iron patch, was <1 minute of driving away from my starting area. On that save, the way I built my base there wasn't a convenient way of belting LDS and rocket fuel to my rocket, so I hand-transported them. 200 stacks, a few minutes of work all told. A few more minutes of work hand-transporting LDS to my yellow science area since they were cut off from each other as well. In Satisfactory, the next thing for me to do would be to get oil, which means hours of back and forth building to get there - after spending a bunch of time shutting various things off in my base so the necessary resources can accrue, and then waiting for them to do so. Satisfactory has orders of magnitude more tedium than Factorio does, and the real problem is that it's mostly stuff that exists at the very core of the game and can't be addressed by pressing forward, only by going back and tearing apart much of the work they've already done. While I acknowledge the comparison to Factorio isn't even slightly fair, the reason I view it as so important is that Factorio solved all these design problems long ago, and even the most casual game designer thinking about making a factory game should have learned lessons from there. It's like making a platformer without learning all the basic mechanics underpinning a game like Mario and the reasons they all exist. Sure, you can make something like Jump King that works very differently and it can be good, but making that difference fun is based on having a good understanding of why previous games were fun and what the un-fun things they avoided were.
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Jul 28, 2020 17:22
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I tried megabase/bus format, as is the most popular way to do things in Factorio and quickly found that it was not feasible. So instead I look for regions that have suitable nearby nodes for producing a specific item, like say computers or something, and then build a factory there, then cart those computers over to the final assembly factory via truck/tractor/golf cart and soon hopefully trains. That seems to work a lot better. The main QoL improvement I want now is a way to force splitters/mergers being attached to a belt to snap to the inputs/outputs of perpendicular machines. And maybe a way to rotate splitters/mergers without replacing the belts.
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Jul 28, 2020 17:27
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I appreciate very much the people who build massive highways and skyways to get where they need to, but I shouldn't feel obligated to build a big-rear end highway around the coast to get from the newbie starting area to the coastal oil fields, but I did. The trek back and forth through hostile jungle a million times was just too much for me.
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Jul 28, 2020 17:44
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