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Canuckistan posted:I see that Satisfactory is on sale on Steam. I know it doesn't scratch the same itch as Factorio, but is it still fun or do you just get frustrated that stuff doesn't work like in Factorio or Factorio does it better? Satisfactory is fine, but I spent a lot of my time playing it frustrated with problems that Factorio has already solved. Late game is significantly less fun than factorio because the game still wants you to build large factories to produce small amounts of individual items, but provides no tools for duplicating all the parts of the design you've already solved. Power has a similar problem with the game quickly scaling up to needing dozens of power plants, every single one of which must be placed by hand.
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Oct 30, 2020 22:21
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LLSix posted:Power has a similar problem with the game quickly scaling up to needing dozens of power plants, every single one of which must be placed by hand. With every belt, pipe, and wire that that entails too. The game is fun and has a lot to like but ultimately it falls flat on the tedium of repeated actions, even in bases that aren't scaling to be something ludicrous. I don't expect (or even want) something as robust as factorio's blueprints in that game, but it needs SOMETHING to solve that tedium.
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Oct 30, 2020 23:32
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Time for a good Satisfactory hate post! Most of the mechanics in Satisfactory don't exist for game design reasons. Why do power lines exist in Factorio? Because it constrains your design, since power poles take space and have both supply and demand connection lengths. Why do power lines exist in Satisfactory? Because Factorio has power lines! And make the player manually wire every building! And limit the power poles for a good chunk of progression to 4 total connections, two of which are needed just to run a line of power poles! It's not like it constrains your design in any way, you can run power lines through walls and they clip through buildings by design. It serves no game design purpose whatsoever, it is just tedium. And nearly everything works this way. In Satisfactory, you build from ingredients in your inventory. In a game where you move slow as gently caress, have a small inventory relative to construction costs, and the ingredients for building vs the ingredients for production are not really consolidated in any sane way, and the game heavily punishes building a centralized base, this is absolute loving misery. You wind up building for maybe 5-10 minutes, then spending literally minutes of "fast" travel to get more resources and come back before you can go back to building. Imagine if in Factorio, your base would be a nearly unworkable mess if you didn't build it on concrete, and you could only place one concrete block at a time, and couldn't drag place, and you had to carry the stone and iron ore in your inventory to make concrete on the ground, and it took more than a full inventory of them just to lay down enough space to build a factory that outputs a single belt of green circuits. And you need to do it about a minute of train travel away from your base, except trains are one of the last techs you unlock, so you have to crouch jump for 10 minutes (since it's like twice as fast as walking), or drive a car which is maybe 50% faster than jumping but gets stuck if you don't take a path that's twice as long. Or you can build a tube that will move you there about twice as fast, but it takes several inventories worth of material to do this. Or you can exploit the tubes to launch yourself there at an almost reasonable speed, in exchange for being hosed on power in a game that severely gates power, and also it only works until you build a bit more and your FPS changes and all your launchers now just kill you. Once you've finally built your building, then you get to do the same thing many more times to ferry the ingredients to build assemblers, belts, splitters and mergers, power poles, power lines, more different assemblers, more different belts, more different power poles, more different splitters. And when you're finally done, you are rewarded by having to build a belt to bring the circuits back to your factory, using several more inventories of material. Or once you've unlocked them, you can use trucks, which require a large amount of open space for each terminal, and work completely fine - as long as you never go near them, lest physics be enabled and they launch themselves into a crevasse or lose the ability to drive up a simple slope. Also if power goes out (and it will, power gates you HARD in this game), you get to spend like an hour of real time traveling around manually refueling all your trucks, because automatic refueling requires power, and trucks will just keep driving until they run out of fuel in some random place. That's a good approximation of the Satisfactory experience. Also, instead of having sane defaults for placing things, like selecting a slope block while looking up at the side of another block making it orient to that block face, it instead orients 90 degrees from it. Why? Because gently caress you, press more buttons! Different objects (and even wires) have different placement origins relative to your cursor and different default facings relative to you or the object you're targeting, and some of them don't even show you the actual direction key parts of the block will face until you memorize inconsistent rules about how the ghost is shaded. Some of this stuff can be attributed to the game being really ambitious and early in its development cycle, but a lot of the core decisions about how the game and its world work will never change because they aren't really fixable without throwing out way too much of the work that's been done. It's clear there was absolutely no design document for this game, no thought about what systems there would be and how they'd interact and to what end. This post is just a small minority of the things that are wrong with Satisfactory. That's not to say there's no fun at all to be had. When you give yourself actual design challenges it's definitely fun to build a cool looking and functional factory that efficiently uses space (well, efficiently in Satisfactory terms, everything is loving gigantic). It's just that >95% of what you do in the game is tedium, with aggressively unfun controls. If you want a game to listen to podcasts or watch TV where you can turn off your brain for an hour and just build the same exact thing dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of times over, and you don't care that the UI and mechanics will be fighting you the whole way, Satisfactory is a decent option. poo poo, even after writing this I kinda want to fire it up and build something, although I know better than to do so. Just don't expect a game that can reasonably be compared in any way to Factorio. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 00:45 on Oct 31, 2020 |
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Oct 31, 2020 00:43
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You mostly hit the nail on the head. I've been playing Satisfactory a lot with a friend and it's got a few things going for it over Factorio for sure, but with every 'pro' comes like, half a dozen 'cons' at least. And the most bewildering part is that some people seem to prefer it this way?? I brought up how the game needs SOMETHING to speed up the late game and the goons in that thread crawled out of the woodwork to say they're *glad* the game has no way to place more than one object at once even all the way at the endgame... Anyways I will at least rebut one of the points you made which is that power lines give you the flexibility to create separate power systems, which can let you isolate what powers your power plant from the rest of your factory, for example. Yes - Factorio also allows for this, but in a way that is a bit clumsier than Satisfactory (i.e. you can't overlap the powerlines' AOEs). In any case, in a game full of badly implemented controls the power poles are like waaaay down the list of annoyances for me, personally.
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Oct 31, 2020 00:56
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Kenlon posted:I don't get why you would want to play Seablock if you're not looking on the complexity of it as a positive. Why cut down on the whole point of the mod? (I'm genuinely curious, as someone who has spent literally hundreds of hours designing interdependent Seablock production lines using Helmod.) Sometimes you want to build factories within factories to produce a single item, and sometimes you just want to produce ore from mineral sludge and not think too much about it. I play both. I still have a v17.8 with a full seablock pack I still work on, but I was feeling like I wanted to try something new. Seablock basic is a fun way to do 'seablock lite'.
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Oct 31, 2020 03:01
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I really want to like Satisfactory, but I hate the fact that you have to basically build concrete slabs everywhere if you want any chance at building big. Also, the aliens and combat are even less fun and useful than in Factorio. They are no challenge other than the first few you beat up at the start.
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Oct 31, 2020 05:21
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Personally the worst part of Satisfactory for me is that you have to build every "story" of a factory 3 walls high, which is very high and means long stairs-- even though most structures appear to be 2 stories tall at a time. If the structures were just a little smaller, or even just their collision a little smaller so they """fit""" it would make the buildings so much nicer.
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Oct 31, 2020 05:42
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If you're not making nightmare spaghetti factories in Satisfactory, you're doing it wrong. Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTGCAwwNyfc
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Oct 31, 2020 06:08
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LordAdakos posted:sometimes you just want to produce ore from mineral sludge and not think too much about it. There is definitely something to be said for SeaBlock making "infinite source" resources as the default...in that you never have to build another mining outpost. Vanilla Factorio kind of reaches that point, but it's after how-ever-many tiers of infinite 'mining technology' are researched; and it doesn't cover oil unless you re-work your oil production to use coal liquifaction.
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Oct 31, 2020 09:46
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Sorry for kicking off the Satisfactory chat, but so far I'm enjoying the early game but already I can see the negative points y'all are talking about. I'm going into this blind and the spaghetti is already stunning. Evilreaver posted:Personally the worst part of Satisfactory for me is that you have to build every "story" of a factory 3 walls high, which is very high and means long stairs-- even though most structures appear to be 2 stories tall at a time. That was my biggest WTF moment so far. I was experimenting with stacking an assembler and at first I thought a 1x2 foundation would be enought.. nope. 2x2 it is with a bunch of wasted space. Then one wall and a ceiling.. nope. two walls... nope. wtf. 3 walls and a bunch of wasted space? check! So a massive 2x2x3 box for a single assembler... and I have to do this how many more times?
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Oct 31, 2020 11:59
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yeah, satisfactory was like...they just made it too hard to do the fun stuff. Which I wouldnt mind if the tech tree was "now you get a way faster constructor" or "now you get small scale blueprints" or "now you get construction bots" or SOMETHING - but its just always going to be as frustrating to build poo poo, forever, and that's just not for me someone in one of these threads said that for people who dig the genre, satisfactory and factorio are an 8/10 game and a 10/10 game but which game is which depends on you
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Oct 31, 2020 12:09
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Factorio is a 10/10 for me because it rewards creativity and doesn't bog the game down with unnecessary grunt work. Things scale up smoothly, and whilst you can always stick to the old ways and place everything by hand (a habit that is particularly hard for me to break, I don't use construction bots or blueprints nearly enough), there's always options to speed things up, which means less time playing Clicking Simulator and more time coming up with rewarding and fun designs, all whilst expanding your poo poo. Satisfactory on the other hand is just a slog for slog's sake. Nothing comes along that makes earlier work slightly less tedious - other than the jump from biofuel to coal to whatever, but even then, setting up each powerplant is a huge pain in the rear end, when you've done it once, you definitely don't want to do it again. Last time I played the game, I think I was 2 hours into a factory expansion when the thought occurred to me: "what the gently caress am I even doing, this isn't even fun". I was just grinding through the tedium to get to the next creatively fun aspect of the game, but then it dawned on me that it'd just be more of the same. Haven't touched the game since. To each their own, I guess. I get the same vibe from Satisfactory that I do from creative Minecraft. Some people love that kind of gameplay, where it's meticulously placing blocks down for hours on end to reach the endgoal. I can't bear it. Factorio manages to inject dopamine and progress smoothly throughout the game, without ever having you pause and think "god drat this is awful", if you ever get tired of working on one part of the factory, there's always a bazillion other things you can zip over to to work on.
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Oct 31, 2020 12:31
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Qubee posted:...and place everything by hand (a habit that is particularly hard for me to break, I don't use construction bots or blueprints nearly enough) Installing a fast start mod that gives you power armor and a roboport and bots at the start helped me with this. Alternately, you can use nanobots. I did both, preferred the fast start. I was still building blue circuit arrays by hand, and had never used a beacon in 1000+ hours...
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Oct 31, 2020 14:13
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MrYenko posted:I was still building blue circuit arrays by hand [Documentarian voice] At first glance, the situation - while depraved - does not yet rise to the level of other terrible events that history has to show. MrYenko posted:, and had never used a beacon in 1000+ hours... But here, with the full context, we can understand the magnitude of the horror.
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Oct 31, 2020 14:41
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Phobeste posted:[Documentarian voice] At first glance, the situation - while depraved - does not yet rise to the level of other terrible events that history has to show. I've got a couple hundred hours and still haven't used logistic (like move stuff between boxes, I do use construction bots and blueprints) robots yet, I just... never get around to it I just plop belts all over its bad but I can't stop I love belts
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Oct 31, 2020 14:49
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Sweeper posted:I've got a couple hundred hours and still haven't used logistic robots yet, I just... never get around to it I just plop belts all over its bad but I can't stop I love belts I've never used them as the primary way to distribute things, just for personal resupply and staging materiel for expansions and for occasional supply of some specific thing where I took one look at the existing spaghetti and noped out. They're mostly more useful than belts when you're really pushing big numbers since you can expand them more than belts I think and they have a lower ups hit but that's really endgame stuff. Now hand placing every element of a blue circuit building array when you're not using beacons and therefore have to place like a hundred machines...
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Oct 31, 2020 14:52
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wait, bots really have a lower UPS hit than belts?! I thought it was the other way round.
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Oct 31, 2020 15:07
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If you're at the scale UPS takes a hit bots are better. You can make more compact builds and leave an entire type of entities out (belts).
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Oct 31, 2020 18:20
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necrotic posted:If you're at the scale UPS takes a hit bots are better. You can make more compact builds and leave an entire type of entities out (belts). I always figured it also had to do with not having to track the sprites of the things on the belt, track the available space between items on the belt, etc. With bots, you just path-find a straight line from A to B. That said, the biters themselves have always been responsible for a UPS hit long before any base I've built.
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Oct 31, 2020 19:44
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XkyRauh posted:I always figured it also had to do with not having to track the sprites of the things on the belt, track the available space between items on the belt, etc. With bots, you just path-find a straight line from A to B. Yeah, this is a large part of it. There are optimizations around compresses belt segments, at least, they used to be really bad back in I think 0.15 and before. True about biters, pollution is also a large contributor.
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Oct 31, 2020 20:45
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Sweeper posted:I've got a couple hundred hours and still haven't used logistic (like move stuff between boxes, I do use construction bots and blueprints) robots yet, I just... never get around to it I just plop belts all over its bad but I can't stop I love belts The first place I ever really used logistics bots for something other than bringing stuff to my backpack and unloading my trash, was for a new mall I made when I got tired of running around my usual multi-part messy malls. I just pushed all the types of materials that a mall needs into a bunch of red chests and then use requester chests and provider chests at each assembler. All the 'sub assemblies' like gears are easy to scale up (just keep adding more) and go into the 'back. and all the stuff I wanted to be able to pick up was in a series of "U" shapes that I could just run into to scoop stuff up if it was something I wasn't just letting the bots bring to me. I realized after doing that how great this sort of setup was, yet I still almost never have used bots for normal production stuff. My current base is using a bot-based red science and green-science area, but I need to work on them because wandering bots carrying crap back from my 'auto trash' keep getting stuck in my isolated networks for those and get hung up because there are no storage chests there to put the trash, and once the are in that logistics network they won't move out of it. I have to run over and connect it to the main network every once in a while, and every time I do that a bunch of my logistics bots 'escape' and eventually I don't have enough in those isolated bits. I suppose I should just leave them connected to the overall network and just not worry about having dedicated bots in the isolated network there, it would probably work just fine.
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Nov 1, 2020 06:56
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There is a mod that gives you a set of robots in the early game, which is excellent for me, because I love copy pasting my designs and just placing them down, and having a bunch of little dudes make it for me. Or to clear cut trees.
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Nov 1, 2020 18:04
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Biggest reason I got the mod is for clearcutting trees in the early game, because god drat is it painful doing it by hand.
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Nov 1, 2020 18:37
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Boba Pearl posted:There is a mod that gives you a set of robots in the early game, which is excellent for me, because I love copy pasting my designs and just placing them down, and having a bunch of little dudes make it for me. Or to clear cut trees. Qubee posted:Biggest reason I got the mod is for clearcutting trees in the early game, because god drat is it painful doing it by hand. Klonin's Construction Drones serve the same early-game purpose, and are much faster. Downside is that they are a bit cheaty too since they use no power (no roboports).. and are faster. Also funny because they can 'build' themselves into places and get stuck as they roll around on the ground instead of flying, and aren't terribly bright.
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Nov 1, 2020 19:23
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I other “I have no idea what I’m doing” news I didn’t k ow you could hold the mouse button to plant electric poles, I’ve been clicking and just timing it out while running  I already enjoyed the game, now I’m really going to enjoy it, what a fantastic game this is such great QoL updates
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Nov 1, 2020 19:35
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Somewhat surprised there isn't a Lorax mod, chop down yr Truffula Trees and get attacked by mutated Barbaloots and spitting Humming Fish.
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Nov 1, 2020 19:48
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necrotic posted:If you're at the scale UPS takes a hit bots are better. You can make more compact builds and leave an entire type of entities out (belts). Additionally if you're at this scale then you're probably pushing a pretty high SPM which means you can research bot speed to be outrageously fast, to the point where the bots are essentially teleporting. Even if some of the individual calculations for bot pathing are more complex than for belted items, it still ends up being much more efficient when the bot makes its entire journey in one or two ticks.
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Nov 1, 2020 19:58
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Does this thread have a favorite Factorio planner or calculator they like to use? I've been using this one, but I'm not sure I'm using it right. In the settings tab, there's the default module and default beacon lines. I assume default module fills the production machines with whatever you select, and then default beacon does the same with those. But what does the multiplier box to the right of the beacon line mean? I assume it's how many modules you can get to boost the machine? So like, if I have an assembler surrounded by 12 beacons, each with 2 speed modules, then I should select the speed module and set the multiplier to 24? Or would it be 12 for the number of beacons?
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Nov 2, 2020 04:37
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It would be 24 because the tooltip says modules instead of beacons. Although it does seem strange that you can only do one of each type instead of a mix. I use the in-game planner/calculator mod Helmod instead. A bit esoteric to work with sometimes but I don't have to alt-tab between programs to make sure my ratios aren't off.
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Nov 2, 2020 05:44
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Sage Grimm posted:It would be 24 because the tooltip says modules instead of beacons. Although it does seem strange that you can only do one of each type instead of a mix. Helmod is great, but man do you need someone to help you learn how to deal with some of it's features. I use both the kirk mcdonald calculator site and Helmod myself. Sometimes I want to plan things about without having to load the game, and when I'm in game I don't want to have to look at my other screen. I used to do all ratio calculations myself, but that stopped pretty quickly once I started playing pyanodon. Vanilla ratios are pretty easy to work out, but once you add in beacons and modules I just revert to using a calculator because it's way too easy to make a simple mistake. I can highly recommend using Helmod, not just for the calculator but for some of it's other features. If you map out a production line you can pin it to your screen so you can check off all the parts. This also has a built in picker tool that let's you place your assemblers etc with the correct recipe and module loadout already selected. There's also a summary screen that shows you the exact number of buildings, modules, etc you need for your build. Very useful for setting up a logistic request before heading out. I could do a little writeup here if anyone is interested, it would have to wait until I get home though.
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Nov 2, 2020 09:17
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 the write-up.
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Nov 2, 2020 12:36
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NachtSieger posted:
Second.
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Nov 2, 2020 14:08
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Picked this up last night after playing Satisfactory for about 200 hours. Kind of at the point in that game where I want to wait for further development before I build any more large projects so hopefully this will sate my factory building urges until then. Noticed in the settings that this is the only game I've ever seen that lets me set it to use all 32 threads of my TR1950x, does it actually scale well when you're utilizing that many cores? For most games it's actually detrimental to performance and you're better off using something with fewer cores at a higher clock speed.
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Nov 3, 2020 23:21
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NoEyedSquareGuy posted:Picked this up last night after playing Satisfactory for about 200 hours. Kind of at the point in that game where I want to wait for further development before I build any more large projects so hopefully this will sate my factory building urges until then. Noticed in the settings that this is the only game I've ever seen that lets me set it to use all 32 threads of my TR1950x, does it actually scale well when you're utilizing that many cores? For most games it's actually detrimental to performance and you're better off using something with fewer cores at a higher clock speed. No, Factorio doesn't benefit much from more cores. It's mostly bottlenecked by RAM access speed, not CPU power
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Nov 3, 2020 23:51
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NoEyedSquareGuy posted:Picked this up last night after playing Satisfactory for about 200 hours. Kind of at the point in that game where I want to wait for further development before I build any more large projects so hopefully this will sate my factory building urges until then. Noticed in the settings that this is the only game I've ever seen that lets me set it to use all 32 threads of my TR1950x, does it actually scale well when you're utilizing that many cores? For most games it's actually detrimental to performance and you're better off using something with fewer cores at a higher clock speed. What Tamba said, but also if you look at some of the previous Friday Factorio Facts, the devs are obsessed with finding tiny efficiencies in their own game. https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-276 is a quick example of how detailed they go with regards to making sure that your big huge monstrosity of a base doesn't murder your computer. There's probably older, better examples of FFF though.
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Nov 4, 2020 00:15
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A guy in Sweden was making these green sciences and I managed to snag one. Best game ever.
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Nov 4, 2020 02:32
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I hate game trinkets and I would 100% buy one of those.
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Nov 4, 2020 02:48
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K8.0 posted:Time for a good Satisfactory hate post! Most of the mechanics in Satisfactory don't exist for game design reasons. Why do power lines exist in Factorio? Because it constrains your design, since power poles take space and have both supply and demand connection lengths. Why do power lines exist in Satisfactory? Because Factorio has power lines! And make the player manually wire every building! And limit the power poles for a good chunk of progression to 4 total connections, two of which are needed just to run a line of power poles! It's not like it constrains your design in any way, you can run power lines through walls and they clip through buildings by design. It serves no game design purpose whatsoever, it is just tedium. And nearly everything works this way. These are pretty fair, in a game of unlimited resources the power pole still is mostly just annoying and makes things messy but it's not that big of deal and yeah they dont really clip and have long range so its kinda dumb. I find it very annoying to try to build vertically especially when you need 3x walls just because of hitboxes but it's also very important to do, and hey IT IS cool to build vertically but it doesnt make it exactly easier and very clunky. For me I played Satisfactory first before recently playing Factorio. I enjoyed it quite a lot getting up to building Plastics, but it also doesnt have much compelling other than as a podcast game, whereas Factorio feels way more interesting in overall base planning whereas in Satisfactory you just kind of embrace spaghetti-base because you dont have tools to easily re-arrange and rebuild it. There are certainly some things I do like and find chill about Factorio is the unlimited resource nodes changes things a bit and makes it a little more mindless and chiller; however, one of the things I hate is there's really no challenge or exact threat to the combat, its just a few space cows that you can ignore if you want to but arnet hard to kill. I would really ike if Satisfactory came closer to the Factorio Tower Defense aspects of building supply chains out to towers and walls/gates and having more reasons to go out and play FPS-defense, I think it;'s a good and interesting aspect of having pollution and having a reason to optimize and build out artillery and defenses. Hopefully that comes in at some point Xaris fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Nov 4, 2020 |
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Nov 4, 2020 04:02
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Marvin K. Mooney posted:A guy in Sweden was making these green sciences and I managed to snag one. Best game ever. Amazing! You could even put it on a string and wear it as a necklace.
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Nov 4, 2020 05:58
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Tamba posted:No, Factorio doesn't benefit much from more cores. It's mostly bottlenecked by RAM access speed, not CPU power Relatedly, what should I select for a (virtual cloud) headless server? 2 cores and a bunch of memory? (we tried hosting it ourselves in the main game client, but the lag was horrible)
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Nov 4, 2020 15:45
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