Satisfactory: Polygon production lines

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Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

So looking at footage of this game, I have to say that I'm fairly worried about how replayable it'll be. My big concern is that all of the machines thus far are fed by the equivalent of Factorio loaders, and almost all of them have one input and one output. There's not really much room for creativity there; with inserters you have the option of how many inserters to feed a machine with, how to structure your belts to get the inserters to pick stuff up and drop stuff off, etc. The Satisfactory loading is literally just Miner -> Smelter -> Storage/Crafter/whatever, and you just hook up a belt to do so.

Conveyor belts are also a bit disappointing - there's a lot you can do in Factorio with the belts being dual lane, and merging belts is both simple and incredibly useful. Satisfactory doesn't have either of those things, and belts are pretty much locked to going from an output to an input, so there's little room for cool shenanigans.

I do really like the graphics and the 3d space though. It's a very pretty game, and building 3d factories will be a lot of fun. I just don't see the actual mechanics of the factories as being that engaging at this point. They really need to have some sort of inserter equivalent or more flexibility with belts or something to make the game keep my interest beyond one play through. It also doesn't help that the first few tiers of crafting are so manual, and that early power generation is also manual.

The automatic trucks are also really cool, and I am looking forward to seeing how complex those logistics get - things like filters that control how many resources are delivered to each location are something that I expect to be higher up in the tech tree, and will make powering remote outposts easier when a truck can be routed around to drop off 50 coal at a time to each outpost.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2019 13:53

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 09:42

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

ninjewtsu posted:

During the alpha I spent way, way, way more time messing with belts than I ever did in factorio. Mostly because seeing them clip through each other really annoyed me, but I'm also assuming that they'll eventually make belts invalidate each other's build zones.

Honestly the 3d adds a lot, I was pretty pleasantly surprised by how it got me changing how I think about factory design once I started making big, multi-floor factory

My point is that while the positioning of the belts is interesting, the belts themselves are not. Since you are limited to connecting inputs to outputs (with splitters/combiners as needed), you can't get up to nearly as many neat tricks with the belts as you can in Factorio.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2019 15:20

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Xerophyte posted:

Sheesh, where did my evening go?

Anyhow, gaze upon my early game spaghetti, ye spergy, and notice that it looks a lot like everyone else's, really:

Also, I still can't believe this coal truck path worked.

It's nice that someone has finally taken the incredibly nerdy factory automation genre and made a game where your coal munching pollution machines are all ridiculously photogenic.

I'd love to see a mechanic where machines slowly get dirty and grungy over time, but in such a gradual fashion (maybe over 10 hours or so) that you only notice hours later when you revisit to upgrade something.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2019 00:57

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Eiba posted:

Well, however you measure it, time limit or not, a one-time throughput requirement will always be bypassable by just building a giant crate and waiting a few hours for it to fill up, and then dribbling it out at the appropriate rate to meet the challenge.

In other words it'll never work as a one-time bonus. You might as well just ask for the stacks up front.

Now if there was some sort of sustained bonus- "This good bonus thing only works so long as we're getting 10 computers a minute"- that might work. I do want there to be throughput bonuses. Those would be a great way to focus everything else in an endgame situation.

That said, I also kind of like this game better than Factorio precisely because throughput isn't the only goal. You can make a factory that barely produces something and then spend hours just exploring the world and come back and feel like you did good when you've got a few stacks of supercomputers or whatever.

Factory Town does something like this. Houses consume goods and give coins (which are effectively tech progression and are continuously consumed by high tech processes), as well as a temporary 1% global production bonus per goods category satisfied, with more complex goods giving a longer lasting bonus. It's a really good system that encourages automation by requiring goods to be consumed continually.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2019 02:14

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

ymgve posted:

Why are you guys bothering with walls in your factory? Just have everything float in mid-air all scifi like.

Apparently the game doesn't render machines behind walls, so it can help performance problems for large factories.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2019 15:18

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Eiba posted:

Well, you need one tiny segment of belt before your splitter to match a 2km level 4 belt, but sure. Technically you'd need two trucks to actually beat a conveyor.

I'm wasn't talking about edge case optimization with limitless resources. In all likelihood when you're setting up your first oil base an absurd distance away you won't have a whole crate full of steel stockpiled up. Trucks are going to be way easier to set up in terms of time and resources.

And more to the point, they're really cool.

But yeah, if you do have an extra crate full of reinforced steel and an afternoon to burn, there's no reason not to make a conveyor across half the world.

I ended up making a skyway for coal that consists of 9 tier 1 belts in parallel. Works fairly well, but I desperately want blueprints to make the setup faster. It's already quick to build, but it could be much better.

# ¿ Apr 11, 2019 21:21

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Ambaire posted:

1 material per 2 meters of belt. 1km is 500 of whatever. 2-3km would be 1000-1500. It's also a one time layout for potentially infinite reward.

As I've said elsewhere, I refuse to use tractors/trucks until they get Factorio-style wait conditions at each end, and don't just blindly follow the route forever wasting fuel with incomplete loads.

Yeah, with routes being static (deposits not depleting, etc.), and Satisfactory vehicles being so limited in what they can do with respect to logic, belts make more sense to me.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2019 09:09

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Neat! Now they just need blueprints and to make power poles significantly less tedious (there's no penalty for building lots of them other than your sanity in clicking all the individual hookups) and the game will be significantly better.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2019 06:38

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Did they ever get something similar to blueprints working? The tedium of lining up buildings and hooking up wires is what caused me to put the game down for a while. Even just larger foundation blocks or a way to drag them over a wide aread would help immensely.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2020 01:51

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

BabelFish posted:

I find myself exploring a bunch more while waiting for the second space elevator upgrade to finish filling up, since now that I've got coal power up and running I don't have to worry about my factory running out of fuel and shutting down while I'm away.

This. Needing more deposits is a big driver of exploration, and you are only really free to explore once you're off biomass.

If we could at least hook up biomass generators to belts so that we could build up a system where we deposit debris, it gets processed, and then fed into generators without doing it by hand, that would be a huge early game improvement.

Thing is, by the time you invest the infrastructure to do so, you're pretty much at coal anyway, so it feels irrelevant. The game feels actively hostile to automation before coal power.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2020 03:47

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Cojawfee posted:

Even after coal power, automation really sucks. I'm starting over and setting up factories before I have access to things I know what I want to use really sucks. I basically have an area where I know I want to eventually set up my factory, and I have to build things messily in another area because I have to constantly take things apart and rebuilt them depending on what I need to grind at that moment. Though I did get smart with my coal this time. I plugged the miner straight into the power plant so I just have to run power back to my factory instead of a coal belt.

I guess the impetus for exploring is just waiting for your factory to grind out materials. If they don't want people manually making things, then they shouldn't make the constructors and assemblers so slow. When I don't really have anywhere to go, putting my phone on my spacebar while watching a youtube video is faster.

At that point though, it's worth your time to go out and hook up additional deposits. Coal gives plenty of power to run more machines, and you can pretty quickly start hooking up more iron, more copper, etc. and start building a larger and larger factory.

I do wish that building machines en masse were easier. Hooking up power lines is tedious busywork given that the cost of each power pole/wire is trivial, and paving a large floor takes entirely too many clicks.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2020 08:52

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

LonsomeSon posted:

Full automation for early-game bio-burner power would require some kind of optionally-burner-charged, optionally-external-line-charged lumberjack structure with mobile drones that could go pick leaves and return them to station, with an upgrade included in the chainsaw unlock to let them harvest trees as well.

I think this would be cool, but considering that Factorio with its bot-based endgame exists and we haven’t seen any conversation about any kinds of drones yet, I’m getting the impression that the devs would rather not gently caress around with any more independently-pathing entities.

Also, completed my very first train loop in Satisfactory last night. Hoooly gently caress how are conveyors so straightforward, but rails so finicky?!

You don't need full automation; just a way for biomass/fuel to automatically route from a container to a burner. Letting players dump hours worth of power into a container and run off to go do something else would go a long way towards making the pre-coal game less agonizing.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2020 23:39

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

I think my favorite part of this game is that a fully autonomous self-driving vehicle with included automated pick up and delivery from stops is somehow less complicated than a loving train.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2020 19:47

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Qubee posted:

How do you accurately build yeet cannons to get you there and land safely with jello without a million deaths attempting it?

Get a "willing" "volunteer" to test it out for you and place the jello where they stop being a person and start being a corpse.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2020 02:03

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Tenebrais posted:

You've really not got any reason to not wire up every outpost of your base into one network.

Especially once you unlock and start using trains, as the rails carry power too.

The only thing that should probably be on its own network is the network that powers the coal mines/water pumps for your coal power - that way you don't have to disconnect everything when you inevitably overbuild and start browning out the power.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2020 03:28

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Fangz posted:

Also this. I like my weirdass undulating factories. If they put in blueprints the game would be tuned with the expectation that I use them and thus my weirdass factory would be no more.

Have you played Factorio with blueprints? You still design each individual bit that you're going to stamp out - having blueprints doesn't make your factory any less spaghetti. It arguably can make the spaghetti even worse, as you have to hook all the inputs and outputs up properly, and that in itself can be a challenge.

Blueprints are what make the game scale. You start out doing stuff by hand. You then move to building machines to do it for you. You then scale up the machines and move through the tech tree. Around this time you need more resources, so you set up a small train network. You then get enough science and resources to use constructor bots/blueprints. You now start scaling up en masse, just about at the time where your factory needs to make blue chips that absolutely devour green and red chips, necessitating a much larger scale of production.

At that specific point though, you're no longer placing one assembler at a time, you're placing a dozen assemblers at a time as one huge block. The intricacies and logistics behind shipping in the masses of ore, smelting it, pressing them into circuits, and shipping tons of circuits where they need to go becomes the new step of the game. Power starts to become a real bottleneck at this point too, especially as modules start coming online and spiking power requirements drastically. The rocket is the ultimate culmination of all of this, where the vast quantities of resources that you now are wielding are channeled into a single goal of launching a satellite into space.

It's a nice, smooth progression where your factory grows in complexity over time, and just as you need to work with lots of resources at once, you get the tools to do so and to really scale up your factory with relatively few clicks, but a lot of effort in designing each individual block, and even more effort in tying together your logistics network to get everything where it needs to go.

Satisfactory still requires similar scaling after a certain point (unless you're content waiting a half-dozen hours to get an unlock), but it never makes hooking up the machinery less tedious. It's lacking that next step where you suddenly start hooking up all the nodes around the map and shipping the ore to central processing stations and then distributing the results to where they need to go. That scaling doesn't happen unless you do it by hand.

Hell, one extremely simple change they could do that would make the game infinitely better? Allowing us to hook power up to one brick of a foundation and having that power all machines attached to that foundation. Removing all of the tedious busywork with power poles would vastly simplify setting up machinery. Click dragging foundations or machinery would be fantastic as well, and even better would be an option that put a splitter or a merger and a short belt to each input of the machine so that we can hook up chains of machines more easily (these sorts of things would make great exploration unlocks, by the way).

More clicks != better gameplay. The gameplay in a game like this is in the design, layout, and logistics of the factory. Tedious busywork of laying down foundations and power poles one at a time and hooking up each machine by hand actively makes the game significantly worse, not better.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2020 12:22

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Cojawfee posted:

That's a big flaw in this game that it never actually encourages or pushes you to automate. It's not until you're several hours in that you get to something that you can't make by holding the spacebar down. And even when you do automate, just grabbing all the materials and putting your phone on your spacebar is often faster. It's especially bad with the manufacturer (or whatever the 4 input one is). I can make 1-2 items per minute with one giant building, or I can make 20 of them by holding down the spacebar. For some things, it was taking so long that I'd just take stacks of the materials and go to a workbench and then do something else for a bit to get the parts made because the building was so slow. Unless you start out the game forcing yourself to keep building more and more production, you end up hitting a brick wall eventually. There needs to be more of an advantage to having a lot of production buildings because they are slower than just making things by hand. Unless you are building megafactories that make 50k iron ingots per hour or whatever.

Honestly the single biggest early game change that they could make would be to give biomass burners a conveyor belt input. That would enable and encourage players to build a biomass power bank, and to automate the production of biofuel. One of the biggest issues is that it's irritating to refuel the burners by hand, and anything that helps to reduce or eliminate that makes the early game much more interesting.

Again, compare to Factorio where you literally start with technology to completely automate iron and copper plate production using just burner mining drills, burner inserters, and smelters. Sure, it's messy, resource intensive, and outputs gobs of pollution, but it's entirely possible to do that automation.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2020 16:34

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Snow Cone Capone posted:

To be fair, until you hit electricity, even with an optimized setup you still need to manually supply at least 1 burner mining drill, and the burner inserters.

If you set the burner miner such that the belt moves from its output to the spot that isn't an output, you can put a burner inserter that will pick up the coal off the belt and put it into the burner miner that mined it. The burner inserters will fuel themselves too. That means you can basically build an entirely self-sufficient burner mining operation where each burner miner powers itself and the excess coal is shipped off to iron/copper miners and smelters whose burner inserters power themselves as well. You do have to empty the smelters manually though.

That being said, it's generally not necessarily worth doing, but you can reuse everything except the burner miners anyway, so you don't lose much, as you'll always have a need for more belts, and the burner inserters can be used for fueling boilers since they're immune to brownouts.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2020 20:45

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

The other issue is one of framing - in Satisfactory you end up in a scenario where your early miner and your early power both cannot interact with automation. Both of them require your input directly, and you are encouraged to start off with hand-crafting raw ore directly into ingots and then into items at a very fast rate. You can even scale up the hand mining to be faster than the early automated miners, and the hand miners have the advantage that they don't even take power. The game very much starts off by teaching you to not automate.

In Factorio, you cannot take ore and turn it into plates by hand. You have to use a smelter to do so, and the game helpfully makes sure that coal is in your starting area and that you start with a smelter and a miner so that you can put them down onto an ore patch and get to work. Right from the word go you already have two tools that work together to produce an output that you can't make by hand, but that you can use to start making everything else, including more of the stuff you just put down. You get really quickly constrained by the amount of plates that you can make, and that makes you want to build more miners, which then makes you irritated at getting enough coal to fuel them, so you put miners on the coal to get more coal, which then leads you to building an electrical grid and using electricity to mine, which then leads...
There's a lot of hand building of components up until you unlock the first assembler, but science packs take forever and three days to craft by hand, so you very quickly get assemblers to do that for you, and you're still absolutely reliant on your miners + smelters to get you enough plates to actually do anything. The automation is central to the experience, and trying to bypass it is a bit of a fool's errand.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2020 21:02

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Klyith posted:

A thing about the AI autopilot: it drives faster than you do. A tractor driven by a player has a lower top speed than running with blade runners. An autopiloting tractor outpaces the running player.

When you make a autopilot route, the vehicle will later bomb along it significantly faster than you did. That means it has a worse turn radius, and may get caught on things that you narrowly missed. Or they'll catch air and flip on bumps. When recording an autopilot path anywhere with tight turns, uneven ground, or other terrain that's not flat and easily driveable, ease off the gas. Use the parking break on downhills. And slow down when approaching the truck stops.

I still don't get why trains aren't earlier than literal self-driving autonomous vehicles. You'd think it'd take a lot more circuitry/electronics to outfit a truck like that than building a train that runs on a track.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2020 18:10

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 09:42

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

ymgve posted:

When I bought the giant Lizard Doggo plushie, I did not expect that I had to stuff it myself

look at this poor thing

Lizard Doggo flattened by the engine of progress. A cautionary tale.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2023 16:39

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