Should You Play: Factorio

Short video. Great game. I'm still playing Dragon's Dogma.

Let me know if you like this format for some future releases, or if I should just leave it to other reviewers and focus on longer stuff instead.

[lEatchalk]

meh factorios okay, i only played like 800 hours. not too addictive

[alaeriia]

> complains about excessive resourse needs for research
> Still using one yellow belt to feed his research crafters

There's your problem. It's not a grind, it's a bottleneck; you need to increase production. The factory must grow.

[nicholasbogan]

The flamethrower is basically the newest forest destroyer. I used oil (the flamethrower ammo) to clear trees to make space for pumpjacks. What could be more environmentally unfriendly?

[kiledamgaardasmussen]

It's funny how the Devs addressed all these problems over the FOUR YEARS since this video was published.

With bots, blueprints, and revamped science recipes, re-balanced trains (now far superior to belts, ) and much expanded military have fixed basically all these problems.

Factorio's problems were lack of polish and lack of content breadth, not lack of depth.

[TheGreatRakatan]

Two words: Automated drones. That stuff changes the game in a significant way

[vaderciya]

I think mods should've been brought up. Bobs mods and dytech add unheard of levels of additons and complexity, that are completely free to the player.

[Timmytimmy]

6:50

The reason why trains are better than belts is because of throughput.
The belts can carry 13.33, 26.67 and 40 items per second. Since mining drills can mine 0.525 ores per second (0.65 for stone), it doesn't take much to compress one belt. Since belts require 1.5, 11.5 and 31.5 iron respectively, it would be most efficient to use the slowest belts across long distances.
Since it takes 25 miners to almost compress one slow belt, we are going to need a lot of them for large outposts that can fit around 200 miners. With 200 miners, you will need 8 lanes of belts just to transport the resources to your base. In this case, it will cost you 12 iron PER TILE to transport your resources (bear in mind that this is the most cost-efficient way to transport resources by belt)

Now, let's see how trains work instead.
2 rails require 5.5 iron (and 1 stone). Since rails are 2x2 tiles, we need 1.375 iron and 0.25 stone per tile instead. Of course, we will need to factor in double rails and rail signals, so let's say that rails are 4 iron per tile (just to average things out). Even with all of this, it is still cheaper to use rails than to use 3 of the slowest belts (4.5 iron per tile). And you might argue that trains are complicated to set up, but if you're just transporting resources from an outpost to your base, it doesn't require any complex signaling. In fact, you might even run a single railroad to your outpost, which would only cost you 1.375 iron per tile.

[паша-нун]

Interesting how basically all the flaws mentioned here we fixed by two simple fitures - bots and blueprints. You are not supposed to unlock big generator, you are supposed to build you own!

[Heldermaior]

You don't need trains? My sweet boy, you are so wrong...

[ivanspoljaric]

I've heard of it and it didn't sound interesting but I decided to watch the trailer. Half a minute into the trailer I paused it, instaled the game and played 7 hourd straight

[chrisparker]

Factorio is finally getting its 1.0 release this Friday. You should do that review. :)

[PERSONTHATISCLEVER]

Holy shit this game took a dark turn fast. That alien part caught me completely off guard.

[fabricioroseno]

I've been avoiding Factorio. The min/max syndrome is strong in me. I almost fucked up my marriage playing mount and blade....

[SETHthegodofchaos]

I feel like this needs a new video once the game releases. There is quite a lot more to point out and comming.
Blueprints, robots, beacons, flamethrower, nuclear power and mods are all already ingame, boosting the endgame experience and extending the gameplay length.
this video does not talk about any of these features. maybe because the player might think they are only side features which can be tapped into as optional content, and that belt factories is the main way to build your factory. This conclusion is easy to get into because you learn for dozen of hours how to build and protect your factory with belts. You maybe dont expect that to change later in the game.
Espacially when starting to try to incorporate beacons into your belt builds you are usually forced to redesign many of your designs. You technically can redo your entire base for increased productivity and efficiency.
Same with roboports, logistic networks and logistic robots. They open up a complelty different playsstyle with does not require the use of belts all together.
Furthermore, the ability to use blueprints + personal construction robots to help you to place large amount of entities at a faster pace was also not mentioned.
the endgame you present in the video is far from the accual endgame, even thought the endgame IS still flawed (just for different reasons). the video sadly barely touched all of the accual endgame gamemechanics.


And on the use of trains: Once ressource fields run out, you have to venture further out (espacially if you the set the ore richness to low). it is easy to underestimated the possible sizes of lategame factories. people build crazy factories with so much material throughput that they just have to use trains, otherwise they wouldnt be able to archieve such throughput. espacially if the final value you measure your factory with is "how many rockets can i launch each minute consistently". of course you dont need trains if your factory is still small or medium sized.

Furthermore, trains are less update-heavy than belts. Eventually the game will run slower. Hardcore players want to create gigantic factories to the point where they start to min-max their computer performance based on how the game has been coded.




edit:
8:39 The power armor provides personal roboports which allow you to let construction robots place entities for you. You can create blueprints and plop them down whereever you want and the robots will do the job. No need to place every single building or belt in the endgame anymore.
9:21 There is a building FOR the upgrade cards: The beacon. It does provide new ways to design your builds, which is mostly interesting if you like to play your games efficiently.

If feel like this review was made with the mindset
"This is early access, therefore it must be a simple game still being slowly developed"
"If the factory works why bother changing it, i just want to finish the goal: launching a rocket"

The game has great depth when you start looking at the mechanics of single entities, but i feel like this has been dismissed or might no be possible to be explored in just 100 hours. Thats why people are able to spend thousands of hours in the game and still enjoy it greatly!

[pafnutiytheartist]

It sounds like you didn't use blueprints to build your factory, if you did it would make expanding very easy, you don't actually need some of the things you suggested, like factories with claws - you can just make a blueprint for it. By using them in late game it's pretty easy to automate even rocket production eithout the need to really afk to send a rocket. Increasing the scale of prosuction you actually start needing the trains as you have to get resourses from a very far away and enemies don't actually attack rails and power poles on themselves. This all leads to different late game designs in terms of both mining and production, which you seemed to miss unfortunately. Also the circuit networks definitely deserved mentioning. While you can play without them they allow a veery presize controll over some production lines.

[pouncebaratheon]

0.15 just dropped; it's amazing and has some of the things you've asked for here. They added the Railworld world type which has very large and rich but infrequent resource deposits which motivates train usage, and biters do not expand to new bases. Infinite science expands the endgame and makes rockets part of upscaling instead of an arbitrary end goal, balancing makes dealing with aliens less tedious, new content like uranium, etc. etc..

[SomethingCatchy_]

I love that everything he didn't like, was fix/added/altered/made better by the time space-age cameout

[cybersteel]

One of the flaws you mentioned (to paraphrase): "the endgame is about doing tedious things instead of solving problems, since the amount of research required is astronomical and you're better off leaving the game running as opposed to expanding your factory to make it research faster" - and you said that it isn't worth the trouble, but you never said why!

Now, I understand that constant expansion has diminishing returns, but that doesn't mean there isn't always something to do. Things could always be faster. You always have something bottlenecking your factory, so that other things aren't working at their full capacity. It's a constant balancing act, and I think that's what you failed to appreciate during the late-game. You restate how the end-game feels like a grind to "stretch out the game in its unfinished state" due to massive resource requirements, yet you give the impression that your factory lacked scale since you claimed that trains didn't serve a purpose that transport belts couldn't satisfy. I will make a point that you should Google some discussions about trains vs belts, because trains do serve a purpose.

Simply put, I think the flaws you observed about Factorio's endgame are a result of a lack of scale and micromanagement to improve your factory's efficiency, speed and overall complexity. I understand that you don't find launching the rocket a satisfying conclusion to the game - that's a fair assessment on the rocket itself - but I think the enjoyment on launching the rocket isn't the destination, but the journey you've taken to get there. As you know, it's a humongous task to launch a rocket, so finally being able to do it is a reward in and of itself. This is my opinion though, I respect your opinion that the rocket launching procedure feels anticlimactic.

[ryPish]

Jumped from you Witness review to the Darkest Dungeon one, to this one, and I must say I really like your style. You now have a new subscriber.

I mostly agree with your opinion on Factorio and the final suggestion you made would be a great addition to the game.

[peterknutsen]

One thing to note is that the 0.15.0 Experimental release removed the stark Magic Blue Science Potion cliff.

It's now a smoother difficulty progression, from Red to Green to Military to Blue, then higher tiers still.