factorio

[Farren]

Spaghetti is love. Spaghetti is life. Who needs organization when underground belts exist?

[Farren]

That sounds suspiciously like organization.

[Farren]

It's all in the objectives you set yourself. Although I'll admit I've been having similar issues of late - overreaching and getting smacked down against a wall of my own ignorance. Plus I get distracted by shiny things easily.

I've been working on a Sea Block factory lately, and that's been taking quite a bit of skull sweat to figure out.

[Farren]

Legit question for people who have played it: how does Factorio comapre with shapez.io? Asking because I "finished" it a few weeks ago and now I'm aching for something similar, everybody seems to recommend Factorio, but I have some doubts

I've played both, although I've played Factorio a lot more.

I think of shapez.io as a more ... abstracted version of Factorio, I guess? Like, there's not a lot of difference between bisecting a square and making two copper cables out of a single copper plate, when it comes down to it. Early building blocks continue to be helpful later on in both games, and expanding production of those early building blocks is also helpful in both games. Upgrades are still a thing, although not all of them are automatic in Factorio. You've got a greater degree of choice in terms of how you approach endgame in Factorio - the closest analogy to the Hub in Factorio would be your science labs, and you get to decide what they prioritize working on.

The biters in Factorio definitely provide a challenge that is missing in shapez (at least, I think it is? I haven't beaten shapez, so for all I know you have to fend off angry pentagons later?), but they can be disabled if you don't want to deal with them.

I prefer Factorio, but that could be because I played Factorio first. I definitely grabbed shapez because I saw similarities to Factorio. Plus Factorio has mods, and that opens up a lot of brand new frontiers.

If you're looking for something similar to shapez but with added complexity and theme, I'd definitely recommend Factorio.

[Farren]

Depends on what settings you play with. At the default, you'll definitely want defenses at any base that's on the frontiers. You can clear out the biter bases, but they can and will expand at semi-regular intervals, and infinite space means clearing them out completely is usually impossible. You can minimize the attacks by managing your pollution levels and keeping a safe distance from their nests. Or you can switch over to Rail World, which spreads out resource nodes more - but disables biter expansion, so once you clear an area out, it stays cleared - which means fixed defenses aren't as big a deal.

As far as how much of a headache they are? Their threat is based on a few different factors. The farther you go out from your starting location, the bigger the nests get. Time, pollution, and destroying nests makes the (remaining) nests more dangerous. Pollution specifically is what triggers attacks, so keeping that under control can keep the headache down a bit, but some things just can't be done without smoke-spewing machines.

One of the things you can research is military - better personal weapons and fixed defenses. Fixed defenses will fire automatically at hostiles; most of them require ammo, but automating reloading is possible.

Usually the first wave of biters tends to be small, so even if you've completely neglected defenses it won't be a total disaster as long as you're not too far away.

[Farren]

Yeah, if there are biters attacking your base, that's a problem that has to be dealt with *now*.

The only other problem that tends to fall into that category is a power outage - and even then, the worst that happens is "Your factory shuts down until it's fixed" rather than "Parts of your factory have been destroyed."

I usually find myself playing on Rail World. I don't mind the biters, but I dislike the nest expansion, as that's what tends to catch me off guard the most. This way, if I'm attacked, it's because I wasn't paying attention to the pollution I was generating - or was blatantly ignoring the minimum acceptable scouting. Immediacy can still be an issue - but in the cases where it is an issue, it's strictly due to my neglect and not due to the game throwing me a curveball.

Or right now, I'm playing a modded version called Sea Block, where the only land is tiny islands - and what I build. Biters can't swim, so the only conflict involves taking out worms (the biters' equivalent to a turret - shoots acid at anything in range, but can't move), rarely.