Yet another Hacker News

40 points laurenth 1 day ago 9 comments

shellwizard 44 minutes ago | parent

I've tried to get into Factorio multiple times because I really love 2D isometric games, but the learning curve is incredibly steep. In my opinion, franchises like the original Command & Conquer were much more accessible for non-hardcore gamers like myself. Factorio feels less like a game and more like managing a complex software architecture.

CodesInChaos 20 minutes ago | parent

I can recommend turning off biters, or at least biter expansion. That way you can at least focus on building your factory, without getting distracted by attacks.

Using a main bus with your factory in comb like rows on one side (so you can make the bus wider on the other side) is simple and will work pretty well.

I often split my starter factory in 4 quadrants with sufficient space for belts between them:

1. Smelters

2. Main bus based factory

3. Oil processing

4. Personal fabrication and mall (especially once logistic bots become available)

avereveard 10 minutes ago | parent

I disable expa sion but also biters evolution. Without expansion and evolution biters are just the right amount of pressure for me for casual play without completely losing having to climb half of the game tech tree

Joker_vD 9 minutes ago | parent

> Factorio feels less like a game and more like managing a complex software architecture.

There is literally a mod [0] for integrating Factorio with Grafana. Yep.

[0] https://github.com/remijouannet/graftorio2

hangrybear666 38 minutes ago | parent

The systematic and scientific approach is absolutely warranted if you want to produce legendary quality at scale. I brute forced my way to legendary mech armor with manually steered recycler loops and wasting millions of iron and copper in the process. Since playing on a Linux developer laptop with 0GB VRam and an onboard GPU (at 60FPS!) I couldn't have scaled it much larger anyways but the entire game, it's a fever dream of optimization and I love it.

fabian2k 23 minutes ago | parent

The difference between Washing and Upcycling is enormous. That does fit my observations, it's nice to see it quantified.

Another aspect that is nice to see quantified is how big the effect of better quality modules is. You likely underestimate that initially since it's not linear.

The Space Casino mentioned in the post is not possible anymore in Factorio 2.1. Which is experimental at the moment, but I'd assume will be released soon. And experimental Factorio tends to be as stable or more as the stable versions of other games.

jordiburgos 22 minutes ago | parent

I would elect the people that does this kind of analysis and management for President.

tobytylam 13 minutes ago | parent

You can make the descriptive / non-math text in LaTeX look better in math mode by using \text{} e.g. $T_\text{products}=...$!