Anybody play Factorio?

[DrGravitas]

I love this game! It's like Simcity meets Dr. Robotnik! Except your industrial expansion is being thwarted by zerg-like insects, rather than furry woodland creatures with attitude.

Never heard of it? Then check out their website and trailer! It can probably illustrate things better than I can.


If anyone else plays, we can share pics of our factories here! I've only run one game of it so far, but I've poured 75 hours into it so far. I love to just expand, expand, expand, so it's kind of huge. These screenshots are a bit old, but they'll do for basic illustrative purposes. If the images are being cutoff, try opening them in a new tab. They're kinda huge in the preview.

Since I wanted to just learn the mechanics, the biters (enemies) are set to peaceful (unless I get to close to them.) Which is a good thing, since otherwise it's pollution that sets them off.
Hint: the red highlights in the minimap of the upper right corner is the intensity of pollution. It's only gotten worse and this is only a "small" slice of the complete factory!

These screenshots are kind of huge, so I won't post all of the factory here... unless somebody else has some to share too!

 

[john_shadowblade]

So the objective is to industrialize the planet?

 

[DrGravitas]

Technically, the fluff frames you (at least in the open world scenario I've played so far) as the lone survivor of a colonization operation gone wrong. You crash land, or some such, and must build up your factory to provide you with the means to survive, ultimately culminating at the top of the tech tree with a superweapon (some kind of rapid fire, high altitude interceptor missile launcher) providing other colony ships safe landing while you fight off masses of insects.

But, I haven't gotten that far yet, as I'm quite content to industrialize everything in sight while meandering up the tech tree

I'm only just scratching some of the more interesting mechanics, like assistant robots. Aside from a handful of one-off combat robotics, these assistants are bound to a network of buildings call roboports. There's two kinds of these autonomous assistants: construction and logistics. The logistical assistants ferry items around boxes placed within range of a roboport, distributing items as required or requested to ease the need for such complicated ribbons of conveyor belts. They also bring you items (if your in range) at your request, so you don't have to go running around to that big stockpile of steel you left in a box on the whole other side of the facility. The construction robots, given the tools and pieces in those storage bins, automatically repair parts of your factory in range, or replace stuff that gets destroyed.

There's some other interesting stuff with these robots that, like blueprints that can be used to define whole sections of factory that you can just layout and have the construction assistants build up for you. There's been some mumbling on their forums of potentially being able to build a kind of Von Neumann Factory that builds and expands itself... but I'm skeptical.

 

[john_shadowblade]

well if it builds itself that just sounds like a game that plays itself. But I'll definitely give this a try sometime soon.

 

[john_shadowblade]

I just played the demo and I like it so far. Not sure if I'm willing to toss out the cash for it though.

 

[DrGravitas]

Glad you liked the demo! The first mission kind dragged for me, but I fell in love with the second/third.

It's still alpha, so if you don't feel like paying $17 for it then you might check up on it again in a couple months. I hear they're going to make a push on a multiplayer mode soon!