Factorio!

That’s awesome. I swear, it looks like an integrated circuit internal photo, like the CPU images you see now and then. It’s good to see that it can be done.

Wait, they can’t destroy walls? Can you completely protect yourself just by walling off all outside access?

They can destroy walls, but the walls generally stall them long enough for turrets within the walls to kill them off. Then you can lay new walls to replace the ones that got destroyed and you’re back to square one.

Do they go straight through walls, or do they path around them if possible? Because I imagine you could set up a tower-defense type layout in the latter case. Uh, if they don’t run by at 1000 mph as I remember them doing.

I’m no expert, but it seems like they first set out from their bases targeting specific buildings belonging to the player (generally things that generate a lot of pollution), but will retask themselves toward turrets if they start getting shot at. They’ll sometimes attempt to path around walls if possible, but they won’t attempt to path from the north side of Gendal’s base to the south side just to get through a small hole located all the way down there. They’ll just try tearing a new hole in the north side near turrets or polluting structures, depending on what their priority happens to be.

Of course, if there’s a hole on the north side right next to them, they’ll very likely just run through the gap. Tower defense-style maze building might be effective but seems horribly impractical to maintain between replacing walls and protecting your turret infrastructure.

I’m just thinking about the deathtraps I built regularly in Dwarf Fortress.

So solar panels don’t work at night. How do you make that work? Or does that mean that during the day your steam engines automatically cycle down? I admit, it’s a little murky how some of these systems work.

If you want to go with heavy solar panel usage, you also need to support them with accumulators, which will act as giant batteries that charge during the day and deplete during the night. Your steam plants would then be your reserve power system, and I believe they automatically cycle down when their output is not needed during the day (assuming you have enough solar, that is). I might be wrong on that.

Either way, you need accumulators if you’re heavily using solar power.

Okay, I was guessing there was some form of power storage somewhere on the tech tree to make solar work. I just haven’t gotten there yet. Cool.

Yeah, I just planted a ton of accumulators after I made that screenshot. I have ridiculous amount of turrets lining the base so right now the worms don’t even get to reach the wall, or if they do its a very light touch.

This is my fourth base, once I actually died, the other three times I restarted. The progression of enemies is

  1. OMG THEY ARE WRECKING MY BASE RED ALERT
  2. Build walls to buy time to arrive at scene for cleanup. Minor damage to base usually as they make it through eventually.
  3. Build automated reloading line of turrets so thick nothing reaches walls
  4. ???

This is not a tower defense game btw, its a city builder with light tower trappings which I am loving.

I went ahead and purchased this… now, it remains to be seen when I’ll get around to playing. I’m still finishing off the additional content in FTL.

Shouldn’t there be a
5) Profit!

Good choice, this game deserves a lot more publicity. It has been a couple of years since my last Quarter to Three moment and this game has done it three nights in a row.

A colleague at work has been describing, in his usual inane game-specfic detail, about the exact layouts of his networks. His current system is a giant N/S multi-belt system. Each resource has at least one belt and this mainline ferries everything. Things take off the mainline using rate limited splitters and are free to put back on, etc. He also mentioned something about exploting corners to fill both sides of the conveyor belt to double this throughput, as currently he’s limited to things taking from or putting out to the conveyor network or something. I don’t see any such nonsense in that screenshot! :)

Also: He described his previous layout in relation to a specific GPU architecture, so you weren’t far wrong Gus!

I love how the belts can carry two items side by side. I take advantage of it in all kinds of ways including doubling up two components, like coal and iron to a furnace so only one inserter is necessary. Or I will double up a belt that has to carry a ton of iron to a long row of furnaces. You can manipulate what goes on what side either using inserters (they always place the object on the far side of the belt) or, since I avoid inserters where possible for speed reasons, just run one belt into another. If you need to be on the opposite side then you use the underground belts to go under then back into it.

Oh, and the worms are starting to make it through the walls again and some even destroyed a turrent! Time to double up the walls and maybe switch to armour piercing rounds?

Right now I am trying to get my flying robotic construction crew up but I always have to do everything at scale which takes forever.

So the flying robots? Awesome. Besides having them ferry items between chests they can also keep you supplied with a specified level of item. So you always like having 200 iron plates in your inventory? Super easy.

So much easier to manage the explosion of recipes with the robots. The belts are great for high capacity items but they get out of control quickly with the multiple smaller items.

I have now clocked 24 hours of play time into my latest save. Where did I get this time from?

Currently I am redoing my petroleum fields so I can crack the heavy and light oil to get more gas. I am also having to expand out to distant copper fields, which required taking over biter bases so I could build. Trains work brilliantly moving the copper back to the smelters over a long distance.

Taking over the biters was frustrating though, I had turtled for so long that the rest of the planet had evolved to the endgame. So the only way I could take out an alien colony was to turtle right up to it. This involved building walls, erecting power lines, and placing turrets into little fortified bunkers, getting closer and closer. Then deconstructing it and bunny hopping ever closer.

I actually enjoy this but it is kind of tedious. Then I saw what this guy did and my jaw dropped. He automated the entire bunny hopping procedure using blueprints.

It is a thing of beauty: http://youtu.be/UmJK_Uh4KB0

That is just amazing. There’s so much more to the game than I knew.

I haven’t even talked about the power armour with modules like exoskeletons, night vision, shields, etc.

Depth. This game has it.

I am playing the campaign, and in chapter 3 you have to repair a railroad. I had the hardest time figuring out to get the trains to run. You have to have two locomotives (facing opposite directions) and the station signal post, has to be on the right side of the tracks. It took me forever to figure out that I had the station on the wrong side.

This really is a great game - also in it’s current state. I have had a single crash, but other than that, it runs perfect.

Oh yes, I am conveniently glossing over the difficulties in learning everything. The rewards more than make up for it in my case but I too hit a brick wall with the trains at first. The biggest tip I have is to get in the train by hitting enter and run around the complete track until it’s 100% working. I was amazed how many pieces overlapped or mismatched.

The station signal post? It’s obvious in retrospect given the arrows but yeah, I banged my head on that one awhile too.

I couldn’t even get the two locomotives to work, I just gave up and made a loop like you are ‘supposed’ to. You mean you don’t have a loop but it travels back and forth between stations? I read that was possible, would be awesome cause gawd damn do those loops take up a lot of space.

I haven’t had a single crash despite 24+ hours playing. It’s certainly a fantastic game as is - well if you like production chains.