Oh and the blueprint feature? Super easy to use. Make a blueprint in the game and use that to draw a rectangle around the section you want to duplicate. Then you get a blueprint ‘stamp’ that just puts down ghosts of everything for the robots to fill in. You can even hook up power lines to the ghosts ahead of time with real ones.
I am trying not to gush here, but it’s oh so hard.
Yes, I eventually got the two locomotives to work going back and forth, so it’s doable. It had definitely been faster and a lot less frustrating to make a loop.
This game is seriously making me question my self-imposed restriction of no Alphas. I bought in to throw my financial support to the game, but I really want it to be (more) done so I can dig in!
Still playing as much as I can, which is basically unheard of for me. I should be bored to tears by now but I still keep trying to optimize my base and finish researching the power suit.
Everytime I think I got it figured out I realize something else, like the upgraded factories don’t just allow you to craft newer tier items but also have a sizable crafting speed bonus. So now I have to upgrade all of them. Which invalidated my whole setup because they are so fast now I can’t keep my long production lines fed fast enough. Unless I upgrade my transport belts maybe? That helped but now I need a bigger inflow of iron and copper plates and …
It’s all very reminiscent of the first time I played the civ series but instead of getting bogged down in micro management I am getting bogged down in optimizing and automatization which is roughly a thousand times more rewarding. The focus on automating everything means you don’t need kludge’s like Civ & GalCiv’s governors.
The liquid stuff is a lot more complex than I was expecting! Even as someone who’s sunk probably 100+ hours into this at this point, I was feeling like a newbie all over again when I fired up the latest version. Once I got the hang of it though it’s just more addicting assembly line stuff to add to the pile. Argh! :)
I “finished” FTL, so I finally returned to Factorio, and I’m finding it just as frustrating as the first time. Basically, as soon as I hit the third scenario, the one which introduces electric power, I find myself coming to a screeching halt because there are things I really must automate, and automation doesn’t seem to work. At all.
The scenario starts you with 3 boilers and a steam engine. I want to keep the boilers supplied with coal. I can’t figure out how to get coal to all three boilers. One, yes, but not 2 or 3.
I did the obvious thing, which was to make a transport belt, and place inserters to pick coal off the belt and into the boilers. It doesn’t work. The inserters just sit there. They’ve got power, but they refuse to move coal from the belt to the boilers.
Make sure they are pointed the right direction? You do know about the R key to rotate the inserters right?
Try taking a screenshot and posting it if none of that helps.
I finally completed all the research and can, with my flying robot army destroy endless hordes of biters without the need for turtling.
I went to make a screenshot, and in setting it up, it worked. I think perhaps the belt was one square too distant in my first attempt. Or something. I don’t know why, in any case.
I can see that criss-crossing supply lines are going to be a problem in a larger game. I wanted coal going that way while iron went this way.
If you just whack 99 in each burner it’ll last for a long time. I think you only need 1 burner running as well? So the others don’t burn down until they’re active. (This is based on me playing this scenario in the demo)
You need 2-3 burners running to keep two steam engines running at full capacity. When I had my basic electrical setup running at about full load, the third burner kept flickering on and off.
My prior experience with the demo had me feeling I didn’t want to manually resupply anything. Things kept collapsing catastrophically when I fed stuff manually. So this time I wanted the coal to be fail-safe, and the ammunition supply for the gun turrets to be fail-safe. That worked out, actually, once things started running. The inserters seem to feel 5 coal is enough, and 10 clips for the guns, and then they’ll let stuff go by on the conveyor belt to machines downstream.
Burner’s will flicker on and off to meet demand. They monitor the water temp and if it drops below 100 the earliest one kicks on and then subsequent ones until it hits 100.
So you always want extra burner’s to meet spikes in your electric network. I think 14 is the max you could possibly need for 10 steam engines. 10 steam engines is the max one pump can support (at 99%).
Good instincts - stick with the automation. It’s the right way to do things.
As far as criss crossing belts go you have a few tools at your disposable. Splitters and the underground belts are the most important, with those you can accomplish just about anything with enough room to work. With the long arm inserters and by doubling up something like coal and iron on one belt you can get up to 8 items feeding into a single factory - not that you ever need to do that.
Ways to double up items on a single belt - 1) Use inserters from opposite sides. Remember inserters always place on the far side. 2) Just run a conveyer belt into the side of another one and it will dump items only on that side. 3) ?
Yes, it’s true that the inserters don’t fill stuff up to capacity. Or else they would never let anything pass by to the next one down the line. Effectively, they end up filling things as often as they consume stuff. But I ended up putting an inserter (two actually, or one fast one) at the end of my conveyor to grab the excess. I bet Gendal has an even better solution. I suppose you could run it in a loop and cycle it back around.
I use the loop method or the inserter into a chest depending on where the end product is needed. If it’s just at that one spot then I might use a loop - research is like that. Everything else usually gets dumped into a chest.
A great tip, and very non obvious, is that inside every chest is a red x. Click that and you can set how many slots the chest will allow. A very good way to avoid over production and its available from the beginning on every chest. Later if you want a very specific number or a set of conditions you can use smart arms, smart chests, and the circuit network with red/green wires.
There are many, many ways to do things in the game and an amazing amount work well. I thought I was all hot shit with my latest build but then a guy posted he was addicted to increasing the production rate of copper wire (you need an insane amount in the end game). His numbers (hit P in game) were over double mine. So I went back and redid things and got up within 20% of his rate after many, many fixes. Seriously was surprised how many things I missed after thinking I had mastered the game.
Also expect to be debugging a lot when you hit Oil. They just introduced Oil not long ago and it shows, they need to work on providing information to the user so they can know what is going on. It’s not bad once you figure it out but it’s a steep curve, or was for me.
The demo really gives you no idea how complex the real game is. I’m near the end of the first “build a car” scenario, and that’s when I first encountered things like underground conveyor belts. That, and they start you with a factory complex that’s about 4x more complicated than anything I’d attempted so far.
The resource limits do trouble me. I’m completely out of iron, and I thought I was screwed until I discovered one of the wooden chests was full of iron plates. That, and the initial factory is set up to mass-produce conveyor belts, which you need for Science 2 packs, but I grossly overproduced those and which I could break them down for the raw materials. It appears that deliberately setting up bottlenecks to limit production of some items may be important. I’m thinking setting up the assemblers to only turn on when you need more of that item.
I abandoned the tutorials after the steam power one. I don’t usually do that kind of thing (I typically enjoy the comfort of tutorials) but they just felt like they were keeping me from exploring what was neat about the game, which is solving logistical problems from the ground up. If you’re not enjoying the tutorials, just ditch them and start a sandbox game. I haven’t been terribly lost in my game, multiple hours in. I did have to experiment to try to figure out oil and gas stuff.
This game has scenarios? :P I’ve honestly never done anything but play the randomly generated free play mode.
I actually liked the “New Hope” campaign, which I finished before starting free play. I don’t usually play scenarios in strategy games, but I found it to be a good introduction to the in-game systems, and I kind of liked having a specific long term goal set for me. The campaign ends before the really high level stuff, but includes an introduction to oil. I’m sure it is work in progress, and will be expanded on eventually.
Starting a random game set to the highest level of alien life makes a very interesting struggle for resources. I started with only a small patch of copper and had to use it all up to research laser turrets with which I could turtle my way right through the enemy lines to a large patch of copper. But then I ran out of power and they overran me. I didn’t notice just how MUCH power those laser turrets draw! increadible. Had to quadruple my power production. It is also a good idea to have a separate power circle just for defences so that production doesn’t get interrupted by too much firing, which is what caused my coal production to stall and eventually my power plants ran our of hot water… Awesome game, hope they keep expanding it!
Same here. The reason I haven’t started playing sandbox games is that I want a definite win condition. I’ll play sandbox when I’ve exhausted the scenarios.
Unfortunately, my first run through New Hope #2 broke. The win condition is to have a lot of steel plates, iron plates, etc., and while I produced all of them, the game refused to count anything I put in the car, and I can’t fit all of it in my personal inventory. Since I’ve seen videos of other people winning New Hope #2, I’m going to try again.
I want to add that my personal factories are never remotely as compact or as efficient as the ones I see in screen shots. Better than some half-assed ones I’ve seen in Let’s Play videos, though.
Well in freeplay the long term goal is to build rocket defenses so your fellow colonists can land. Right now it’s basically a place holder - you research and build it and boom - game over. The next couple of versions are supposed to start fleshing it out, along with multiplayer.