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It's not the easiest - in fact power is by far the most difficult thing to derive in the game with no exterior input. For boilers, you need to make the assumption that every step of power generation is lossless, see that a steam engine consumes 30 steam/second, which equates to 900kw of power output. Then you look at a boiler and see that it consumes 1.8mw of power and assume that water and steam units are 1:1, so it takes 60 water/second. Once you know that any doofus can divide the 1200 water/s output of the offshore pump by 60 to get the 20 boilers it supports. If you do make those assumptions it's easy enough to verify them as long as you have sufficient load, but it's not a great system. Solar and nuclear are worse, requiring far too many assumptions to reasonably expect a player to solve on their own. Everything else in the game, if you're struggling to figure it out you just aren't trying. It's all really simple ratios like X:1 and 3:2, until you start getting into modules, at which point you either do a bit of math or just build until the ratios work.
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Feb 17, 2021 19:38
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Games with no time pressure are inherently either solvable, random, or some mix of the two. Good games are ones that use randomness and/or complexity to create interesting question and doubt for the player without being so complex and/or random that it's impossible to plan at all. Where the balance between randomness and complexity lies and where the balance between solvable and unpredictable lies are basically the two axis of player preference that designers have to try to land somewhere a lot of people will enjoy.
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Feb 23, 2021 23:47
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Factorio can be played without enemies, or with enemies that don't attack until you do. It also starts off very small scale and gives you the tools you need to make scaling up fun. It is the best automation/factory game, nothing else is even close. It's like if it was still the early 90s and then Mario Odyssey came out, it's that far ahead of everything else in the space. Go grab the demo and be absolute certain this isn't the game you want to play before you even start considering anything else.
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Apr 10, 2021 00:22
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That's the one time I would recommend Satisfactory. It's incredibly monotonous. It's basically "Do the same thing over and over for hours : The Game". The awful UI that the developers have put no effort into fixing is an issue, but if you can get past things like having to arbitrarily rotate things as you swap around while building because the devs are too lazy to standardize orientations, it's just loads of duplicating the same thing over and over and over again or traversing the same route repeatedly and your brain can be almost entirely turned off.
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Apr 10, 2021 03:08
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Fhqwhgads posted:I'm playing King of Retail and it's janky, confusing, stressful, and I just can't seem to stop playing it. I love the premise and I feel like there's something good under there but man is it rough right now. Every 6 months or something I look at this game and consider buying it. It seems like one of those games that is insanely shallow but still might somehow sink its hooks in. I don't know what to think about it.
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Apr 10, 2021 04:27
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Trains are definitely useful. They're much more efficient than trucks are, but unlike OpenTTD they aren't worth building at the start of the because of scale and because of the extremely heavy initial infrastructure cost compared to your loan size. Once you get your second area going, you'll have enough distance and traffic that trucks start bottlenecking hard, and it becomes far more efficient to start building a rail network and only use trucks for intra-city transport. What do you mean by stations not being moddable? Do you mean not being able to widen/lengthen them? You can, you just have to delete the station and drop a new one in its place. Annoyingly this will destroy the signals at the end of the stations (Voxel Tycon doesn't have implicit signals on stations), but the station name always persists unless both the station and every route with it are removed. My feelings on the game are that it's really good, but looking over its history I am concerned about the pace of development. I hope it's not a forever project, there are a lot of features that would be nice to have and I hope it's not a month or two for each little thing to get implemented. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Apr 26, 2021 |
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Apr 26, 2021 18:14
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Signals work exactly like they do in Factorio, although the actual pathfinding algorithm is definitely different. Chain signal before entrance, chain signal any internal section dividers where you don't want trains to actually stop, regular signal after exit merge. Can you post an image of something that's not working how you expect?
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May 3, 2021 22:56
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zoux posted:Yeah Factorio had always looked tedious has hell to me, but I got it on one of those free demo weekends and played it for a few hours and thought it was alright. DSP had just come out and the reviews were great so I thought, hell, I'll check this out for $20. I've never had a game grab me like that before, I guess I do really like management games. DSP is orders of magnitude more tedious than Factorio. I can't stand playing DSP because of it.
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May 14, 2021 15:31
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Zurai posted:It's exactly the opposite for me. Factorio is VASTLY more tedious. You have to do the same actions relative to DSP, but you have to do them 10 times more to get the same relative output. You're conflating scale differences with tedium. That's silly. Factorio's vanilla burner tier might be comparable to DSP in terms of tedium, but it lasts less than an hour unmodded, and even then I'd argue it's nowhere near as tedious. The reality is that Factorio has massively superior building mechanics and even without construction bots you can build most things by simply holding down LMB and running. Building a production line as large as you want is generally just a matter of build one (which takes <1/4 the time it does in DSP because of a vastly superior UI), copy/paste to suit, select electric pole, hold down LMB and one direction for a few seconds, select assembler, hold down LMB and run the opposite direction for a few seconds, select belts, repeat 2-3x, select inserters, and granted those have to be individually placed but they're easier to place than DSP, and you're done. And then you get construction bots and it's literally design one block copy and paste and walk away. And at the same time you get logistics bots, which eliminate the need to travel around to pick up materials - and even before that Factorio is easier, because you can hold far more in Factorio and even pre-bots a mall that produces as fast as you're going to build is far smaller than its DSP equivalent. To try to compare the two and claim that Factorio is the more tedious is absolutely ridiculous. And no, you don't have to place modules or beacons manually. You get bots before either, and you can use multiple different features to automate module installation. They're part of Factorio's late-game hyperscaling where productivity shoots to the moon. Basically everything you're saying sounds like someone who has never played Factorio, just made a bunch of absurd assumptions that have no basis in reality. Mayveena posted:I have a mental block with Factorio. It feels solved but that I can't find the solution. I know it's me, but it stops me every time. There isn't really an objective definition of solved in Factorio. There are tons of elegant ways to do things, you can do things fast or slow, it really doesn't matter. Launching a rocket is the "win" condition but it's only like half of the game, just do stuff that you enjoy and don't worry about what anyone else has ever done. You should worry about optimizing for the things that you care about, and those will change over time. The design of the game is genuinely beautiful.
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May 14, 2021 18:35
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zoux posted:How does satisfactory compare? I've been reticent because I don't love first person but the factory genre is pretty bare. I've heard mixed things too. If you like slowly, mindlessly building the same things over and over bit by bit with terrible traversal and an extremely bad interface (You will not find a 3d building game where snapping is worse and default rotations are less consistent. Not even close.) then Satisfactory might be fun to you. I personally consider it a heinous crime against game design, and I'd recommend a minecraft modpack or something over it because it's hard to do worse. It really is just a pile of completely arbitrary ideas thrown together, half-copying mechanics from Factorio without any understanding of why they exist in that game or how they might be implemented as something other than another box to tick in Satisfactory.
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May 14, 2021 22:14
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There's also novelty. Theme Hospital was incredibly novel when it was new. Today it's not. So while our standards have in general gone up, it's also true that we enjoy flawed games today when there's not a better alternative.
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May 16, 2021 22:46
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Some day Paradox and Creative Assembly are going to collab on a game and actually summon Satan into the world with their DLC practices.
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May 20, 2021 21:55
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Mayveena posted:Everyone is totally welcome to ignore me on these rants btw, I'm sure you all are tired of hearing me complain. I made a post to try to help you in the Factorio thread.
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May 22, 2021 23:13
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You go to the Steam page for it and it lets you download the playtest, which is open until Monday. It's good as hell and everyone should check it out.
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May 23, 2021 00:16
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zoux posted:
Did you click the button? It's always been like that, it should just instantly give you access when you click it. They're calling it an open beta, so it shouldn't be limited participation.
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May 23, 2021 00:43
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I think a resort builder/manager could be good. A pirate island/bay game could also be great. Some sort of mobile naval arcology thing could be cool too, like a ship that people live on.
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May 23, 2021 02:44
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Yeah I'm in the same place. I actually got used to the UI in a lot of ways as I used it, but I did suggest a bunch of specific improvements to them. Totally agree that the game needs more stuff that can happen, but the actual building is really fun and I'm probably going to pick it up at launch for that reason. I love being creative and making an interesting space for my NPCs to live in, you just can't do as much in 2d and it has some of that Dwarf Fortress crack as a result of being 3d.
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May 24, 2021 22:54
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I love Factorio and I absolutely hate DSP. It might be a decent game some day, but right now it's insanely tedious. Cannot recommend. Imagine if automating red science took more time/clicks than it takes to launch a rocket. Not more thought, just more clicks. That's about where DSP is at right now.
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May 28, 2021 17:54
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SkyeAuroline posted:Good news. This update is multibuild update. I thought from reading the patch notes that that got pushed back another update, but maybe I misread the Engrish. I might actually try it again if that's the case. It's only a small fraction of what the UI needs to be actually good, but it might be enough for me to be able to tolerate it long enough to finish the game.
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May 28, 2021 18:18
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Personally, I see two major things that distinguish management games from puzzle games. The first is that in management games, many of the puzzles are created by the player. The second is that management games are generally of a level of complexity so as not to be practically solvable. Rather than trying to find the or an intended solution, you're always looking for a better solution.
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Jun 5, 2021 20:56
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It's a fun game but if you're on the fence there's no rush to buy it. If the 3d base building bit really appeals to you, that part is good as hell, but a lot of other features aren't there yet.
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Jun 7, 2021 18:06
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Kvlt! posted:Sorry if this is the wrong thread for this, but I recently picked up Automation and am digging it but I am totally mechanically/car illiterate and was wondering if anyone had a good written or youtube guide on basic car stuff that would help me understand the game better Definitely the right thread. Automation is way beyond "basic car stuff". You're kinda asking to be linked a video that makes you a car engineering enthusiast of at least a few years. Automation simplifies/glosses over/skips/gamifies a lot of things, but there's a lot of stuff that will never be super obvious to someone who isn't into cars. You can learn a lot of things by playing it and researching individual things, but I can't really recommend you a single source that uses Automation as a platform to teach you the things about cars that Automation cares about/is emulating. Kilrob's channel might be the best resource - he's the game's lead designer and does a lot of talking about why things are the way they are, but a lot of that is also likely to fly over your head at first. The engine designer is much more directly simulator-ish than the car designer. If you just go learn random things about engines, drat near all of it will apply. The car designer is by necessity much more abstract, so without knowledge I can see it being harder to understand exactly what is being abstracted in many cases. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Jun 8, 2021 |
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Jun 8, 2021 19:08
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Automation is very little business management, and those parts of the game are frankly terrible. It's very much optimizing sliders with completely opaque reasoning behind them with no relation to real-world business or any comprehensible/exposed model, which is obnoxious compared to the car & engine designers where the impacts your choices make are much more comprehensible if you understand what you're actually designing, and the reams of instant feedback throughout design that the game gives you which can make up for huge gaps in your knowledge.
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Jun 8, 2021 22:32
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That's one of the best bugs I've ever seen. Definitely report it, but beg the developers to make it a proper random event.
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Jun 15, 2021 15:14
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In this whole discussion it's worth remembering that DSP's blueprint system is now <1 month away. It's not going to be nearly as good as Factorio's, but it should be a very good addition to the game. If I were looking for a game like that right now, DSP would definitely be it. Also, Minecraft mods should really not be overlooked. I'm far from up to date with the current state of things, but it's definitely worth a look for anyone looking for some kind of more chill or more 3D building game.
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Jun 27, 2021 18:44
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One thing that has happened is that it's relatively speaking very easy to make games now. I think that has caused something of a shift in priorities, where previously you had to be really convinced that you had an excellent idea to commit the resources to it, and you'd have a lot of time to refine your ideas. Now with the accelerated pace of development, the market is awash in both great ideas and crap ideas. Some ideas that are good but not excellent just don't catch on for whatever reason, usually developers underestimating how important marketing is now, and that's when I think the real danger of feedback from a community that isn't the right community can kick in and hurt an otherwise promising project.
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Jul 14, 2021 16:11
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To criticize shapez and mindustry : shapez is extremely repetitive and doesn't give you copy/paste until way too late and also charges you when you use it. I really, really hate this game. It could have been fun, but it's Satisfactory level tedium without even being interesting to look at. Note that the demo doesn't really even begin to give you a taste of the tedium. If you play the demo and think it was fun, ask yourself if you'd still think it was fun if everything you just did took 10+ times as long. If the answer is still yes, maybe buy it. Mindustry is just not fun to build in. Building is too automatic (most of your building strategy is focused on preventing automated connections from happening rather than connecting things), and the game is too focused on being an optimization puzzle where you have X seconds to build something Y optimal or you lose the mission. It's not that it's hard, it just means you don't get to play around and have fun. Deeply deeply flawed, but I'd say it's much better than shapez and maybe worth considering if you have a high tolerance for bad UIs. K8.0 fucked around with this message at 12:59 on Aug 7, 2021 |
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Aug 7, 2021 12:56
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You know when someone tells a joke, but they tell it repeatedly and in detail and eventually you start to realize it's not a joke? That's the vibe I'm getting from that game.
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Aug 28, 2021 03:32
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Mayveena posted:The last time I played through to oil it took six hours to fill the space elevator. That's just too long. Couldn't figure out exactly what I needed to fix. Everything was just so slow. I have discovered through watching a video I could actually understand that I am cramming buildings too close together. Maybe separating them further apart from will help. It's a sadistic grind and anyone who pretends otherwise is lying to you. You don't enjoy that kind of stuff, don't try to force yourself to.
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Sep 8, 2021 05:51
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Mayveena posted:What I mean is that the recipes as a set never change and there are absolutely way better and way worse recipes making the decision process less interesting than it could be. Yeah, it's definitely a mechanic that could be interesting, especially in a game that didn't expect you to play 800 hours on one map. In something like Mindustry or some of the Factorio mods that have you visiting new maps having to find and choose different, actually balanced unlocks for each of them could be a cool concept. Honestly seems like you could build a game around the idea that you will randomly have different base unlocks, then pools of accessible random unlocks, and finally expensive tech unlocks if you really need to fill a gap in the options you have. Having to completely reimagine production is fun, so long as you can have enough knowledge of what your options are now and what they will be in the future.
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Sep 9, 2021 00:53
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MrYenko posted:You wouldn’t download a carrier. I mean that's pretty much what the Protoss do.
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Sep 11, 2021 00:08
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Factorio is the god tier weak GPU game. If you build huge factories it can become CPU dependent, but GPU never matters. Voxel Tycoon is actually quite a heavy game. Not something I'd want to play on a laptop.
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Oct 12, 2021 19:53
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socialsecurity posted:It's VERY EA and development is crazy slow so give it a year or 3. I concur with this. Going Medieval has a very strong foundation, but development pace is pretty glacial. I put it in the same category as Voxel Tycoon where I've had plenty of fun to justify the purchase, but development is slow enough that it's probably going untouched for another year or two before I get back to it.
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Nov 10, 2021 09:05
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Steam trains would actually tend to be more prone to doing burnouts. It's fairly easy to get immense torque out of a steam engine, and it's potentially tough to precisely regulate. It's also not so easy to scale it up to high speed.
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Nov 13, 2021 00:02
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Volmarias posted:Replace the train wheels with giant gears that can grip those tie downs instead! So you want the train to rip apart the support for the rails. I see absolutely no way this could go wrong.
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Nov 13, 2021 00:10
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It's a game that should be good but instead is a giant pile of poo poo that refuses to learn lessons from decades of game design. I'm not sure why you'd be surprised that people complain. They wish it was good and it just isn't.
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Dec 15, 2021 08:25
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Radiation Cow posted:Satisfactory makes me motion sick. I want to like it, but the scale and tiny field of view makes it claustrophobic and unpleasant to play. That and the difficulty in making nice conveyor belt layouts puts it at the bottom of the factory-like genre for me. Honestly if those are the two things bothering you then it shouldn't be a problem. You can change the FOV and set it to be Y-axis based, so that should be a non-issue. And making nice conveyor belts is easy if you always build on foundations, since that gives you snaps and lets you make everything neat (although it's still more fiddly than it should be).
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Dec 15, 2021 11:51
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The difference is that resources are effectively infinite in Factorio, where in Satisfactory you have an extremely limited supply of resources. Also rebuilding is much faster in Factorio, even without bots you can build in a matter of minutes if you know what you want, while the equivalent in Satisfactory takes tens of hours. Also you can easily carry an entire reasonably productive base of materials with you, where in Satisfactory you're looking at minimally dozens of trips each taking potentially 30+ minutes one way just to build a new base. There are many reasons that that advice is perfectly reasonable in Factorio and totally unreasonable in Satisfactory.
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Dec 16, 2021 15:55
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Protocol7 posted:Is this true with all the resource nodes though? They are infinite, you're basically just capped by your miner level, power shards, and how much high-level conveyor you can run. I'm talking in terms of throughput. If you abandon a base in Satisfactory, you're abandoning some of a very limited number of resource nodes and maybe shards. While resources do get mined out in Factorio, it happens quite slowly and the further you go from spawn the more dense resources are. Leaving a base and building a better-designed replacement from scratch doesn't really cost you anything other than a chunk of space which is effectively infinite.
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Dec 16, 2021 17:09
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OwlFancier posted:I was looking at satisfactory again. I'm wondering if I might enjoy it, the stuff they showcase in the trailers looks really gorgeous, like just building cool looking stuff is something I like doing. I've put like a thousand hours into space engineers just making bases and spaceships even though there's virtually no gameplay. It's definitely got the grindiness you're looking for. The caution I would have for you is that the interface is early prototype level in many ways. I've never played SE so I can't compare it directly, but there are serious problems with building in Satisfactory. The way the game snaps on edges is horrendous, easily the worst of any building game I've ever played. The animations as things build are obnoxious, because they obscure your view and make chain building quickly very hard by shifting the location of the thing being built. Also, orientations aren't normalized, so if you're going along building one thing, and then you select a variant or something in the same family, you'll probably have to rotate it to place it properly, and when you switch back rotate again. If you don't mind that kind of poo poo where the developers clearly give absolutely zero fucks about QOL, it's definitely got the kind of grind you're looking for. You can absolutely spend 1000 hours making number go up, it's probably at least multiple thousands to fully exploit the map. It is pretty shallow, though. A significant number of the mechanics are only there because the developers saw them in another game and copied them without any understanding of the purpose they serve in other games, so they mostly become a number of clicks requirement rather than a design requirement. That said, if you want to make poo poo that looks cool, Satisfactory definitely has that, especially if you have a thing for integrating the environment into your builds. It's a pretty game and given how much poo poo you'll be building it performs very well, and you can be quite creative with the aesthetic tools they give you.
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Dec 27, 2021 02:12
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