Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

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I feel the exact same way. It's interesting that you mention Rimworld - I dived into Rimworld when I first got it and came to appreciate the way little things add up in that game and make the simulation more interesting (be it positive or negative). The complicated UI is slowly unraveled and becomes intuitive as you learn the game because there are simple feedback mechanisms for actions that affect your colonists.

Everyone tells me I'd love factorio. Every time I load up the intro tutorial I have the intention of finally diving in and just.... nothing. I can't get into it. I don't feel an incentive to learn the building and crafting UI's. It just feels like work. I'm not even sure why I'm building the things I'm building, or what the aim of the game is.

Maybe rimworld sucks me in because I can immediately empathize with the plight of the survivor, whereas factorio seems to be all about building efficient machines for the sake of building efficient machines.

Yes, Rimworld is easier to get into for many. "Survive" is a way more obvious and natural goal.

But once I got more and more into the details, Rimworld was the one frustrating me. I probably just despise this kind of "Storyteller" aka Event choosen by Wealth & RNG. This ruined the fun for me and is probably the reason I played Factorio easily 10 times as long as Rimworld.

The closest Factory has to that is the pollution mechanic, but that doesn't feel nearly as contrived.

I believe difficulty can be adjusted right? If you're not much for unforeseen attacks.

Not sure it would be fun for me with something like a peaceful-mode.

Combat is a useful "problem" to solve/prepare for. But having understood those are just randomly selected, totally interchangeable events (that btw, actually change after reloading a save) made them feel arbitrary to me.

Added to this, the difficulty of those events is fully determined by some arbitrary "value" of all the stuff in your settlement combined together. Build a big wall around the settlement? Value just went up. But not if those were natural mountains. Thus to beat the game, you want an effective defense while keeping that arbitrary value low. And this just kind of killed the immersion for me.

Thing is, I also don't see a good way to avoid such value driven systems when designing a survival-game that is supposed to keep being challenging. There is little risk of "game over" in Factorio or Oxygen Not Included once you got past the initial challenge and it becomes more of a SimCity than survival. Civ becomes a chore. Games like Don't Starve have a high skill floor and the restarts made me loose interest just about when I had learned enough to get through winter. "Go to harder area"-games just incentivize not taking risks. Time-based difficulty is an OK compromise at best...

Perhaps you can answer this for me then: what is the goal in a game of factorio?

The factory must grow

The stated goal is to launch a rocket.

But doing so hardly ever gave me a feeling of closure (excluding the 8h achievement speed-run) I got after finishing some story-based game and the "you won"-screen has a "keep playing" button for a reason... I expect most player use it.

If the core game loop doesn't bring you satisfaction and you don't find motivation in setting your own goals, then this game just isn't the right one for you.

That was the original goal, at least over a year ago. They have since extended the tech tree requiring you to launch lots and lots of rockets containing satellites in order to acquire Space Science packs.

https://wiki.factorio.com/Space_science_pack

Factorio is a sandbox game where you are free to set your own goals.

As a new player, my goal was to explore everything the game had to offer, and that meant researching all the technologies in the game and learning how to use them effectively.

A secondary goal is to make efficient use of space, which is limited by biters, base layout, and resource layout.

Another goal is to automate as much as possible instead of hand-crafting.

Yet another goal you might have is to defend your base against the biters to go after them pre-emptively. If you enjoy the combat in the game there are a wealth of ways to get more of it or increase the difficulty. On the other hand, if you don't like combat you can dial it down or even get rid of it entirely.

Mods increase your options exponentially, and give you much more new stuff to explore and use.

Like any sandbox, what you do with everything you're given is up to you. The limits are: your interest, your skill, and your imagination.

I feel like I didn't get the same satisfaction out of factorio until I turned the difficulty up enough to feel like the bugs were a threat so I could lose. Admittedly I turned it up too high to get that feeling and had to restart with a bit less difficulty. Then I had a reason to build walls/turrets/etc because I couldn't maintain safety without them and planning for mining expansions.

I highly recommend the Rampant mod. It makes the biters smarter (they'll seek out the weaknesses in your base defense), let them use pheromone trails and conduct pre-emptive raids on your base, and makes them tougher in general.

Depending on what you have to fight them with, the default settings of Rampant might be too difficult, in which case the mod has lots of options that'll let you dial that difficulty down. Also, you can get various other mods (like improved weapons, far reach, or tweaked evolution rates) to make fighting them easier.

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