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Comment by drilldrive | Hacker News Reader

Meaning this in the nicest way possible, but is there more to this game than spending hours at a time micromanaging? I do that at work anyways, don't want to bring that into a hobby.

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This game is kind of the opposite of micromanaging, though I can understand why it would seem like it is.

There's an old joke about golf "The goal of the game is to play as little of it as possible," which is also very true for factorio.

As you advance through the tech tree, previous things you did manually you'll automate more. There's an achievement called "Lazy Bastard" that forces you to do a bare minimum amount of manual work.

well not exactly minimum amount of manual work, just a limited amount of handcrafting. you still have to lay out and place things down yourself (until you get robots)

Although let's not kid ourselves. Lazy Bastard is way more work then just playing normally :D

It's a very particular definition of "lazy".

I believe that's true of all the achievements -- I'd guess that's why they're "achievements" (although I believe some games include normal game milestones as achievements just for the dopamine hit)

It is playing normally once you've done it once. You level up as a player after you've mastered it.

> achievement called "Lazy Bastard"

One my very first bosses noted the reason he felt I was an exceptional programmer was that I had managed to automate everything at the office from time reporting to doing performance reviews.

Out of curiosity as I too would like to automate the tedium of things like a perf. review - how exactly do you automate those 'one-off' per year tasks that fall more in line with spending more time maintaining the code for that task than time saved automating.

I have had some success with certain tasks in the very high-frequency category, but almost no successes with anything that has a cadence higher than a month (always relevant.. https://xkcd.com/1205/)

> how exactly do you automate those 'one-off' per year tasks

These were quarterly reviews. Basically I had it copy/paste verbatim the BS from the previous review. This worked for everything except accomplishments. These were 'completed' tasks (from my time reporting) for the reporting period copied into that section.

I partially automated performance reviews at one place.

I wrote weekly status updates, important accomplishments I marked with asterisks. For the annual reviews I just had a script that loaded a TeX template from the past review then populated it from the flagged entries in my weeky reports. Then I'd just edit it down a bit, tweak the language and sent it out. In theory I could have probably gotten away with sending the autogenerated one at least after I'd refined the usage some.

I did it this way because it's always hard to start writing a performance review. But I found it a lot easier to start with a bunch of stuff I did and restrict it down to the relevant stuff.

I was tickled when they later updated the job description for my role and used the text from my performance review. I guess since I didn't have to spend much time populating it I managed to completely optimize the level of corporate-speak in my narrative. :)

I mean yes, but also no. I was skeptical that I could get into the game after reading about it, but I played the free demo [1] and got hooked. After "beating" it about 80 hours in I've lost a bit of interest because it seemed a bit more like work than play to really scale things, but the 80 hours of enjoyment was worth it. Might come back to it at some point and try to make a megabase or try some mods.

[1] https://factorio.com/download

It's programming, but stripped down to the essentials. You don't have to spend hours reading documentation to find the function you want, or googling for stack overflow answers for some build error.

In particular, its being able to build a complex distributed system with extremely high visibility to discover the bottlenecks and overflows that need to be resolved. With some Chaos Monkey thrown in as random biter attacks.

> You don't have to spend hours reading documentation to find the function you want, or googling for stack overflow answers for some build error

...until you start messing with fluid system and oil cracking

oil refining is much simpler now. it's easy enough to figure out through trial and error.

for me the only time when I'm always checking the docs is when I'm trying to supply enough water to a nuclear plant. the pressure loss over distance for a pipe almost never matters, but it really does for a nuclear plant. if you don't have a very short run of pipes or lots of pumps along the way, you will never achieve the full potential of your nuclear plant. this can be quite disastrous if you make assumptions about how much power the plant will make. I wish they would add something to the UI to make it a bit more clear when pipe runs are too long.

It feels more like iterative problem solving. Once you get part of your factory working, you can entirely shift your attention to the next problem. Existing regions of the factory require surprisingly little attention until they become a bottleneck (thereby presenting a new problem to solve).

I don't view it as micromanaging. I view it as building foundations in good and scalable ways. At the beginning when the map is empty (analogous to a green field project with no files yet) it may seem like micromanaging. But if you do it right, you quickly grow out of that phase and start operating at a scale the new order of magnitude up. This cycle repeats a few times and before you know it (because you accidentally stayed up all night playing the game) you're copy-pasting massive factories around and having armies of robots build it for you. You no longer care about minor details and micro-optimizations, you care about the next order of magnitude.

No. But it sure is satisfying watching a new belt line get loaded for the first time.

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