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Comment by iliketrains | Hacker News Reader

Aww, thanks! We heard lots of feedback about tutorials and it is our priority to improve them.

> My only request would be to make it so you can click on a product and have it take you to the recipes involving it.

Try right-click!

> I also really like the design choice to not have to lay power lines everywhere.

Haha, this was removed due to time constraints. We were thinking to have it introduced in some lightweight fashion, like substations that cover large area, but this is still in "thinking" phase.

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Power tends to be interesting when it can be used for logic control - having some trigger that causes a portion of the industry to go dark to focus on some rarely used portion - too many games throw power in just because it's everywhere in factory sims.

As you continue to develop the game I'd suggest you make sure the features you add are always accompanying some interesting feature expansion - one thing that always struck me as odd in Satisfactory was the inclusion of combat - you, the player, interact with enemies only when exploring the world and it adds relatively boring stress - it isn't and doesn't try to be combat focused (like factorio where the factory exists, for a long time, solely to better defend the factory) instead it's a smattering of FPS gameplay in an otherwise unrelated feeling game. So, you need to sort of choose between gameplay or simulation focused - EU4 might be an example you're familiar with where the earliest iterations were strongly focused on simulation with flavor events driving most of the gameplay... and, over time, it has shifted to focus more and more on fair mechanisms - it still has very rich feeling flavor, but the flavor is always secondary to the gameplay. Choosing to focus on either mechanics or flavor and seeing the other as a bonus that will enrich the experience is extremely valuable.

Congrats on the game! I've played maybe five hours of it last night and look forward to learning more of it.

Oh yeah, was never a fan of Satisfactory's combat. Did they ever make it optional?

I really wanted to enjoy Satisfactory, but found the first-person perspective made factory building tedious. I know they've made some QoL changes like adding a grid to make it easier, but...meh. It's a beautiful game, but so far DSP has been my favorite factory builder, but gimme another dozen hours and I'll decide how CoI compares in the longer game.

It has slowly become more optional - there's a bit that's necessary near the beginning with your weak little zapper... but if you've played before it's pretty easy to rush guns quickly enough that you never really have to seriously worry about it. It becomes a non-factor really quickly... and if it were like factorio (and they could destroy portions of your base) it'd be even worse since it's so hard to figure out what little components are missing in Satisfactory.

Among the design decisions that Satisfactory made meaningless by poor balance, Weapons is solidly middling. It would make sense if you had to clear areas of enemies to unlock the ability to build on them, and/or if higher-tier weapons were required to defeat higher-tier enemies (the kittens). As it stands now, it's such a non-mechanic - You get Xeno Basher and are more or less set until enemies are made completely meaningless by rifles. They've just reworked the system and it's even more meaningless by the addition of new ammo types and cool things to do with them, which I hope is a precursor to making you use those ammo types. There is the potential and even promise of such - See the "Crab Battle" trailer.

What really bothers me about Satisfactory is how inefficient rails and other modes of transport are compared to just running a long conveyor of advanced products. If you compact even two tiers onsite, a single T2 conveyor can handle a large area's worth of resources. Capacity and throughput for trains are limited by their limited input slots, too. Nested hub and spoke factories make a lot more sense than trying to ship everything raw to a central location, but all of the tier upgrades are around shipping more further.

Factorio seems to have a similar issue with its OP Flame Turrets available in early-mid game already... but perhaps it's even worse in Satisfactory ?

It's less a question of balance and more a question of whether the feature actually properly fits the rest of the game. Factorio is designed around the attack waves being a motivator to get better tech quickly - you want to bee-line flame turrets and develop the tech to get self-refilling turrets and self-repairing walls... In satisfactory the enemies only exist to gate off certain map areas and they do that very poorly with sky bridges, instant building (to box in enemies or give yourself cover) and other mechanics that can't be trivially removed clashing heavily with combat.

If they wanted combat to be a thing, they could use it as a gate - "You can't build here, enemies are nearby". I think they could actually make combat a fun part of exploration in that way, by giving you a limited area you can build in initially and giving you rewards in new buildable land from combat. It would vastly change the game, though, which is perhaps not a bad thing.

I think a big problem you'll hit here is that a large number of gamers are generalists - we enjoy playing a variety of games and have a variety of skills accumulated from that experience. That means that the FPS portions of the game are either going to match our challenge level and discourage factory builder specialists or it's going to be extremely underwhelming for FPS players. Factory builder specialists - those folks who absolutely adore DSP and Factorio but who, when dealing with the threats in Factorio, leverage creeping turret walls and artillery to clear the creep and who try and avoid fighting on foot outside of the very earliest game stages.

Building multi-genre games is a really hard problem.

That's why Factorio has a Death World game preset (self-explanatory) and a Rail World game preset (which among other things, makes it so that enemies never expand and never attack you first).

I did enjoy the immersive first person aspect of building a truck, and driving it through the jungle to find coal deposits, but yeah, the combat was either overly easy, or ridiculously hard, then it just became a nuisance.

I think it’s less about making a choice between one and the other, and more about committing to the features. Satisfactory could easily have a decent combat component to it (more specifically, the factorial model of automated combat makes perfect sense for a factory game, and 3D tower defense games are quite viable).

The problem with Satisfactory is they half-assed it — they didn’t commit to adding combat, they just tossed it in because why not. There’s nothing really stopping them from layering on combat mechanics without disrupting their current gameplay… they just need to actually do the full job, or not at all.

It’s not even unreasonable, as currently the game has no real driver for optimizing base layout or production rates beyond your personal interest in doing so.

Power, per your description, is the same; if you just toss it in because why not, it adds nothing to the game, and usually detracts from it instead. Ultimately any additional mechanic needs to be “worth its weight”, and should either alter your interaction with existing mechanics, or enhance those interactions.

Simply targeting “more simulation” isn’t sufficient justification on its own

As Tynan (RimWorld) said in his book, show, don't tell. Walk players through a tutorial without them realising its a tutorial. Look at Oculus First Steps for a great tutorial that doesn't feel like one.

Portal has the best tutorial in game history.

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