Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

While I have not really played SE (past initial launch, it was too daunting to build the ship in space, etc) I have run into these kind of "issues" in Factorio. While they can have disastrous effects, I often really enjoy finding the core problem and finding a solution to make it "fail-safe".

Sometimes I wish I could go back and wipe all my Factorio knowledge and start from scratch again, most importantly refusing to use blueprints from the internet except for basic things like balancers. Finding early/mid/late game malls/blueprints sort of ruined the game for me. Min/maxing is fine by myself but once I'm "competing" against the internet or feel obligated to find the most efficient/best green/red/blue circuit factory, or science packs, etc it really ruins the game for me and makes it feel more like a job.

I got a good thousand or two hours out of the game before I hit that point and someday I want to try playing it again with self-enforced limits on what I'm "allowed" to get from the internet and what I need to just figure out on my own. The first game I played was pure bliss (and I played with Bob's mods and a number of others, yes that was stupid for my first playthrough but damn it was fun), I'd love to recapture that.

I want to reinforce your plan. Somehow I played factorio for a few hundred hours before finding online communities and blueprints. It was a wonderful experience of discovery and exploration. I came up with a few "novel" designs during that time that I'm still proud of.

Once comparing my own work to the best online it took a lot of joy out of the game. But I found that the memory was short lived, once I cut myself off from those online communities it was easy to fall back into the "let me pull out my sketchbook and solve this problem" mindset. I think half the fun is that design process.

I'm well north of 1000 hours now, and still discovering new ways to play and solve problems. I've come full circle and now build spaghetti bases because they are so visually fun.

I've heard this story repeated many times now and I'm glad to hear people are able to get back into it after having the joy sucked out. I think next time I play I will refuse to use a "main bus" until much later in the game if at all. That was the one of the biggest joy-killers, trying to plan for a mega-base essentially from the very start. It's not fun to plan out your bus and leave lots of room for red/blue circuits or more science packs while you are still building MK1-level things. That or trying to setup production lines with room for MK2-MK3+ versions of things from the start. It's complete overkill especially since there is no advantage to having a bus next to where you start. Better to situate it further away where minerals are more dense/plentiful and later in the game when it actually makes sense. Looking back I can't believe how stupid it was for me to setup 4 lanes of iron, 2 of copper, and a handful for each circuit type from the very start of the game, it sucked all the fun out but I didn't notice the reason.

The game largely felt like I was stuck in the same cookie-cutter, always trying to never have to tear up lines or rebuild elsewhere (trying to do it perfectly from the start). That was easily half the fun of my initial runs, realizing I needed to expand or rebuild instead of trying to perfect the build order.

> I think next time I play I will refuse to use a "main bus" until much later in the game if at all.

I mostly played through without any internet advice until I shared with a friend who did use internet advice and the main bus was his advice. Thankfully I already had a base so I tried this for a specific process/product (rockets ofc but still). I think a lot of “late game” stuff by experienced players will likely converge towards a bus since you’ll be already learned scale and order by then, but maybe with less precision in layout. The problem is that you can’t un-see it once you start building with it once.

I agree that fuck perfect from the start, build at the right scale at the right time. It’s way more fun. Conversely, if you like multiplayer games, this is a game where it’s really fun to play with people who are new. You can use their naïveté to override your knowledge or build completely different looking based each time. It’s fun to guide them through rediscovery (eg wtf why did all the trains dead lock!)

I found I enjoyed the process of putting together a mall from a blueprint, but leaving the rest of the factory up to me. I find the logistics and planning part of factorio more interesting than the "build up all the parts you need to make the factory" part.

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