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Comment by polivier | Hacker News Reader

Mindustry is such a great game. I sunk tons of hours in both campaigns with a friend of mine.

For those who come from a Factorio background, Mindustry has less automation and more combat. Also a Mindustry map does not take 50 hours to complete; rather it will take a few hours and may sometimes take several tries as some maps can be fairly hard. Space is limited as compared to Factorio, so space-efficient designs do matter, especially for defense (you want to pack towers tightly, with the constraint that towers must be fed by a conveyor of ammo or a pipe of liquid, or both). You also need to consider that you often need different combinations of towers in order to defeat different types of enemies.

Overall, a very well-made game and very addictive.

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Sounds like something I might try. Factorio has a tower defense element that never really works because the attacks are too small, my base is too large, and I always just wipe out the biter camps. That's an aspect of the game that clearly needs a lot more challenge, but lots of players just ignore it and build.

For my first half-dozen tries, I always built may bases far too compact. I really had to learn to use the space available to me. A game that rewards compact building might be just for me.

You have the difficulty sliders and the death world preset and an entire enemies tag on https://mods.factorio.com. What more do you want?

Mods are great, but they generally lack cohesion. I agree with OP. I wish that instead of passive upgrades and only a couple tower/ammo variants, the game had a deeper tower defense aspect.

It'd be nice to have more enemy and tower variants, with certain types of towers working better against certain types of enemies - or towers that debuff enemies instead of hurting them. Maybe there could be structures that attract nearby enemies so it'd be easier to direct where attacks hit.

I think stuff like that would keep the tower defense stuff from loosing relevancy in the late game while staying fun.

I should suggest warptorio here: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2

You should try Warp Drive Machine: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Warp-Drive-Machine

Better combat in vanilla is a reasonable ask. They're right, the combat isn't fun!

for me Factorio combat was overall boring and just drudgery, and just adding unfun pressure.

I always play factorio with no combat. Just disable all biters, so they don't even show up on the map

Some mods change biter behaviour to make them smarter, such as Rampant. Others change the entire gameplay loop, like Warp Drive Machine. The mod ecosystem is huge, and it's far too early to claim you know for sure it'll be boring.

RTS elements. It’s really tedious dealing with base defense and biter expansion prevention if you want to build a rail world type of base (and have the map for it). Artillery helps somewhat but the range is limited by radar arrays’ range.

Let me build a bunch of units, set up patrols, feed them with resources, and actively deal in an automated way with Biters thinking my land is their land :)

The pathing of the enemies in Mindustry feels somehow more like a classic tower defense game. I think they come from a small number of points and are primarily focused on your “town hall” type structure.

They’ve certainly got a lot of overlap, but Mindustry feels like a tower defense game that has a good factory builder added on, while Factorio feels like the other way around.

Anyway, two great games.

Try Rampant?

It makes you optimize for different things which is why I prefer it to Factorio even if the tech and crafting tree is less developed.

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