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Comment by rustcleaner | Hacker News Reader

I install this on everything. It is really really good, and IMO the way more games should be made: make a fast simple windowmanager friendly interface presenting puzzles and games in a very pure and unencumbered form. Another example: I love SimCity 2000 for Win95, but not SimCity 3000 or SimCity 4. Why? Wright did 2000 right, the post-EA SimCities were all full screen flashy playskool interface monstrosities. 3000 brought some cool features in, but I wish they had kept to a 2000-like interface.

My ideal games look something like Siemens PLM NX or something, and less like a one-armed bandit in Vegas.

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SC2K had a beautiful interface, I concur, but it was broken as a sim, because of how transport was simulated. Paths were drawn, kind of like ray-traced, from each tile, and at a junction, a random route was taken. There was no directiveness. So for example if you made a little group of roads as a 3x3 set of tiles, practically no routes would exit before timing out by travelling too far, because they would keep taking random exits, and so stay within the 3x3 set of road tiles.

As such, you could not build a natural, normal transport system - for example, a central ring road or subway, with routes radiating outwards off of the ring. The only way to build a viable city was to understand how the transport sim worked, and then build a transport layout to fit how it worked.

As an aside, it really does feel like many games aren't about what they seem to be on the surface.

The SimCity series was less about building a city than it was about managing traffic.

SimTower was less about property management, and more about elevator management.

Factorio is less about building a factory, as it is about resource routing. Or, later, programming trains. Or later, god knows what, I haven't gotten that far.

Baldur's Gate III is less about defeating the BBEG through RPG mechanics, and more about choosing who to romance (Karlach).

Along similar lines, I really enjoyed shapez. Please forgive the blasphemy here, but I never could get into Factorio even though many of the mechanics are similar. (The former allowed me to focus on game play. The latter was a little too grim for my liking.)

Is it because of the enemies?

FWIW, you can turn them off. I always play with them disabled. Just not what I'm interested in. You might enjoy that, too.

I also enjoyed shapez, but it's no comparison to the depth of Factorio, especially with mods.

Thank you. The enemies are a big part of it. I will give turning them off a try.

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