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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced that factorio requires planning ahead for computer players. For human players it certainly does, because tearing up your factory and rebuilding to fix shortsighted designs has a steep time/labor cost. Even for human players though, this cost becomes mostly a psychological obstacle once you get construction bots.

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Long-term planning is necessary if you have biters enabled: typically you need to secure territory/resources and invest in defenses before the resources run low and while the biters are still manageable. Otherwise things can get badly out of hand.

Edit: IMO the biggest difference between Satisfactory and Factorio is that Satisfactory has no crises. If a Satisfactory base shuts down it is annoying, but you can dig another miner / / build another plant / etc, entirely at your leisure. But in Factorio, a shutdown is an emergency with a ticking clock.

We were thinking of creating a minigame resembling a "tower-defense" setting, where waves of bugs get released and the agent needs to create appropriate defenses. It would be interesting to see if agents are capable of defending the base and how much resources would they put towards defenses in a normal game where enemies are enabled

The biggest cost in factorio by far is the human time cost of setting up logistics, building factories and mining outposts.

To an LLM those probably aren't even costs

seems like we just need to add that 'cost' to the agents...

We do actually track this. Each action an agent takes consumes 'ticks', which is how long it would take a human player to do it. For example, moving 10 tiles to the right takes something like 300 ticks (5 seconds).

However, our results only loosely indicate that smarter models use fewer ticks. I have an intuition that we will get more signal for tick-efficiency as models improve.

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