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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

> brimming with QoL features.

I'm surprised they didn't find a way to further improve the belt system. I thought they had it solved pretty well but e.g. Shapez is leagues better (talking about belt placement only here).

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Is it possible Factorio is handicapped because of the perspective? I saw a post by the team that said the visual perspective was a mistake that caused endless headaches to accommodate. Things don’t perfectly align which bubbles up everywhere.

Have not played Shapez.

No, this is just about the UX of drawing a long belt in a 2D grid. I think part of the problem is that they can't easily change the existing UX without breaking muscle memory for all existing players, and maybe they might not want to make it "too easy" to avoid throwing off timing or encouraging certain mechanics like blueprints or trains?

Although now that I'm looking at some tutorials, it's also possible that I just missed that they introduced a very similar feature.

For “I want A connected to B and I don’t particularly care how” where A and B are long distances apart, Shapez belt mechanics are nicer than Factorio belt mechanics, but Factorio train mechanics are nicer than Shapez belt mechanics.

For “I want to lay down a lot of belt in this area and I want each piece placed in a certain way” I think Factorio belt mechanics are nicer.

I think the C (?) mechanic in Shapez to manually fix a corner is really neat. I haven't tried the Factorio R-while-dragging mechanic, it might be the same or close enough.

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