currently on sale on steam 20% off. anyone played this? one of those rare "overwhelmingly positive" reviewed games. like factorio but apparently more inspired by stellaris and The Wandering Earth and an indie game developed in the Good China.
the lead developer is named Mao Mao which is based as fuck.
It's good. It's all about setting up and balancing different resource and component pipelines and that scales up to multiple factories on a single planet, then on multiple planets, then in multiple systems. It does get a bit overwhelmingly after a point, although more in the hurdles you have to clear to progress getting a bit harder to wrap one's head around than in having to go back and actively manage old assembly lines.
Yes its pretty amazing.
But your enjoyment will depend on whether you actualy enjoy sandboxes, setting your own goals beyond just getting to a certain point in the tech tree.
But in short yeah, it was a big hit... 2 years ago. They announced the combat update which is pretty hype. Once it hits it may just be one of the best games of the decade easily. But they must make sure it wont kill performance. Anyway you can read the latest blog post.
Would I recommend it? If you enjoy sandboxes, then yes absolutely. If you are the kind of person that absolutely needs hand holding/directions/narrative then maybe pirate it instead then buy it for the updates. If you can't pirate it then maybe try a pirate copy of Factorio first and see if you enjoy factory games before buying this on steam honestly.
If you want pirate games I'd start on https://cs.rin.ru/forum/
Not to go off topic but in terms of sandboxes Cities Skylines 2 is coming soon, so may consider saving for that instead.
I played it a while back. It got a little overwhelming for me, but some friends really liked it.
hmm. yeah like i really want to love all these central planning/factory games but only workers & resources clicked (because it was grounded in city building/real world), while factorio was too much combat and satisfactory was too 3d.
There’s no combat and it’s isometric. The managing different planets bit was where I tapped out.
Just so you know, you can turn off the combat in Factorio (I'm also not a huge fan of it).
Factorio is easily my favorite of the "Big 3" (Factorio, Satisfactory, and Dyson Sphere Program), so I'd recommend playing it with combat off before Dyson Sphere, but in case that doesn't vibe with you I did enjoy my time with DSP a lot. Seeing the scale come together is the magic of the game and it's a generally good time. Also has a multiplayer mod that's quite good if you've got fellow comrades to play with.
does turning off combat take away from the progression at all? i know much of the production chain involves making ammo/weapons/etc do you feel it takes anything from it?
and satisfactory would be really cool but i just can't get a "big picture" mental image of my factories in the 3d space. the towers don't help. they go off the rails quickly and i say this as someone that used to do all the minecraft factory/pipe mods
Full disclosure I'm not much of a fan of satisfactory relative to the other two and my critiques of it are likely way beyond the level most people want to engage in factory games and are definitely nit-picky.
Factorio loses some of its natural progression by turning off enemies, but it still retains most of its complexity as the vast majority of the game is still solving the factory problem. In the base game you get so hilariously strong by the end of it that the enemies are more an afterthought than an active problem.
That said if you find that the enemy-less game isn't complex enough, you can always pick up a modpack that greatly increases the complexity of the factory components while still not having mobs (some combination of bob and angels mods should more than do the trick).
My first Factorio "win" was playing bobs mods with a friend with enemies off and it was a really enjoyable ~60 hour experience.
If you have more questions I'm glad to answer them as well if my ramblings above created any.
Honestly probably the best gaming experience I've ever had and opened my eyes to my new favorite genre.
I'd heard people say Bobs mods was great prior to playing (was loosely aware of the game due to streams) and just decided to go for it.
No regrets at all. Starting up a Space Exploration world this weekend as I've heard it's fantastic.
Oh yeah, I don't blame you at all. Factorio is extremely my shit. I just haven't worked myself up to Bob's yet. My last run was a very train heavy Industrial Revolution 2 run which was interesting. I'll probably go for Krastorio next.
Space Exploration looked daunting. Best of luck with it.
im doing a krastorio/space exploration run and i should warn you you will lose a few hundred hours to it. it's very fun though
It's a good factory game, if you like those you'll love this one. Personally I don't have the patience for these games and usually quit in the first 5 hours or so but up to that point it was pretty fun.
I enjoyed it but the text in the UI was so small it gave me migraines and I had to stop playing.
It is very very good. In terms of factory games, I place it above Factorio and Satisfactory by far.
I love it. Spent 100s of hours building huge space factories.
If you've played Factorio or something like that it's more of the same with good developers. There's a looming big update with combat mechanics that look neat and aren't the usual "the natives are mad. Kill them so you can extract more resources".
never heard of it, sounds cool. nvm, it's already on my steam wishlist lol
It's also another suggestion based off of your comment about playing through some technical Minecraft modpacks, but Create: Above and Beyond for 1.16.5 is a pretty solid experience if you haven't played it.
It's centered around the Create mod (and has quest-based progression to guide you through it), but it's expansive enough with its other mods that non-technical players can also really enjoy the additional building/magic paths that they can optionally go down.
I'm no expert in pack balance or anything like that (and create is the specific interest I had in the pack), but it was a great choice as it allowed my little friend group of technical, magic, and building aesthetic focused players to all live in harmony.
I got to the point where i had multiple systems with multi layered dyson spheres and a whole inter-system network of transports.
The jump from one planet to multiple is a bit of a hurdle but you eventually get to a point where you can basically just place down a logistics building next to a resource, slap down some mining/processing buildings and just jam the belts into the logistics network and the transports figure out the rest.
One thing I will say is once you have a factory that goes beyond one system the main thing you are managing is your framerate as the game sort of starts to fall apart when it gets that large and your early factories aren't efficient. The discord has a lot of event modules you can use when that becomes an issue but the idea is to reduce the number of belts as you get more efficient
