The Factorio developers have spent a very impressive amount of effort optimizing the game. Here's a few more Friday Facts about how they optimized specific aspects of the game:<p>- Friday Facts #82 - Optimisations: <a href="https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-82" rel="nofollow">https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-82</a><p>- Friday Facts #117 - Path Finder Optimisation I: <a href="https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-117" rel="nofollow">https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-117</a><p>- Friday Facts #176 - Belts optimization for 0.15: <a href="https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176" rel="nofollow">https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176</a><p>- Friday Facts #204 - Another day, another optimisation: <a href="https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-204" rel="nofollow">https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-204</a><p>- Friday Facts #209 - Optimisation is a way of life: <a href="https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209" rel="nofollow">https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-209</a><p>- Friday Facts #281 - For a Few Frames More: <a href="https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281" rel="nofollow">https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-281</a>
Peter Molyneux, designer of Black and White (an old god-game) said that he wanted to make a game that he could look over someone's shoulder playing it, and know them better than if he'd spent an hour talking.<p>Few games give you enough creative choice to materialise how your head works in a game. A lot either over-prescribe the optimal way of doing it, or the meta just forces your hand.<p>Factorio lets you use rules to express yourself within a space they made for us. I play it for the same reason I first coding.
"less flawless than intended" is a good way to think about it. Factorio is a good game, but what makes it great is just how flawless it is. You can grow your factory for hundreds of hours before you run into any performance limitations, and it will never ever crash or glitch or desync. They've spent years making it as flawless as possible.
I was wondering, what's the "right" way to run a Factorio-like simulation, algorithmic ally speaking? I.e. You have conveyor belts bringing items to/from producer/consumer objects. A conveyor can only move its item forward if the next conveyor tile is empty (or is moving its current item off). Can you do this in a single pass over conveyor tiles and/or items?<p>It feels like there should be an elegant solution.
The powerline fix (dragging and it not placing the last pole) is awesome, it's a bug that always bothered me even though I understood exactly what "edge case" (not that "edge" but still) it was hitting. Also wires in blueprints/ghosts is nice. I'll have to play with the ghost fast replace but I think this will be very nice once I re-train myself to trust the expected way you want that to work (vs knowing it doesn't work normally and adjusting for it).<p>Overall I continue to be impressed by the Factorio team and consider it some of the best money I've ever spent on a video game. In terms of return on investment (time-wise) I think it's got every game beat expect maybe Skyrim for me. (especially if you exclude my video game time from before I went to college and cut back drastically)
I got really in to Factorio for a while. Then I beat it (Launched the rocket in to space), and ever since then I have no desire to go back. I think it just feels too much like work for me now. I think the fact that Factorio feels so much like programming both makes the game great, and makes the game exhausting. Nowadays, after a full day programming, I just want to relax with games that don't require refactoring.<p>That being said, it's a great game and would still recommend it to anyone that hasn't played through it.
Factorio is awesome, but I found that I needed to enable infinite ores/oil and disable evolution to really enjoy it given my time constraints. Adding the nesting factories mod (can't recall the name) was also a QoL improvement for me.<p>If you find the regular game tough to get into, try playing with some basic mods.