It may have cost me my job and my marriage, but I finally launched that goddamn satellite into space.
LOL!
Congratulations!
Maybe?
I guess it depends on how much you liked your job and marriage.
Factorio sounds like a name of an elf on Disenchantment.
How many hours of gameplay did it take? That is one hell of a complicated game.
Woohoo! Now do it in 8 hours.
For me, 76 hours on a favorable map.
Holy crap; I am impressed! I have about 30 hours into that game and I’m fighting for a stalemate at best. It is ridiculously complicated and difficult.
People keep saying it’s complicated and difficult, but it starts out deceptively simple. I always felt like I was just a couple of minutes away from understanding it all, then I’d hit some new complication. “Just one more research pack and then I’ll have it made!”
Seriously, if you have any game-addictive tendencies, you’d be well advised to sit this one out. I say this non-ironically, I’m a little scared at how much it sucked me in, and I’m glad I finished it.
I picked it up earlier in the year, played it obsessively for a while, and stopped once I had beat it. It’s a fun game, but I did find that it was getting drawn out towards the end. To be fair, some of that was due to a couple of decisions I made: the first was to play a train world, which meant that setting up new ore mining setups was a lot more tedious as I had to build up a rail line and set up a brand new defence perimeter before I could start building the miners. Second, I kept putting off learning to use robots and logistics networks, and eventually I was so far I figured I might as well shoot for the achievement for not building a logistics network at all. I hand-crafted a whole lot of stuff because of this.
Also, I’m just really, really bad at setting up assembly lines in sane ways, so they always very quickly turned to spaghetti.
Still, it’s a really fun and engaging game for a certain kind of mind. I’ve played games that scratched similar itches in the past, but generally they wound up frustrating me as I didn’t feel I had enough control over the overall manufacturing process, and something would always end up going wrong. That’s never a problem in factorio – sometimes it took some thinking (or googling), but there’s nearly always a way to accomplish exactly what you need to do.
I feel like logistic robots are a must-have item, because unless you plan perfectly, your middle-investment assemblers are far away from the high-investment assemblers that need them. That really moved things forward for me.
I was tempted to skip nuclear power, but eventually my power demands couldn’t be met by solar, and my coal pollution was attracting too many biter attacks. The reactor was a real lifesaver.
Stuff that I skipped:
[ul]
[li]Trains. I just used belts for everything.[/li][li]Blue belts. Red belts are must-have, but I found them fast enough.[/li][li]Logic components and a lot of automation. I probably missed out, but I program enough in my day job that I didn’t feel like doing it in-game.[/li][li]Advanced military. I did get the power/speed upgrades, but I found it easy to kill even big biter nests by running over them with a tank.[/li][li]Crazy armor upgrades. Once I got the tank, the modular tier armor was enough.[/li][/ul]
I wound up getting all techs, but that was because I was always so slow at getting the next science pack produced that I researched everything before I had the new science packs production online.
That’s one of the great successes of the game, IMO. It does start simple. It’s comprehensible and logical. And it isn’t lagged by Dwarf Fortress-like bullshit where things simply go wrong or get out of hand. But those first dozen elements quickly give way to 4 dozen and then to elements within elements and before you know it, you have a crapload of things going on at once without ever achieving anything quickly.
I did similar - I got so far in the game, and then ran for the end through mass producing what I already have. I haven’t been back since I beat it last year, but I probably will at some point, they keep adding stuff.
Congratulations on your hard won victory!