Factorio Future Plans
I know a lot of people who enjoy this game, and I am trying to get into it at the moment. I played a couple of hours earlier this week, and this is my review:The premise of the game is excellent. You have crashlanded on a remote planet and have to start from nothing, acquire resources, build tools, build machines, automate the acquisition of resources, etc., until you have developed enough technology that you can build a spaceship and flee the planet. Wow.There are 2 things I don't like.Firstly, I don't like the "biters" that come and destroy your base. I don't really think this adds to the game in any way. It feels like it was added to the game to make it appeal to the "gamer" demographic rather than the "programmer" demographic. If I'm working away on one corner of my base trying to solve automation problems, I don't want to have to run away and piss about shooting some pointless biters who are trying to destroy my stuff. I know the answer is "that's an automation problem too! build turrets!". But I just want to calmly play the game at my own pace, I don't want to have to be attending to urgent biter problems.I stopped playing the other day after biters destroyed a load of my stuff and I no longer felt invested in the game. That's not fun for me. I want to play the game, but I don't want my stuff getting destroyed if I do a subpar job of defending it.Secondly, (and this is partly related to the biters, but not completely), I find the game surprisingly stressful. I think this comes from the interplay between short-term and long-term problems. I don't know exactly what game mechanic causes it, but I think I would find it much more enjoyable if I could calmly work on problems without having to run around topping up coal and otherwise putting out non-automatable fires. Perhaps it's just the visuals of loads of materials stacking up on conveyor belts and going to the wrong places, and the kind of visceral feeling that the problem is getting worse for every second that it's not solved. I don't know. I don't find that relaxing.I will have another go though. I love the concept, and I haven't actually got to the end of the tutorial yet. I understand that when you start the proper game you can ask for "peaceful" mode which turns off biters, which sounds ideal for me.