![]() But what really impresses me is how the game illustrates the complexity of the real world. ![]() The game is incredibly addictive (especially for programmers?). Eventually you can build power plants, labs to research new technologies, walls and turrets to defend against attackers, oil refineries, robot delivery drones, trains, and more. But soon, you are building an automatic mining drill, then a conveyor belt to bring the ore to a smelting furnace, then robot arms to insert the ore into the furnace and take the smelted bars out, then more conveyor belts to bring those to other places where thy can be used. Like Minecraft, you start out punching trees for wood to craft a pickaxe with which you can then mine some ore to craft other things. The game is currently in "alpha", but I'm not sure why it's far more polished and less buggy than many finished professional games I've played. It's like a cross between Minecraft, SimCity, and Civilization, and the result is massively better than any of them. Here's a review I wrote in December 2014 that still applies (original at ): This has been the most popular game at my LAN parties ( ) for the last year and a half. The game also has a really great mechanic where you are constantly unbalanced for what resource you need to build up, but only because you decided to expand and create, so that your plans always digress into other plans and other problems to solve.Īlso, the multiplayer is great and works really well, though it has a weird setting where you can set your own latency, and it seems like the host and clients are in lockstep not allowed to skew (so if you have a laggy client its a problem.) It is extremely satisfying to build your first solar panel array while fighting for every resource, and then a few hours later have your 5000 strong robot army assemble a blueprint of that same array in 5 seconds while you watch. My favorite part is that basically any action or building (up to the far late game) usually pushes you to build it by hand once or twice, and then automate the process forever. If you ever enjoyed Tekkit (minecraft) or the more automated part of Dwarf Fortress, you will like this game a lot. I have been playing this for a few years and just started again with the release of the steam version. It feels like you're playing a symphony of borglike capitalist efficiency. coal stacks up because your furnaces aren't burning it because they're blocking on insufficient supplies of ore because you have insufficient electrical capacity because.). When you get it right you get visual feedback (absence of congestion on your production line as e.g. It's Totoya Factory Simulator 2016 in this respect. A fairly key skill for Factorio, which is present in Big Pharma but not relevant except at the highest levels of play, is timing the production of multiple subcomponents (which might happen in different quantities, at different rates, at variable distance from where they are consumed) such that one's production line never starves, blocks, or overproduces. Capsule non-spoiler summary: best $20 I spent last year.) (For spoilers on that score, see my Steam review, which is the topmost one on the page. It's substantially less advanced in terms of factory mechanics than Factorio, but the strategy is very, very deep, much deeper than you'd expect from looking it it. My favorite of those that I've played so far is Big Pharma. There exist several other games on Steam these days with the same core build-a-(semi-)autonomous-factory mechanic. I have one warning to you which I am not aware of seeing elsewhere for it: something about the color palette gives me severe eye strain, to the point of "physically painful to play", in a way I have never experienced before or since. This game is fantastic, and ate ~20 hours of a business trip earlier in its development lifecycle.
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