f13.net

There was no thread for this game, so I figured I'd start one by mentioning how fucking horribly evil this little game is.

An open world tower defense game with automated factories.

Evil, and a gem.

I saw it on Steam and I was captivated. It looks fantastic, but also overwhelming. Anxiety inducing. I wanna play it but it scares me.

Been playing this one since it was on early release.  It's really, really fun, but after a while there's no there there.

The last time I played this there were only a handful of 'tutorial' type scenarios.   It was fun but it only took me an hour or two to feel like I did everything.   Is there more to it now?

There's the sandbox mode, where you basically generate some terrain and away you go.  The point is to build the end tech to get you the fuck off the planet and, meantime, you keep getting attacked by munchers.  There's a rather nice mechanic whereby the more industrialised you get, the more the munchers munch.

I got to the point where I'd made flying robots everywhere, was using blueprints for everything and had a 'Research Cube', so all the tech was trivial.

At that point, you realise there's really not a game as such.

Pushed a largish update this week.  Steam achievements and better mod support.

Still not a ton of stuff of stuff to do once you get your basic plant built.  The game forums imply that once you begin your endgame push, you'll generate enough pollution that the biters become very hard to keep at bay.  I got all the way up the tech tree, had the ungodly armor that let me raid biter hives with impunity, I just couldn't find the fortitude to gather all the resources to build the rocket.

But optimizing production lines is still a challenge.

It took way too long to mine resources at the very start, I got bored and uninstalled.

I enjoyed this a few months ago, but I'm not sure why. I can't really recommend it, yet I did have a lot of fun with it playing all the way to what was then the rocket defense end game. I basically turtled till I was able to blueprint hop my laser turret forts anywhere I wanted to clean out the bugs. I haven't replayed it at all though, but I might the next time I get an itch to play around with trains!

Bought this today.  Almost didn't do any work.

The price of this is going up to $30 on the 16th of April.  If you were thinking of picking this up, I'd suggest doing so now...

Interesting.  It's good, but it's not worth that.

It had a great start but at some point I realized I was working a job but not getting paid.

Yeah, pretty much.  I'm always amazed how much like Subnautica in theme Factorio is, yet one of them remains interesting and is more of a game.

The entire game of Factorio is 'do some research'.  Once you have a nice research conveyor going on, everything else is just holding back the bugs till you're done.

So.

Just like my job.

My problem with Factorio is that I take an adhoc approach to the initial layout, throwing down what I need now to get to the next steps.  When it comes time to put together an actual functioning a->b->... ->j setup, I realize I need to either start a new setup away from my garbage setup, or tear down all of what I have now and start over.

I really should get into blueprints more, I think it would solve a fair number of issues that I have.  Tediously setting up 32 smelters just so, with belts and hands and poles and etc is just so tiring after a point, particularly when you need to build something like 9 or more complete setups like that if you want to have actual throughput.

That and I have never gotten the hang of oil.  I don't know why, I just never have enough plastic or sulfuric acid or whatever, so I generally hit a pretty hard wall of "I can produce 6 red circuit boards continuously! ... that's awful, guh."

 :oh_i_see:

I also find the beginning to be a bit of a tough go now that I've played through a few times.

Anyway.  I think it's worth getting and playing if you think you would enjoy it, but I also think unless you're a very small subset of the population, you're going to launch the rocket once, fiddle around with a few ideas in new maps/games, then walk away.

You're essentially describing tech debt introduced into a software system.  Sub a few words out and you can make a lot of money instead of wondering where your evening went, watching passable porn, then falling asleep.

Yeah, but I do talk about technical debt in software in my real life job, much of the day.  Are you suggesting I start a business telling people they done fucked up their software?  Would people actually pay for the privilege?

Uh

Consulting is a thing

Just happened upon this like a week ago: https://allarsblog.com/2018/03/16/confessions-of-an-unreal-engine-4-engineering-firefighter/

They would, gladly.  YMMV based on your skill with bullshit.

LOL

.17 Release

They changed up some of the research formulae, tried to even out some of the spikes in difficulty (e.g. going from blue to yellow science), added some quality of life bits.

Don't know if anyone still fools around with this, but the changes are enough for me to give it another shot.

I fool about with it when they do a new release.  I really, really like the game, limited though it is.

I've been waiting for .17 to drop before I did another playthrough.  Time to fire it up again.

Can I configure this to work with Github webhooks and a Jenkins server?

Probably... not?

You can automate a fair bit in the game already, to the point where robots with blueprints can apparently infinitely expand your base.  Sort of.

I was mostly joking but am unsurprised by your answer.

I know you were joking, and I almost replied with a Selenium/Protractor joke, but that is web based, so obviously would not work with this.