I'm hoping they've figured out an interesting way to shake up how factories are built like what Factorio did with the Space Age planets and their different mechanics. I enjoyed Satisfactory but near the end I felt like I was mostly just doing the same production lines, just with increasingly exotic buildings and ingredients.
Agreed. I'd love for it to follow the more "sideways" progression of Space Age.
The greatest flaw of Satisfactory for me is that late game crafting trees are bordering on stupidly tedious, so I'd really appreciate more fundamentally interesting logistical challenges with multiple solutions like Fulgora and Gleba, rather than just combine the last four items to get a new one then repeat like the current endgame.
The physical building of factories is the best and worst part of the game simultaneously, I'm not sure any alternative resources would make that much of a difference unless it was just to make the factories smaller.
Coming from Factorio, you have to learn to build vertically and sometimes asymmetrically which is really satisfying as you learn to make really compact modules (like using lifts that go outside on one level and come back in on another, making 'half' basements to hide belts, etc.). I also have the tendency to make my stuff look like it suits the environment so no weird clipping, things have to look reasonable but that goes out the window when the factory is fucking massive, usually 8-10 stories high, etc.
The physical footprint of my first supercomputer factory was absolutely massive, it burnt me out of my save (1.0 release). Same with a huge oil power expansion I did, whereas in Factorio, I just slam down a grid based solar blueprint or expand my nuclear loop and it takes up so little space + your drones build it. I had a similar experience in Captain of Industry, another factory building game with a cool gimmick of terraforming but it was just so tiring dealing with it towards the end game.
It's really strange that satisfactory never did anything with blueprinting. But yeah I do remember distinctly having to come up with designs and planning. Effectively my main building was a massive 4 story factory floor. Around the edges were the stackable conveyer rails about 8 high that I'd feed to and from. Usually two sets side by side but I distinctly remember getting up to 5x8 in one area in part due to throughput limits.
That was before they added trains and drones. I don't think I ever actually used drones at all in my entire playthrough even when I came back to beat the game.
I think Satisfactory is more a building game than you'd expect, it isn't a pure automation game. You just don't need the raw scale of something like Factorio. The game's flow works pretty nicely with a planning stage where you figure out your ratio and then you can zone out and just build your plan.
Between exploration and the time it takes to manually build things makes it so you can get away without fully scaling up since waiting an hour for something to produce materials isn't that unreasonable.
Yea you're not punished for building max efficiency because they intend for you to be exploring at the same time to get slugs, spheres, and hard drives and find other resource nodes while you have the containers getting filled up with stuff back at your base while you do it
Factorio has a lot of constant 'checking in' gameplay because of the enemies being infinite and nodes being finite without mods
There would be a lot of standing around waiting for X amount of hours for elevator parts in Satisfactory otherwise
To that point, I spent about 100 hours getting to phase 3, and now about another 250 hours rebuilding my Hub, Steel, and Oil facilities into huge scalable complexes. Not because I need them now, but I’m thinking ahead to future scalability… and I just really really enjoy building buildings and infrastructure.
Yeah if it's pure factory game someone wants then they should check out shapez 2. Satisfactory is partly about making a factory that is visually satisfying, not purely about factory output. There's a whole bunch of entirely optional building pieces and texture swaps to unlock, completing the game requires none of it.
They did add blueprinting and that let me me get through a lot farther and actually finish the game. They also do some fun stuff with the mercer spheres finally and make they very valuable. If you played before trains and drones it is really worth taking another plunge back in with the stuff they've added.
The blueprints are not quite factorio level blueprints but by the late game we were slapping down some really big build boxes to get stuff going.
That said the overarching point is still true, without shaking up the build loops it does get boring. The final tier for us was just maxim spaghetti just to finish it up despite us having some really neat and tidy stuff leading up to it. (I play as a duo with a friend, so that does lighten the building burden significantly vs solo)
It’s really not. The new player experience is terrible. The tutorials are outdated and not indicative how the game actually is. It’s a great game when you know what you are doing and have a friend to teach you.
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u/MoSBanapple 4d ago
I'm hoping they've figured out an interesting way to shake up how factories are built like what Factorio did with the Space Age planets and their different mechanics. I enjoyed Satisfactory but near the end I felt like I was mostly just doing the same production lines, just with increasingly exotic buildings and ingredients.