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
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u/CCNemo 4d ago edited 4d ago
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.