Factorio Forums

I do really love Industry Giant 2. The game has a lot of common with factorio: you build factories, create transport and market products.
Factorio is gorgeous about production & transportation.
The problem is no one needs your products.

It would be really good if you could add cities / camps, where you could market your products.

Quite a nice idea even through this is not the direction Factorio is heading. It might make quite an interesting mod where you would need to produce some stuff and you would get money / stuff in exchange for it.

I think, that someone could have already shared that idea.

E.g. at the beginning there are camps, which require simple things (iron ore / coal).
You supply that stuff => get money & bonuses => the camp grows over time.

The camp grows => it demands more advanced staff, provides more money & bonuses.

It would be nice if there would be certain type of item you could get only from trading, and you would need it for making more complex things, research, etc. Then you would be highly motivated to trade and help cities. In the current setting, it could be some camps/cities of friendly aliens.

Or cities of colonists. We are the first one colonist. When we become enough advanced we can send a signal to homeworld and colonists will arrive. Then we will give them products which they needs to colonize this planet. We could employ them for money to do some advanced works.

(I also played IG2, and yes, Factorio have the same pleasure from just watching when flows work. )

It may be possible to get close to this by modding the reactions, so that the ‘science’ requires different ‘consumer end products’.
You can then imagine that the factories producing the sciences are housing for different levels of labour classes, where the top tier needs a steady supply of cars, trains, and other very expensive stuff.

A way of simulating trade could be to add reactions that transform ‘consumer goods (pick axes, guns, …)’ into base resources (coal, iron, …) with a small net profit. It would then be interesting to start on a map with very few resources, and then only live by the ever increasing trade flow. The profit should be very low for simple product, but high for the higher levels to motivate the player to evolve. – but I don’t know if the code allows the same item(s) to be created from different materials.
I have no experience in modding (yet), but even if each building can only have one output, then we could have sellers of coal, iron ore etc defined as a mod.

Another way of creating ‘trade’ could be to change the boilers to require consumer goods, - if you don’t supply goods, then the government cuts the power.

I personally think the official Factorio should have focus on the current 1 man survival mode, but a 'trading empire' mod sounds possible to make.

We have something similar in plan for one of the future additions to the challenge pack.
One possibility would be just logistic simulation, trade posts with different ratios, and the goal would be to profit.
The other one would be, that there would be some crafting/factory building involved as well.

kovarex wrote:We have something similar in plan for one of the future additions to the challenge pack.
One possibility would be just logistic simulation, trade posts with different ratios, and the goal would be to profit.
The other one would be, that there would be some crafting/factory building involved as well.

I am waiting for it.
The challenge should be the best ever.

I think it is actually a good idea to add demand for your products.
Yes, a starport would be a good idea. Trade federation requests something from you. Then you make and sell it with starport.

I agree. Whichever way you spin it, if there's no aliens the game becomes kind of pointless at a certain point. So maybe there needs to be some peaceful goal for those of us not interested in blasting aliens.

That said, the goal of making a profit doesn't seem like it would go well with this game. I would prefer that after reaching certain techs, you can develop colonies, as others have suggested. These would have to be spread over the terrain, so the player needs to explore to find suitable sites, build the transportation to get goods needed there.

Freetambo wrote:So maybe there needs to be some peaceful goal for those of us not interested in blasting aliens.

There will be. Not in this release, but soon. The idea is that you will be able to communicate with the aliens and make sort of diplomacy with them. Then you don't need to kill and they won't attack you, however you will have to pay them some fee for the land / polluting their territory.

Supercool! But the beginning 1-2 hours or so are the same?

slpwnd wrote:

Freetambo wrote:So maybe there needs to be some peaceful goal for those of us not interested in blasting aliens.

There will be. Not in this release, but soon. The idea is that you will be able to communicate with the aliens and make sort of diplomacy with them. Then you don't need to kill and they won't attack you, however you will have to pay them some fee for the land / polluting their territory.

That's pretty cool, but it does not address the main issue of "peaceful building". I mean, right now I just turn off the aliens but at a given point all I'm doing is building research for the heck of it. And when I've researched everything I can, the research will just keep piling up. I would love to be able to build other stuff than just research or ammo, and that's mainly where the colonization idea comes in.You get to go out and build awesome cities or camps, or bases.