Just bought the game; What were Your first impressions?

[davidjohnson789]

Great post

[sigars13]

Somewhat late to this, having bought the game 3 years ago. Flippin' love the game. I just had to buy it after watching Arumba play constantly. Just the difficulty and challenge are phenomenal.

[bk5115545]

My first impression was that everything was very straightforward and that oil is the devil. The controls seemed natural but my friends always complain that they pick up things they didn't mean to when they have high ping.

I honestly wish that there was a gamemode that made every recipe require like 4x resources (except for ore -> plates and oil -> light,heavy,petrol) so that I would be forced to make better use of the train system.

[Koub]

My first impression was that everything was very straightforward and that oil is the devil. The controls seemed natural but my friends always complain that they pick up things they didn't mean to when they have high ping.

I honestly wish that there was a gamemode that made every recipe require like 4x resources (except for ore -> plates and oil -> light,heavy,petrol) so that I would be forced to make better use of the train system.

Give a try to marathon mod

[xlRadioActivelx]

Personally I switched the mouse button controls in minecraft so this games controls were pretty natural for me, however I found the enter key for getting in and out of vehicles a little too awkward to do seamlessly so I switched it to 'f'. My other impressions were how awesome this game is.

[trh0002]

Hi, I played through the campaign and have started to play on a new map and here are my impressions.

Campaign: I struggled with one of the levels a bit (the railways one) as I didn't realize that I needed to provide supplementary defenses for the mining sites at first.

I really enjoyed the campaign, as it slowly opens up the game's tool kit to you and provides interesting objectives to pursue. I do wish there were a few more levels, maybe just a slightly story driven version of generating a world and tasking you with launching the rocket. I also like the level with limited resources, starting with everything I worked so hard for is pretty cool.

I've also started to play an open ended game and I don't find it as challenging (should have increased the monster spawns) or engaging (lack of a story objective) as the campaign, but I still plan to see it through and launch that rocket!

Thanks for making this game, I'd recommend it to anybody who likes the factory-building aspect of it.

[LogicalOre]

Hi! I bought Factorio a couple weeks ago and have been hooked since. Really loving it!

I started with the tutorial/campaign and worked through the first couple missions, but then was like, "This is taking too long, I want to build big, now!" So I started my first sandbox game. Spent hours and hours on it, building first one factory to get me through the science, then moving off a little and building a complete second factory using the output of the first to get to the missile silo and launch my rocket. And in between factories, I went on safari to clear out all the biter nests in the vicinity with my tank! Awesome!

Now I'm onto my second full game...

First impressions:

Pros:
- Complicated networks of connected widgets to create things.
- Complex recipe structure & technology tree that requires a decent amount of thought on placement.
- Challenges in bootstrapping the factory with one set of tools, and then upgrading to newer tools.
- Need to explore and discover resources.
- Flattening nests with the tank rocks!

Cons:
- Definitely needs something to consume goods in the end game. Don't know what, exactly. Maybe more bigger projects that require more of the goods being produced?
- I find the biters attacking the factory to be more of a nuisance than an interesting game feature. But maybe that's just me.

[BoredMormon]

Loved it.

I'm a manufacturing engineer in my day job. This game manages to capture the feel of running a large complex factory. All of the great moments were there.

"What do you mean you shut down production for three days just because you were out of thirty cent caps?"
"We can't meet quota because supply chain just diverted all of our raw materials to another plant."
"Where the heck do you expect me to install this piece of equipment?"
"Its just a little change, what can it hurt?"


There were a couple of things that threw me, self powered conveyors for one. Mechanical conveyance normally comes in a more developed plant. I guess no one could convince the biters to work for minimum wage hauling coal?

But altogether a great game. Now its time for me to get off the forum and back to playing.

[Zigei]

great post

[Serenity]

Very impressed and entertained, but disappointed in some of the details.

When I first saw videos I wasn't sure about the conveyor belt thing. But finding ways to sneak belt around and make things fit is very entertaining. The whole game is very addictive and huge time sink. And my previous game was Banished...ARG!

I liked the campaign as a tutorial. In retrospect I did terrible, but it was good to get the basics across.

Combat is fun, but I can see it get repetetive in the long run. Especially on hard settings with the huge number of nests. I like the tank overall, but I found the tank cannon almost useless. Both in power and even then not showing the range. Seems it's more for close in combat than sniping from a distance. That said it's very durable and I had success just driving over smaller worms.

The map generation is really terrible. It's hard to control the resources and the parameters interact in weird ways. Oil is messed up somehow, with often either too few or too little. I had to abandon a game because I ran out of oil and there was none around in a reasonable distance. I lack the experience to know how long resources will last and simply assumed it would last a lot longer. But then I sunk resources into my logistics network and they were dry already. Not cool.
I've tried RSO. Just generating maps and looking at them and the resource distribution is way better. Still not sure about the richness, but I don't get how how can't set the distance between fields in vanilla.

Don't like the module stuff. But I don't like such mechanics in games in general. Especially when one option is clearly recommended by everyone. Or cheesy mechanics like keeping oil flowing with beacons.

The advanced logic stuff is very interesting in theory, but poorly implemented. Even having studied computer science and knowing a lot of electronics, it's hard to implement. The signals and conditions have weird names. Logic wires are hard to see. Some things can only be done with complicated workarounds. Both at the logic and implementation level. If RS-Flip Flops are important, they need to be their own component for example.
And it shouldn't be so difficult to switch on steam engines at night. Why can't you detect the power coming from a solar panel or accumulator or whether a light is on, and flip a switch on the power plant?

Speaking of power generation, more options would be nice.

I like the way research is implemented, but you can breeze through it way too fast. It should take longer. The real cost isn't time but resources. But because those are hidden in intermediate products, you don't really think about the immense amount of basic products some things cost. I only became aware of that once I read some posts with detailed numbers.


All in all, it's very impressive for this stage and the core game is great, but the details still need some work. I know I focused a lot on the negatives above. Those mainly appear when you really start to think about the game and the overall plan for your factory. But when focusing on small-scale issues those things don't matter as much and the fun you can have overshadow them.

[iCamper]

I just loved the game after 10 min of playing its just awesome !!

[myguyfromthe80s]

Love it, loads.

But the enemy is much more like an annoying little brother. They need to be something more...

[Shroomworks]

After watching the trailers and subsequently buying/installing/starting the game i began to mine a patch of stone,turned over to my brother and said: "the madness has begun."

This pretty much sums up my first experience/impression with the game and i'Ve been loving it ever since

[StarFox31]

Loving the game. I cant wait to finish my 2nd game up so I can install a bunch of mods I found.

[Meritic]

Love it, loads.

But the enemy is much more like an annoying little brother. They need to be something more...

You can always play in peaceful mode.

[Llinx]

Brilliant is what I thought. I have liked building games for years but this is one with a difference. managed to screw up my pipe network by flooding everything with crude oil. Not sure how to flush the system out. I wish I hadn't bought this on steam though. Would have preferred to have this from the web site here.
On the whole though I give this 10/10. That's how much I like it.

[ArchJudge]

The first few days I lost track of time and forgot to sleep, the creative experience was so awesome even with its simplistic graphics that it was like being a little child playing with building blocks for the first time, I even resented not knowing about the game sooner. I fell asleep in front of the computer, it was that addictive for me.

However after a while and overcoming the challenges that appeared as I tried to build a factory in an inexperienced way, it started becoming a bit monotonous, mods alleviated that a bit but not by much, probably spent too much time playing, eagerly awaiting 0.13, should go outside more often until then. I think the game has potential to be the best in history if development continues and more refined challenges added.

[Rum0r]

I saw it on steam and it instantly intrigued me. I played the demo and I just bought the game. I'm excited to see what it has to offer!

[AutoMcD]

I have a confession, when I first started and went through the tutorials I moved things by hand until WAY LATE because I didn't realize the belt in my inventory was conveyor belts. Mouseover just says "50 health" so I thought it was a health or armor thing, saved it in case I got attacked. lol.. The interface is still a little rough around the edges. I love the game though.. logged hundreds of hours already!

The advanced logic stuff is very interesting in theory, but poorly implemented. Even having studied computer science and knowing a lot of electronics, it's hard to implement. The signals and conditions have weird names. Logic wires are hard to see. Some things can only be done with complicated workarounds. Both at the logic and implementation level. If RS-Flip Flops are important, they need to be their own component for example.
And it shouldn't be so difficult to switch on steam engines at night. Why can't you detect the power coming from a solar panel or accumulator or whether a light is on, and flip a switch on the power plant?

I have to agree, I find the combinator/decider parts to be terribly non-intuitive to use, and the circuit network overall took some tinkering. Just simple things like turning lights and pumps on and off seem more complicated than they need to be. I've gotten the hang of that part, now it only takes a few seconds to set up a pump to run only if the tank is x amount full.
There are logic signals which I needed to read on the wiki what they are, we have colors AND numbers. My first instinct was that outputting a color would change the lights but it didn't work that way. I think the mouseover tooltips are very under-utilized. And I don't understand why the inputs and outputs are separate, I always end up linking them together because I don't know which end is which and for what I'm trying to make happen they don't need to be isolated in the first place.
I'm liking what I see in the update blogs, a lot of improvement to these things, but I expect this area likely will still be fairly clunky after the update.

I also agree about the map generation, it doesn't seem fully dialed-in yet.

[Wolfae]

My first impression of the game was that I was going to get bored after one playthrough. In reality, I find the game exciting each playthrough. It's a challenge to make more and more efficient factories.