Never played any sort of game like this. I don't know what this genre is called, but I love it. I had no knowledge of any mechanics, how biters spawned/evolved, ratios....any of it.
Started the game after watching some random YouTube video for 20 minutes on the game and seeing the 1000th Reddit reference. Bought it on Steam (it's just an alpha!? I would have been pleased to see this game as a release product these days!) and hopped into the game. Played the first parts of the tutorial, seemed straightforward enough. Decided to make a map and hop in. I don't remember my settings exactly, but I think I left everything default except maybe the size and/or richness of resource patches.
Launched the map, had a decent size iron, coal and copper patch right by me, so I set up shop and started to see what I could do. Took me about 5-6 hours to get a hang of the controls, get the basics down and some power made - was trying to read tooltips and make a plan. No biter attacks had happened yet, so I had thought that maybe they were off by default and I had misunderstood the map creation screen. I was trying to figure out how many boilers to engines I needed when I nearly messed myself when my introspective moment was interrupted by the first biter I had seen all game. It was about 8 or 9 hours in that I got my first biter attack, I was NOT expecting it at all.
I had to hit escape and go through the menu looking for the command to fire my gun. I don't remember if I had to craft bullets while running, or if I had started with a few. I lived, but I never did finish that power calculation. I was about to get back to it when they attacked again and I decided to find where they were coming from and end it...except all I had was a handgun. So I put all my effort into defense and science, got a machine gun made and went after them. Killed a nest, went back to my base, started to get attacked by another. Remembered I had seen turrets in the science tree and began work towards those as fast as I could. Everything was dedicated to science and production of bullets at this point.
I got my first 10 turrets made, and the constant attacks doubled every hour it seemed like. I spent the next 5 hours fighting back biters nests, trying to build production for turrets, science and bullets as I went. My base was (is) an unholy mess.
Finally discovered walls, figured out I could set up turrets with an arm to feed them from a belt, and promptly did so, creating a small safe zone to finally get my base going. I was about 15-20 hours into the game at this point. I started to actually make a base at this point, and started to make forays out to push biters back so I could expand a bit. I got myself a decent size base, and finished off my original power plant of 40 steam engines go with my 10 boilers - because that's what I had remembered as the right ratio, not remembering that I got interrupted mid thought.
I pushed military research as far as I could with red and green science while my walls were being attacked, got my mining and snelting set up halfway decent - I had no idea how to use the belts properly at first so there was a lot of trial and error. I was about 30h in the game when the biter attacks started again. I had walked out of my base in every direction as far as I could in a single day and killed every biter nest except 1 that was too big and I had left a couple full turrets between my base and them to cover my retreat. With what I know now, that probably exacerbated what happened next.
I had just completed a push to surround this oil field north of my base when an insane amount of attacks began. I spent 4-5 hours running back and forth, crafting repair packs in my inventory trying to make sure my turrets didn't get destroyed. I set up better wall production and changed my turrets to have no space between them. Everything was built as a reaction, and I had a hundred little factory setups all over. I couldn't support more wall, so I decided to make a ton of landfill and built my chemical plants and refineries on what was basically a marsh. At some point I pushed the biters back 1 more time and had barely just handcrafted enough military science to get laser turrets.
I hadn't used pipes much before, and somehow I had 25 refineries and like 20 pumpjacks, so I spent a very long time dealing with this. Trying to get the refineries and pumpjacks powered, I experienced my first blackout. That's fine, I thought, I'll just double my power production! So I built myself 10 more boilers and 40 more steam engines...
The biters attacked increased again, and I figured I would Google how the hell I was supposed to stop them. Found out all about pollution, how they respawn bases.... woops. This was the first time I had really Googled something about the games mechanics that wasn't "what button does X factorio" or something like that.
Ended up getting my turrets lines reinforced with piercing ammo before I finally got a haphazard battery factory going. Setting up the chemical plants was an actual disaster as I hand repaired everything and maintained my defenses manually. Then, finally, I got a blackout inducing amount of laser turrets out behind my line of turrets and I was fairly secure again. I only had to go repair things once in a while.
I'll be honest, I was about 50ish hours into the game at this point. I had no blue/yellow science yet, no red chips...nothing but a factory that made red/green science, bullets, batteries, turrets and laser turrets. The next 10-15ish hours I spent working against power blackouts caused by the laser turrets all going off at once during the constant wall attacks. I found out how easy it was to clear nests with laser turrets vs regular turrets, and for a 3rd time I ventured out and cleared nests. I went past my pollution in every direction.
I think I finally played factorio "the normal way" for the first time around the 60-65 hour mark
. I had basically decided that there was no way I was going to let some game beat me. My factory would cover this planet, and the indigenous population would become a footnote.My power kept going out as I finally researched and was using bots to expand my base out. I ended up panic building like 10 total power arrays. Basically I built 1-1-2-2-4, in order, because I couldn't get solar made and I hadn't seen a uranium patch yet.
It was during my research into solar power that I realized I had my ratio wrong the entire time.......
I've finally found a uranium patch. My beginning iron and copper patches were at like 300k left, and my coal was around 800k. I realized I needed to expand anyway, and there happened to be iron, coal and copper out there as well. I won't go into the troubles I had with that huge expansion, but I feel like it was probably the same as most people go through.
I've got myself about 100h in this map. Artillery, rocket launchers and flamethrowers along with the bot network have made defense viable, and I am working on nuclear power for the first time as soon as I get my first rail network working properly and the iron/steel flowing again. The uranium was pretty far away from my base.
In retrospect I could have just restarted the game and gotten to where I am now in about 1/10th (or less) of the time. I am pretty sure that my initial "peace" period only left me surrounded with biters, and my reactionary building only created more pollution to piss them off and spawn them faster. I leaned ALOT about the game in this first foray. I won't be building a Rocket until I rebuild my base properly just because I have decided that will be what I am looking for. I've got 6300 construction bots and 3000 logistic bots helping out now, they seem to do a better job than I ever did.
I've finally started to look stuff up online and watch videos on how to play. Used my first blueprint the other day!
Anyway, great game. Not often I struggle so hard in a single player game. Very rewarding pay off though. I'll post some pics of my base if people are interested when I am I am done redesigning it. I have torn out alot of the panic builds, but there is alot of stuff that is still really bad that I need to pull out, so I'll do some before/after pics
