Factorio gameplay critique

[Ogro]

Greetings,

I have improved my understanding of the game over time, and now I understand why there are Factorio calculators being made.
When you learn about the ratios and start making designs with the right amount of elements, with enough throughput, then a lot of the issues of the factory that ills new players are gone or are severely reduced. Like belts backing up, insufficient belt contents, etc.
I my case I was trying to make common belts of things supply multiple stuff, now I calculate most process to bare basics and supply it.
All that learning process was great, but my critique is that I learned most of it while not playing the game. I was reading, watching and listening about the game. And nowadays I have to pause or quit the game, pick up pen, paper, calculator, and calculate production and consumption speed for the whole chain of what I want to archive. Based on the recipes and taking into account quality, and modules to figure out element quantities. Then I go to the game to build the spatial design with the quantities figured out. I think that is bad game design, I think the game should supply the player tools for debugging the factory and figure that out, and provide some in game calculator too. So we can play the game in the game with game tools.

What do you guys think? What was your experiences?

[quineotio]

Greetings,

I have improved my understanding of the game over time, and now I understand why there are Factorio calculators being made.
When you learn about the ratios and start making designs with the right amount of elements, with enough throughput, then a lot of the issues of the factory that ills new players are gone or are severely reduced. Like belts backing up, insufficient belt contents, etc.
I my case I was trying to make common belts of things supply multiple stuff, now I calculate most process to bare basics and supply it.
All that learning process was great, but my critique is that I learned most of it while not playing the game. I was reading, watching and listening about the game. And nowadays I have to pause or quit the game, pick up pen, paper, calculator, and calculate production and consumption speed for the whole chain of what I want to archive. Based on the recipes and taking into account quality, and modules to figure out element quantities. Then I go to the game to build the spatial design with the quantities figured out. I think that is bad game design, I think the game should supply the player tools for debugging the factory and figure that out, and provide some in game calculator too. So we can play the game in the game with game tools.

What do you guys think? What was your experiences?

To a certain extent yes, but also I think people worry too much about perfect ratios. Part of learning the game is watching the way things work and learning the concepts from that. It's too complicated of a game to teach entirely in the first playthrough.

One thing that makes the game a lot better for me is using the editor to design builds. This could be incorporated into the base game with something like a design computer - when you use it it acts as a sandbox with free everything and you can design blueprints in it. It would be convenient to not have to /editor. It can certainly be painful to design things in game because it takes a long time to move or clean up a build once it's placed. Like if you want to move your furnace stack one tile it could take you half an hour if the belts are all full. Being able to test everything first in the editor just saves too much time to not use it.

I do think some things could be done to improve onboarding, but also, there's no way to make a comprehensive tutorial system because there are just too many features. The base game is much better than Space Age at teaching the concepts by increasing complexity gradually over time, but even then, you're inevitably going to have to restart a few times. When you first play, there's no way to understand how much production you're going to need, so you inevitably end up with spaghetti, which is not optimal. But I don't think there's any debugging tool you could make to overcome this for a new player.

With regard to an in game calculator, I'm not against it, but I think you have to be careful with this type of thing, because it will bias the way people think about the game. You don't need to do complex calculations. You can ballpark most things fairly easily in your head, and learning from watching the factory work is more fun than doing precise calculations for everything in my opinion.

[angramania]

There are mods like factory planer and blueprint-sandboxes, which solve the mentioned problems. And there are many other mods, which solves the same problems in different manners. It is up to player to choose.

[Panzerknacker]

Tbh I found myself mostly experimenting inside the game, I calculated ratios quickly on a pocket calculator sometimes. I never used third party tools, only recently I moved towards writing small programs to calculate more complex scenarios.

I also think perfect ratios are highly overrated. I love to optimize but usually the most fun games come from when you just pump out the stuff you need and then go 'oh shit too little now of this' and you quickly slam down a new production line.

[quineotio]

Tbh I found myself mostly experimenting inside the game

On Gleba as well? That's the biggest /editor area for me. There are too many things to figure out. I would hate having to do it in game.

[Tertius]

When I first got Factorio, I found myself using Excel computing ratios and amounts to see how much input I need for some output at the end of a longer production chain. I didn't find this misplaced, Excel was just the right ad hoc tool for this (I didn't know about factory calculators back then).

As time went on, I got into the game and knew intuitively roughly how much input will result in how much output. My old Excel sheets are now years old and I never touched them again. I don't feel such functionality needs to be built into the game. Everyone has its own approach to factory planning, the game shouldn't suggest or force one specific method.

After all, you can still build your ad hoc factory. The Rate Calculator mod is in my opinion the best tool to support both: ad hoc building but also long term planning. It's not really a classic planning tool but just a tool to calculate input and output rates of a given factory. It enables you to build something and immediately see how much input and output it has, and if there is surplus or underproduction of intermediates. It supports the iterating process of first creating a rough draft then fleshing out your factory.

My other main tool is /editor. I need a paused game to think and design, and to single step through the circuit network.

But that's all just me. You want perhaps something different.

So what tool should the game have built in? We don't know. So it's ok the game has nothing built in but leaves this job to specialized mods and external websites or even Excel if you prefer that. The job is too complex for a simple tool, so it's a huge amount of work to build something good. But just part of the players will use some specific tool, so it's wasted development time for everybody else.

[mmmPI]

All that learning process was great, but my critique is that I learned most of it while not playing the game. I was reading, watching and listening about the game. And nowadays I have to pause or quit the game, pick up pen, paper, calculator, and calculate production and consumption speed for the whole chain of what I want to archive. Based on the recipes and taking into account quality, and modules to figure out element quantities. Then I go to the game to build the spatial design with the quantities figured out. I think that is bad game design, I think the game should supply the player tools for debugging the factory and figure that out, and provide some in game calculator too. So we can play the game in the game with game tools.

What do you guys think? What was your experiences?

I think the best tools are those specifically made for the task, and player can set themselves different tasks in the game, so much so that it's difficult to provide a set of universal tool that would suit everyone. The game i think is voluntarily quite minimalistic on the amount of stats and methods to monitor your factory and make the ratio so as to not force upon players those specific ingame tools.

My experience was similar as to what you describe initially, taking a lot of time outside the game to read spreadsheed and bunch of charts and technical explanations, that's also in a way because i like those.I like that it makes the tutorial "plentyful" with different level of depth in different places. Another part of my experience is player in multiplayer, and it's very different, you don't pause the game , you don't spreadsheet, people use mismatched blueprints sometimes, leave part of the factory unfinished, overbuild another part, break some part here and there attempting to fix another problem not realizing their mistake, and you have to improvise something temporary without much time for planning.

I think it's also a "skill" you can develop if you consider it as such, to be able to play "paper-free" or "spreadsheet-free". Typically by building at a micro level some design that are tileable or easy to expand and duplicate. That's would be like the first mini step, this way you can adjust more easily "on the fly" instead of alt-tabbing for a cheat-sheet.

Part of my experience is about modded games, and from there i learn that you don't always "find" the answer , the spreadsheet and what nots, because you have a unique combo of mods, or some that have few dowloads and not much tutorials about them, they are very new , and so on ... In those cases you may also develop strategies, if you don't have the perfect ratio, and you are not sure how to calculate, or if things will change later , you can create dynamic setup with combinators. I remember a game with Angel+Bob mod where we couldn't decide on a process for doing sulfur with the other players because we weren't sure if we were going to have "too much" or "too few" of it, we just unlocked a bunch of receipes and we needed "some" sulfur but it was also a byproduct of oil refining for plastic which we needed too. There was several feedback loop , modules and technologies ahead, so much so that we ended up making a setup that could either "produce" or "void" sulfur as needed. Made so that we could easily upgrade one or the other capacity.

I think there's a lot of fun in learning how to make little display or indicator for the factory with combinators, it's not just for the sake of being flashy or noisy, it's to my experience sometimes even necessary in some situations, that doesn't replace some in depth vizualisation tools that "could" be in the game, but that adds a layer of gameplay where when you design a factory you can also design it for "monitorability" if that is word x), you incorporate design mechanism that allows the factory to be easily monitored , like counters or lamps that flash for a specific reason , to alleviate the need for you as a player to have perfect ratio or suffer dire consequences, you make it so your factory tells you what it needs

My favourite tools in game to add are the lightest, i prefer using "rate calculator" to alleviate mental math , you add building and select until it makes "1 belt of input" or "output" and you go from there , also "FNEI" more than the in depth "factory planner" or "helmod" which i've tried but to me feels like "work", compared to what i've mentionned, trying to find tips and tricks to avoid feeling the need for them, which is not always possible, but i'm fine with it.

[NineNine]

When you learn about the ratios and start making designs with the right amount of elements, with enough throughput, then a lot of the issues of the factory that ills new players are gone or are severely reduced. Like belts backing up, insufficient belt contents, etc.

There are many ways to play this game. The idea that belts backing up is an "issue" is an entirely personal opinion. I don't see that as an issue... I see that as a completely expected, completely normal state of the game. At any time, most of my belts are backed up. If that bothers you for some reason, then you do you. Some people want their factories to be very pretty. Some people play with no bots. Some people play with only bots. Some people play for speed, some people let the game play while they're away from the computer.

I've played many thousands of hours for years. I've never once used a calculator, an editor, or any kind of planning tool. I don't really see what the point is. I look at my factory. I find the bottleneck. I fix the bottleneck. That's it.

All that learning process was great, but my critique is that I learned most of it while not playing the game. I was reading, watching and listening about the game.

It sounds to me like you found some random people (or bots) on the Internet, and decided that their opinions about the game were right, instead of forming your own opinions.