That was fun, thanks for keeping the server up a bit longer than expected
Wish I had taken some screenshots to remember how some of the things worked. Those main conveyor belts were very impressive and I still have no idea how the computerization to make alerts when they ran low worked. Did the rocket get launched? I did manage to place a silo near the end. And research nukes, but not try one
This time I was comfortable enough with the basics to add in a bit here and there, not that my contributions amounted to much compared to the massive "spaghetti" Oniatus and Sigma (and anybody else?) were able to add in. But I understood the concepts and was able to add to capacity and fix things when needed, unlike last time when I could pretty much just stare at the madness
Some observations this time on Factorio in general: it does what it does
really well and is an impressive project. Super cool to play if its focus is your niche, as I'm sure the fans of making giant factories in Minecraft would agree to, since I believe that's where it came from in the first place. Although some of the UI / hot keys are still a bit strange to me, and the variety seems to thin out relatively quickly in the base game (I'm sure mods add a lot more)
One thing I noticed in particular. In my single player game I reworked my approach to using belts and inserters a couple times, and by the time I managed to get one train and a refinery going I had pretty much settled on having to do a set of "main belts" that would be 100% dedicated to one resource each and then allowed to fill up to where production/refinement would stop as the belts were full. Then update belt speed as needed to fit more (which I ended up doing some on the server). Had started poking at that by the time this event began.
Less than 24 hours later that's what Oniatus and Sigma had built in glorious fashion. Talk about validation of my theory. Yet it seemed relatively obvious after even just a few hours of solid play, and I hadn't really thought of any alternatives and still can't really see any. Yeah you can replace some stretches with trains but that's more or less the same concept. Is that ... it?
Not to pick on Factorio or anything, as said it does its thing
really well (and I'm especially impressed with its stability and automated testing) but where Minecraft seems like a shallow sea Factorio seems like a deep pond. Pretty soon it seems like you need to invent your own challenges or work with maps/settings that are weirdly constrained in some way. While our server this time was on peaceful I'm now playing with every difficulty maxed yet don't really expect trouble. I hope to be surprised and maybe mods exist that can make the next round radically different
Conversely something like Dwarf Fortress seems more like a deep ocean, only the water is weirdly low detail and kind of ugly, oh and it is poisonous and full of piranhas that somehow enjoy the poison. Plus you're totally alone since there's no multiplayer. It was fun putting out small capacity-related fires in Factorio but that seems like it outside of self-challenges after you've trivialized resources (which happens fast). In DF a lot of different things tend to be on fire a lot of the time
Although that in the end can often end up leading to overly micromanaging everything and slowing down time to a crawl.
I'm very curious what sort of gameplay systems we will end up with eventually to both maximize potential "width" and "depth" of our content.
