1) learning the game, making spaghetti
2) pulling in other blueprints, reaching the end game
3) creating your own blueprints, reaching the mountains of madness
I also highly recommend playing with a non-engineer friend. It’s an interesting way to watch someone gradually develop an intuition for abstractions and service-oriented design.
I submit that with more useable balancers, importable blueprints never would have made it into the base game.
it was fun for like 4-5 hours (I think I got to solar panels? or nuclear power plants? i forgot) but once that simple fact began to sink in, i was never able to pick it up again.
maybe its different if you're playing with other people
It was fun to get there and i always had some goals to acheive. But at some point it's done and dusted with 0 replay-ability.
I will never understand the mindset of those that build Megabases.
Fortunately there are mods to fix that.
I had a whole slew of complaints about the vanilla game, but found that mods already existed to fix virtually all of them.
I have friends who are engineers who tired of it quickly, and friends who aren't who quickly got drawn in.
I feel that with every single of these factory games from Factorio to Satisfactory, from Dyson Sphere to Shapez.
Interestingly enough I did sink a ton of hours into Rimworld, though, which has some factory like parts but more of a human simulation element to it.
Figuring out which parts are worth refactoring into better solutions as demand increases is also quite fun imho.
An endless megafactory is just placing blueprints someone already created for 'optimal X' from online. I could come up with my own but it's not motivating when there's already better out there and it's not motivating to play 'MS paint bucket fill' endlessly.
I launched the rocket. Went "that was fun" and now cannot be bothered to go back.
Currently, you build a base from the very lowest tech all the way up to the highest tech in a single go. What would possibly make the game less tedious for me is if a single play through was split up into different levels with mini objectives. Once you complete the level mini objective you move on to a different map and start a new base at a higher tech level. That way you can just throw away all of the “tech debt” of the old base while starting at a higher tech level.
I imagine this would be a different game mode, but it would make the game more attractive to a wider audience in my opinion.
That's entirely a chore you have decided to do.
It is entirely fine to just leave your spaghetti base producing stuff in its little corner while you go build the next step somewhere else.
I've did that few times, basically leave the old base to act as "mall" (just produce building to furnish the new base) while I build bigger and better, once I hit construction robots and can freely blueprint everything.
Hell, once you get to robots you can "just" erase it entirely easily if it displeases you, blueprints make it easy to change your mind.
> What would possibly make the game less tedious for me is if a single play through was split up into different levels with mini objectives. Once you complete the level mini objective you move on to a different map and start a new base at a higher tech level. That way you can just throw away all of the “tech debt” of the old base while starting at a higher tech level.
Not exactly that but look up at Warptorio 2 mod. You basically have limited sized base that teleports every XX minutes to a new planet, so you carry a small base with you but have to rebuild every warp. It is pretty hectic on default settings tho
At higher levels, it gets more challenging and complicated. You need to produce power and coolant, and you need to use a mix of defenses. And you also need to defend vulnerable sectors against counter-attacks, and build offensive units to attack enemy sectors. And it has a cute little system for programming units in "assembly", although the documentation is almost non-existent.
So even if it seems weirdly easy at first, it might be worth playing at least the first few campaign levels. Overall, I'd say it's my favorite mobile factory game, just edging out Refactory.
The classic way to do this is to load up a train full of supplies and drive somewhere further from the start, with more enemies and better ore patches. Or if you don't have trains yet, take the car.
You can add a lot of variety and interest through Factorio's mods (there are hundreds of them).... however, eventually even that may not enough to stave off boredom because ultimately Factorio is just one game.
Still, I encourage everyone to try some of the mods. I'd personally never play unmodded Factorio after my first playthrough. They make this great game so much better.
Assign leaders and have people responsible for raw resources, transport, power infrastructure, advanced production and fighting off biters