![]() ![]() But the longer you play on a given map, the more they'll evolve new unit types. The early enemies are pretty trivial, and you can plink away at them with a basic pistol effectively. Nearly all of your machinery generates some pollution, even if you move completely to green energy, which will justifiably agitate these creepy crawlies if it reaches their habitats and cause them to attack in waves until your every creation is obliterated.ĭefending your bases with walls and turrets is viable, but I found it more exciting to take the fight to them and make sure there were no active nests anywhere near my base or outposts. You need to prevent your logistics puzzle from being smashed to bits by aliens.Making little optimizations to save space and increase throughput isn't all you'll be concerned with, though you’ll need to prevent your logistics puzzle from being smashed to bits by those ever-expanding alien nests. The map is sprawling enough to accommodate some truly magnificent and intricately designed manufacturing facilities – the only limit is what you can wrap your head around and your CPU finally saying enough is enough. And even after more than 40, my most advanced factory still has a lot left to unlock. It’s one of those games that feels like it doesn't even really start until you’re 20 or more hours in and have access to a lot of tools that make your life much easier. ![]() And eventually, populating your base with autonomous drones will allow you to do things like move resources from extraction sites to refineries without a maze of conveyor belts, or even copy and paste large, multi-part structures for easy expansion. ![]() Cars, and later tanks, give you personal mobility and a major combat advantage against this alien world's single-minded insectoid inhabitants who resist your industrial revolution. Unlocking trains lets you ship large quantities of materials quickly over long distances on a schedule. What really saves Factorio from slipping into monotony are some key techs that can totally change the way you play, and they’re spaced nicely through the tree. But the satisfaction of getting everything working properly is a hell of a drug. Trying to figure out what steps I needed to take and in what order could give me a slight headache, and there’s a fair amount of repetition involved in setting up a new supply line that works exactly like the previous ones but with a different extractor building. And also you're running out of copper again so you need to explore new areas of the map and build an outpost that can supply more to your main base. Progression can feel a bit tedious now and then, like when you realize your next level of science – which is “researched” by manufacturing different colored science units out of various materials – requires two products you don't have, and each of those is made from two or more secondary products you also don't have, which may even require you to seek out new raw resources far from your main base. There are tons of hotkeys and keyboard shortcuts that let you perform important tasks quickly and precisely, but it took quite a bit of fumbling before hitting Z to manually feed items to a machine or shift-clicking to duplicate a factory's output onto another became muscle memory. That said, the interface– like everything else – takes some getting used to. It's usually very easy to see which buildings are making what, if they're getting enough power, and where all of your supply lines are going. I found expanding and upgrading my factory almost Zen at times.Everything from your astronaut to the heavy industrial equipment is drawn in a readable, colorful pixel art style, which cuts down on the overall stressfulness a lot. And it's pretty forgiving of mistakes, since you can rearrange machinery fairly easily and without cost, so it's actually unlikely you'll mess up so badly you can't save it on the default difficulty. Factorio scratches some similar itches with its intimidating but exciting depth: once I got into a groove, learning how to weave underground conveyor belts to connect extractors to refineries to multiple layers of factories to create an optimal assembly line, I found expanding and upgrading my factory almost Zen at times. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, as anyone who’s played great games like Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, or Crusader Kings can tell you. ![]()
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