Saturday, October 7, 2017

Factorio AAR part 3

5th Log Entry:

The walls are made, but there's a decision to make on where to put them. More space to cover doesn't increase the amount of biters I have to deal with, but getting to and from the edges takes time, and I'm on the clock. Also, lazy. Running sucks. I could build the wall out to cover what I've already built and slowly creep outwards, but I think it best to grab the area I want now before the biters get to it first. They've been steadily encroaching, their expansion fueled by the smog I've been spewing. Because they can't swim and all the good resource patches are near the water, I elect to set the wall between the lakes to the east and west.


Iron, more precious to me than gold right now. And in biter territory. If I want it, I'll have to clear their spawners from the area and push them back. The biters aren't truly active yet so this should be straightforward. I establish a line of turrets and move forward. The turrets behind support the ones in front. The biters are fiercely protective of their bases, but aren't communal. Far away bases won't assist, and once these ones are down it'll be the same as before, except I've got more territory and a wall.


The carnage is both sweet and painful. Quite painful, really. If you ever find yourself on the planet make sure to check out the local fish. They're good pain relievers, and like all meat will heal wounds quickly by eating. Mmm, tasty.

Biters not scaring you if they're so easily killed you think? After all I'm already destroying their bases and taking territory. Can't be too dangerous? Then you've forgotten that they evolve. No sooner did I get the wall up and turreted that the biters evolved two new forms.







The new red biters are tougher, stronger, and all around meaner. Takes a lot of my current bullets to take just one down, much less a swarm. Better bullets is on my ever growing list of things I want to build. Copper jacketed steel rounds should do well against the new armored biters.

The other form is weaker and less armored, but able to spew acid from afar. Even works over my fancy new wall. How rude. Easy to kill, but hard to prevent damage from them, so they'll wear my turrets and walls down.

Frustrating. All I want to do is build and get off this planet. Not spend time killing biters and getting hurt. What a waste.

[Dan speaking: Quick belt tutorialish thing:
So, belts. You've probably seen them already, they move items on the ground forward, so I can get items from point a to point b. Simple and straightforward. But if you want to take advantage of what they can do and really get a well designed base, there's other things you want to keep in mind.

Each belt has two sides that don't mix. Inserters will only move items onto the far side of the belt, and if a belt is pointed into another belt, it will only spill items onto one side. If you keep track of which items are on which sides, you're able to do things like improve throughput by ensuring both sides are used or to have two sets of items on the same belt.

Good example of this are my furnace lines. The line on the left has ore+coal, in between is a furnace that needs ore and coal to produce plates, and outputs those plates onto a belt, with a similar setup mirrored on the other side. Beauty of the setup is that if I were to have two sides of ore and another line of coal, I'd need to change the belt setup anyway, as they only place onto one side. There are other designs for later, but this one makes for a great early game setup as it's cheap and works well with the starter buildings.

As well, there are splitters. You can see them here along with the underground belts (that do what the name implies). Splitters work both to split a belt into two belts or two merge two belts. They've got two input belts and two output belts, and take and give as equally as possible. This setup here is a balancer, and works roughly to take each input lane and output it as evenly as possible.

And here's a more zoomed in image of the belt lines in the main section of the base. Belts go horizontally, split off by splitters for factories above. Crossing is handled by having some go underground.

If anyone has questions, feel free to ask!]


Factorio AAR Part 2

3rd Log Entry:

We've got visitors! The others made fun of me not liking the dark, but then we end up with biters at night. Really glad I grabbed that survival pistol.


Biters - an ecoterrorist's crazy construction. How do you stop humans from despoiling new planets without breaking the bank? You bioengineer a species that grows with pollution and is incredibly violent towards that growth source. No pollution and they have a minimal presence. Start polluting and they grow to terrific sizes and can overwhelm an unprepared settlement. All it takes is a few spores and the planet's safe from harm. Quite genius. They're why the space-engineering course came with a mandatory military course. Combined with aim assist and I can make a shot between furnaces and drills and only hit my target.

The guys in the ship get all proud when they make a head shot in Halo 27, by comparison.

But why do all the work myself when I can automate the killing? Next on the research list: turrets. As soon as I mass produce research, at least. The clock is ticking.


Doesn't take long for the biters to wreak destruction. The next night they target my road production again, but do a much better job. Production will be stalled until I can do heavier repairs. The turrets must take priority. Then lights. This flashlight ain't cutting it.

[Dan here, here's some more base pictures:]

This is my first time putting down bricks to speed things up and I'm really liking them. Especially with that long trek down to the boilers/iron ore and back. Things are looking good though, mass production is really starting and I'm enjoying not being resource starved.


Factorio AAR Part 1

Hello! I started this Factorio (steam link) AAR a few weeks ago and posted it on a gaming forum that I frequent. Given that the forum itself is behind a registration block, I'm reposting the content here. The nature of the reposting and this site's somewhat lackluster formatting options means that some of it may feel a little out of whack. Still, shouldn't need more than a little leeway for the read to still be enjoyable.

To explain the format a little, an AAR (stands for After Action Report) where the writer plays the game and effectively narrates what happens from the perspective of the ingame persona. The narration uses both pictures and the written word to tell what is hopefully a good story.

If anyone is interested too, feel free to message me if you want to hop in and play with me. The multiplayer experience with this game is quite good, and I heartedly recommend people give it a go. There's plenty to do, even if you're completely new to the game, and I can give a decent tutorial if you're interested. It even has a demo version if you're on the fence about buying!

I've got two mods for this run. Resource Spawner Overhaul (RSO) to spread out resources and make for a better looking map, and Space Extension (SpaceX) that extends the end game a bit so I have time to play with all the fancy end stuff while still having a meaningful goal.

As well, I'm playing on the "deathworld" setting. Enemies are more plentiful, power up quicker, and are more of a pain. In addition, everything is more expensive, and research takes 4 times as much time and resources. Essentially though, it's the same game as normal, but a little stretched out.

I hope anyone that reads this enjoys! It's been fun to make so far, and I'd love to know that others enjoyed reading too.

1st Log Entry:
That lake wasn't quite so big before we got here
Well, that was unexpected. I take a quick nap and find that we've crashed down on a planet the ship's log has named "Nauvis". Everyone else was content to sit back and play video games while we waited for rescue, but not me. "It's crazy for one person to build an FTL ship" they said. I'll show them! How hard can it be? I've got my trusty engineering suit, some scrap metal from the ship, and a condensed copy of space-wikipedia. I've got this nooooo problem.
First step is to get production started and the electricity running. I'd prefer not to be alone out here in the dark and I'll need the soothing glow of molten metal to get a good night's sleep.