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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3917 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 8, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The only downside is, it's not 3d.

Am I the only one who likes discrete legible units in most of my games? AFAICT, that's what ties together my preference for 2d grids and turn based gameplay.

Do you know what one of the earliest improvements I do in Satisfactory is? I build foundations for my factory, so that it can be grid-based. Same with any basebuilding in Fallout 4 or Valheim: The first step is to build foundations to remove the unique geography and provide a consistent grid, and the second step is to fight with the actual construction because first-person gameplay is a terrible way to translate your thoughts into (virtual) reality.

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Am I the only one who likes discrete legible units in most of my games?

Nope. That's my preference too.

I'm almost done with it and all in all I've been very pleased with it. There are several design choices Earendel made for SE that I much prefer over SA though, mostly related to ships and platforms.

Reaching the derelict platform in SE is both a really cool moment. But it also serves as a good introduction to working in space as you can very quickly see which buildings you might want to rocket up. Its also provides a very tactile and satisfying experience of scavenging for new toys. In SA you launch your first platform and you get a popup about building out your platform. It's not particularly well explained, noob traps abound and unless you had the foresight to build a lot of rocket silos you will be waiting awhile before you even start building out your platform simply due to the time it takes to launch stuff into space.

SE's focus on doing research on your space platform also makes SE feel very distinct from the vanilla experience of working on terra firma, and it acts as a focal point to your interplanetary activities. You go planetside, you build a base, you rocket your new widgets back to your platform to do more science. SA has you shipping all your science back to Nauvis, it's the vanilla experience but more so.

All that said most of what I haven't mentioned is lightyears aside of SE. SE's planetary outposts felt like setting up mining outposts with 10-20x the busywork. Each planet in SA provides fresh and unique challenges that require novel approaches to factory design, especially Gleba. Interplanetary logistics mostly just works compared to the SE's which despite my best efforts I never managed to master.

I'm pretty iffy about quality, it's too good not to use, but simply unlocking introduces UI frustrations, never mind actually trying to design and deploy it at scale.

SE logistics gets a lot simpler once you get antimatter since you can make a minimalist shuttle design, copy/paste it a bunch of times, and then send them back and forth like super large expensive trains. (technically you can do this with rocket fueled shuttles, but then you have to worry about producing and refueling and having enough fuel capacity to get there and back). But that's late enough to unlock that you've already spent a few hundred hours dealing with the more complicated and expensive. methods.

I actually haven't played SA yet because I'm still in the middle of Pyanodon and am not allowing Factorio to update and break my mods. But I am very excited for what happens when some of the mod people take the new infrastructure and ideas in SA and then combine them with their crazy mod expansions.

SE logistics gets a lot simpler once you get antimatter since you can make a minimalist shuttle design, copy/paste it a bunch of times, and then send them back and forth like super large expensive trains.

Leave Nauvis and settle on the smallest non-dry, non-vitemelange moon in the system. You need to build a ground base somewhere, but the planet with a deep gravity well, no special resources, and many biters isn't that good of a choice.

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I actually think the no special resources is a point in Nauvis' favor for the main ground base, because it means the core miners give an even distribution of resources instead of overloading you with one thing for export (which is what I want my mining outposts to do, not the main base). But the gravity and biters are points against it. I chose it anyway and tolerated the downsides partly for sentimental reasons, since all my pre-space stuff was already there, but mostly for the respawn. If I make spare space suits for each planet then I can return home by stripping all my stuff, sticking it in a warehouse, and then suiciding and respawning on Nauvis. Makes it way easier to go exploring and building outposts if I don't have to budget for a return trip. I could be mistaken, but I don't think you can do that effectively with other planets, since if I recall correctly, the respawn options are something like (Nauvis, nearest space station, nearest occupied planet) or something like that, which will only work reliably if your chosen base is near (or you have shuttles from Nauvis to the new base I guess).

I chose to move to a moon just to see what happens rather than any well-considered reason, but I think it worked well.

The lack of core miners wasn't an issue given the ease of importing materials (I ran out of local copper and uranium, and local oil was very very insufficient) because the other planets had nigh-infinite amounts of ore. I got copper from the belt, uranium and oil from the oil moon, and all of the advanced materials from around the system. Low gravity is extremely important for using spaceships, as it allows you to use just one fuel tank for a full set of chests (to 300 integrity) and still have enough range to make a round trip.

I hadn't thought of the respawn trick, but I'm not sure if I would use it if I had. It feels like an exploit IMO.

It's Factorio but more, where each flavor of "more" is different in its own way. If the base game came out in the early 2000's, the DLC would be one of those really good expansions whose purchase would be thoroughly justified, like TA: Core Contingency or SC: Brood War.

I cobbled together a space platform and set forth. Thoroughly underestimated my fuel and ammo needs and got smashed to bits by asteroids while traveling. Now I'm stuck on a volcanic hellscape where none of the production chains make sense, I didn't bring enough stuff, my base back home isn't really set up for remote construction, and I'm having a great time.

Vulcanus is actually the best place to end up stranded on, you got very lucky there. There are almost no threats to worry about and you have easy access to an almost infinite amount of every resource (except for uranium). Gleba is the actual hell-planet.

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I really hate Gleba too. In hindsight, the biggest problem is you essentially have to beat the entire challenge before you get a reliable source of iron and copper. But you're going to get attacked regardless of whether you're doing well or not. There are other problems but the 'you're getting attacked and you have no good way to get bullets' is just an awful design decision.
In the end, I also went with the 'army of logistic bots' solution. I really wish there was some way to get future technologies without the Gleba science though, having to keep a space platform constantly running there and back is incredibly annoying.

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I ended up just brute forcing via log bots, but I did read an interesting post on the subreddit that suggested a "main river" architecture (compared to the typical "main bus"): all spoilables go on a giant belt that ends with a bunch of heat towers where they're promptly incinerated for power. You pull from the river, process the material, feed the results back onto the river. The result is that all your spoilables are always fresh, the "river" never stops flowing, and you avoid any awkward clogs. Viewing Gleba as, basically, a flow system vs. the stock system you see on the other planets seems like it'd greatly simplify logistics. Personally I didn't build a single heat tower until Aquilo which is an obvious missed opportunity in retrospect.

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My current strategy for Gleba is to think about it later. I'm not yet sure if it's going to be fun or "fun", but I'm hoping for the former.

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The only downside is, it's not 3d. Why, I can't tell you,

I prefer Satisfactory because I like the 3d.

However there are definitely people who strongly prefer the circuit diagram type problems that Factorio makes you solve.

It could be a visual thinker thing. Or possibly a electronics vs software background.

I briefly tried Satisfactory and trying to align the machines in gridless, first-person 3D was too much of a hassle.

For what it's worth there is a grid if you build on foundations. But I don't disagree that it's a hassle. Building stuff is a veritable chore in Satisfactory, not helped by the fact that the devs have refused to implement blueprints big enough to actually be useful.

They’ve since added an optional (hold Control) ‘world grid’ to Satisfactory, which helps a lot with alignment. But it definitely does get overwhelming still, and not a problem specific to just this game: Manufactio and Space Engineers struggle a lot because of it.

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Yeah, I meant more in the sense that intersections of two grids (or more, or where subgridding) can be annoying to line up at best, and Clangtastic more often.

The PCU limits are really conservative, especially with modern computers. The defaults can be easily disabled and the hard limits are a lot more reasonable, but it’s definitely a thing I hope is much improved for the vrage3 version.

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Yeah, that's fair, especially the frustrations about the game itself not really existing. Having some level of self-imposed limits on guns and ship complexity can keep a server moderately performant even with bigger ships -- I have had several 2m-5m kg multi-ship combat scenarios that were reasonably playable physics-update wise -- but the lack of reason to do it is more serious for the game.

It's realistic that space doesn't really have a ton of choke points, but it has a very First Year No Man's Sky feel to it, without a lot of the charm that NMS had. Keen's put into a wide variety of game modes that just don't really exist in the vanilla game. Even with Contact finally adding a reason to actually use the combat system after literally ten years, it ends up resulting in a couple dozen randomly-placed encounters with nothing but GPS waypoints to push toward them. MEMS and similar mods show solutions to these things, and I can understand not wanting to be quite as overwhelmingly common as in those mods, but it's disappointing in many ways.

KSP is definitely more 'complete' as a game (and more realistic, as you mention on the orbital mechanics stuff), even if some of the mechanics in the non-sandbox mode are kinda dumb. In exchange, it's a good deal more limited on the construction side.

I remember merge blocks being fairly okayish. I used them for docking without issues.

They're a lot smarter than Connectors, but there's some hilarious stuff that happens if you have too many around, or if certain blocks are on the subgrid (eg, magplates, short wheel suspensions, rotors oh god rotors).

Dyson Sphere Project had a respectable pseudo-3d grid system, made somewhat annoying by the wierdness of mapping the grid to a sphere.

Flashbacks to Planetary Annihilation ruining the best part of Supreme Commander by making bases guaranteed messy

I just like sprites more than 3d models, maybe that's weird. Plus it means my next PC build can be a 9800x3d with the same GTX 970 I've had for 6 years.

Might be critical for late game, who knows.

I only read the developer diaries. I can't play the game, because I have a family and a career that would be destroyed by it. But I've heard this is the case.

The only downside is, it's not 3d. Why, I can't tell you

There are a ton of 3D imitators in the genre, so it's 100% possible, and I know a couple people who can't play Factorio because of it. I think the devs are obsessed with the quality of the code and design in the game to such a degree that they believe 3D will never allow such precision and control of the player's viewpoint. I think they're right.

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Factorio is a uniquely addicting game for me. I love it - however I can't escape the fact that the time I spend playing it is the same muscles as programming (which has a high $ROI compared to gaming), and I just don't have the time right now. If my battletech group takes a sabbatical I may be able to schedule 1-2 days a week to play.

I suspect that most of the 3d games use a grid system somehow. My buddies have really liked Satisfactory if you'd prefer to get the 3d experience.

Also, speaking of factories, I watched an awesome little sci-fi vignette about it recently: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cntb3wcZdTw (Mid voice acting/writing but can't have it all)

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