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Notes -
Short review: Factorio: Space Age is .. pretty good. It's kinda like Space Exploration mod but somewhat lite & polished.
There's a whole bunch of new mechanics, such as spoilage of certain items on Gleba, grave-robbing on Fulgora and industrially excavating the ruins of an entire civilization and turning it into recycled materials and reusing some of it. Spaceships can't use logistic bots and have only one chest, requiring a whole additional way of building stuff.
Item quality, unlocked by said grave-robbing is a replacement for the upper tiers of materials Bob & Angels used to have. It doesn't seem critical so far, but it's nice to have and makes things more efficient. Might be critical for late game, who knows.
All in all, if you like automation games, this is a worthy DLC for the one that started the genre.
The only downside is, it's not 3d. Why, I can't tell you, seems to me the entire belt-related code could be pasted into a 3d game bc essentially, the belts on a 3d grid are the same as on a 2d grid (if you had infinite belt-types for interleaving).
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.
3d and grid based are orthogonal concepts.
Captain of Industry is both grid based, for building, and fully 3d. They might even add on tunneling (I'd love it).
Vehicles have bounds defined by the grid, but they don't move on it.
You know, I was actually considering going to the forums to bitch to ask for a FPS perspective, or more precisely, being able to zoom in really close and really down - it'd cost them not much because trying to stick another conveyor belt in a big mess of other belts, from a bird's eye view is pretty hard. Despite the snapping code being very,very good!
I mean, I like grids because we're not neanderthals and lacking incredible memory we need things neatly laid out if we're not to keep getting sidetracked looking for stuff. Neanderthals didn't put their stuff in any sense of order whatsoever, suggesting either improbable stupidity (bulk of our ancestors wasn't likely much smarter at the time), or more likely, far better memory. Having to align stuff is a pain.
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Nope. That's my preference too.
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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.
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.
Biters in vanilla are nothing, nothing. Just build walls and minefields. You've got robots for that. It's a set of pretty simple blueprints you copy & paste. Terrain is flat, rocks dynamited.
Finally knuckled down and put together an actually good item quantity balancer (no mods, loads a train car with ~30 different items in specified quantities. Pretty simple. Subtracts what's in the buffer box from what's in the train, turns every negative smaller than -10value into 1, and puts that to the filter inserter. Inverse filter inserter on the other side, with smaller stack, and it does the job.) If you spam this and segment the logistic network (using the same algo) to push non-train stuff out networks and push normal items in, you can expand endlessly.
Hell with that you could expand endlessly even with Rampant as with nuclear shells cleaning up what's actually 'Deathworld squared' becomes a possibility, your wall just has to be high firepower enough to deal with inevitable massive attack Rampant loves to spring at you. Once you have nukes, blasting the entire area around your base with nuclear fire feels so, so satisfying. (have to do this manually, It's way too much of a waste, algo isn't made for nuclear shells).
The only downside is the UPS drops to 10 for 3 minutes every 45 minutes when Rampant is busily moving the kill counter into the half a million range. But the fireworks are epic.
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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.
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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.
I didn't play it in this game but it's lovely looking at it.
Infinite power. Infinite minerals. 50% productivity smelters. You can pipe liquid metal everywhere. You can easily fill out a belt with basic metal components.
What else do you need ?
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Gleba is really driving me nuts. Unless you do pure bot logistics, the entire thing is a nightmare to automate.
It's deeply irrational trying to do it, but the whole thing has so many edge cases. E.g. I converted all my spoiled vegetation into nutrients. But that means the mechanical nutrient cycle starter plants can't provide nutrients to even start everything else.
etc.
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.
Finally got it working.
Had to make the nutrient belt look whether all the fruit processing, flux making and nutrient making machines are running, and only then start feeding the rest of the factory. Sequence related issues, having to gate all the flows to parts unless they're working..
Screenshot
If I had to do it all over again, I'd leave more space between the segments, and also pre-install some belts.
Gleba is really OP if you get it to work, the amount of iron and copper you get from bacteria is nuts.
I deleted that mess (it worked but required babysitting) and remade it with bigger, better thought out modular parts.
Now it's almost attention free and keeps working.
Gleba is really good imo because stack inserters are godly. You can basically 4x the capacity of any belt. Incredible!
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The enemies are no threat - they only appear if you're farming the trees hard enough.
Don't care about pollution - care about the spores.
I mean, you can automate the space platform. I dumped like 15k iron on Gleba purely working out the bugs on mine.
The real problem isn't the spoilage, it's that there's so many feedback loops needed.
And the issue is, if you let your fruit to spoil, you lose the seeds. If you lose the seeds, you lose possibility of sowing them. So.. Yeah.
This got me like 4x due to certain bugs. I've decided to, at the very least, used bots with fruits and seeds. The rest is nuts, the devs purposefully went with absurd amounts of stuff like nutrients to discourage botting.
In the end I decided that this kind of shit needs a modular approach - don't even want to deal with calculations, so I made small units that each does one thing and then just connect them together.
The outer loops is nutrients and waste removal, the straight-thrugh belt is the actual processing.
The issue is mainly that I the fruit cycles were unsynced, so sometimes it'd stop working bc one wasn't available in quantity.
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.
Just burn it for electricity. I brought Tesla towers, they incinerate a megawatt each on standby. The giant crabs are not killable otherwise than rockets or electricity.
E.g. ?.
But you can process it all into carbon, which takes up less space and store it too. Even make coal out of it, really. Which you need to do anyway because of the giant crabs, which are very, very tough and armor-piercing rockets are really the only way to deal with them.
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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.
The only real difference is, instead of conveyor belts that end, you need loops.
Everything on Gleba except ore decays into spoilage, which can be processed, rapidly & inefficiently into nutrients, which all the bio-reactors need to work, or turned into carbon & explosives.
All you need to do. And ofc, all the bioreactors require removing spoilage and putting in nutrients. And since sometimes a lot of stuff can spoil, long-handed inserters aren't the best. Actually, why didn't I just interleave the shit out of it.
...play play play, write down something and figure out what's probably a way better solution.
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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.
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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.
But Space Engineers has a grid.
The problem with Space Engineers is that a building game with a default multiplayer build limit that you can max out in 6 hours is kinda pointless. Played some of it but honestly..
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.
Playing in a sandbox by myself is not interesting anymore(put a ~few 100 hrs into that).
PvP multiplayer is where it's at, but last I checked those servers either had punishing settings where you'd spend a day slaving away to build the equivalent of the 'starter' ship.
I tried it a few times, and if you gave me the yellow starter ship out in orbit, I could get enough materials to build this in three hours..
These are gravity drive powered remote control miners that chew a straight way through an asteroid, throw out uninteresting ore and then report 'job done'.
You can basically build anything. The guys basically made a 'game construction kit', not a game. I basically gave up on it after I understood something as simple as a huge (100k tons) ship can lag a server by itself if it's moving. The engine is a toy engine.
They also gradually removed much of the challenge of the game itself.
Ironically, the actual 'Space Engineers' game is KSP. You've got heat, aerodynamics, actual slightly simplified orbital mechanics.
I dunno, I remember merge blocks being fairly okayish. I used them for docking without issues.
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.
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).
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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
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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.
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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.
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.
I mean, assuming you have a career and a family, you can moderate your heart's desire for freedom and also your gaming time. If you do some planning and analysis off-game, you can probably complete the game in 2-3 months of 1-2 hours in the evenings.
You can always just do a grid. Even if player POV was in a 3d grid, that'd still be improved. And 3d has way more options.
Especially in space, 2d just looks fucking weird. We are all flatlanders down here but up there?
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)
It's missing some stuff like building physics, and tbh, I am just never buying that game unless it gets insanely appealing.
Wish normal Factorio was more combat-oriented. Like playing Rampant, the only problem is most people avoid that mod and it's hard to find anyone to play with.
I was thinking about buying Satisfactory but their community manager was posting woke shit on Twitter, and I decided to simply not give my money to people who are in my opinion stupid enough to pander to the worst people in the known universe.
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