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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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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).

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.

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.

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