The Monthly Game Club game for November 2024 is Factorio, the construction and management sim from 2020 that’s seen consistent updates in the time since!
Nominated by @Gaagaagiins and selected specially for its new expansion launch. Here’s what Gaagaagiins has to say about Factorio:
This game will either entirely repulse you or ruin ur life (but in a good way)
I want more weirdos to play it with
See sub-points:
The demo is easily available for download on the computer based platforms on the developer’s website (Download | Factorio), or, on the Nintendo eShop (an aside, the controls and performance for this game were not meant to be on the Switch, but apparently it’s been well received on that platform due to it having an apparently well thought out control scheme (as another related aside it apparently runs well on Steam Deck too))
The demo doesn’t really capture what the experience of playing the game is fully like, but there is more than enough substance to the demo for it to make it clear whether it’s your thing or not. If your experience is anything like mine it’ll end up having probably like 12 hours of solid entrancing gameplay to it
Factorio now an expansion pack named Factorio: Space Age, but the vanilla version could already easily occupy one for hundreds of hours. At any rate, if you get hooked on the demo, don’t be in any rush to get the expac.
For those who love it playing it can be like defragmenting your brain and I love it, 1,820 hours on Steam and that was the count before the expansion pack came out
I myself have played a bit of Factorio and can see why it’s such a hit! The tutorial is great. I think it’d be really fun to plan out some Insert Credit Monthly Game Club multiplayer sessions together. If folks are interested, let’s coordinate! This is, I think, the first game we’ve got in the club that has an optional multiplayer.
What’s your background and experience with Factorio? Excited to see what y’all think!
Figuring out the structure of your factory is fun! I think the general approach I’m using is to have a main line of copper plates and a main line of iron plates and create sub factories for each science type with those inputs. Though there’s an argument for common intermediate components having their own sub-factories as well.
Where do you draw the line? That’s Factorio, Baby!
This game is intimidating! Both because it seems kinda complicated and also because I don’t think I want to spend the next few years of my life playing it. Maybe I’ll give the demo a go and then see how I feel after that.
That’s exactly how I feel! My brother has played it and poured over 300 hours into the game. (For reference, I have only a few Steam games with that dubious distinction: Team Fortress 2, Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings II, Stellaris, and Rocket League.) All of those except Stellaris accumulated most of those hours before I had kids. So there is an odd time budgeting calculus here where I’m not sure I want to give Factorio the time that currently goes to the occasional management sims.
I’ll download the demo next week when I’m traveling and dabble in it. Now that it’s part of the club, I owe it a try.
I haven’t been updating my diary over the last few sessions of play cause I kinda fell into mentoring a friendly noob online and have been helping with their save file, in between pecking away at mine.
But if anyone is playing and wants a consultation either tag me itt or hit me up online, if you own the game I can hop into your save file and see what’s up
For now, I’m not quite yet into the expansion content, but I’m getting pretty close. The expansion also came with some significant changes to the base game, mainly one that truncates the original win condition so that the expansion, some that only come into play if you’re playing the expansion and some not, but they’re all good changes.
For the record, if you do fall in love enough to want to get both the expansion, it’s generally recommended to start a new save file to play the expansion, since the truncation of the base game is pretty significant.
I’ve played the first few tutorials of the demo. My thoughts in rough order:
Since this is marketed as a management sim, I was initially surprised to realize it’s a survival game. The initial mining feels a lot like a 2D Rust. Then the automation seems to fit on top of that or within that.
I like the early scaling of the tutorials. They do leave a lot to players to figure out, e.g., giving a few conveyor belts but not explaining how to use them to make the task easier.
I failed the power generator tutorial mission due to attacking species. I guess the creatures are meant to ramp up tension between expansion and the need for defense. I was too slow getting turrets up.
I don’t like the controls on the Switch. They feel too arbitrary; how many times did I pick something up rather than opening it up? It also took me a while to figure out targeting with the right stick. I may retry on PC if it’ll run on a simple laptop.
I fell off the monthly game club for a while there, but will try to rejoin this month! I usually tend to turn off the survival elements mainly because creepy crawlers and heebiejeebies but will give it a go this month!
I’m delighted that so many people like this game, but I see it and just think that it looks like an actual job I have had. I don’t want to due process engineering unless someone is paying me to due process engineering!
I feel like capitalism managed to take all the fun out of most (hardware or software) engineering jobs by compartmentalizing all the steps of the process so much that it just feels nothing like what made us passionate about it in the first place.
And we engineers just started making games that feel like the jobs we wish we had instead of endless meetings looking at JIRA boards.
I think this is because many people who have engineering roles are actually divorced from the end product. An EE doing schematic capture has a different set of skills than the CAD tech doing the PCB layout, or a software engineer may only write firmware or a user-land driver, but only in one OS and not in the other, and nobody in this value chain uses the end-product. In a game like Factorio, you actually get to see the end result.
Also, our systems are so complex now it’s extremely difficult for a single human to have enough broad domain knowledge to understand how the whole thing actually functions. When you build a Factorio, you know exactly how it all fits together.
I have been playing Space Age since launch day and I really thought I would be further along, but when I hit chemical science and got construction bots I started to shift gears toward making a megabase using trains. My goal is to reach 120 science per minute which is more than a little ambitious especially since they moved some extrememly useful late game technologies into space. My evolution factor is like 0.88 so I will be getting behemoths soon and I will have a harder time clearing out new space to expand the factory, my solar panels, or to get resources. Getting utility science is my next goal so I can get some of those damage upgrades to stay competitive with the biters, but I still need to finish setting up my big circuit fabricators for blue science and preparing for blue circuits.
