Should You Play: Factorio 

meh factorios okay, i only played like 800 hours. not too addictive

> complains about excessive resourse needs for research > Still using one yellow belt to feed his research crafters There's your problem. It's not a grind, it's a bottleneck; you need to increase production. The factory must grow.

this game is fucking heroin.

Two words: Automated drones. That stuff changes the game in a significant way

It's funny how the Devs addressed all these problems over the FOUR YEARS since this video was published. With bots, blueprints, and revamped science recipes, re-balanced trains (now far superior to belts,) and much expanded military have fixed basically all these problems. Factorio's problems were lack of polish and lack of content breadth, not lack of depth.

The flamethrower is basically the newest forest destroyer. I used oil (the flamethrower ammo) to clear trees to make space for pumpjacks. What could be more environmentally unfriendly?

You don't need trains? My sweet boy, you are so wrong...

Interesting how basically all the flaws mentioned here we fixed by two simple fitures - bots and blueprints. You are not supposed to unlock big generator, you are supposed to build you own!

Factorio is finally getting its 1.0 release this Friday. You should do that review. :)

I think mods should've been brought up. Bobs mods and dytech add unheard of levels of additons and complexity, that are completely free to the player.

Holy shit this game took a dark turn fast. That alien part caught me completely off guard.

I've been avoiding Factorio. The min/max syndrome is strong in me. I almost fucked up my marriage playing mount and blade....

I've heard of it and it didn't sound interesting but I decided to watch the trailer. Half a minute into the trailer I paused it, instaled the game and played 7 hourd straight

6:50 The reason why trains are better than belts is because of throughput. The belts can carry 13.33, 26.67 and 40 items per second. Since mining drills can mine 0.525 ores per second (0.65 for stone), it doesn't take much to compress one belt. Since belts require 1.5, 11.5 and 31.5 iron respectively, it would be most efficient to use the slowest belts across long distances. Since it takes 25 miners to almost compress one slow belt, we are going to need a lot of them for large outposts that can fit around 200 miners. With 200 miners, you will need 8 lanes of belts just to transport the resources to your base. In this case, it will cost you 12 iron PER TILE to transport your resources (bear in mind that this is the most cost-efficient way to transport resources by belt) Now, let's see how trains work instead. 2 rails require 5.5 iron (and 1 stone). Since rails are 2x2 tiles, we need 1.375 iron and 0.25 stone per tile instead. Of course, we will need to factor in double rails and rail signals, so let's say that rails are 4 iron per tile (just to average things out). Even with all of this, it is still cheaper to use rails than to use 3 of the slowest belts (4.5 iron per tile). And you might argue that trains are complicated to set up, but if you're just transporting resources from an outpost to your base, it doesn't require any complex signaling. In fact, you might even run a single railroad to your outpost, which would only cost you 1.375 iron per tile.

It sounds like you didn't use blueprints to build your factory, if you did it would make expanding very easy, you don't actually need some of the things you suggested, like factories with claws - you can just make a blueprint for it. By using them in late game it's pretty easy to automate even rocket production eithout the need to really afk to send a rocket. Increasing the scale of prosuction you actually start needing the trains as you have to get resourses from a very far away and enemies don't actually attack rails and power poles on themselves. This all leads to different late game designs in terms of both mining and production, which you seemed to miss unfortunately. Also the circuit networks definitely deserved mentioning. While you can play without them they allow a veery presize controll over some production lines.

Jumped from you Witness review to the Darkest Dungeon one, to this one, and I must say I really like your style. You now have a new subscriber. I mostly agree with your opinion on Factorio and the final suggestion you made would be a great addition to the game.

One thing to note is that the 0.15.0 Experimental release removed the stark Magic Blue Science Potion cliff. It's now a smoother difficulty progression, from Red to Green to Military to Blue, then higher tiers still.

0.15 just dropped; it's amazing and has some of the things you've asked for here. They added the Railworld world type which has very large and rich but infrequent resource deposits which motivates train usage, and biters do not expand to new bases. Infinite science expands the endgame and makes rockets part of upscaling instead of an arbitrary end goal, balancing makes dealing with aliens less tedious, new content like uranium, etc. etc..

"Factorio should be feature complete by the end of this year." *posted in February 2016* Thank the Emperor that Kovarex and others are still running strong.

Should you play factorio? YES YES You SHOULD

One of the flaws you mentioned (to paraphrase): "the endgame is about doing tedious things instead of solving problems, since the amount of research required is astronomical and you're better off leaving the game running as opposed to expanding your factory to make it research faster" - and you said that it isn't worth the trouble, but you never said why! Now, I understand that constant expansion has diminishing returns, but that doesn't mean there isn't always something to do. Things could always be faster. You always have something bottlenecking your factory, so that other things aren't working at their full capacity. It's a constant balancing act, and I think that's what you failed to appreciate during the late-game. You restate how the end-game feels like a grind to "stretch out the game in its unfinished state" due to massive resource requirements, yet you give the impression that your factory lacked scale since you claimed that trains didn't serve a purpose that transport belts couldn't satisfy. I will make a point that you should Google some discussions about trains vs belts, because trains do serve a purpose. Simply put, I think the flaws you observed about Factorio's endgame are a result of a lack of scale and micromanagement to improve your factory's efficiency, speed and overall complexity. I understand that you don't find launching the rocket a satisfying conclusion to the game - that's a fair assessment on the rocket itself - but I think the enjoyment on launching the rocket isn't the destination, but the journey you've taken to get there. As you know, it's a humongous task to launch a rocket, so finally being able to do it is a reward in and of itself. This is my opinion though, I respect your opinion that the rocket launching procedure feels anticlimactic.

I feel like this needs a new video once the game releases. There is quite a lot more to point out and comming. Blueprints, robots, beacons, flamethrower, nuclear power and mods are all already ingame, boosting the endgame experience and extending the gameplay length. this video does not talk about any of these features. maybe because the player might think they are only side features which can be tapped into as optional content, and that belt factories is the main way to build your factory. This conclusion is easy to get into because you learn for dozen of hours how to build and protect your factory with belts. You maybe dont expect that to change later in the game. Espacially when starting to try to incorporate beacons into your belt builds you are usually forced to redesign many of your designs. You technically can redo your entire base for increased productivity and efficiency. Same with roboports, logistic networks and logistic robots. They open up a complelty different playsstyle with does not require the use of belts all together. Furthermore, the ability to use blueprints + personal construction robots to help you to place large amount of entities at a faster pace was also not mentioned. the endgame you present in the video is far from the accual endgame, even thought the endgame IS still flawed (just for different reasons). the video sadly barely touched all of the accual endgame gamemechanics. And on the use of trains: Once ressource fields run out, you have to venture further out (espacially if you the set the ore richness to low). it is easy to underestimated the possible sizes of lategame factories. people build crazy factories with so much material throughput that they just have to use trains, otherwise they wouldnt be able to archieve such throughput. espacially if the final value you measure your factory with is "how many rockets can i launch each minute consistently". of course you dont need trains if your factory is still small or medium sized. Furthermore, trains are less update-heavy than belts. Eventually the game will run slower. Hardcore players want to create gigantic factories to the point where they start to min-max their computer performance based on how the game has been coded. edit: 8:39 The power armor provides personal roboports which allow you to let construction robots place entities for you. You can create blueprints and plop them down whereever you want and the robots will do the job. No need to place every single building or belt in the endgame anymore. 9:21 There is a building FOR the upgrade cards: The beacon. It does provide new ways to design your builds, which is mostly interesting if you like to play your games efficiently. If feel like this review was made with the mindset "This is early access, therefore it must be a simple game still being slowly developed" "If the factory works why bother changing it, i just want to finish the goal: launching a rocket" The game has great depth when you start looking at the mechanics of single entities, but i feel like this has been dismissed or might no be possible to be explored in just 100 hours. Thats why people are able to spend thousands of hours in the game and still enjoy it greatly!

I wasn't too sold on this guy's "armchain developer"-ing, until he proposed making the Player revealed at the end to actually be a Von Neumann machine. That's fucking brilliant!

Blueprints would allow most of the automation you wanted, and personal roboports on your power armor make clearing the forests super easy. Even back then. With the new additions that are in the game, flamethrowers and setting an entire forest on fire makes it super easy (albeit it will make greenpeace show up). Also most of your complaints are addressed by mods, but I never feel that is a real solution. Plus you can get a rocket super fast, I did it sub8 hours and speed runners manage less than 2 hours. However I do agree the end game is weak, and the general thrust of your argument is correct.

In ten to twenty years Factorio is going to be like how the original dungeon keeper is now

Me, watching this video in 2020 hearing "The developers estimate that the game should be feature-complete by the end of the year." Video was released 4 years ago. Only took three years more... :) I love the game throughout the whole time.

I've seen gameplay of this before but you were able to sum the game up in a way that makes me desperately want to try it. good job!

No mention of robots and blueprints, things which I liked the most about the game

Aliens that attack you for industrialising their planet?.. Is there a mod to turn them into mindworms?

I've put 500+ hours into this game (pre-steam obviously) and it's amazing. Obviously some people won't like it, and yes, the end game is flawed, but compared to most AAA titles I have purchased this is vastly superior.

Good review. Glad to see you've fixed the mic issues. : )

This is a great analysis of the game at the time. It would be great to see an updated analysis including the influence of mods.

When do we get an updated video on Factorio?

Followed your advice. Now I am addicted. thanks!

what hooked me was the fact that when i started it i wasn't planning ahead so everything seemed inefficient, but after checking the tech tree i saw, "smart inserters", this could fix my problem, but then i ran into issues with items being everywhere so i needed an easy way to get stuff around, so again i looked into the tech tree and found "logistic bots", so i spent all of my time gunning for those bots and the logistic techs behind them, always thinking "just one more tech and the system will be perfect and i will have everything" but it wasn't perfect, i needed to more but i was running out of space with everything so close and intertwined, so i looked again at the tech tree and found a tech i missed on the way to logistic bots, "construction bots" which could deconstruct and construct from a blueprint. After rebuilding my factory i realized that my setups weren't optimal, the ratios weren't right, so that where i decided that i needed to restart and make a factory that is right and planned out from the beginning with the right ratios. I did better the second time, but there were always better setups, always more optimal ways to do it. 1000 hours later i think i need to restart from the beginning again, my train network is using loops and loops are shit.

The old Rocket Silos look so cool. Also if your wondering, They've adressed so many of this issues posed. This game Is AMAZING now

I have to admit that while the review part of the game was nice, the after review part sounded at least a little bit whiny. Yes, Factorio could use a better endgame, but when you think about it, the devs are really just trying to add features right now as well as polish. Just think about how many years Minecraft took before it had any meaningful semblance of an endgame. At least Factorio has a goal to work towards right now (launching a rocket into space) whereas other games have not done that. Also, I think you're the only person I've heard complaining about the polish that the dev team is putting in. The fact that they care so much about their game, and by extension their playerbase, is really important. Polishing what they have is making the game look nicer and function more efficiently, and I think it's great that they're doing this as they go along rather than getting all the way up to a pre-release and doing it all at once. It's very neat and tidy and goes a long way to make Factorio a better game. Finally, one more little detail that did bug me is how you talked about trains. Trains are MUCH more efficient than belts for transporting resources over long distances. To have a belt even come close to how efficient trains are, they would need to move resources many times faster than they already do and have a higher throughput. This would mean having 12 or 16 belts (or more depending on how big your trains would be) bringing your resources in, and depending on how far away the mining or production site is, that could become prohibitively expensive very fast. Trains may seem expensive but the truth of the matter is that they are very good at what they do, and are much easier to defend than a main bus.

The idea of making a clone to research upon sounds amazing. It would also tie in with the making of the rocket, as its purpose is to deliver the clone to a new planet.

Finally released! Would love to see a follow up video for this game.

Like you I discovered this game before it was put on steam, and I fell in love with it. I'm glad to see someone take the same level of love for a complicated game like factorio. Thank you

Thanks for this awesome review! This is exactly what I wanted to know!

This review was for a version of the game a while ago, since then there's a bigger scope to the end game with there being a use to launching multiple rockets. That being said the endgame, whilst being MORE interesting is not interesting enough. I usually start again with a different challenge or harder settings rather than continue past 150 hours of one map. I'm just up to 1000 hours on my Steam copy and I've definitely done more than that before too... I said this to a friend who played the game (about 100 hours before stopping) and I think it's worth saying to you. If the end game felt like a grind because you were taking a long time to finish it... why weren't you expanding your base to make it quicker? You know, literally the thing you spend the entire game doing. Building a factory, then building more factory. Then refining the design, adding modules etc...

That last idea about making a clone and going to a new plant is so cool, it would retroactively turn you into one of those self-replicating drones and would bring up some cool questions about your origins

this is a great review. glad I found this channel

Best review ive seen! Great job!

Was this review made before they added logistics? I didn't see you using any robots.

if you play long enough and in lower quantity settings for ores you will definitely need trains

If you do not play on peaceful I would definitely recommend starting in an area with large forests and chopping down as little as possible. This will delay the alien attacks as trees are by fare the best at absorbing pollution.

Very good review and criticism thank you. I wonder if any of the suggestions made it into the game.

I found a mobile game similar to factorio, it's called "Sandship". You are basically an engineer building a factory on a tank on an alien planet. It's really good for a mobile game, but being a f2p game, it of course incorporates a goddamn lootbox system. Some resources you need for research can only be obtained from lootboxes.

This video made me consider playing Factorio, which I might now! Especially after the Total Annihilation comparison (one of my favorite games)

THE FACTORY MUST GROW

Factorio announced there first expansion today space age the game has evolved so much since this video

I absolutely hate that you don't have more views and subs, keep up the good work man.

Great work Joseph! another fantastic video.

I now have almost 600 hours in Factorio and never thought of buildings or endings like you mentioned and tough the video is already pretty old its great

You said tanks are better to take down enemy bases than Lazer Turrets? have you tried making a simple blueprint with turrets surrounding a light pole and having your robot building them for you? It is the most OP thing ever

I took the complexity a whole other step. I worked out the optimal ratios for crafting science packs (necessary to research new things) all by myself by paying attention to the crafting times to create the intermediate resources while wasting as little time as possible. This led me to discover that one gear factory is sufficient to supply 5 Science Pack 1 factories, for example. And for the record: 13 refineries (supplied by 13 pump jacks and 1 crude oil storage tank for runover) supply 5 sulfur factories with petroleum (a storage tank for leftover petroleum) which supply 2 sulfuric acid factories which supply 25 battery factories (ya really), but basic oil processing also supplies light and heavy oil, which allows 14 solid fuel factories for heavy oil (and 2 storage tanks, one for heavy oil and another for a factory that processes left over heavy oil into lubricant which needs its own storage tank) and 23 solid fuel factories for light oil and one last storage tank for leftover light oil. That’s the optimal setup that crafts every drop of crude oil as fast as possible, according to the crafting timing. This is on top of a base setup that doesn’t use conveyor belts for much, because conveyor belts don’t get resources from point A to point B as fast as keeping everything compact/piped together and abusing inserters and chests, and feeding the chests with material manually. Why do this? So that when you unlock robotics later on, robots can do the manual transfer of goods for you, so you don’t over complicate your base with conveyor lines and don’t have to worry about early factories in a conveyor line hoovering up the conveyor belt resources and leaving the further factories bare. Conveyor belts are only useful when crafting time-intensive products like Science Pack 2, because the initial factories take so long to process the goods that later factories can be supplied without any supply disruption (by the way, 2 inserter factories and 2 transport belt factories can supply 48 Science Pack 2 factories. Ya, really.) I could have looked up those ratios myself (maybe I’m off somewhere, and inserters introduce a small error in processing as it takes a 1/2 second or split second to move materials, which is faster than a belt but slower than the “assumed” instant timings for the ratios I worked out). However, sitting down, working out the math, then building it and seeing the end result is unbelievably satisfying. It feeds into the addictive nature of the game; it’s not just that you automate X so you can craft new materials that allow you to automate Y, it’s that there’s an underlying mathematical logic to the whole thing that can be studied and exploited to the player’s benefit. That is what makes Factorio so unbelievably fun for so many people, and why it takes so long: you’re doing what engineers all over the world do every day: figure out the math to make X product using Y materials. Real-world engineers need a preliminary step, though: figure out Z requirements and B environmental conditions that Y materials must have and can survive in, in order to satisfy C problem the engineer is attempting to solve. It’s awesome that Factorio taps into a part of this process, and it makes me wish that the environment affected materials as well: iron rusts, copper tarnishes, petroleum evaporates, uranium radiates, etc., and that rain and winds could cause damage to structures over time, and that different environments have different structural considerations (crafting solid foundations specific to swamps/sandy areas, constantly repairing stone and asphalt paths in snowy areas because of frost heave in the ground, designing pipes with flexible supports that can withstand earthquakes (Wouldn’t that be terrifying if it existed in Factorio?), on and on and on. The focus the game has on its “Make X and Y to build Z” aspects is a great foundation, but to become legendary it must expand its environment and factor in real-world physics to drive aspects like decay and environmental damage. This would sell Factorio’s world as more of a “living ecosystem” than simply a manufactured game world to play around in, which would greatly improve the game experience. Make of my thoughts whatever you will.

Started playing it today and I could see myself putting 100 hours into it. The controls are super intuitive and it runs very well. The gameplay is just plain satisfying.

oh trust me my first factory looked like the spaghetti monster in the trailer... and no when the research starts to get too long, you expand, at least I do

the best way to describe this game in my opinion is the Feed the beast minevaraft mod packs you start off with small scale automated systems that make you cobblestone, stone, lava, and sand, and build your way upto automatically growing and cutting down trees, sivving for diamonds, etc etc

Damn the cloning idea is ingenious

Some great suggestions. I do think having more biomes with unique resources would be the way to expand it. Right now there is very little reason to use trains and is more about just giant supply lines. I haven't played the game much in the past year, but I do hope they polish up the end game instead of having it be super grindy like it was.

If I could make a suggestion - You should do more of these 'mini' reviews and space out the more lengthy ones - I'd love to hear your thoughts on games like rimworld and slime rancher.. Seems like it'd be less of a workload and still keep content flowing.

You should come back to it. I've watched a few of your videos, and I'd love to do some co-op with you on this some day.

I think the long range artillery and logistic/construction blocks were a great addition

Albeit a bit old now but still a great and leveled review. You earned yourself a sub!

The tree clearing thing is really simple if you have personal roboport. I wonder if roboports and logistic network were not available when this was made. The logistic network fixes a lot of tedium in my opinion. Thank you for this review.

definitely going to be checking this out, I hadn't heard of it until now. great early access policy, btw.

It's released!

The clone creation new game plus you suggest is probably the best idea i've heard for this game

Hi. So Factorio just had 1.0 realase and came out of beta. Will you do new video some time in the future?

A recent update has changed the UI to some extent. It’s still definitely the same base game, but there are a few new textures.

My friend and me decided to get the game. We built a huge factory like the one in the trailer.

Added to the list of my favorite demos.

In my opinion you should do another review of this game, explaining the beauty and complexity of the logistic system and maybe even the circuit network system... And what about Rimworld? You mentioned Dwarf Fortress...

Great review

You've mentioned Dwarf Fortress a few time, wondering if you've ever considered making a video on DF, I know it might not be worth the time and effort for such a obscure title, but I'd certainly dig it (ha dig).

I fucking watched this exact video like, a year ago, and I was like "wow this guy sure knows his shit, too bad he has too little views", and completely forgot about it since I got hooked on Factorio, and couldn't remember the name of this vid to subscribe. Then I watched your No Man's Sky vid a week ago, subscribed, and "REFOUND" this vid. Genuinely happy that your vids and channel are getting the recognition they deserve, you almost always capture the gist of a videogame in your reviews -too bad about your wrong opinions on Dragon's Dogma though- Keep it up!

Yo, I would love to try these old versions of the game out. Many things are different, dope

Thank you for expanding my interest in ohter games.

Trains are extremely useful if you can use them correctly. I find them most useful to carry my self over large distances, and they're typically better then belts for large factories as you can separate each system, that way in case one gets attacked(At this time I'm assuming it's very late game and pollution is super heavy) the whole factory doesn't get destroyed.

feature complete, end of this year :D (video from early 2016) seems like something happend in between, something great!

Hit me hard with that Galifianakis gif... It was exactly what I was doing. Reminds me of the the fun I used to have with the Tekkit mods. Can't play yet tho, just got addicted to Diablo 3 so gonna have to wait 200 hours to get bored of that first.

Hehe, feature complete by the end of the year 2016... good one past Joseph Anderson, good one.

This game sounds great. Just one question, why was there eerie music in the background?

the game as really changed a lot since this video. though it's still changing somewhat, i hope when it has it's first 1.0 release you're gonna get back and redo the review and talk about what changed for the btter, for the worst, and how the game now is

It seems like an okay an idea to use the/a train to carry rocket parts to a construction facility, then be taken to a silo. Though I only have the demo, it can use the trains to be a bit mandatory. And how about an armored train, decked out with MGs, and (light) cannons of sorts?

This review is pretty accurate especially the end-game. However how can you not mentioning mod and combinaters?

I highly recommend the new update, even if you don't make a video about it. What they have done is pretty interesting.

And it's version 1.0 now.

Are you planning to take another look at this game when it hits 1.0? There's a lot of new stuff since this video :) in particular, the alien artefacts are gone (combat was the weakest part anyway...) and there are 3 new science packs instead, plus a 7th pack, space science, which you create by launching rockets.

Starting in an area with lots of Trees won't be a problem if you use the Agent Orange mod.

Yay! Re: Afraid of them not delivering. I think I they adressed this, they wanted the game to be basically polished and playable before they added features, sort of the reverse of the normal alpha-beta-release process. This was because they wanted Factorio to be ready for steam/have rapid progress leading up to 1.0 without getting bogged down with optimization, polish, etc, the sort of dev hell that DayZ got stuck in.

are you going to re-visit this game sometime in the near future when 1.0 comes out?

What if they made it so that the trains had weaponry and the rails either couldn't be attacked or weren't targeted as often as factories by mobs? I would think that late-game expansion would be encouraged, since you could set up little mining operations all over the world, and (fairly) safely transport goods back to the main factories where they get processed. The challenge would be making sure that those miniature mining bases are adequately defended, as well as making sure the weapons on the train are up to scratch. Definitely interested in the game though. Would you mind posting a video when it gets off early access, so we get the news?

You may think its excessiv towards the endgame, but the compulsion to the need to grow the factory and perfect it just feels so... goooood.

The flamethrower story: so onetime I was angry at trees because they took forever to clear, I fired my flamethrower into them and they caught on fire. All of my walls were destroyed because the fire killed them. Remember, trim the trees away from your wall before you burn them!

Factorio is an interactive finite state machine simulator.

You can output from drills directly into furnaces. Coal drills can also power each other (and I see you discovered this later.. and later again also the first one). I believe that factorio would be better with something to explore - random ruins, other factions, rare resources (the current worldgen is exceedingly dull). Originally, the developers were firmly against this but they seem to have come around a bit so let's see.