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[n9103]

Spitters don't out-range laser turrets, in fact, the turrets always have at least a slight advantage.
But the spitters will almost always prefer to shoot at the turrets rather than the walls.
If you get a wave of Big spitters, and don't have a stocked roboport quite close, as well as a very dense layer of laser turrets, you can kiss the turrets goodbye, due to the big spitters almost always getting off at least one shot each, and that one shot doing over 1/3rd the damage to kill a laser turret. (I think, can't clearly remember, but it's a very significant amount in any case.)

[lemon10]

So, i've just finished a game of this from start to finish, and I have a ton of different random things I feel like sharing with everyone.

Spoiler: On defense (click to show/hide)

-A hive will attack the same point every single time. That means that you can simply fortify that point and they will keep attacking it pointlessly. It also means that 95% of your walls will never be attacked by a single enemy.
-Having your defenses in range of a construction network is very helpful in avoiding having to manually repair or replace anything.
-Laser turrets are about a million times less trouble to have (or any real defensive scale), but gun turrets at the points enemies attack you will do for quite a long time.
-Kill all hives in pollution range. It has three positive effects. 1) They stop attacking you (which is really rather minor, since attacks are pretty trivial once you get defenses up). 2) Pollution at hives increases evolution (aka, it makes all the enemies tougher). 3) They can't spawn more hives, and since they are in pollution range any hives will probably be as well.
-Once you get automated construction use templates to build all your walls, it makes things far easier. For most of the game I used a template with a single turret, electricity pole, lamp, and 7X2 walls in the front. Later on I bumped it up to two turrets on each 7 long stretch of wall.
-Corners are far far more likely to be attacked then any stretch of strait walls, as such fortify your corners accordingly. In addition, attacks against them naturally have to deal with far fewer turrets at a time, as well as the enemies being more concentrated. While you may be able to do with a single turret for a stretch of 7 long regular wall, your corners should have many more defenses.
-Conveyer belts probably help, but I never needed (nor built) them at any point. The melee aliens all died super fast, and the ranged ones were the only threat, (and they could out-range the conveyer belts with ease), and to be honest my defenses felt like overkill at pretty much every point in the game. While having two layers of defenses, fortified strong points, fallback positions, compartmentalized sectors, ect was neat, it was also completely pointless. I never even lost a single wall tile (although I did lose 5-10 turrets over the course of the game (which were then promptly replaced by construction bots). To be honest, I lost more buildings when I accidentally double grenaded my base then I did to all enemies over the course of the game.

Spoiler: On offense (click to show/hide)

-Tanks are awesome early-mid game, just run over the hives.
-Armor piercing rounds deal tons more damage then non-armor piercing.
-Grenades are fairly useful early-mid game. They are amusingly most useful for mass tree clearing. Two of them will kill all the trees in a AOE, and a stack can clear a significant track of land.
-Destroyers scale the best at endgame. The start off rather sucky compared to Destractors when you have 1-3 of them as cap. But the technology gives you more at higher levels. You get +1 per tech level for the first few, and by level 11 you get +10 per level. The cost does keep increasing, but each later game level still increases you damage by a huge amount. At tech level 6 you get like 13 of them, and they deal tons of damage. By level 10 you get 33, and level 13 a max of 63.

Spoiler: Production (click to show/hide)

-Both logistics networks and circuit networks are super helpful in managing production.
-Logistic slots for yourself are a huge help. Not having to manually go back and grab 100 circuits/metal plates/coal/ect when you need to make buildings is really useful.
-Trains are super neat, and helpful for moving goods over any significant distance.

Spoiler: Construction (click to show/hide)

-Use templates once you get them. They are massively helpful in mass building of solar farms, accumulator farms, defense construction, and a few other things.
-Use mass grenades to clear trees early-mid game. It is an order of magnitude faster then just wiping them all out by hand. Seeing that I killed 3 times more trees then enemies is quite amusing.
-The destruction template allows you to kill trees. Once you get it you can simply use it to wipe out all trees within range very easily.
-Keep room for expansion. While you may only need a single circuit producing building early-mid game, as the game progresses you will need to build tons more, and as such will need room to expand those facilities. Don't be afraid to completely destroy and rebuild your facilities if you need to.

E: Of note, perhaps the single thing that annoys me the most is how enemies will always attack the same spots. If they varied it up a bit things would be far more interesting. Still not super great, since there is a bit of a lack of defenses, and the fact that you need to cover such a huge area makes it monotonous by necessity, but it would still be nice.

[n9103]

Could nitpick here and there on minor points, but overall some pretty good advice here.
I'm guessing this wasn't with any increase in difficulty (higher frequency or size)?

One point on the conveyors on defense: They're useful for either keeping the spitters at your laser turrets' far range, and keeping your turrets out of theirs. Or, they can be used early game to force the spitters closer, so that they're now in range of your gun turrets.

[Rilder]

So a mate and I did some MP to try it out, seems to work remarkably well honestly, though I had (as host) bouts of random extreme FPS lag quite often, dunno why exactly, if it was just due to my shit upload or what.

[bersaelor]

Played this for a while, really neat concept. I always loved Industry Giant and being stranded on an island - games.

They are also a european team, so I really hope more people find them and it gets bigger

[LoSboccacc]

they are to shy to get on steam, and keep postponing the date. the game is in near a very polished state, but I guess they also fear the onslaught of bug report and additional forum work

I have the same stutter as well. by their admission, they only tested the game on lan, and this multiplayer was 'for the very brave'

I got as far to logistic robots before having a serious issue, but the game was quite stable.

got the same occasional lag spike as well. my guess is that it is related to biters path finding during an attack, because it happened just when they started moving. they ruled out the possibility, but I hope will investigate the issue.

testing multiplayer games is quite hard

I have currently abandoned it because modem issues of my buddy, but if you are still playing and noticing the stutter and know what wire shark is, feel free to post a trace and I'll do the legwork of analyzing it.

[MarcAFK]

I have currently abandoned it because modem issues of my buddy, but if you are still playing and noticing the stutter and know what wire shark is, feel free to post a trace and I'll do the legwork of analyzing it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Good luck, that's quite a lot of wires to trace, but frankly I don't see how it helps with internets lag

[LoSboccacc]

*googled wireshark, was not disappointed

[The13thRonin]

New alpha around the corner... Excited...

Just bought Factorio last month... It's pretty much everything I've ever wanted in a game...

[LoSboccacc]

Pretty much. I only stopped because my multiplayer factory grow into logistic crashes around 11.3, but since last releases are finally about polish and not  crash bug I plan to resume real soon.

If you like the genre, there is now infinifactory. I prefer the factorio open format than challenges, but YMMV.

[n9103]

MP has gotten more stable with (almost) every patch.
If you're waiting for almost all of them to be fixed, then you'll be waiting until they officially move to working on the .12 release exclusively.

Spoiler: Troubleshooting and Challenging settings - wall of text (click to show/hide)

I'm not really sure what you mean by "logistic" crashes, but increasing the latency setting has helped with desyncs on all connections. It just comes with the obviously increased latency, but settings less than 250 are quite acceptable. I would be surprised if you're already at that point and still getting desyncs. As someone that got to Rocket Defense in MP in .11.0-.2 in up to a 6 player game, I think I'm qualified to say that multiplayer alone shouldn't be the cause of being unable to finish a game.
If you meant something not related to desyncing, then don't mind me.

As for impliying factorio lacks challenges, the campaign is a good place to do the learning-how-to-play level challenges, and there are more than a couple scenarios on the forums that are also fun. Sadly, a few of the better ones haven't been updated with factorio, but that wouldn't be a particularly large issue for anyone with a lua background. Mostly a matter of switching syntax on some terms, and changing out commands for others. The general framework still applies though, so most can be updated with less than an hour of work. (Though that hour of work quickly grows if you're not familiar with lua, or you do anything more than just making the scenario compatible.)

Of course, if you're the kind that tosses in mods willy-nilly, then you're probably going to have a less than challenging experience. Few of the mods actually make the overall gameplay harder. Some make playing more convenient, others less, but the end result is almost always an easier time surviving biter attacks.

Probably the most challenging start you could do (and expect to usually win, rather than almost always lose) would be a decrease in all the resource generation and an increase in all the biter settings. Taking most options to the highest or lowest setting usually results in a more frustrating game, rather than just a harder one. Usually though, you can set one of the settings per line to an extreme without adversely affecting the experience.
Just never increase the starting size, or decrease it below small. The former results in no challenge at all, the latter nothing more than an exercise in futility.

Finally, having a 2nd player makes *all* things easier, especially in the beginning, so consider increasing another value to an extreme for each additional player.
With 4 players, myself and others were (barely) able to conquer a maximum biter settings on a small start map, though it was a hell of a challenge, and required specifically limiting power and pollution production!

[The13thRonin]

Is there anything besides Minecraft mods that comes even remotely close to Factorio? I can't seem to find any similar games.

[Niveras]

Maybe the Anno series, but that is more about extracting, refining and production (as well as very, very minimal management of populations) than it is about the opportunity to design a robust production chain in detail. Anno is especially hands-off in terms of transportation, since one a product reaches a warehouse, it is instantly available to any other warehouse on that island (though you'll need to ship it manually, or semi-manually, to other islands if its needed elsewhere).

[Reelya]

Capitalism II has some factory stuff, but it's very abstract compared to this, you have factories which consist of 9 modules (3x3 units), and you wire them up with different types of units to process goods or handle supply chains (you can wire up warehouse factories to centralize distribution to other factories). Plus you have a few "sizes" of factory, but they still have 3x3 production units, the big ones just cost more to run and produce more per unit. They give you a set of default factory layouts which can produce any product, but they're deliberately not optimized, encouraging you to design ones yourself. Graphics are about the Simcity 2000 level. It's on sale on gog.com this weekend btw.

It's more about the supply chain from mines, farms and forests to consumer outlets than just designing factories though. There are rival companies, and you can do full vertical integration or buy and sell from other companies at any point in the supply chain. The game features a lot of products and types of shops you can build. There's a ton of complexity in the game to explore, though not as in depth on just factories as factoria. Although, it really needs Capitalism III which never happened, to take some of the ideas further.

[The13thRonin]

Maybe the Anno series, but that is more about extracting, refining and production (as well as very, very minimal management of populations) than it is about the opportunity to design a robust production chain in detail. Anno is especially hands-off in terms of transportation, since one a product reaches a warehouse, it is instantly available to any other warehouse on that island (though you'll need to ship it manually, or semi-manually, to other islands if its needed elsewhere).

I don't like the Anno series... There's something about it that just feels off... I think it's the fact that gathering resources is so formulaic and boring.

I have Capitalism II - LAB but it's not scratching the same itch as Factorio...