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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).
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 just like sprites more than 3d models, maybe weirdly. 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.
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