Factory Town (early access)

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Lorini
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Factory Town (early access)

Post by Lorini »

Here is my Steam review of Factory Town (I should have mentioned in the review that the dev makes weekly updates so he's very actively supporting the game)
I have 60+ hours in Factory Town and the more I play it the more I enjoy it. At first it seems like just another game where you process this into that, and of course Factorio is the most well known of those types of games. In Factory Town however, you start with procedurally generated tiles containing various raw resources. There are many resources you want to harvest in Factory Town such as grain, trees, stone, mana, cotton, and all sorts of other material. And yes you take that material and put it into a workshop or a grain mill or a lumber mill or a school. But in Factory Town you also need coins in order to pay for the processing and this is what is most appealing to me. It’s not just finding the resource, calculating the belt speed and then building accordingly, you also need to sell stuff to the workers who live in houses that will buy what you process if you manage things correctly. And speaking of belts, there are several ways to move goods around in Factory Town. There’s walking, wagons, boats, trains and probably more that I haven’t seen yet. It’s almost like a transportation game even, instead of only a resource processing game. And yes, there are actually little figures in the game that do the work for you at least until you replace them with conveyor belts and other automation. They don’t look as cute as the ones in Oxygen Not Included but they are at least there and I appreciate that. In my 60 hours, I’ve not gotten to the end game yet because I keep finding new ways of working with the game and then starting anew with a different plan.

I highly recommend this game to those who enjoy this subgenre of strategy games.
Oh and it's on sale right now, 25% off.
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LordMortis
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by LordMortis »

I keep swearing I will not do more EA games but your description scratches itches. I like builder/traders economy games and I like what factorio has done for automation game mechanics.

For others who might add this to their long list of EA games they swore they would buy no more of, 25% means $14.99 for 46 more hours as of this post.
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Lorini
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by Lorini »

I try very hard to only recommend games that I think some of you folks would really like. He's been very responsive on Discord as well.
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LordMortis
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by LordMortis »

Got as far as red coins and I think Ima let it cook it a bit more before I get back to it. Hopefully at least until they change right click from destroy to deselect. Having to escape or hit Z constantly and accidentally destroying stuff was a turn off. Maybe I get the hankering and learn how to map my own controls if I get the hankering and they haven't got made the change.

That said, I think there is more going on here already than there is in Foundation, even if Foundation is much prettier.
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

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-Coop
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Lorini
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by Lorini »

LordMortis wrote: Fri Oct 11, 2019 7:39 pm Got as far as red coins and I think Ima let it cook it a bit more before I get back to it. Hopefully at least until they change right click from destroy to deselect. Having to escape or hit Z constantly and accidentally destroying stuff was a turn off. Maybe I get the hankering and learn how to map my own controls if I get the hankering and they haven't got made the change.

That said, I think there is more going on here already than there is in Foundation, even if Foundation is much prettier.
You can change that yourself but you'll find that it won't work as right click is used to direct workers and other processes and right click can only do one or the other. You can however change the keys freely if you can find a combo that works for you. That change won't ever be made because of the design. I've gotten used to it over time.
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by naednek »

having a hard time figuring out the farm tile... says i need fertilizer... i bring it to the farm, still says i need fertizler.
hepcat - "I agree with Naednek"
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Lorini
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by Lorini »

I will be streaming this gameon Twitch as Mayveena at 4:00 PM Pacific time today. Hope you can make it :)
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by LordMortis »

Heh, by time you had posted this I was playing Foundation for the first time in a year. The Steam sale notifying me of the last update pulled me back in. The pace was much slower than I remember. I'm OK with that. I'm not far enough along to know any differences in the game from a year ago. The patch notes suggest it's become much more of a fleshed out organic city builder. It won't ever be production chain stuff like Factory Town.

What's new in Factory Town that got you posting again?
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Lorini
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by Lorini »

Here are the updates and the dev just put up a new build on the beta branch. I've been playing it pretty much every day since I posted originally but there didn't seem to be much interest in it so I didn't want to push.

I'm just starting the end game but it's tough for me to understand exactly what I need to do. I'll be watching some vids this weekend to see if I can figure it out. I'd like to use the Mana stuff but I don't really understand how to do so.
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Lorini
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by Lorini »

Well Lord Mortis, you'll be happy to know that right click cancel is up on the beta branch. You have to right click on an empty space, but it does work, just tested it.

The game has come a long way since the beginning of early access. He has tutorials and a campaign now. He's doing further work on the trains (best implementation of trains in a non train game that I've played) and is overhauling the not good mana system after that. Give it a shot again :)
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Re: Factory Town (early access)

Post by jztemple2 »

Coop just pointed out to me that there was a thread for this game, so I'm copying over what I posted in the Video Game Randomness thread for the sake of completeness.
I'm currently playing Factory Town (Steam link) which I got in the Sim Games sale which ends Monday on Steam. This is a factory builder game, in some ways like Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program or Satisfactory, but it is also a city or colony builder like a simple Banished or maybe Timberborn. Basically you harvest resources, put them through production and use them to upgrade your houses and other buildings so you can produce more. Since there is no starvation or combat there is no death spiral situations.

The twist is that instead of just having your cute little people hand-carry resources and products, you can also build conveyors and chutes, carts and trains, pipes and more. There are tons of different products to make and distribute. Check out the trailer for the game:



It was in Early Access in Steam for who knows how long and was at the 1.0 release last November. There haven't been any updates for almost three months which I think is more indicative of the maturity of the game rather than any abandonment by the devs.

There are eight Campaign missions which helps to get your feet wet in the game. There are also custom games which like Tropico is where you select the parameters and the map is auto generated. There is also a sandbox mode where you start off with an empty map.

I'm pass the Steam return playtime limit and I'm somewhat engaged by the game. I'll keep playing for awhile and see if I still like it after a few hours. If some other folks post an interest in the game I'll start a dedicated thread.
So I'm continuing on this game. At a basic level it's like Banished or that ilk, you collect resources and either give them directly to house or go through production. You need peeps to collect the resources and operate the factories and move stuff from one place to another. The only except are places like the market and the general store which distribute their wares automatically to houses in their range.

The difference here is that at each tech level there are only a certain number of houses that each hold a certain number of workers, so you need to use labor saving devices to improve efficiency of those carrying tasks. The easier one is a wood conveyor belt which moves stuff from one building to another. Then there is the chute, which moves stuff quicker but can only handle certain items. Beyond that are cloth conveyor belts which move faster. And I'm sure their are others I haven't seen yet

Alternatively there are other methods of moving. There are carts, which still use up one person (who I guess is assumed to be operating the cart). Carts can go anywhere a person can. They can carry up to four items instead of the just one a person carries. There are also mine carts that run on tracks but are more efficient. And then finally there are trains which carry even more. Another method is using pipes, either above or underground. Early on only water can be sent in pipes, but that changes later on.

This is a look at my village at the end of campaign mission two. I don't have much in the way of conveyor belts, but I'm running a number of carts around.
Enlarge Image

There are oodles of goods, well beyond simple things like food and timber and bricks. There are there no doubt so you can have all sorts of complicated production chains and transports. And that's when this game start being more like Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program, it becomes as much about production chains and processing and transport. It's a nice idea that works well as a more relaxing kind of game. As I've mentioned, there are no death spirals of overspending or not enough food or bad aliens attacking your village. It's all rather zen.

Questions?
My father said that anything is interesting if you bother to read about it - Michael C. Harrold
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