Is this game more or less confusing than Satisfactory?

[Revalopod]

Which one is more confusing/complicated ?
Satisfactory or Factorio?

[Fel]

The complexity is not really in the same place in the two games.

In factorio it's more about figuring out a decent layout for your machines in order to be able to add more to increase production to everything as you grow.

Once you mastered the bases most of the recipes are pretty straight forward and the resources are all over the place for you to exploit.


Of course it's not that factorio doesn't have complexity, it has plenty of it for those that want to get the ratios right or to get into the advanced stuff like circuit logic.
But as a new player you can be satisfied with a factory that works even if it's far from efficient since you can just add more machines to make more of what you need instead.

[juliejayne]

If you like 1st person views, Satisfactory is for you.

If you prefer a better overview, Factorio wins hands down.

I find Factorio far less confusing, yet far more complex. But there is also DSP which sits between the 2.

[Xelephant]

You could try the demo and see if you like it.

[THE kilroy]

Originally posted by Xelephant:

You could try the demo and see if you like it.

Its a trap!

[a-bullet]

i choose factorio over satisfactory (got both), as it is easier in factorio to scale up, the map is very individual (depending on creation-settings) and it has bots you can use to build / remove stuff. oh, also the availability of defense-mechanics.
what i find somewhat interesting in satisfactory: you can unlock alternate recipes for automated crafting. but that comes with the work of remodeling half your base several times, if you want to make the most out of it.

[Dunhill]

Originally posted by Revalopod:

Which one is more confusing/complicated ?
Satisfactory or Factorio?

Factorio can get a lot more complicated than Satisfactory in pretty much every aspect. On a surface level, both games are very simple; you make resources go into a processing building, and then make them go to a different processing building.
Factorio allows for a lot more upscaling and has a lot bigger focus on logistics than Satisfactory, which is mostly why Factorio can be a lot more complex.
Logistics always seems like a secondary concern in both games, but there's more to Factorio logistics than there is to production and power generation. You are given a few extremely versatile tools that work well with each other, and with those tools you can create so much more different stuff than you could with production and power buildings combined.
There's a myriad of ways to arrange transportation around your base, and depending on how you chose to do it, your base will end up having extremely different layouts.
Pretty much all the Satisfactory's complexity comes from alternate recipes and its power system. Other than that, Satisfactory can't achieve much complexity, both because it simply lacks features and because upscaling is incredibly limited because of pc spec requirements.
If you're simply concerned with how to make things work, you can safely ignore 2/3 of the game and the complexity, and at that level, Satisfactory and Factorio are about equally complex. But realistically, I'd say Factorio is far more complex than Satisfactory is, at least in its current state.

[Ninja Zyborg]

yeah factorio is more complex but I gotta say, the mess of conveyors you can get going in satisfactory while still being pretty much 100% efficient with them is pretty funny.

[Jade]

I think it's significantly easier to read what's going on in Factorio.

Each entity in the game has a unique appearance that makes it stand out from the crowd as opposed to Satisfactory which has a very homogenous art style. I've watched hours of that game and even played a little bit and I found it difficult to tell at a glance which machines were which.

For example, the splitter and merger look nearly identical and its easy to mix them up or place them the wrong way. Since the game is in three-dimensions, it's easy to place things wrong due to perspective. Having that extra dimension I think harms the game more than it adds to it.

While Satisfactory is certainly the more "simple" game, I found it to be rather shallow. Mines have infinite resources. The enemy combat is very stale. That's not to say Factorio's isn't either, but I think it's even worse in Satisfactory. It really feels like a cheap add-on. There's no pollution to attract enemy waves. There's no enemy evolution to impose risk over time.

There's also strange game design choices such as having to grasp for foliage for a good hour of the game to power your generators, something that cannot be automated and only seeks to waste the player's time until they have the ability to mine coal.

I think a similar argument can be made for Factorio's burner machines. They literally exist to make electric machines and then thrown away.

[Morsk]

I don't think "confusing" is a real difference here. They are just video games and not too confusing in the end.

Satisfactory is a 3d building game like Valheim, except the combat is even worse than Valheim's, but you can make lots of conveyor belts. It is the only game where you can do this in First Person with nice graphics, so it has that going for it, but it doesn't play anything like Factorio.

I'm waiting for it to finish Early Access before trying it again. Its devs resisted copying convenience features from Factorio, but maybe they'll steal something from Dyson Sphere Program eventually, and it will be better to play it then than now.

[Aero182]

i play both games.
satisfactory needs a lot of work till it matches the complexity of factorio.
you don't even have biters to defend against, or circuits to mess around with, or blueprints in satisfactory.

it may never match, as factorio is much easier to put in new elements as you don't need to make 3D structures.