William DyceI feel like this AAR should exist somewhere on the internet where I can easily share it, so here goes: the tale of an 88-hour, 5-player Marathon-Trainworld-Deathworld game of Factorio we completed during the French lockdown in 2020 #game #aar 🧵
In the beginning it was simple. We did struggle to fend off the constant attacks, but after a few hours were at last able to enclose the entire perimeter of our factory with walls and manually-fed machine-gun turrets. Things looked good...
...but there was one problem: we were running out of iron! It was all going towards making bullets to fend of the aliens, so we couldn't make much scientific progress. We were stuck, and if we didn't find more iron soon we'd slowly run out and eventually be overwhelmed 😱
We began to scout the area, desperately. What we found were nests: endless nests. Nest too strong to consider tackling.
Far to the north though, on the other side of a forest, we at last found an iron deposit with no aliens living too close-by. Soon we'd threaded a railway track up to it, taking care to give the nests a very very wide berth.
No aliens would attack our little block-house as long as it wasn't generating any pollution, but we'd need to pollute to extract any iron 🤔 Our extraction operation would need defences, meaning a regular supply of bullets. But how to get them there?
The plan was simple: every train would leave our outpost, known as "Certain Death", with a cargo or ore. It would then return with a cargo of bullets, having refuelled and offloaded its ore at the main base.
We also experimented with some train-based anti-alien defences, but these proved not to be very cost-effective 😞
Disaster was averted, but we were effectively back to square one, endlessly turning ore into bullets to kill the aliens who were trying to stop us from mining ore: a perfect Capitalist Utopia.
Also our outpost had an electric life-line running along the train line back through alien-infested territory: defending the whole length of the track would be impossible, so it could be cut at any moment by a stray alien patrol!
Luckily our technology was progressing! This meant both armour-piercing rounds and the beginnings of petrochemical research: with flamethrowers and explosives we might at last be able to push back the alien menace 🔥
We tried at various times to clear out the aliens around Certain Death using small-arms fire, but the nests were too thick. I had a plan though: we'd extract crude oil and send it up by train - no refineries, no pipelines, no nonsense: just train carriages full of Black Gold and an open flame.
We very nearly lost our outpost before this plan came to fruition: even with belt-fed turrets it was taking 2 people working full-time firing armou-piercing bullets and throwing grenades just to hold back the swarm. We needed to regularly shut down the extractors to rest and repair (since the aliens only attack if they smell pollution).
It was a race to research Fluid Wagons so that the crude oil, piped from "Gas Town" to our main base, could be carried all the way to Certain Death by train.
If memory serves we felt that building a pipeline would be too risky: we'd need a lot of metal for pipes, and we'd need pumps at regular intervals to keep the pressure up. And we'd angering the nearby nests setting all of this up - we didn't have the manpower.
Flamethrower turrets are stupendously effective - they produce a lot of pollution, but their ability to kill aliens far outweighed their tendency to attract more of them. Soon we were upgrading the entirety of our defensive perimeter from bullets to napalm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSziMeScxuo#t=1m50s
Resident Evil Retribution ending scene
This allowed us to annex the area to the south, build a petrochemical plant, and begin manufacturing long-ranged rockets. With these, at last, we could out-shoot the nests' defences and clear them pretty consistently.
The rest, as they say, is history: many hours later Certain Death would be entirely enclosed within a larger perimeter wall, and its historic defences would be dismantled.
At this point in the game were filling acres with iron or copper smelters, and sending the resulting metal plates by trains to massive factories on the other side of the continent.
It's hard not to feel like the monster when you are, very clearly, the monster.
So that was Factorio! Thank you for coming to my TED talk 🙂 https://mastodon.social/@wilbefast/110404340516042598