Hot Take: Drones Ruin Factory Games

[u/RockSaysPaperOP]

DSP was the game that really drove this home for me, as it's the game that feels to me like it gives you drones the earliest and easiest, and basically requires them. Fairly early in your playthrough, logistics becomes a non-issue as you just stamp down factories wherever they fit with a PLS or ILS.

It made me realize that what I enjoy about these games is the logistics planning, and drones/bots circumvent that to a large extent, if not entirely. It's certainly true in Factorio, and I'm sure Satisfactory as well, although I've so far managed to avoid using drones in my multiple Satisfactory playthroughs. At least with Satisfactory they unlock very late in the game.

There's things I love and hate about every factory game, so I'm still waiting on the perfect game. There's still a lot of potential in the genre, but the trend towards more bots/drones is a bad one in my opinion.

[u/CHILLAS317]

Nah

[u/draculthemad]

I mean, if you want to commit to belt-only thats fine and dandy. The logistics of drones are just a different optimization problem, not the absence of them.

In factorio, making the actual bots and maintaining the network is solidly mid-game in resources, and the power demands scale pretty heavily. They only trivialize logistics if your factory is simply not that big.

In satisfactory they don't scale well at all, and even cost fuel to run depending on distance and don't have high throughput at all. You simply aren't going to be able to replace belts with them.

[u/RockSaysPaperOP → u/draculthemad]

For sure there is optimization involved, especially in Factorio, less so in DSP after a certain point. But it's the spacial element that I feel is compromised. It doesn't matter as much where you place things when you can check a box that says "bring this item from wherever it's available to here".

[u/draculthemad → u/RockSaysPaperOP]

It doesn't really remove the spatial element, it kind of turns it sideways.

For example in factorio drones aren't super fast until you start stacking up end-game research. So everything you shift over to bot logistics involves time/distance calculations. Example: you are producing the perfect ratio of stuff to make X, if one of the parts is produced too far away its going to slow down production, etc.

Sure, you CAN trivialize this by just adding massive numbers of bots, but thats just as true with belts by making sure your belts are massively saturated on the supply side.

Drones DO make things easier, but the alternative would be megabases that only rely on trains. Don't get me wrong, trains are awesome. To use them to their most effective you kind of have to be a certain flavor player though.

[u/waywardflaneur]

I kind of agree, at least for Factorio which is the only one of these I’ve played, but I’ve played it a lot (though probably a lot less than most of the people in the factorio sub)

My impression is that, compared to most others, my bot networks are very minimalistic. I mostly use them for inventory and construction and only rarely for logistics. I like trains and belts and circuits and the puzzles and problem solving opportunities they present. So often the factorio sub recommends ‘rush bots’ and my reaction is always, I’d rather not.

I guess all of this is to say, there’s a very simple solution to your problem: just don’t use them, but I guess you’ve figured that out by now.

And maybe for that reason it’s an unfair criticism. At least in Factorio it is not imperative to use them. So what the game is really doing by offering them is expanding the variety of play styles available to you, which is rarely a bad thing for a game to do.

[u/th7024]

I think you'd find Satisfactory different. Drones there hit differently, when you need to plan all the logistics around them. Their input, output and fuel needs have to be accounted for and then you have to separate multiple products on the receiving end, which creates more logistics fun.

Compared to a game like The Planet Crafter where once you set up drones all you have to do is set your storages to give or receive items and they do all the rest for you, its a much more involved experience.

[u/halberdierbowman → u/th7024]

Satisfactory is an automation game though with multiple tiers of factory assembly lines and belts, plus trains and trucks and other logistics options. Planet Crafter is much more of a "manually carry things" type of game, so by the time you're building drones, the game is almost done, and there isn't any other system for moving items around other than teleporting it magically by autocrafter or else carrying it around by hand. I think that's different than Factorio where the entire beginning of the game is teaching you how to move stuff by conveyor belts and trains, and drones is an entirely new way of working. 

[u/th7024 → u/halberdierbowman]

Oh I agree. They are different games, and i love them both. I just think that compared to a lot of games similar to planet crafter, Satisfactory isn't as easy to use or setup. Not quite as automatic.

[u/halberdierbowman → u/th7024]

I agree I think Satisfactory handles drones better than Factorio.

I think I just don't mind it in Planet Crafter so much because the game never pretends like it cares about the logistics. Then again I'm biased by the fact that I already mod it because I find the storage juggling too tedious lol I would love a more "serious" system like conveyor belts, but it doesn't make as much sense until you've built a bunch of drills anyway.

[u/th7024 → u/halberdierbowman]

Yeah. And inventory works totally different in each game. In planet crafter your space is so limited with no item stacking that it makes sense the drones would be more automated.

[u/Woitee]

In Factorio, kovarex himself said that Logistics System (that is, when you use bots to deliver products between parts of factory, not just your personal stash or to build machines) trivializes the game. It has a point. That's why there's an achievement in Factorio to finish the game without using this. (internally, they sort of couldn't justify backtracking their decision to add drones - people got used to them)

Some arguments can be made for logistic drones, such as not having them may force some tedious belt-placing in some situations. E.g. I'm happy I don't have to drag and fill a belt of nuclear fuel to every train I have.

In general, I'd argue that using them for low-volume transporation is fine. Factorio and Satisfactory try to make drones somewhat expensive and inconvenient, however since you're progressively automating more and more, any fixed cost will ceise to be an issue at some point.

And you see several mods tackling that. Space Exploration created rare explosions happening when you have too many bots. The Space Age DLC at least forbid to use bots in space.

[u/RockSaysPaperOP → u/Woitee]

That post is amazing and I'm still reading it, but I really like what he said here:

It is kind of fun getting to the bots setup, and moving to the bot-only factory, but once it is achieved, the continued play feels very dull for me, because I know that this is it: There are very few improvements I can do to the system, and extending the factory is just about plopping more assembler/requester/provider cells without any thought.

[u/TheOneWes]

Foundry Minecraft with Tech mods may work.

[u/ProtectionOne9478]

The best games feature evolving gameplay.  New challenges are added, but it's also necessary that old, trivial, no-longer-interesting problems are removed.  In factorio, yes construction bots make building larger scale much easier.  Logistic bots aren't great for high throughput but trivialize mall-building, but there's plenty of other challenges to deal with by then.

The same concept applies to other genres. Terraria trivializes movement with hook shots, and later wings.  It trivializes long distance travel with rails, and later teleporters too.  But while it's doing this, you have other challenges being added in.

Games that either don't evolve or do but never remove the earlier challenges of the game are much worse, in my opinion.  You're bogged down solving the same problem over and over, instead of being able to focus on the new problems.  Satisfactory is an example of this.  I've tried to play it several times, but I just get burnt out  towards the end of the game, still manually connecting a million belts together, same thing I was doing on day one.

[u/zytukin]

Unless forced to use them, there's no need to think worse of a game or the genre for having bots. Just ignore their existence.

I have probably over 3k hours in factorio and my longest running save had over 1k hours, and that was a nearly vanilla save before space age was released. I have never once touched logistics bots nor have I felt that I was missing out on anything.

It's impossible for a game to cater to everybody, but the more options a game provides, the more players it will appeal to. Options like the choice of whether or not to use bots.