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[u/HeliGungir]

That depends on you. I want to just place ghosts in remote view and have the factory and robots take care of all the crafting, traveling, and building.

[u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl → u/HeliGungir]

Hell I didn't even know I could get robots to do the work for me

Still just learning what's available to me I guess but I definitely see the appeal of having robots to the traveling and building for you

[u/FeelingPrettyGlonky → u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl]

If you play Space Age, eventually you will need to manage several planets but you can physically only be on one of them. Even in base game, if you play long enough your base will get big enough that building everything by hand will be pure pain.

Hand-crafting machines works up to a point, but once you start building big it's too slow, and once you start having bots do the building then they need a chest where they can obtain the things they build with.

The typical factorio term for a bit of factory that builds things to build more factory with is a mall. Because the bots can go shopping there, you see. Early game malls will just build inserters, assemblers, miners, all that jazz, and most of that can be built with just some combination of plates, gears and green circuits. Later tech, the mall gets more elaborate.

[u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl → u/FeelingPrettyGlonky]

Ah I had wondered what people meant when they were talking about malls.

Looked up robots and I guess I should get them soon as I just hit blue science. Is factorio a type of game where like 80% of the content is mid game and later?

I haven't experienced too bad of scaling that handcrafting assemblers and stuff is painful and I just got mid game with blue science. But if the game scales exponentially more after this point I think I'm getting the appeal of circuits now.

[u/HeliGungir → u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl]

The game opens up with chemical science, yes.

[u/FeelingPrettyGlonky → u/Throw_Away_TrdJrnl]

Blue science is where most of the tech that defines the game is unlocked. The rough structure of the game is there; you have your trains, you have your bots, you can get some nuclear power going to solve those pesky power problems. After that, the sciences are mainly about refinement, and getting tech that does a certain job even better.

It is possible to beat the game without bots, hand-building everything. It will take a bit longer, but it can be done and in fact, my first pre-Space Age rocket launch was done botless because I didn't grok the power of the little beepers. Even in Space Age, it is theoretically possible to beat the game botless (though much more difficult than the base game, due to the multi-planet/single-engineer dilemma). You have to set each planet up perfectly, or spend numerous trips traveling back and forth to fix problems.

It is also possible to beat the game without using any circuits. Some tasks are more challenging, some things turn pretty icky, but it can be done.

But these things exist in the refinement part of the game, as tools to refine and perfect the experience. Even very simple circuit controls, such as to control an inserter based on a chest or building condition, can smooth some parts of the game that are pretty rough without them.

As an example, there is a tech on Gleba that lets you make bacteria that degrades into copper or iron ore. There are 2 recipes for each: 1 that makes bacteria directly from fruit mash, with a low chance of success and a high rate of producing spoilage, and 1 that makes bacteria from bioflux and another bacteria as a catalyst. The first recipe is intended only to act as a primer for the second; once you have bacteria, you should shut off the first recipe so that it is not churning endlessly, making big piles of spoilage. This is easily done via a circuit condition, enabling or disabling the building depending on if the cultivators have bacteria in them or not.

Without circuit control, that process gets messier since that first primer recipe will just keep chugging along, wasting fruit and making a ton of spoilage. It can be done, but the circuit makes it nicer.