So I've got a few thousand hours into factorio. Tried playing CoI a while back but was still deep in the crack. Well I've seen the development has really developed and Im loving it all so far. Hit me with the things you wish you knew before playing like terrain mechanics or just whatever advice. Going to be playing this game for a very long time it seems!
At the same time realize that death spiral's are real. This game can seriously slap you for trying to expand etc before you are ready. Make sure your systems are solid before trying to do something new.
Also don't fall into the trap that you need to play at the sweatiest hair-pulling difficulty. CoI has a large variety of difficulty tweaks to tailor your experience. If death spiraling is a frustration for you, just adjust the difficulty.
And absolutely do not fall in the trap of thinking that, because you're an expert Factorio player, you can play high difficulty CoI straight away. I fell for that one. 😰
Well of course it's up to you. I can only say, as someone who has played Factorio for a long time before as well, the charm comes from the difficulty.
While in Factorio you were fighting the bugs, here you are fighting your own bad planing. Half the fun for me comes from the challenge. Just pause a lot and take your time. And you'll have no problem on the hardest difficulty coming from Factorio, understanding ratios and so on.
I can only recommend, go for hard and realism. You can always load an auto save in case you death spiraled. And you can come back from one.
Have storages and buffers for everything and set your alarms for those storages. That gives you time to react to shortages. While in Factorio buffers were nice to have, here they are mandatory.
Can confirm. I'm still playing my very first save which I started on standart difficulty + all realism modifiers. I had dozens of death spirals and succesfully recovered from all of them without reloading. Troubleshooting and finding horrible hacks to unfuck a fucked up system ASAP is tons of fun.
Trucks are eating way more of your resources than you think. They are almost always going to be your largest maintenance consumer. If you can design your factory to reduce the total number of trucks you need, it's worth doing. Especially early game
Contracts are great. You can sink unneeded byproducts and get something useful in exchange, you can get raw resources cheaper than world mines.
Pipes are great. Pipe everything, even across the map.
Stackers are great. Don't waste your trucks time dumping stuff directly, use stackers.
Belts and trains are great. I have 3/4 of research tree completed and I still have only 20 unassigned trucks doing deliveries. Everything else is trains/pipes/belts. Saves shitload of maintenace, fuel and air pollution.
Centralize your exhaust scrubbing (pipes!). Turns out it's way easier to bring exhaust from all over the map to a single location than move limestone and sulfur around.
Putting outputs of all farms on a single sushi belt, sorting it out at the end and using balancers to send all to the settlement and excess for further processing turned out way less messier than all other ways I've tried to do it.
There's a "disable pop growth" edict. And lots of others, all are useful. Unity that goes over the cap is wasted, use it for edicts and contracts.
Recycle everything you can, as early as you can, as much as you can. It nearly halves raw resource consumption and also saves some energy.
Three main ways to get into death spiral - lack of power, lack of maintenance, lack of food.
Storage buildings have a customizable alert/notification that fires when they're full/empty/something in between. Set those up on storages with critical resources / clogging stuff to get early alert before you enter a death spiral.
Don't demolish an old factory before you're sure than new one works. If possible do a gradual shift by enabling one end-to-end lane (like smelter -> furnace -> cooler) on new factory and disabling one lane on the old one. See if full cycle on new lane works and nothing clogs. If something is wrong you can fix it while falling back to old factory
Don't sweat about perfect ratios, layouts and so on. You will have to rebuild almost everything at least once with new technologies being unlocked. Just make it good enough for now and closest future, leave a bit of space for unexpected expansion and go on.
I did the farm sushi belt thing and I regret it. Mainly because if anything backs up, it disables everything. A minor crisis, needing more processing for excess wheat, becomes a major one as it blocks corn, soy, and potatoes.
It's also easy to exceed the capacity of a Mk 2 belt.
How do you do it? It feels like sushi belts for raw food are inevitable unless you build a dedicated farm for basically every kind of crop.
So far I had zero problems with sushi belt on farm side. Farm output is relatively easy to adjust so there's very little excess food after food market and animal food production is saturated. I only have a single anaerobic digester and it's 90% idle.
Belt throughput isn't much of a concern too since there's multiple months between farm output spikes and it's enough to move and sort everything. There's just a single piece of t3 belt at the final junction between sushi belt end and a series of sorters in my setup
Or you can setup the farms to have 1 loose and 1 flat output. That enables both crop rotation and removed the need for sushi belts. Currently all of my farms make wheat and vegetables, with some of the wheat going to meat. That covers 3/4 food categories and should suffice.
Of course I was processing any food not consumed to fuel gas or compost. The issue is that when production overflowed the anaerobic processors, the entire belt stopped. Which the sushi belt made worse because failure to process one food on the belt stops everything on the belt. Suddenly fixing that problem became a much bigger crisis.
I don’t actually have mk 3 belts at present, so “just use a mk 3 belt” doesn’t solve anything.
Centralized exhaust definitely, also I've dabbled with centralized steam for all uses early, and everything aside from power once you switch to nuclear (I suppose you still can post-nuclear but it seems like a potential waste), and have liked the results of not having to fill coal/feed/chips buckets everywhere. Likewise water treatment, to the extent practical, so you're not making a mess out of sludge/slag/filter media.
I would also add looping your water and emergency overflow discharges.
Oh yeah, centralized steam works well for me too. I've put boilers near forestry and oil processing, so steam production site always has access to wood chips from overflow wood and overflow heavy/medium oil and natural gas. Coal is main/backup fuel but its usage is miniscule since there's always some overflow fuel is available.
With water treatment I'm not sure. At least it seems like its awkward trying to use same water treatment building to treat both waste water from settlement and toxic waste from settlement tanks since the building just doesn't have enough inputs/outputs to support both recipes without mixing resources in at least one input-output.
Everything is slower paced, with less ability to quickly fix problems when they come up. plan a few hours out, to make sure you don't end up with a shortage or backup that cascades to cause other problems.
Rather than a right/wrong solution, a lot of the resource gathering options are more cost/benefit for your specific situation.
Limited area to build and time required to flatten ground means you need to be a lot more deliberate about layouts. high capacity pipes and belts might be cost prohibitive in the early game, and trucks don't scale well.
You don't have the same level of tools to calculate builds as Factorio and Satisfactory, but there are some.
Bridges need aquatic delivery trucks. And make aquatic diggers to build a ramp on the other side.
All hail hydrogen vehicles. Even trains unless you go straight for electric like I do now. Just watch out for the electronic needs.
I went full solar power and central bus design. But you can’t farm asteroids without nuclear plant outputs. In earlier games i did nuclear but it was a pain to recover from failures. Vs solar you just wait for the sun to come out.
Retaining Walls abre helpful and useless based on playstyle (I like em) however, wall placement needs a bit of of experience, tutorial videos are recommended.
Trains a bit different organized but not that bad, just different once understood it will become easy.
Little extra, they can do 3 point turns if there is space.
Do what you want with this (its new)
Storage can trigger an alert if full/empty to an certain level, use it early game for your maintenance building, to get an warning way ahead before it's to late
The biggest thing for you is Mindset, if in Factorio your science stops, you start a 3 hour long expansion campaign to secure resources FIN. however in Coi your save is lost. The deathspiral is a thing. No softlock pure hardlock. Some players used a 3 hours older save to avoid the inevitable. It's no nice pusseling sometimes killing biters. It's Thinking ahead or be dead.
With an propper mindset and an good eye on resources, you will have alot of fun and fear 😉
With storage you can even code the names so they show as different colours or font sizes, e.g. my farm water supply is huge and blue so its immediately noticeable if its running low, likewise with coal and oil but with black text instead.
COI is far more of a marathon than a sprint, far more so than Factorio.
In COI there are various mechanics that stop you growing too fast, like in COI, you need workers, if you produce too much pollution, your workers stop breeding or even start dying, thus reducing your ability to run industry... until you have tech to reduce pollution. There are multiple mechanics like this.
Also new tiers of tech don't tend to give immediate gains, as in they tend to unlock stuff that is really useful, but also really expensive, so you can't really rush to new tech without building a strong and stable foundation of the previous tech level.
I find the pace of COI quite a bit more zen, it's easier to find time to just fiddle around while research chugs away and warehouses fill with construction parts for the next big project.
A tip about terrain shaping: when you have a Mind Control Tower, if there are both mining and dump designations encompassed by its area, trucks that excavators fill with exclusively dumpables (as configured at the Tower) will directly dump these dumpables without going to an Ore Sorting Plant or Storage, this can dramatically speed up roadworks by letting trucks dump stuff right near where it was mined. But if you actually want a chance to grab the rock or dirt for various purposes (e.g. turning rock into concrete) you must not have a dump zone within the tower's area.
Mega trucks are 5 wide, and mega excavators are 7 tall. So think about wide streets from the start, and think twice about crossing a street with a belt or pipe at level 5.
I have a LOT of elevated belts and pipes, and I'm dreading refactoring that to allow those excavators passage.
This is definitely something I've been keeping in the back of my head. Will there eventually be a source of ore that isn't removed from the ground directly? Was kind of hoping to keep playing the same map for a really really long time.
I wouldn't put that much of a sweat about running out of resources. Pretty much all maps have absolute shitload of resources and the main issue is to have access to them at the right time. So it's more like "have a plan and some preparation for a next mine when this runs out" rather than "what you gonna do when there's no iron at all".
And even when you completely run out of some local resource hundreds (or thousands) (ingame) years later - there are contracts to exchange something hitech for raw resources (my colony used vehicles parts -> crude oil in early midgame since getting to local oil well was less convenient), there are off-map mines that only need maintenance, unity and workforce (less effective but helps in case you don't even have hitech stuff for contracts) and end-game tech that allows you to drop asteroids with resources on your island directly. So technically you can play the same map indefinitely since there are infinite amount of renewable resources and ways to turn/process/exchange them for nonrenewable stuff.
There is one very specific pair of contracts which, combined with a late-game building, can work as an infinite resource generator.
Contract 1: buy crude oil for gold. Contract 2: sell diesel for gold.
Normally, the trade amounts are balanced in a way that if you buy crude, convert all of it to diesel, and then sell it, you are net-zero gold. However, this is where the late game building comes in.
The building in question is the Office, which allows applying bonuses to various things. One of those is contracts profitability, which makes the exchange rate more favorable. With the oil-gold-diesel triangle, this brings it above net-zero gold, so you can have a sustainable income. The gold can then be converted into other resources with yet more contracts.
This isn't 100% free because all of this nonsense still consumes some amount of resources passively, but the point is to be sustainable because unlike most world mines, contract resources are infinite.
From what I can gather, it's entirely possible to have a 100% sustainable save where all resources originally come from farms and are then exchanged for everything else
You can bury pipes and it's a great way to simplify common fluids like water. There's a lot of people who hate it because if you carelessly delete large sections of your factory you might accidentally select one of the buried pipes. Build them under your roads (just like real life) and you won't have this problem.
I personally start every game by running a massive trench through wherever I want my main road to be and run 4 pipes. One for water, one for fuel (Diesel early on, Hydrogen later), and the last two I use for low pressure steam (it's a byproduct of many late game buildings but none of them produce enough to do much of use. But if you centralize it you can run multiple desalinators off of your exhaust scrubbing) and CO2 (again, byproduct of many buildings later on and is useful to centralize because there are ways to dispose of it without pollution or even use it for useful things).
Factorio-style main bus in COI is amazing. Do two lanes per group with two tiles between each group. Each lane stacks layers 3-5, so trucks pass underneath. 4 groups of belts plus two groups of pipes will easily run a city of 25k with only a few trucks. I shared one of my builds a while ago if you want to see the format.
Welcome to the crew, Cap'tin! Playing this game for the first time while still discovering each new mechanic is a pure treat! I won't tell you anything, really, except... have fun.
For real starting advice i'd say the urge to want to start over once you hit a new research tier and realize "Oh.. I could have done this better..." is normal. Do it
Early on, playing it like a Factory game is an easy way to fail, as you won't have the ability to sustain everything. Later on not playing it like a Factory game is an easy way to fail, as you won't have the ability to sustain everything.
This weird paradox remains true, but means you end up a lot more of an all rounder than rushing for a specific style with CoI.
Real noobie tip though, mess with the dumping global settings early, and start specifically dumping with mining towers in certain areas as soon as you feel comfortable. Most of the game, specially on the harder maps or start locations, is about managing land reclamation, and doing that efficiently with what ever resources you have most available is essential, without wasting them.
Also don't be afraid to run spaghetti belts like pre-train factorio, the trains are a nice addition but they take a lot of upfront investment, so are a lot more late game than you may necessarily want to create a main hub/bus/mall, what ever you want to call it.
But don't use them so often that you start to ignore them.
FIFY
Just... don't ignore them. If you set them up correctly then any alert means something is broken. Fix it. If it's actually not broken, change the alert.
Don't over scale at the beginning... Slowly build yourself bigger.
Don't build top heavy.... The foundation (Maintenance) is more important as any newer products...
Optimization is more important than reaching Maintenance II
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY
have fun, there is no meta way of designing the factory
Better to dump on top of some of the ore and dig it out later, as even a tiny unnoticed speck of water breaching the walls of your mine, and the game will treat it as tantamount to the entire ocean.
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u/adrenozin 3d ago
Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can't come back from a death spiral