Factorio nerd, Satisfactory ultra-nerd reporting in.
Clocked 20 hours, enough to get a gist of what kind of production line matrix the game requires, restarted with a much neater layout. AMA
tl;dr- i feel this game delivers way, way more than its price point even right now right at the start of EA. The UI/UX is clunky in a few ways, translation is questionable (to the point of being misinformative sometimes lol) but there is already a very, very solid 50-100h-per-run game in here and with obvious stuff to be added down the line. Basically I would venture to say that outside of some controls and performance jank, you could make an argument this feels like a retail release and stuff they're eventually going to add down the EA roadmap (combat, defense, etc) as expansions, even.
In a nutshell, it's a lot less obtuse on a micro-level vs Factorio
- single lane belts
- much easier to cross belts w/ elevation rather than specific underground parts
- way, WAY simpler sorter implementation
- power initially is just chucking stuff into thermal generators which == coal w/o water piping shenanigans
- much lower building count (i.e. not spamming 17 miners to fill a belt)
- no pipes, fluids all exist on belts although they can be stored in fluid-specific containers very compact
honestly, after playing Factorio forever, this is a plus- I wouldn't want to get into yet another game with a lot of busywork just getting things to WORK
On the flipside, it trades all the micro-complexity (in my opinion) a lot of macro-complexity in that there are a lot more different parallel production lines even from basic resources, which alongside lower building count actually further weakens the strength-of-concept of a main bus- both runs I've found that the best solution really was to arrange things in a way that they generally made sense with things reasonably close to where they wanted to go w/o crossing over half your base in the process. (This also is Satisfactory experience speaking where main buses are just a bad idea lol)
There's a much larger focus on power generation (hence the name) and I feel that the game generally isn't going to scale in the same way Factorio does, i.e. building count (honestly, it's really hard to considering how much Factorio is coded pedal-to-the-metal), and instead scale based on your existing stuff doing more and more. Instead, you get to literally physically fly to other planets and eventually other star systems, set up first sublight and then warp-drive networks to get stuff where they need to go... which uses a shit ton of power, again playing into the main concept of the game. This is again a simplification from Factorio trains which... just works so you can focus more on macro design.
That being said, a lot of mindsets of factorio and production line/automation games in general very strongly apply. Setting up a main mall so you spend less time building stuff to expand is still almost mandatory to make it anywhere in the game in a timely fashion
One thing that blew my mind is that the geometry for the entire solar system actually is accurate to what you see from the planet, and affects everything from solar panel activity to whether your railguns can shoot swarm sails into orbit or if they can't get sufficient pitch as the planet rotates. It's a simplified yet reasonably believable model of a solar system including planet rotations, orbits, etc.
Highly, highly recommend if you're into Factorio.
edit:
the way the square grid crushes itself as it approaches the poles is hilarious, frustrating and yet endearing all at the same time
Idk but Satisfactory is is slowly becoming like a Factorio 2 lol
strongly disagree, they aim in very different directions lol
