This is something that gets glossed over a lot in the debate. "Writing to convey functional information" has a different set of success criteria than "Writing to convey emotion and shared human experience". One might still legitimately argue that knowing that a text is LLM-generated undermines confidence in the former (there's no guarantee that a coherent mind exists that can clarify ambiguities); but much _less_ so than for the latter.
People have been buying and sending Get Well and Happy Birthday cards for centuries, written by other people who don't give a shit about sharing their human experience with the receiver, and are just doing their jobs as professional greeting card writers.
It's _better_ that the illustrations were made by an illustrator, but it still would have been cool and front-page-worthy if that hadn't been the case.
Not really. AI slop is an instant turn-off for me. It's like hearing someone talk about a dream they had; it is egregiously boring for everyone except the person relating it.
This is a weird perspective. The middle planets can be approached in any order. And mods allow near-infinite variety - especially those that build on the platform of custom planets.
> there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.
Sounds to me like you are caught up in trying to chase optimization and bemoaning the fact that there's only one optimal strategy. Do a no trains run! Or a no bots run. Or a 1000x science modifier run, or Lazy Bastard, or Death World, or... there are plenty of constraints, both programmed-in or self-imposed, that can push you out of the "standard" optimal strategy.
The system for moving between planets is locked down. It is rockets or nothing. And that system is deliberately designed to defeat scaling. What really killed me was the message saying I was only allowed one of a specific key building on each planet. That was very anti-factorio imho. As I said above, as an indi developer moves forwards they add constraints to focus and guide progression. I simply do not want that. So I disabled all the planet stuff and play like it never existed.
That restriction is needed in some way to prevent that building being a way of teleporting stuff across the planet. They did relax this in 2.1 and allow you to build extensions to that building where you can add inserters and use belts/trains.
I'm going to restrict my commentary to the base game, both because you're deliberately ignoring the stuff in the Space Age expansion, and because I've not yet gotten to the new stuff in the expansion. While the following might sound like a "gotcha!", it isn't:
> I get bored whenever there is only one way to do a thing and no room for a player to invent alternatives.
There is only one way to process iron ore: put it in a furnace. There is no way for the player to invent alternatives. There are only three ways to make electricity, and two of them require you to boil water. There's no way for the player to invent alternatives. There are so many examples of places where stock Factorio permits you only one way to do a thing and prevents you from inventing alternatives.
> The system for moving between planets is locked down. ... And that system is deliberately designed to defeat scaling.
All of the systems for transporting materials are locked down... it's hand-transport, belts, bots, trains, or nothing. Hand-transport's godawful scaling is why you build everything else. Bots are deliberately designed to scale incredibly poorly and belts to scale pretty badly, which is why you're -as it seems like you'd say- forced to use trains to transport materials over very long distances.
> The tech tree become more rigid. Exploration must happen in a more specific order. And then the graphics department takes over, adding more and more objects until a previously huge and open world is a tightly cluttered mess.
That hasn't happened to Factorio in the thirteen years that Wubi has been working on it.
yes, one landing pad per planet a really obnoxious restriction I really hoped they'd remove in 2.1, but they did a half-measure instead. their rationale is uncharacteristically misguided, intended to prevent using rockets for on-planet logistics. first of all, it would be a cool option. second of all, that option would be impractical and very expensive both in terms of resources and UPS, so people would only use it in very niche scenarios. it's an overwhelmingly unpopular design decision.
I also dislike that they moved some base game tech to space and other planets to discourage extended stay on Nauvis. which again makes no sense because an extended stay on Nauvis itself makes no sense when each inner planet offers overwhelmingly powerful tech that renders every single assembly line you can make without leaving Nauvis utterly obsolete. not having cliff explosives before Vulcanus, which may not be the first planet you visit, is a minor but obnoxious inconvenience even if you do decide, deliberately or due to inexperience, to stay on Nauvis for a while. artillery being moved there is equally pointless -- the best defense in the game are landmines, and they can be still unlocked in less than an hour. I don't remember what else had got moved, but I do know that if I wanted to build a 10K SPM kilobase without ever going to space, I still could. and even if there weren't these hamfisted disincentives, the #1 advice for noobs would still be "go to space ASAP", because the incentives alone are more than enough.
that all being said, these are my very only gripes with Wube and I played the game for >1000 hours, 200 or so after the DLC came out. except for maybe not being able to choose the output lane for inserters, but that limitation is as old as the game itself, and I don't know whether it's a misguided design decision or simply a limitation of their extremely optimized belt system.
I don't think there's ever been a game I've been more satisfied with. for every game I ever played that seriously, my list of complaints had much more entries than <10 with Factorio. it exceeds even the old Blizzard's level of polish.
oh, neither of those two complaints apply to the base game. vanilla gameplay is still largely what it's been since pre-1.0. 2.0 changes like the simplified fluid mechanics imo had only positive impact on it.
> except for maybe not being able to choose the output lane for inserters, but that limitation is as old as the game itself, and I don't know whether it's a misguided design decision or simply a limitation of their extremely optimized belt system.
I think I might have some good news for you, this was added this summer with the extension of the “flip” mechanic
sadly, that only applies if the belt is perpendicular to the inserter, not parallel (i.e. you can pick left-right, not near-far), so it's only half-great. it addresses the major inconsistency with non-trivial belt configurations breaking when flipped rather than rotated. the minor inconvenience of assembly lines requiring a small lane-switching segment on their output belts once one lane is full still remains.
Output lane switching is possible - some mods (e.g. [1]) add it, as well as even wilder options. Not offering it in the base game is a deliberate choice.
As far as belt lane management goes, another interesting option - which is also present in the engine, but not used by default! - is lane splitters [2].
I think the only misleading part of this situation is your naive and self-centered definition of "trust", and the assumption that so many others think similarly enough that they need to be warned.
I trust a business to fulfill their obligations as stated in writing for the money paid. I do not trust them in any other way. Nobody should "trust" or depend on undefined behavior. Common sense can only ever be as common as you expect.
> expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and [another thing, which is not the same thing as the first thing but merely similar or related]
With the *arr stack, some of the trackers it uses to search for a torrent will present a captcha when Prowlerr queries it for a search. If you integrate FlareSolverr and set up Prowlerr to submit queries through it for the trackers that have CAPTCHAs, it won't get blocked by them.
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