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What game did you hate even after sinking a lot of time into it?
(media.piefed.social)
I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Factorio. I'm "only" 100 hours or so in. Don't like it one bit honestly but it's the main game my friend wants to play so I still just hang out doing whatever in it
What do you dislike about it?
It's just spreadsheets basically.
I get enough of that in my day to day life as a programmer; data flow, ratios, connecting the pipes, everything Factorio is just programming and spreadsheets.
Don't get me wrong, I say I hate it because it's not for me and drives me crazy. I recognize for others it's a great game and objectively quite well done.
There's a few ways to play this game, saying this as someone who has sunk nearly 1000 hours over the years.
The main bus strategy is one of the most popular, and it is highly efficient. However this sucks all the fun out of the game for me. It feels like just tacking on yet another section of the factory and everything is already mostly figured out for you. The grid strategy with trains surrounding each square is even worse.
If this is how you guys are playing and it isn't enjoyable, try just going full spaghetti. Half the fun for me is trying to squeeze in some new area and figuring out all the turns, underground belts and pipes, etc.
And the game really opens up when you get to Vulcanus. Most people pretty much abandon their Nauvis base other than for a few things like importing science.
Yeah, I always ended up doing custom bases for each resource, and then tying it all together with trains. It kept things fresh, because main bus designs absolutely suck the fun out of it. A properly organized and optimized train network is truly a marvel to behold. I always avoided going full grid with my trains, simply because I wanted to avoid the exact “micro factory inside of each square” problem you touched on.
I used a grid for my trains, but only to make blueprinting easier. Nothing worse than bringing two tracks from different parts of your base together, only to realize they can’t actually mate because the damned tracks are off by one square (one started on an odd square, another started on an even) and the tracks literally won’t let you bend them into place to meet in the middle. The grid was simply a standardized track length, so I knew my intersections would always meet up cleanly. Basically, I wanted to avoid this problem:
But I also haven’t touched Space Age at all, so maybe trains are an old meta by now.
Tracks not being able to touch have not been a problem for years, I think.
Try playing with the mod Rampant with extra water to make a more mazey map. Deathworld settings if you can/want. It changes the mentality away from spreadsheet megabase optimization minmaxxing to instead be tower defense "slap something together and get it done, soldier!".
Makes it way more enjoyable for me as it gets rid of the perfection mentality and beings it back to being a game again. Things dont need to be perfect, and if you try to do so the bugs will just punish your fiddling by smashing your base. You gotta do things well enough to work but at a pace fast enough to stay alive. Whole different game. Way more fun, imo.
I recently played a game with Rampant PLUS a mod called Bobs/Angels that makes the recipes more convoluted and hard. Was an amazing time. Here is the end base after 250 hrs in all its messy glory
24/7 there was hordes of bugs assaulting the walls with crazy abilities. If a train didn't pull up with bullets every few minutes the walls crumble