It’s not a survival sim. Dear god if I had to do actual busywork like manage fatigue or hunger bars, in order to get to the fun part of building stuff.

There’s some combat involved in exploring, but at its core, the game is a management sim. It’s a giant spreadsheet dressed up as an FPS.

Balancing the numbers of the production lines, is the point. Can a factory still run if you don’t do that? Sure, but very inefficiently. If you’re running out of stuff faster than you can use it to build stuff, your factory isn’t big or efficient enough.

If you have time to kill before your factory produces what’s needed for the next milestone, you have time to increase capacity or load balance inputs and outputs.

If you’re leaving the game to run to achieve your goals instead of doing that while your existing machinery works through the milestones, the game probably isn’t for you. Doubly so if you need something to “press you to do things” because constructing automated factories while doing the math to maintain efficiency is somehow not its own reward for you.

And then they try to fix it by spending even more on the next title.

I don’t get it.

It has resulted in some fantastic, well-selling games, but it was never going to reach the universal “literally everyone is playing this” level they seem to keep thinking will happen “any second now”.

Sony?

Final Fantasy is owned by Square Enix.

I suspect Sony pays them very little for the timed exclusivity, still that does help.

But the mismanagement I’m referring to is less to do with the platform availability (though that doesn’t help) as it is with Squenixes habit of consistently over-estimating final sales, and thereby overspending on development and scope.

Squenix did it with Tomb Raider, they did it with Deux Ex, and then axed the franchises entirely because they “failed to meet sales projections”. They still sold like hell, but “underperformed” because Squenix had completely bonkers expectations, and thereby also spent way more than warranted.

The marketing budget for Shadow of the Tomb Raider was apparently more than a third of what they paid for development, and even the development cost was questionable.

The exact same pattern is happening with Final Fantasy, where they try to fix waning sales by going bigger and bigger, instead of more efficient and consistent. I hope they wise up before they axe FF, too.

Intergrade is an increbile game. I loved it.

Squenix is still missmanaging the shit out of their franchises, and I will be waiting for Rebirth to be discounted and on PC.

Waited for the PC version of Intergrade, and then a sale. It was absolutley fantastic IMO. But I will still do the same with Rebirth.

Squenix keeps trying to spend more to get more, and it never fucking works.

It’s always “our titles are performing below expectations and we will be forced to axe the project” when the whole reason things are going south is that they somehow thought there was a market to make hundreds of millions, then spend accordingly.

And when fans aren’t interested in buying one game three times for full price:

Rebirth didn’t need to be bigger and better than Intergrade. It just needed to be the same quality level (which was excellent, now with Rebirth its overshooting the sweet spot by a mile) and cost less than full-price.

What? Squenix overspending still didn’t result in proportianlly higher sales?

No way! But surely, next time it’ll work!

If youre unfamiliar, squenix keeps upping the budget when they get “hits” expecting the return to scale. Then when it doesn’t, they use it as en excuse to abandon the franchise.

They did it with Tomb Raider. They did it with the new Deus Ex games. I really really don’t want them to do it Final Fantasy, as I really enjoy the modern games.

Browse the community, perhaps. It’s a neat game.

I’m running a dedicated server for it, check out the relevant post if anyone is interested in joining.

Absolutely.

First basic, steel, and caterium factories are built.

Working on a quartz facility, next is going to be the first steps in processing oil.

Also still looking for more players.

I do have a construction planner tab open in my steam overlay.

The fact that steam now remembers the tabs you had on a game-by-game basis makes it extra useful. You can close the game, and it wont appear in other games, but start up Satisfactory, and all your plans are right there.

Also works with catwalks, walls and railings.

R to toggle build mode. In Zoop mode you can drag the mouse to build dozens of foundations, walls, fences, whatever, all in one go.

Doesn’t it do both? Quick switch toggles through all the items in a category, so it should go tier one single wall, tier one double wall, then tier two single wall, and tier two double wall.

You can also hold E to get a selection wheel with all options.

In some cases, it can actually be smart to underclock. It’s exponential in that direction too, meaning machines become more power-efficient the more you underclock them.

Yeah, and copying a machine using middle mouse doesn’t copy its configuration. That only works with blueprints.

It would be so neat to just point at a bunch of smelters and going, YOU’RE ALL SMELTING IRON.

Yeah, those would makes sense being together with power-poles, but they aren’t.

I tend to stick to just keep cables on the hotbar, pointing at walls, ceilings, or floors, will build a wall connector or pole, respectively.

Do wish there was a key to make it build a double wall connector.

Do you know about quick switching?

Tapping “E” will toggle between all the types of a constructable. On belts, for example, you toggle through the tiers.

So you can have just tier one belts on the hotbar, and to select tier two, three, etc. you’d just tap E the corresponding number of times after selecting “belt”. You can to get to a shitload of constructables really fast with just one hotbar.

This one is huge for programmable splitters, and pretty good on smart splitters, too.

Yes and no.

Pending means the sub hasn’t gone through to the home instance of the community. If you’re the first subscriber, this means the there will be no inbound federation bringing the content from that community to your instance.

If someone else on your instance has already successfully subbed, the federating is already occurring, and your instance will be receiving the activity as it comes in.

Your instance will then show it to you, both in your subscriptions and in general, even though the sub is pending.

If your sub stays pending, you may have to unsub and resub to get it to work. If no-one else on your instance has subbed either, then the activity will continue to not show up for as long as it is pending.

I don’t mind PDA most of the time. It’s cute when two people are completely lost in each other. I appreciate it when people bother being discreet, but even when they don’t, it’s usually not that invasive when people express themselves just between the two of them.

But then there’s the attention whores, playing it up for the crowds.

He’s cuddly as hell, and gets right up in the business of new and old humans without a care.

Even knows how to play fetch, given I use a toy that he likes to chase when thrown, more than he likes to chew it when caught.