Factorio is a game in which you build and maintain factories.
In the spirit of most early city-building/simulation games, it's a top-down view over a player that runs around the surface of an alien planet, mines for resources, assembles parts, and automates industrial manufacturing.
The end goal (currently) is to build and launch rockets and satellites. The developers plan on extending that beyond just the scope of just a single planet surface, such as colonists coming there, or having you go underground, or having you go with the rocket to another planet or moon.
At one point, there was even a mod that had the player collecting and sending food and resources back to a home world via a portal, which gave the game a sense of purpose and connection to things other than just the player.
The game does have multiplayer, which is an incredible feat on its own since the game is designed to be hundreds if not thousands of small animations - the primary benefit of the art style. The sense of purpose is bolstered by other players joining in on the design process, however, there is no progress tracking system in place. When new players join a game that has already advanced through the first stages of the research tree, there's no easy way to see what has been done and what needs doing. Players spawn around the same area. There is no trade system between individual player inventories or owned property. There is the idea of property, in the sense of the game tracks who built what, but no rules as to who has access to what. There are no team nor competitive mechanics, and no trade systems between teams.
The thesis of the game is an exercise in exponential industrial consumerism. Aliens are hostile, as they should be, since you're senselessly polluting their environment. All resources are mined - nothing is sustainable other than solar power. The player is expected to gather resources at an increasing rate, process them into usable parts and materials, and consume that to create research.
Research is to improve the technology the player uses to mine and process resources. Far enough in, the automation becomes efficient enough to allow drones to do most of the material transport and construction for the player. Trains, a major component of the long-term game, allow for an interesting mini-game to help the player move resources to the central factory area from long distances. Research, however, is largely arbitrary and a massive time-sink. The ingredient requirements and ratios of manufacturing alone is enough to make the game interesting and time-consuming. Technology research should be a game mechanic, but not so demanding as to be the game's primary immediate goal.
Specifically, the grid system is misused. Single cells are capable of storing thousands of resources, including full-sized vehicles and structures. There is no spatial relationship at all. I would much prefer if at least the storage mechanics used something closer to 1:1 ratios; right now they average around 1:64. I even made a modification to the game that reduces the storage to around 1:4, as well as utilize another mod that adds storage and warehouses that are 9:32 and 36:64 (altered to be much lower, of course). The game has no grid (also known as entity) representation of items, so mods cannot yet be made to achieve 1:1 storage of resources.
Power production is messy. Electrical lines are short, on tall wooden or metal poles, and distribute power in a square around them. A better method would be to have electrical power assumed for all electricity-using entities within a certain distance of each other, and then only need to use poles to transport electricity over long distances.
Conveyors and water pumps don't use electricity, while just about everything else does. There's no wind turbine, no geothermal plants (no lava on an alien planet? ...come on), and no flowing water, which means no dams or water-wheels.
There is no production waste, and so no recycling methods are included either. Recycling even older technology would be beneficial to the game design.
Why would I use trains when conveyors are drastically cheaper to produce, and provide a constant flow instead of a large, periodic flux?
Impassable or non-flat terrain could add challenge to the game in the place of making research less arbitrarily time and resource-consuming. Also, more environmental events, such as dust-storms, rain storms, and fog could make the game more interesting and challenging.
In conclusion, the only reason that I took the time to study and analyze Factorio's design is because I enjoy the concept and the game greatly. All of the items I mentioned are possible, and most are, dare I say, easy to implement. The framework is present, with exception of item storage, to build Factorio up to a game that easily beats out the competition in an otherwise flooded market of computer games. If the game can be modded and made better, to the point where most players play with a collection of specific mods, the developers (which includes me, for my own games) need to seriously consider and implement mods as realized game mechanics.
I want to urge future game developers to strongly consider the thesis, or the message, of their games in the scope of how people perceive them. I perceive Factorio as a manifestation of the industrialization of our civilization. I strongly desire Factorio to become a game that is aware of its own message, and to give players the option to play in sustainable ways. In the future, I hope, such destructive resource exploitation is looked down on and laughed at as wildly naive and wasteful. We can utilize minerals and materials fully, we just have to learn how. Factorio can help!
