How to make a great automation game

Factorio just released version 2.1, its last major update. Or at least that's what they're saying now. Terraria has been releasing new "final" updates every other year since 2011, so only time will tell.

Factorio started the automation games genre, which is now well established with many great games. This is a great time to review the whole genre all at once, what works and what doesn't. And even Factorio got a few things wrong, as the genre was still new back then.

What makes a great automation game

In automation games, players spend time doing 5 things:

1. figuring out and automating new things
2. identifying bottlenecks
3. dealing with bottlenecks
4. waiting
5. bullshit

The best automation games are those where you do mostly 1, 2, and 3, and keep 4 and 5 to minimum.

Figuring out and automating new things

You want to build some new product you don't have yet, or are only making manually. Or you want to use some new more efficient process to get the same product, like foundry based steel instead of furnaces. Or you're setting up new logistics system like a rail network. Or a different combat system like a wall of flamethrower turrets.

This is the part all automation games get right. There's so much variety. Automation usually starts with belts carrying simple items, and machines doing 1-to-1 and 2-to-1 manufacturing, but then it goes into all kinds of crazy directions.

And whenever I think I've seen it all, I try another automation game or mod, and it turns out there's some completely new way to automate things! Dyson Sphere Program lets you solve electricity production by building a ring of solar panels around the equator, so half of them are always in the sun. On Cerys you produce plutonium by funneling cosmic ray particles with charged rods so they hit your stored uranium as many times as possible. On Rubia strong winds prevent belts and inserters from facing West, so you have to build your entire factory from West to East, throwing any excess into the wind.

A very important thing is that this is a one-way progression. Once something is automated, it stays automated without any further effort. The game should never ever break what you automated.

I can't think of a single game or a mod that got this part wrong, the range goes from fairly good to totally amazing.

Identifying bottlenecks

The second thing is identifying bottlenecks. You make some science packs, but you want to make more. You seem to be making enough green chips, but they're stuck on a slow belt and some of the destinations are not getting enough. Your factory is suffering from power outages, so you need more power. You need more space for your factory. You produce too much waste product, and for now you just dump it into a chest and haul it out manually, but you really need to address it properly.

Automation games have a mixed record here. Some bottlenecks are very easy to identify. Belt based designs make it especially simple - empty belt means you need to produce more, overfilled belt means you need to consume more. Or when producers are idle as belt is full, while consumer is idle as belt is empty, you need to increase belt throughput. That's one of the reasons belts are so popular - it's so easy to figure them out!

But often you aren't really given tools to figure things out. How many items per second or per minute a given building produces? Most games including Factorio 2.x now show you that on a tooltip but back in Factorio 1.x you had to do the math yourself. How many accumulators do you need? There's still nothing in game to tell you, you can either find out some ratios online, or add more when you run out of power.

Unfortunately there's a conflict between these two activities. Making processes more complex makes automating new things more exciting, but it can also make identifying bottlenecks more frustrating, and players should be able to stay in the game and figure things out, not feel forced to look for online tutorials.

For more exotic ways of production, you often see that things aren't working well enough, while having no good idea why. Why is my Gleba factory working sometimes, but then it just randomly dies and turns into a cesspit of spoilage? Nobody can tell. Why is my asteroid reprocessing loop getting stuck, while an identical system elsewhere keeps working perfectly? Who knows really. Why my wall can hold biter attack most times just fine, but then they break through once in a while? The game has no numbers to help you, so you just blindly tweak something and hope it's the right thing.

Dealing with bottlenecks

Once you've identified a bottleneck, you need to deal with it. Sometimes it's easy, just add a few machines, upgrade them to next tier, add more belts, and so on.

Sometimes you see that your current approach just isn't working, and you need to automate something new to really address the bottleneck. Maybe your belts just aren't good enough and you need to get some trains. Maybe there's no way to get enough blue chips on your new planet for all the rocket launches, and it's just easier to setup a space ship bringing them from another one where blue chips are abundant. Maybe your gun turrets aren't holding with highly evolved biters, and you'd rather add some flamethrowers to your walls instead of trying to double down on your current solution.

Sometimes you need to get creative. You identified that you need more space. Do you clear some biter nests and build a new wall? Make a landfill factory, then landfill a lake? Bring cliff explosives from Vulcanus to flatten an area that's unused for now as cliffs are making it too awkward to use? Or use a different design that's more space efficient, like adding speed beacons?

And most of the time, you just need to make a bigger version of what you already build, or copy it over a bunch of times.

This part needs careful balancing, and a lot of games do it quite poorly. If you make it too easy, just copy&paste whatever, and it just works, then you don't really have bottlenecks. But if you know what needs to be done, but it takes hours to actually do, it can take fun out of the game, and make it feel tedious.

This is where I feel Factorio got the balance wrong, making scaling up before construction bots just infuriating. Placing 1000 belts? Just run and drag, and it's done in seconds. Placing 100 assemblers? Run and drag, done in seconds. Placing power poles? Smart placement will make sure nothing is disconnected. But then you have to go through ridiculous and error prone tedium of connecting it all with inserters that takes the fun out of the game.

Then you finally unlock construction bots, and the whole problem is completely solved, but at the same time you also unlock logistics bots, which trivialize the game.

There are other operations you pretty much need construction bots for, like moving parts of your factory a bit because you didn't leave enough space, even though you keep telling yourself to leave more space over and over.

Most post-Factorio games got it right. You get equivalent of construction bots either immediately or very early, but logistics bots very late. And many popular mods like FasterStart give you a small number of personal construction robots either right away, or at least very early.

An interesting if simplistic example of an automation game is Shapez, where resources are infinite, machines are free, but there's just one thing that takes a special resource and that's copy&paste cost, so you can't just make your factory infinitely big with a few clicks.

And these are three things automation games should be about. Automating new things, identifying bottlenecks, dealing with bottlenecks, in a loop until you win. Unfortunately...

Waiting

A very common anti-pattern is forced waiting. All automation games want you to produce big amounts of something to progress, a lot of research packs, or a lot of machines, a lot of rocket launches, and so on.

It's quite easy to find yourself in a situation where you feel stuck - you can just wait a few hours doing nothing and then progression just happens, but there's not much you can even do until then that feels meaningful.

This is not the same as dealing with bottlenecks. For example Dyson Sphere Program has "Mission Accomplished!" tech that "wins" the game (you can of course continue as a sandbox). This requires a huge number of Universe Matrices, which are produced very slowly by your Dyson Sphere. There's no good way to speed it up, and whatever bottlenecks your factory has won't matter after you "win" the game, so the best strategy is to AFK for a few hours. Absolutely terrible. Or at least that was the case when I last played it, it's still an early access game, so they might have changed it by the time you're reading it.

Shapez is notorious for this, as every research requires a different item, many of which aren't used by anything afterwards, so you really don't have any incentive to scale things up. And as for doing the next item while you wait for current research, that research often unlocks a new building you need for the next item.

Compared to most other automation games, Factorio is really good at not doing that - technologies that would hard block you tend to be cheap or even unlock automatically with a trigger. The game is also complex enough that there's always a bunch of things you want to improve about your base while you wait. You could still wait for technologies that make your factory more efficient, but they don't require unique items you'll never need again, and they don't block you from progressing.

A few Factorio mods like Cerys got this wrong, and force you to wait for some item like a huge number of blue chips to progress, and Cerys prevents scaling up until very far down the tech tree. Cerys is overall a great mod, but it could use some numbers being tweaked a bit. At least you can remote view into another planet and fix things there while you wait.

Bullshit

And finally, the last category, bullshit - everything that doesn't make your factory better. Especially pointless grind, but there's a few other types of bullshit too. There are games where grind is acceptable, but automation games are not it.

Factorio was clearly designed before it was understood, and it still has two main bullshit grind activities - fixing resource patch depletion, and dealing with biter nest expansion after you clear them up.

And they know perfectly well that it's bullshit. You can litearlly disable biter expansion on campaign start, it's disabled on some presets, and most new world (Vulcanus, Fulgora, Aquilo, space asteroids) don't have any equivalent of biter expansion.

They also know perfectly well that resource patch depletion is bullshit. Space Age made resource patches deplete at 50% speed with common big mining drills (down to only 8% with legendary), and most of all it made mining productivity techs dramatically cheaper.

In Factorio 1.x, a level of mining productivity costs about 940k in minable resources, and 1300k oil.

In Factorio 2.x Space Age, a level of mining productivity costs, between foundries, electromagnetic plants, biolabs, and cheap mining drills, costs about 18k in minable resources, 33k oil, and a bit of rocket launch capacity to send calcite over (it could be zero if you mine it in space).

These changes kept resource depletion in the game, but by mid game it's about 100x less of a problem than in Factorio 1.x. Because they know perfectly well that it was bullshit, but they couldn't quite make themselves just remove it.

Satisfactory is full of grind early game as well (again, I played it during early access). You're going to spend more time gathering fuel and bringing it to power plants than actually automating for very very long time.

Dyson Sphere Project has notable non-grindy type of bullshit - flying between planets. The whole space flight system is highly unintuitive and you can find yourself randomly stranded in space if you didn't quite hit the target, forcing you to load the save.

Most automation games unfortunately have some kind of bullshit. Cut it all out.

Summary

And that's how you can make a great automation game or mod. Have a lot of fun things to automate, provide good tools to identify bottlenecks, don't make fixing bottlenecks too tedious, cut waiting and bullshit to minimum.

Crusader Kings 3 landless play or Paradox games are not always easy even when OP

Paradox games are really complicated, but once you get through all the complexity and know what are the right options and what to ignore, they're normally very easy. Experienced players sometimes do silly things like "Hisn Kayfa very hard no allies no loans" in EU4 to get some kind of a challenge.

But recently I had a chance to play a total noob game.

I had ridiculous amount of hours in CK2, and I played CK3 a bit, but it never managed to pull me in the way CK2 did. It did some things better, some things worse, UI and map were a huge downgrade, overall I just didn't care, and I have limited gaming time.

Even the long overdue map expansion to China and Japan weren't all that impressive, as there are already CK2 mods that do that, which I played a lot.

But at some point they released ability to play as a landless character, and I had to give it a go. Well, at soon as I found some time, which was about a year and many nerfs later.

Robin Hood

All my attempts were custom characters in the earliest start date.

My first try was going in basically blind. I created a custom Anglo-Saxon Catholic Robin Hood character, way over points limit, as I had no idea what I was doing so I thought I'd make it easy for myself.

As it turns out, going over point limit was absolutely unnecessary, but I'll get to it later.

You can choose your camp purpose, so I decided to be a bandit, and I was wandering around, doing contracts, earning some money, and it mostly felt like I've been getting absolutely nowhere. Years passed, and I was still having my tiny bandit band with shitty characters, modest amounts of gold, and very little prestige to show for it.

The only interesting thing I managed to do in all this time was getting a good wife. At first I wanted to use character finder to search for some unmarried woman with good traits and romance her. But CK3 character finder is just shit compared to CK2's. You can't filter by age range other than "adult vs not adult", so most of the matches were some automatically generated grandmas. You also can't filter or sort by distance. There's "diplomatic range" filter, but it seems to have nothing to do with romance scheme range. The game wouldn't let me start a scheme unless I was basically in the same county, and I'd need to stay close to it for a year.

I tried to do this anyway with all my landless characters - find some lowborn woman with good traits, move my camp nearby, and start a romance scheme. But this really isn't the way to go. Game doesn't generate that many unmarried women with good traits early, you probably don't have skills for romance scheme early, and it ties you to the same place for a year or two. It sort of works, but it just isn't great. And I had multiple targets just die on me to a random event bufore my schmeme completed. There's probably some events in the game to cull random landless AI characters to keep game performance acceptable, and my potential wives kept dying to it.

The easiest way to get decent wife as landless character is to just get "rescue a fair subject" contract (justiciar category), which is very easy, and then you can just ask that rescued woman (or presumably a man) to stay with you. This is what I ended up doing mostly.

You can also just visit all taverns, and they have decent chance of getting some kind of "seductress" character you can bribe with some booze to join your camp. The downside here is that they are often quite old (but you can still get them to join for traits).

You can absolutely do the romance scheme, or even elope with rulers' wives, after you get your skills and lifestyle perks a lot higher, which isn't that hard, it's just going to take time.

Anyway, as Robin Hood, I met some good traits wild woman by a random event, did a prowess check, and we ended up getting married.

Contract Types

There's a lot of contracts you can get but they belong in mainly there categories:

• scheme contract - you and 5 of your agents start a scheme, which needs some time before you can roll dice if you win
• transport contract - go to another province, get reward
• skill check contract - go somewhere, do a skill check, if you win, you get a reward

There are so many problems with what I was doing:

First, most contracts are schemes contracts, so I was mainly taking them, and they are absolutely terrible this early. They take extremely long time, so I could only do a couple per year, and they can fail anyway.

Second, contracts have tiers, 1 (offered by counts and below), 2 (offered by dukes), and 3 (offered by kings and above). Rewards for tier 1 contracts are relatively poor, and you only get access to higher tiers if you have enough prestige. How to get prestige? By doing contracts. So if you're stuck doing tier 1 scheme contracts, you'll die of old age before you get access to good contracts.

Interestingly, rewards aren't even that bad by standards of a landed ruler - you can easily get higher income than a king by running a camp poorly and doing really bad tier 1 contracts. But costs are completely unreasonable. Recruiting a random mediocre character costs 100-150 gold. You can buy a whole county building for less. It's baffling that they didn't scale both income and expenses by 5x or 10x less to get them more in line with the rest of the game.

What you want is to do as many contracts as you can, and who cares if you fail. Skill check contracts are best for it, as they are super fast. You probably don't have great traits at this point, and you don't have great agents, but failing a few contracts doesn't really matter.

The next best are transport contracts. You just need to go to some different county, and free money and prestige. The main downside is that you don't know where you're supposed to travel until after you accept the contract, and reward has no relation with distance, so sometimes it's too far and not worth it. But a few times I had travel contract to "travel" to the very place I already was at (but contract giver wasn't). Free gold for 0 days.

I'll get to correct meta later, but at this point I had no idea.

Benjamin Shapiro and the Medieval healthcare system

I ended the Robin Hood playthrough early, and I checked some youtube videos and reddit guides. There are problems with checking what people say, and I'll get to it. But I was getting nowhere, and being a bandit had big downsides if you want to become landed later, so I thought I might as well restart and do things properly.

I wanted to try another meme character, so I made an Ashkenazi Rabbinic Genius character, starting in Venice, and tried scholars camp purpose. I thought I'd be spreading some Judaism maybe.

Anyway, Ben got Consumption before even reaching his first contract. As an established ruler it doesn't matter too much except for some lower health, but as a landless adventurer, it prevents you from visiting any settlements, gathering provisions, and doing basically anything else to make progress.

I was waiting for it to pass or something, but it didn't for years, so I eventually just gave up. I guess God didn't want me to play Ben Shapiro just yet.

This is a pretty shit game design. There's probably some ways to deal with consumption and other diseases, but if it happens so early, you might just as well restart.

Also Ben Shapiro losing to bad healthcare system, the irony.

Marco Polo

OK, so another start. Catholic Italian Marco Polo in Venice, the goal is to travel to China and come back.

At this point I was actually getting the meta a bit. I was avoiding slow scheme contracts, taking skill check contracts, and transport contracts, and I was slowly moving towards China.

I got annoyingy cancelled by the Abbasid Caliph for no reason, which meant I wouldn't be able to get any contracts there. I'm not sure if there are any downsides of just passing through, but either way I turned North towards Central Asia.

I was slowly meandering towards China, and I took a skill check contract to kill some bandit. I had quite high 26 prowess at this point, so I just went for the fastest option to duel him, and then I suddenly died, and got a game over. Well, that wasn't expected at all. My opponent also had a fairly high 24 prowess, and somehow the RNG favored him.

Duels are one of the CK3 features I really dislike. They depend on prowess and traits of both characters and some RNG, which is fine, but the game won't tell you "you have % chance to win / lose / die" like it does with almost all other events. You need to alt tab to google sheets to get that information. If consequences of not knowing was some minor prestige reward then whatever, but this is literally life or death situation for the campaign, and it should not be obscured this way.

Of course in the future I'd know to only select this option if I had way higher prowess, and otherwise take one of the other options.

Contract meta

Anyway, here's the landless contract meta as I eventually figured it out:

The most important thing is to stack all travel speed modifiers - from lifestyle traits, camp upgrades, and good camp officers. Then get some travel safety modifiers. They're not as important as speed, as you can avoid dangerous places. There's customize route option, and you should absolutely take it - it can make your travel faster (default planner really hates taking sea ways even when they're a lot faster), and safer (by going around dangerous areas). Eventually you'll need custom routes to hit "points of interest" too, I'll get to that.

Then as you're upgrading travel speed, just take all the travel contracts you can. If they're really inconvenient, you can keep them open for very long time, they don't seem to expire for years, and they don't cost much when cancelled.

With all the speed upgrades you'll be moving really quickly and collecting rewards all the time.

Whenever there's no good contract available, first ask town crier for more contracts. Especially transport contracts are great. If town crier doesn't have transport contract as an option, you can either pick some other category, or go to another town and reroll (there's a timer until you can ask again, so don't ask if you don't want to take any contracts). I'm not completely sure which other contract types for town crier to pick. Justiciar and stewardship tend to have some quick skill checks, diplomatic and intrigue tend to be slow schemes.

Criminal contracts are a bit of an all or nothing thing. You can do them and get a lot of very good rewards, but you lock yourself out of many decisions like buying land, at least until you clear your reputation. So either go all in, or don't do them at all. Doing them only sometimes is probably the worst option.

Stacking travel modifiers is useful for all other contract types as well, not just travel contracts. You'll get more high tire contracts of all kinds, you'll get more points of interest, and you'll be able to just get where you want to be a lot faster, and with a lot fewer bad events on the way.

And if you don't see contracts you like, just keep on moving. Between town crier and just moving on, you will find many good high tier contracts eventually (if your prestige is high enough for higher tiers).

Once you get enough prestige and unlock tier 3 contracts, you should go somewhere where there's a lot of king tier rulers close together like India. Many parts of the map (like Europe and the Middle East) have only very few big king/emperor tier rulers, and a lot of vassal and independent counts and dukes, who are somewhat lot less profitable. But that's not something to worry about early game, and even tier 2 contracts are mostly fine.

For skill check contracts, just pay to hire any good characters. You can use Scout for Talent travel option to get more events for them cheaply, and you can hire some for settlements (but they're more expensive). Don't worry if you fail (other than literally dying or getting wounded) if all it costs you is some prestige and opinion. Just keep traveling super fast and doing more contracts. If someone's bad at everything, don't bother hiring them.

For scheme contracts, they're not normally worth it as they take too long. However, there are multiple upgrades (lifestyle traits and camp upgrades) that let you do them faster. Unfortunately each such upgrade only applies to a specific kind of a scheme. Once you gathered a lot of good characters, and some faster scheme upgrades, these contracts get pretty good. In any case, go for as fast as possible option, don't spend twice the time to go from 80% to 100%.

Benjamin Shapiro the second

I could have reloaded Marco Polo autosave, but now that I finally figured out how to play, I wanted to give Ben Shapiro another go.

This was a start under 400 point limit, and it really didn't matter. If you visit every tavern and every training grounds on the way, you'll get insane skills in no time. I was the highest skilled character in the game less than 10 years in, and that includes Alfred the Great of Wessex, which the game sets up with insane starting skills.

It's especially easy to get ridiculous amount of prowess, by buying weapons and armor (I got +8 and +5, but there are better) at any random town market, prowess training at any castle training grounds (+6 before the option stops appearing), and blademaster training (+12 total, it starts showing up after flat prowess bonus ends). I started with very low prowess intellectual character, and had 55 prowess in less than twenty years, probably higher than anyone in the world, without even really trying to focus on that. Other stats increased a lot too, but somehow not quick as fast as prowess.

Somehow I managed to get over -100% stress gain, so all the events where I'd be getting stress were giving me 0 stress. I guess facts didn't care about my feelings.

You can farm prestige by doing a lot of contracts quickly, basically via travel speed.

You can farm piety by visiting every church on the way and doing tiny donation, at stupidly good exchange rates.

Sometime during this playthrough I discovered that you can visit "points of interest" to get rewards, especially lifestyle points. The UI for it is atrociously poor, but this lets you unlock all perks pretty quickly. This isn't infinitely farmable, as you only get a reward the first time for each point of interest, and it really encourages you to travel all over the map instead of staying in one area.

You can get some more traits and skills from university visits and pilgrimages too - similar to what a ruler would have access to, but a lot cheaper.

I suspect there are ways to improve other traits even further, as I've seen some screenshots with well over 300 skill sum total characters, my Ben Shapiro has "only" 175 total and 23 lifestyle perks), unless that got nerfed somehow.

But since this was already going so great I decided to look for options to get some land.

Getting landed and the nerfs

There are many ways to get landed. The boring one is to inherit something, but that only applies if you're a former ruler who temporarily lose their title, and managed to murder scheme his way back to the throne. Or if you managed to marry some royal in line of succession. It doesn't really apply here if we want to play a custom character.

You can buy land. Becoming a count is cheap, and it's not too hard to convince a king or a duke somewhere to sell you some. There are also events where you can get a county as a reward for joining someone's war. But who wants to be just a mere count?

Buying a duchy is a lot more expensive (2600 gold instead of 400 from what I've seen), and kings take a lot more convincing, but it's nothing too excessive.

You can convert your adventurer camp into a nomad camp, and seize some pastureland county somewhere, then continue horde gameplay.

There are also some ways to buy estates in administrative state, but I have no idea how that works exactly.

But what I really wanted is to conquer something. I've seen some video guide of people getting ridiculous armies as adventurers super easily - which cost nothing except provisions to run.

So I tried to hire some men at arms, and join some wars. But wait a moment, why am I not getting results anything close to what those youtubers were getting? My soldier count is tiny, they can barely fights, can't siege, and even if I win, rewards are miserably low?

Let's check 1.13.2 patch notes:

Reduced knight limit from Roaring Campfire significantly.

Removed the MAA max size modifiers from excellent aptitude camp officers.

Reduced adventurer government knight limit by 8 (10 -> 2)

Reduced the “Max MAA regiment limit” that you could get from your adventurer camp by 4 (across multiple buildings).

Reduced the “Max MAA regiment size” that you could get from your adventurer camp by 5 (across multiple buildings).

Reduced the individual MAA max size modifiers from the Baggage Train camp building by 2 (3 -> 1).

Added an upper limit to gold reward from the “Stand with Us” contract of 1 yearly income of the employer and their current gold.

All together that's like a 80%-ish nerf to amount of soldiers you can have, and much lower rewards on top of it.

This really surprised me. They didn't really nerf travel speed, skill gain, lifestyle points gain, but they applied heavy nerf hammer to transitioning out of landless adventurer back into landed.

Actually they also reduced gold, prestige, and provisions rewards a bit:

General contract gold rewards decreased by about ~30%

Travel contract gold rewards decreased by about ~25%

Crime contract gold rewards decreased by about ~16%

etc.

But this isn't anywhere close to the massive nerf hammer MAAs got, as you can just do more contracts by travel speed.

DLC Nerf Cycle

This isn't the first time it happened. Paradox often releases a DLC, it's stupidly OP, everyone has some fun, and then the next patch they nerf it into the ground. Usually it's some some specific feature getting nerfs, not whole way of playing.

The closest similar case I can think of were CK2 Republics, which were completely broken OP on release, then two months later they nerfed them with trade post limit, demense size nerfs, removing best plots etc.

I'm not saying nerfs are wrong, but they nerfed a very specific part of adventurer gameplay (being a mercenary and getting land), and not really other things (fast travel, max skills, easy provisions, gold, prestige, piety, and lifestyle points), and they made all the old guides break.

Guides and meta

And it brings me to the last point. I'm still playing this basically blind. All the guides and videos were created back when the feature was released. As far as I can tell, nobody bothered to release new ones post-nerfs, and the game doesn't really tell you anything. Paradox games never do.

What I'm saying here isn't even any meta, I only played it a few times, figured out what still works and what doesn't anymore, but I'm sure I missed a lot too.

Men at arms cost provisions per province moved, and since the meta build is all about stacking up travel speed, this amounts to very high provision cost per year. Apparently there are ways to stack provision cost to -100%, then it doesn't apply, but there still doesn't seem to be much point in having a small army as landless. They're just a cost center without any benefit. Go big or skip the army.

I suspect the right call is to save a lot of money (like 10k+), then only hire man at arms last minute before going landed, after you have all your camp upgrades for a bigger army already built. If rewards from joining wars got nerfed so hard, there's no point joining wars while adventuring.

One thing that seem especially nerfed is getting the Conqueror trait, to move from landless to conquering spree. It requires having a huge army and winning a lot of wars, which used to be pretty easy pre-nerfs. After nerfs, it probably needs alt tabbing to google sheets.