I'd love to see their take on something like Universal Paperclips or Dyson Sphere. So many homages have been built to Factorio; they could return the favor.
I'm thinking they may get inspired by some of the mods out there; there's a mod to go into space (build a factory inside of a spaceship) and land on other planets, for example. They could reach out to those and buy it, iirc that's what happened with some of the KSP features and addons as well.
I wouldn't mind if they'd do something big with the enemies / monsters. Maybe introduce a new antagonist entirely.
Or a whole new class of sea and/or undersea base buildings, with unique resources that have to be launched up to the surface for your main base to process.
Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
I've always thought that factorio should have bulk transports, things that arrive after multi-hour trips. There are a handful of mods that tie the character into an external economy. Rather than the survival scenario, I think Factorio 2.0 could be based on taskings surrounding the arrival/departure of transports. Rather than "build the rocket" the task could be "have 200k of blue circuits ready for the arrival of a transport in X days." Changing up the tasking would allow for truly different factories to be developed. I'd love it if the game suddenly told me that I needed to switch from one end product to another, any excuse to delete an entire factory and build a new one optimized for a different goal.
I like this idea. imo the core of factorio is conquering scale. the base game is already very polished. at this point I just want more stuff to do post launch. taking the scale up another order of magnitude (huge ships, point to point air transport for latency sensitive goods, etc.). would also provide the opportunity to expand combat a bit to provide automated defenses for far away shipments. I want my robot navy, now shut up and take my money!
From the blog post:
> One of the steps we have already taken is hiring a concept artist, he might be known to you under the nick of Earendel
Earendel's list of mods for those curious: https://mods.factorio.com/user/Earendel
> Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
There's one thing that could work with this idea that I haven't seen in any game so far. You've built this complex factory and have it running like clockwork. The game should be able to observe it - to notice that the flow of inputs, intermediate products and outputs has been stable (even if cyclic, because you built a solar-powered factory or have some intermittent backpressure on the conveyors) - and then abstract away your factory, simulate its matter balance via closed-form mathematical functions closely approximating the steady-state behavior. This way, you could have many complex factories running nearly for free, while your attention is focused elsewhere.
Factorio itself, in its current form, may be a tad too complex for this idea to work (at the very least, there's extra complexity in managing finite resource deposits), but I think it's doable in principle. But for some reason, as far as I'm aware, nobody ever tried it.
(Even in Kerbal Space Program, the closed-form math only applies to stable orbits; internal state is not processed. There are mods that try to simulate e.g. life support or power flow for such craft traveling "on rails", but as far as I know, they all do that by running numerical simulations and have problems with error at high time accelerations - whereas my idea would be to approximate a continuous function of time for relevant values, and use it instead of numerical integration.)
I don't think you can retrofit an efficient closed-form model onto an existing simulation; it has to be designed in from the beginning. I suspect that's a big part of why KSP only simulates two-body conic section orbits. They knew they wanted to include time acceleration as a gameplay feature, and so they limited the simulation to closed-form orbits for which that could be implemented stably and reliably.
In Factorio, a well-designed factory can be approximated by its steady-state behavior. But part of the reason it's an interesting and challenging game is that it's not always obvious how well a factory satisfies that criterion. You can have bottlenecks that only show up in unexpected conditions, or systems whose throughput depends on the details of inserter positioning, or feedback loops that switch from controlled negative feedback to runaway positive feedback when some parameter crosses a threshold.
Given how easy it is for these kinds of simulations to accidentally end up being NP-complete or even Turing-complete, I'm very skeptical of the idea that an algorithm could make reliable decisions about when it's safe to "optimize" an entire factory without drastically changing its behavior. I think any game simple enough to make that tractable would effectively be an entirely different genre. (I would be pleased to be proven wrong, though!)
That said, you could certainly optimize the simulation of individual components that are themselves simple enough to not have chaotic behavior. In fact, Factorio does some of this already. For example, long transport belts are simulated by tracking the position of items relative to the belt, rather than their actual coordinates. So an item's "movement" isn't simulated on every frame; only when it reaches the end of the belt, or gets picked up by something, or if you're actually looking at it. (https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-176)
Imho Factorio's next step should be into 3d. I don't mean a 3d game render, I mean factories biuld on different planes, or even a spherical planet. There is a game out there (I shall not name) that is claiming to be a multi-planet 3d version of factorio. People do want more.
I like Kerbal because of the scale of the systems that are possible, and because of the challenge of planning out the logistics of a cross-solar-system flight. Setting up a scientific "colony" on a far flung planet is just a cool thing. I certainly don't come to Kerbal for its flight mechanics - not saying they're bad for what they are. It's just that the game's physics are built around the requirements of time accel.
Also, I've heard the broad strokes of that story about Squad before and always wished I knew the specifics. Getting an ad agency to financially support a video game to get an employee to stay - that's gotta be an interesting story.
He explained that when you are making airplanes in MS Flight Sim, the aerodynamics is manually defined, is a pain in the ass to define, require a ton of manual labor, and not necessarily will work as expected.
He said then his dream was a game that was like MS Flight Sim, except players would be able to design airplanes in whatever way they wanted, and the game would calculate all aerodynamics for them.
Any particular reason you don't want to name it? I mean, I know what it is, and I've sunk 12 hours into it so far. While it still has a lot of polish left to do (It's only been in Early Access for two weeks!), it shows a lot of promise. I like it because it allows me to stack belts to more than two levels which makes dealing with spaghetti a lot easier.
I have the "other", more eh..."satisfying" factory game as well. It's beautiful, but placing objects in first-person is actually rather frustrating.
As to the GP comment, that’s actually what I came here to say. Original IP is a big risk when Factorio is that tough an act to follow. Sometimes you make something groundbreaking, but then your sophomore effort takes you to the stratosphere. Like the leap from Final Fantasy IV to VI. Other times you have that one period of genius that you can never really top, like Minecraft.
An idea I've had bouncing around for 20+ years was a variation on Transport Tycoon where you could "zoom in" on towns/farms and play them as if you were in Sim City/Sim Farm, or "zoom out" to connect to other regions run by other players, with trading or even combat. A universal format for "simulation stuff" would mean you could have it extensible, so you could have a dedicated farming simulator if you wanted, else it would be treated as a box with an average output, with the same logic applying to sub-elements, so if someone wants to micro-optimise a plowing algorithm, they can have a "plow management" simulator which plugs into the farming simulator, which plugs into the transport simulator. At the other extreme, someone who was only interested in country level trading could have the country outputs boxed based on an average level of output.
Might be too complex for any one player to handle everything, but even so!
I fully endorse this idea. Like a blend of factorio + sim city + Civ VI -- though the complexity might make it unplayable, i would absolutely buy it and try anyway!
I think the challenge is that there's a tension that comes from having lots of optional, interacting systems that the player both a) can make meaningful improvements to a system that contribute to the rest of their game experience ("If i make farming better, my town will have less food") and b) can ignore systems they aren't interested in without crippling their gameplay (or, conversely, improving one system making the rest of the game too easy).
The tension is almost tangible in games like the Paradox grand strategy games: if you pick up something like EUIV as a novice now, it's very difficult to figure out which systems are actually important to moving the game forward in a meaningful way.
Edit to add: this does sound like an awesome idea though
They could add different planet types (like a water/island world, train world, restricted/small world, variants like that), or increase the difficulty and challenges as you progress to different planets. I'm pretty sure this already exists as a mod though.
Programmatically, it's not that different from what Factorio is - isometric, moving stuff on conveyors = moving cars on roads, etc. They have the talent to make this genre more than "balance residential, commercial, and industry".
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic Transport Fever 2
Additionally, the assets, algorithms, experiences and engine are optimized for factorio-like genre, it's logical that they want to utilize them more or less.
If they start into 3d like Satisfactory or Dyson Space, I won't be that optimist. Even if they can do it, it'll take much time. It'll be amazing if they can pull it though.
I think big expansion pack will be the best course for them, bonus point if they can really expand the gameplay.