Factorio is a factory with some tower defense to mix things up. Once you get your defenses up a bit, the biters are never really a big threat again.
Mindustry the opposite. It’s actually either a tower defense or an RTS (depending on if you’re playing the campaign or against other humans).
In Mindustry campaign, waves are timed and if you don’t pause, you’re going to be building frantically trying to keep up with the increasing difficulty of the upcoming wave as the clock counts down.
Also unlike factorio, space isn’t unlimited. You have to be very efficient to pack as much stuff into the limited space as possible. Enemies aren’t just limited by walls and a boss flying overhead is a force to be feared.
Each sector is its own factory. Once you get far enough along (spoiler alert?), your older sectors will start getting attacked by enemies again (much more powerful ones). A lot of locations are lacking some resources necessary to create top tier weapons, so defending these means managing how you send these resources to them from other sectors.
Then as you get that worked out, five sectors all get attacked at once. You try as hard as you can, but the more you build, the more they attack. Then the conveyor break and it’s publishers clearing house day!!!
In Factorio, my defenses are usually pretty weak, because they can never keep up with the growth of my factory. Instead, I take out biter camps before they become a threat. So there's not much tower defense about it for me.
It sounds like in Mindustry, taking out camps to prevent an attack doesn't work?
On the other hand, building very compact comes naturally to me. My Factorio journey had been mostly about learning to use more space so the factory stays scalable when it needs to grow. But I'm very bad at that; everything eventually turns back into super cramped space-efficient spaghetti.
For many levels the enemies come from "off screen" so there is no base to attack. There are some levels where you are supposed to send troops to destroy the enemy base, but once you beat that level if your base there comes under attack the enemies come from "off screen" again from what I remember.
> It sounds like in Mindustry, taking out camps to prevent an attack doesn't work?
No, it's a more traditional tower defence format where there are set waves that spawn on a timer, there's nothing you can do except build defences to kill the enemies that spawn
The enemies spawn into a restricted area when the spawn counter finishes.
There are some maps that require you to invade the enemy base too, but they also spawn invading enemies and those bases have defense towers like yours does, so you aren't just going to walk in and deal with it.
I haven't really had any problems with that. Sometimes there's a brief period where some camps are too powerful for me to engage with, but soon enough there's a new technology that gives me an edge against them again (modular armor, tank, artillery).
In Factorio you put down a big wall with turrets behind it. In Mindustry you build a maze with towers and bottlenecks. You can't build it off completely and always need to leave a path for the enemies. The production line is all about feeding your towers.
No, because like in a tower defense game, there are stages, and every stage has its own base to build and a different level of technology available to the builder.
