I would argue that not just anyone can be a troll. Or at least, an effective one. As disgusting as the words sound, there is an art to hurting people, and most trolls are downright comic.
I wouldn't say that hurting people is always the objective of trolls.
For example, I enjoy trolling as a flat-earther from time to time. Do I really believe the earth is flat? No, but it's fun trying to defend something absurd just for the sake of honing debate skills. Sometimes I can find logical fallacies in round-earther arguments and leverage them, which is immensely satisfying.
That's true. People complain about being banned, and then it turns out that they called someone's mother a hamster.
Not that there isn't some awful part of me thinks it's a little bit funny to tweet gay porn at the alt-right, but if you do something like that, than don't complain about getting banned: you had it coming.
Klei is one of my favourite studios. They are behind or have been involved in tons of great stuff. Mark of the Ninja, Don't Starve, great stuff indeed.
Yeah, I'm going to confirm that it was easier for me to install and run my first Linux distro (Slackware) back in '99 than it was to play Dwarf Fortress. Seriously, anyone who can get a fortress to last a year in-game amazes me.
As someone who also first installed Debian in 98 from a single floppy disk netboot image, a memorized FTP site domain, a cable modem connection and a whole night of hoping, I wholeheartedly agree, Dwarf Fortress is way, way harder.
Every year I pick it up and play it for a bit just show myself that I can do it.
These days, I watch streams of people playing the game on Youtube or I play Rimworld if I'm in the mood for actually playing something myself.
I've never been able to have the patience to get to one of the really interesting kinds of fortresses that have steam-powered defenses that tunnel hordes of enemies strategically through your base only have them burned to death.
Also, the game is single threaded so there's a very linear limit of how many dwarves and interesting emergent things can happen in your fortress.
God, I miss playing that game. When it's good, it's the best there.
I've wanted to learn Rust for the express purpose of making a faster, multi-threaded DF-like game.
They took out the beehive? Aww. That was one of my favourite lairs. Whenever I'd get poison resistance I'd gleefully head on back to where I found the entrance and clear it, gathering up my precious honeycombs.
Clearing it as a non-poison-resistant wizard with mephitic cloud (confuse, run away, pick off) was a lot of fun too. A small grind, but a fun interlude.
Nah, factorio is much different. It's more about building factories, and optimizing them to maximize throughput.
It's more engineeringy than artsy. In minecraft my goal is to explore or make things that look cool. In factorio my goal is to make the mostest efficientest factory.
I think the best part of Factorio is that usually you'll set yourself a goal. Say, getting production of something like modules set up. You'll start building the section of the factory. Partway through you'll realize you need to up production of some material it depends on. So you'll go figure out why that line isn't efficient -- sometimes it's just due to how you've structured it, but other times it's due to lack of resources. You go to connect more resources to your network; maybe by finding an ore deposit and running a train to it. Wait, no, now you have a lot of trains in the system and not enough stops for them to drop stuff off without causing jams. You redo critical areas of your train network. By which point you discover that you're being attacked on yet another front by the aliens and you go to set up defenses.
Much like Civ, there's usually so much going on in Factorio that you'll always be in a "okay, let me just finish this and I'll stop" situation which never finishes. Of course, that's horrible if you have other things that you should be doing, but it makes for a really enjoyable game.
Cool, might try it out. Factorio is really designed for this so it's much easier to build things than I'd expect in a modded minecraft, but will try it out.
Have you played modded Minecraft? The automation systems there are extremely elaborate, leaving redstone in the dust, and it's been like that for a very long time now.
We've got lua-scriptable actors, we've got elaborate Redstone circuitry, we're got about six different item transit systems, and several power systems to choose from (I believe RF is the most common one now). We've got machines for automating just about everything, and IIRC, we can finally build moving structures again.
We've got at least two magic systems, if not more, endgames of your choice, and many dimensions to pick from.
And all of it plugs together, and you can pick and choose exactly what you want and customize it to your specification.
I have played modded Minecraft. They are different games, even though there's definitely inspiration and similarities. There's no real point holding them against each other.
I will say that Factorio is far more moddable than Minecraft as well, and actually has a built-in mod browser. Mods are first class citizens and the community has done great stuff with it just like it has in Minecraft.
Which set of Minecraft mods would you recommend? I've played a lot of vanilla, but haven't ever done much with mods. I've always enjoyed building redstone mechanisms like secret doors, automated mob harvesters (when those worked well), and Factorio definitely scratches my automation design itch, but I think it would be a fun addition to MC, too.
My big 4 for any modpack I put together (disclaimer, it's been a year or so since I was last big into modded MC, so my knowledge may be out of date and it's possible these don't all work together on the current version):
- Buildcraft. It's often considered old and dated, because it gives only a few simpler building blocks which need to be combined to make anything useful, but I consider that it's strength. It basically provides a piping system, for taking items, liquids out of and into inventory and machines, a power system that runs along similar pipes, and machines that will mine or pump for you when provided with that power. Its final stage power production consists of pumping oil, refining it and burning it, though it's underpowered compared to pretty much every other power source as it was one of the first and didn't participate in the mod arms race as much. I like the visual nature of its piping system (you see individual items travelling along the pipes) compared to many of the modern more efficient alternatives.
- Mekanism. Been a while since I played, but there a couple of mods that give you your basic set of processing machines that run on electricity. Mekanism has a decent progression system and gives you some room to make processing chains. (Competitors to Mekanism are Thermal Expansion, EnderIO, Immersive Engineering and IndustrialCraft2. Of these, Thermal Expansion and IC2 were in flux last I played Minecraft, often only having nightlies available, EnderIO falls into the "too powerful" issue at times, and IE is the new kid on the block which I haven't tried yet)
- Railcraft. If you get super into Railcraft it's fun building automated rail networks and trying to run as much off rails as possible. Has a very pleasing scope to it, as you can see machines in action.
- Minefactory Reloaded. It suffers from the "magic block" syndrome a bit, but it enables you to automate things that most mods didn't touch, like mob breeding and farming.
Other options:
* Forestry. It has tools for automated farming, though they are a bit "magic multi-block". Also bee-breeding which is a massive rabbit hole of its own and can basically produce anything if you get addons like extra bees or magic bees.
* Thaumcraft. This mod kind of resists automation of its own progression a bit (though it provides plenty of tools to automate other mods), but it gets in there because it's so different to most other mods out there. Magic and automation via little golem minions that run around, lots of cool items and tools.
* Frames. I think the current mod supporting them is Remain in Motion? Basically allows you to move a lot more stuff around in the world. Vanilla has a super lite equivalent in slime blocks these days, but frames go so much further.
* Project Red. If you ask anyone who's been around for a while, there's a mod called Redpower 2 which was available for 1.2.5 and 1.4.7 that was super popular. Project Red is basically an open source clone of this mod. While last I checked ProjectRed doesn't include its Blutricity or Forth based computer, it does include Red Alloy Wire, which is redstone on steroids that you can run up walls or have lines running in parallel that don't connect etc.
* Computercraft. Build computers that can run lua programs. I often use it for powering displays that show me the status of various aspects of my base. Also little automated turtles that can move about and mine or place blocks from their inventory or other things. Definitely OP but it's fun so I let it pass :p I built a super simplistic vi clone and a package manager for it back in 1.4.
The entirety of factorio is centered around automated combat and production. Even with all automation mods I'm aware of, minecraft pales in comparison.
I don't think minecraft's engine could even handle the number of concurrent actors that factorio does. When I used to play minecraft, you couldn't make complicated redstone devices on big multiplayer servers because the engine couldn't afford to simulate chunks that weren't occupied by players. Factorio simulates the entire map, all the time. It's heavily optimized for thousands of concurrent actors.
Oh my god and the optimization in Factorio is seriously impressive. They have an excellent blog and often post technical details, it's a real treat to read.
It's worth adding that they successfully had a multiplayer session... with 400 concurrent users that was actually playable. There's not many games that can run 400-player sessions on a desktop computer (albeit a powerful gaming desktop).
Speaking as someone who managed plenty of Minecraft servers back in the days, it really doesn't compare. Factorio is able to handle several orders of magnitudes more circuitry than Minecraft ever could, on far weaker hardware at that.
Non-campaign maps are 'unlimited' in size unless you configure them otherwise. You may be playing the campaign/tutorial, or may be confusing the visible map (which will indeed expand/reveal as you get near it) for the entire map.
The Factorio map is unlimited (ish, maxint and all that). However the map matters a lot less in Factorio than it does in Minecraft, as the latter relies a lot more on the preexisting world than the former.
It is quite big. And even that might be an understatement. And I believe there might even be unlimited modes. You probably played a forced small campaign mission if you think otherwise.
So if you ever played Crazy Gregtech from 1.4/1.5 where it rewrote a bunch of mods and made everything hideously expensive and tried to force you into automation.
Now imagine they removed the forced manual crafts like plates etc. were for a while.
Now they put in a smooth curve for the automation so you get your first automated thing pretty early and the answer is never "go grind manual mining for 2 hours" or "quarry half the world and come back in 2 hours when it finishes", but instead is "build more automated lines" or "find the weak link in your current chain and optimise/expand it more".
Modded minecraft certainly feels like an inspiration, but this takes that plumbing/building/optimisation aspect of it and boils the game down to most of that. And since there's a single designer and no mod arms race, everything feels like it fits together, and has a balanced progression.
I like it more, especially since so much of modern modded minecraft consists of building a single pipe and attaching appropriate outlets to it (AE2 being one of the worst offenders).
Also another suggestion for people who like the automation/optimisation aspects of games, OpenTTD is pretty good for scratching that itch once your networks get bigger.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer! As a fan of Zachtronics games, This definitely sounds like something I might like.
>so much of modern modded minecraft consists of building a single pipe and attaching appropriate outlets to it (AE2 being one of the worst offenders).
That is one of the things I really hate about AE. It just sucks all the fun out of things, as does any other mod that makes things too easy (cough cough EE2 cough cough). I miss being able to leak items, screwing up your machines because you needed a stepup/stepdown on your power supply, and blowing your reactor core. AE is like liquid anti-fun. And I really miss RP2...
It's close, the automation is a bit more straightforward in Factorio. Factorio also has a tower defense aspect i think is missing in modded minecraft. Perhaps closer to fortresscraft evolved.
Dwarf Fortress fills its niche very well, to the point that anything that tries to make the same tradeoffs (extreme depth at the cost of accessability) in the same arena will inevitably be compared to DF unfavorably.
But I will argue that DF has a cousin in a game that is comically far outside of its arena: Quake, and the Quake family tree in general.
Both have a devoted audience that sticks with the games despite their extreme age and poor graphics. But more importantly - by accident more than by design - Quake has a ridiculous depth (both in mechanics and strategy) at the cost of exteme mechanical complexity (Just look at what you have to do to get the RA on Aerowalk).
If you're looking for Dwarf Fortress lite, I'd suggest taking a look at games by Paradox Interactive, which have a similar reputation.
That comparison is at best a stretch. It makes sense if you're young, but at the time of release Quake was the one of the most graphically and technologically advanced games available. One of the first truly modern FPS games, one of the first fully 3D texture mapped games, one of the first real-time action games to be widely played on the internet, one of the first to take advantage of 3D acceleration, etc. At release Dwarf Fortress was talked about in the exact same way it is talked about today...
The mechanical depth you're talking about is a lot less like the depth people talk about when talking about Dwarf Fortress simulation complexity, and closer to emergent complexity of found in any good multiplayer video game. If you're talking about the Quake family tree, some of the most played current day first person shooters (CS:GO, COD, TF2) are direct ancestors of Quake, sharing some of Quake's source code.
I have a ton of respect for Quake, its movement mechanics and its influence, but I don't really get the comparison.
I would argue that Quake has a lot more emergent complexity in its mechanics than a lot of other FPSes. Deathmatch has elements of territory control - moreso than in the Halo/COD lineage, as I understand it. And because you have to control territory and stay alive, there's an incentive to go fast. Very fast.
As a result, the more advanced mechanics of Quake (once bugs, now hallmarks of the series) have a very steep learning curve that hides an ocean of depth.
And yes, it is closer to the emergent complexity of an online shooter than the simulation complexity of DF, but the theme of depth hidden behind extreme complexity is the same.
>If you're talking about the Quake family tree, some of the most played current day first person shooters (CS:GO, COD, TF2) are direct ancestors of Quake, sharing some of Quake's source code.
I was actually talking about Quake's lineage in gameplay: Q3A, UT, and the rest of the arena shooter subgenre.
Given, this is an odd comparison, and I don't blame you for disagreeing. I'm not 100% sure I agree with me, and I am me.
Like I said, I was aiming for a game that had similar depth/complexity tradeoffs to DF, but which wasn't situated in the simulation/sandbox genre, where all comers have to be compared to DF, and most don't measure up.
I kinda disagree with your choice of the phrase "poor graphics". This is kinda like say that Minecraft graphics are poor. The truth is, these games utilize exactly the graphics they use for a reason. DF is a throwback to Roguelike games and Minecraft sorta became the defacto standard for voxel construction. Now maybe we could agree that these visually abstracted styles are no everyone's cup of tea. The beauty of this tradeoff is that it allows a small development team (or developer) to focus on gameplay without sinking significant time into making things look good and perform well.
I'm not sure if it's lighter but after using the Now Launcher for a long time I switched to Nova Launcher Prime about a year ago on my Nexus 6P and it's been fantastic.
It has some great additional features, is well maintained and updated, and I've never experienced any crashed or UI stutters/lag due to Nova. Nova has a free version with almost all the same features as the paid version, and no ads, so you can test it out.
+1 for Nova here too - used it for years on a variety of phones, and I've not found another launcher which works as well with such a good feature set; there are lots of nice touches in there and the author seems to keep it up to date with new UI developments (such as the recent update which has some pixel features added). Well worth the small extra for the full version to help support it.
-at the moment it is not possible to integrate with Google Now the way the Now launcher does. Although it looks like this is officially going to change (and one of the motivations behind this move)
-tastes in launchers vary widely from one person to the others. I have quickly uninstalled pretty much all of the launchers I have tried since they all tend to give bazillions of options instead of focusing on good defaults.
Trolling needn't have anything to do with any of those subjects.
It has, however, become associated with them, as trolling is inherently anti-PC.