Recently discovered Satisfactory. It's roughly GTA2 vs GTA3 when compared to Factorio (2d top down vs 3d open world). I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on the two games and what one does well vs the other. What people get out of either.
Having sunk vastly too many hours into Factorio, and recently just about 'completing' Satisfactory, I think Factorio is the far richer factory game.
Satisfactory's unexpected joy is in exploration, such as finding all the alternative recipes. However mid game starts to be a bit of a drag, and late game is borderline miserable (the Smart! mod helps tremendously but I'm talking vanilla-only experience here). In particular in satisfactory you never out-tech problems. You never get tools to help you start abstracting away details like you do in Factorio with construction bots, beacons, modules, and substations.
Satisfactory makes me want to design & build pretty or well laid out factories. But since it doesn't give me any tools to help with that, I end up with just floating slabs in the sky of endlessly repeated simple connections.
Factorio feels far more rewarding when you come up with clever layouts for things, as you can then copy/paste it. Or design it to be modular for later expansion. There's the metagame there if making things tileable for rapid expansion later on. Satisfactory largely doesn't have that. It's too painful to expand anything, so it's all one & done stuff
Satisfactory is more designed for social interaction. That alone makes it worthwhile.
I suspect this is part of my own mindset. Satisfactory is all about watching the sunset over your factory as you goof around with good friends after a real world hard days work. There's no frantic action to be had by design. The factory is slower.
I really didn't like Factorio at all. It's either too frantic with enemies or just a grind with no enemies. I'm always down for Satisfactory and beer with friends though. That game has a relax and chill factor like no other.
Satisfactory is smaller scale (resource patches far apart, most of the build being about transport and linking a few buildings together, power being harder to achieve, and overall feels resource constrained) and Factorio feels like a blank canvas to paint factory on.
