Hello, this is Anokuu, as many of you may know, I mainly use Necromancer. My dream has always been using a tank just like a "Necromancer with drones that can shoot", and Factory, is no other than my Dream Tank!! The new tank that has born after a month of no update, really lived up to it!!
Factory, is VERY hard. It is so versatile, but hard to control. You have to be a master to master the master. Are you READY??
The Factory's drone (I will call them Minion) maximum health = about 3.2 pentagon (overlord = about 1.6, necromancer = about 0.9)
Upgrading bullet speed will affect on minion's movement speed. The bullet speed stat is same as a tank's movement speed - 7 bullet speed minion will have same speed as 7 speed player's tank. Note that your drones' recoil will make them slightly slower.
Upgrading bullet damage will also increase the health of the minions. Just like how body damage works to increase the tank's health
2. Basics
"Spin Area"
The minions circles around the cursor when they are in a certain distance to the cursor (about 15~17 grid box, I call it the spin area) of the cursor when attracting or repelling.
The Minions spins counter clock wise when using attract, and spins clock wise when using repel.
"Attract"
When attracting, if the minions are outside of the spin area, they will go towards the cursor's direction until they enter the spin area.
When attracting, if the minions are inside of the spin area, they will repel until them enter the spin area. In this situation, the "attract" works like repel. This allows the minions to move at faster speed with the help from the minion's bullet recoil.
"Repel"
When repelling, if the minions are outside of the spin area, they will do the general repel (just like other drone tanks)
When repelling Inside a specific area (I call it "The Leash") (about 1 ~ 4 grid box), the minions will be pulled toward the cursor and, will perform just like normal attract of other drone tanks. If the mouse move too fast, the minions will be unable to follow the leash. This allows the minions to move at faster speed with the help from the minion's bullet recoil
When repelling in the spin area and outside the leash, the minions will spin clock wise and shoot outwards until they escape the spin area. It will move like normal drone tank's repel.
"Spinning Attract"
Use attract to spin around the "Spin area" (In this case, because of the special drone movement Master has, the attract is actually repel), shrink the circle in the process, then Repel in the center of 6 minions. This usually takes less than 3 seconds.
"Shooting Star"
Use the spinning attract to attract all 6 minions (become a star shape), then charge towards the opponent with the minions as shield in front of the Master. When moving toward a direct along with minions leashed, if you have the same movement speed as bullet speed (For example, 7 bullet speed and 7 movement speed), you don't need to move the mouse because they have the same movement speed as you do.
Factory's Control Visualized
3. Attacking/Defending
And all that, is just the tip of the iceberg of the mess of skills, tactics, builds, practice, and everything else that comes with being a factory main.
But the real fun hasn't started yet. Anokuu has most certainly covered the controls, but I am going to cover how to actually use those controls.
Before I do that, I have to go another step backwards to what factory truly IS as a tank. What is its niche in the vast array of diepiology out there? To put it simply, factory is the utmost epitome of two different inherent features of diepio tanks in general at the same time. All diepio cannons have different levels of firepower and depending on their total number and their favorable position on the tank, the damage value can usually be determined. (for example, each triplet barrel is weaker than a twin barrel because of the greater barrel number) The factory possesses 6 aimable barrels, which it can feasibly point all of in any direction from any variety of angles. Therefore, due to the favorable position and number of barrels,factory does unfortunately have fairly weak firepower per bullet. However, since it can effectively be used as a 6 barrel tank, that weakness almost doesn't exist, very much like autogunners 5 guns all seem weak seperately, but applied together they are beastly weapons.
So the first thing factory is the ultimate tank at is barrel per direction spamming.
The second thing that factory possesses is drones. And these drones are the epitome of the drone branch for possessing the greatest power per second of any drone class in the game. In fact, Factory is the only class which can feasibly use its drone launcher in one direction as defensive DPS, making it the single most efficient tank in the game at drone blocking, which is an important aspect of drone classes in general.
Therefore, the second thing factory is the ultimate tank at is drone blocking, with its essentially 20 pentagons of standing power and 3 pentagons per reload of additional power.
So, why isn't Factory abused by everyone because of its huge capabilities?
There are really 3 reasons:
The first is the difficulty of control on the drones, which don't follow logical norms.
The second is that the drones are not all that deadly, with low dedicated damage making them only powerful with a direct hit rather than glancing blows, and their low speed making them unwieldy for drone damaging purposes.
The third is that its 6 barrel gunnery has very limited range and bullet speed, making it hard to fight anything outside of knife-fighting distance away.
So what factory gains in power it makes up for in an utter lack of ability to use that power effectively without a lot of experience and work in the class.
So in order to use factory effectively, you need to do three things: Learn how to control the drones, learn how to use low damage drones effectively, and be able to hit enemies from close range.
So the important part here is to take advantage of all of factory's power to cover as many of its weaknesses as you can.
The first weakness to be covered is controlling the drones, which is getting back to what I said at the beginning. Now looking at Anokuu's huge block of text on controlling drones, it might seem like a daunting task at first. But here is the first and most important thing I am going to tell you about that: You can get massive factory scores without ever using the right click button.
I know this because having played factory a large amount and having also watched many youtube videos of factory players breaking 500k or more, I have learned that the only time when repelling is generally used is to get drones around enemy drone classes and very occasionally finish off a retreating enemy, although even then it is uncommon. The other common feature of the right-click, the attracting/shooting star technique, is overshadowed by the much simpler technique of point-and click while moving.
So for me and every other major factory player, the number one technique is simply that: point and click while moving. The reason being that when the target for the drones is far away and you move to constantly put that target further away, the drones will naturally converge onto a single path, creating a group of drones all firing in the same direction.
Here is a quick (sorry for the low quality) video demonstration of the factory's point and click while moving technique gathering a bunch of drones into a single pack.
Using just this type of motion, it is possible to achieve a lot with the factory, in fact most of its viable techniques can be achieved with just this technique alone.
It is still a good idea to take to sandbox and mess with the right-click controls since they do occasionally help, but those are more extra bonuses you should learn after mastering the moving click in all its forms.
Here is the other most important part of factory drone control: Aiming past the enemy. Let me give another quick video demonstration of what not to do and why.
In this section (assuming you can see it through my quality) I placed my mouse directly onto the target spreadshot. Because of this , when I got close not only did the drones keep too great a distance for the bullets to have much effect, but they also rotated out of the way and left me wide open for getting torn apart by the spreadshot.
Next up is what to do correctly.
Notice that in this demonstration I keep my cursor more forward, and when I actually see the target I put it way past the target, and because of that the drones did not change directions to give away my body or have weak hits, instead finishing off the enemy before even making physical contact.
While these are obviously simple examples, basically the same concepts apply to most fights in general, just with more chasing and more turning. After a bit of practice, you will come to be able to kill basically anything in a 1v1 fight, because it doesn't have the power or reaction to stop you.
So after mastering the controls the other two weaknesses, inability to use the drones effectively and necessity to get close to a target are still left to be covered. Lucky for us, these two weaknesses actually cancel each other out!
Here's why: What better way to take advantage of low damage but high health drones than to use them as a shield to get close? The answer, there isn't! The answer to the second weakness, how to use the drones, is to use them to cover the third weakness, needing to get close. Therefore, when fighting most enemies the simplest way to overpower them is to simply walk up guns blazing, and use the drones to both get your firepower right in the enemies face where its supposed to be while also protecting you from harm by the enemy.
Of course, this entire section is just with Anokuu's build of 00077775.
There are actually a large number of viable factory builds, with almost every stat brought into question as changeable.
Basically the only thing that remains entirely constant that I see is 7 drone speed, otherwise I have seen low speed, low reload, low power, and high health builds that work quite effectively.
4. Other
A few other useful tips, since long repel+attract is the easiest function to assure all 6 drones are using, the best way to freeze your drones in place is to put your mouse far away from ALL of them and spam right click while autofire is on or right click and left click.
Use of the drone freeze technique is advised in several situations, including drone vs drone battles where keeping pressure on the enemy consistent is valueable, and in situations where you want the enemy to approach, and using the drone freeze along with backing away from the drones is a good way of goading some opponents into the close range combat that gives factory its greatest advantage.
Also, creating a trap formation and holding it in place with the drone freeze is actually more likely to work than you might expect at first, I have had even a simple left-click circle get walked right into as long as its not firing inward at first, but instead simply spamming back and forth characteristically of a frozen drone formation.
Another totally random tip, if you are feeling like stealing an alpha pentagon the best way to do it is with the Shooting Star mentioned near the beginning of this section, just with moving very slowly forward. The goal is to mainly use the power of just the front few drones to do damage while the back drones push the front drones into the alpha pentagon, increasing the rate of DPS over just point-and-clicking past the alpha pentagon to try to ram it.
This is also a good way to fairly instantaneously kill rammers if they are stupid enough to hit the shooting star head on.
And the last totally random but actually extremely valuable tip, the one-drone defence (pioneered by Anokuu). The idea behind this defence is to take advantage of the huge power per second of factory drones to stop rammers. Since the factory produces drones regularly in one direction, if you point that barrel towards an enemy rammer holding only one drone with the right click leash, the enemy rammer will not be able to hit you as long as you point the barrel-and-grab towards them and retreat. With this technique, you can make fighting 1 factory drone feel to the rammer like fighting several.
(Don't make the mistake of using this as your main anti-rammer technique, just know it is at your disposal if you have a drone in the reload cycle and the rammer enemy is very close).
