I have a fear that the expansion will not be for me

I finally caught up with the FFFs and just read last week's FFF 417. When reading some of it, and looking at some of the screenshots, I fear that the expansion will not for me. In fact, I've had this feeling a few times before in a few other FFFs.

I'm too impatient to create a megabase in the current version of the game. From time to time I do a playthrough with the endpoint basically finishing all researching, and maybe doing the first few levels of infinite research. Then it becomes too repetitive for me to continue, so I just end it there, with a medium size base.

Also while I like trains, I find signals very difficult, and am (once again) too impatient to build those big crazy intersections. I usually just have 2 lanes (1 for each direction) and just set up some simple crossings with rail signals everywhere. The scale of my factory is small enough that it doesn't lead to any big issues.

But some of the FFFs go into really crazy numbers. Legendary items, enormous throughputs, a million science per second. And I've seen some crazy rail intersections which are just too intimidating to me. There's some more stuff from previous FFFs that I can't fully recall. But just thinking about managing big numbers of a handful of different planets feels intimidating to me.

So all in all I'm a little worried how good of a fit the expansion will be for the casual player like me... or if it will be mostly for the hard-core and more advanced players.

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You might be right. Because you are generally expected to build bigger in the expansion. But definetly not so much bigger, if you just want to progress.

I tried to steer the game design into a direction where if you compare the end state you had (all (nauvis) research finished), things should be ok because:

1) You finish all nauvis only research faster compared to vanilla

2) The rocket is cheaper and simplier compared to vanilla

3) The planets are effectivelly an alternative to progress compared to the infinite research, which should be more fun.

4) You can build "relatively" small if you want to just finish the game, there is one tester who finished in 37 hours by trying to go as minimalistic as possible (some semi/exploits were used, which we want to patch, so it will be more), but it still wouldn't be crazily more. We finished our MP playtrhough with very seldom use of quality, so we kind of proved it is far from necessary.

Obviously, the game is designed in a way, that when you just want to go big and expand horizontally and vertically, you can do way more compared to vanilla, but it shouldn't be required.

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