Originally posted by
ZenEngineer
There are a lot of good things about this mod but I'm not as enthusiastic as you are. Maybe it's a taste thing but there are a few design choices I dislike in the mod. (I'm playing with large ore patches since I wanted to finish the early game quickly, so I might not have the desired SE experience).
AII industries. The new recipes are interesting for about 5 minutes, then just annoying. And it forced me to play from the beginning rather than reusing some existing base. Apparently it's only suggested now though, not required. If I wanted a slower early game I wouldn't be playing space exploration.
Beacon overload. Maybe it's because I was playing with K2 which actually gives you larger assemblers and small beacons that fit inside the larger beacon's range, so it lends itself to heavily beaconed builds. SE departs the factorio beacon approach for no good reason. It's halfway interesting to design with that in mind at first, but after you have the wide area beacons you can pretty much ignore that challenge, and then your builds end up pretty normal, with just belt throughput to take into account.
Pipe connection on 4 sides makes things not easily tileable for no good reason. Maybe they wanted to encourage the use of their long pipes (it doesn't) but in general it's just an annoyance as you have to keep buildings two or three times apart to avoid mixing the side fluids. It makes piping connections more complicated without adding anything to the game
Random new buildings for no good reason. What is the difference between a particle accelerator and a particle smasher or whatever? Why do I need to make 20 different buildings for different recipes? It doesn't make the game more interesting or give you any more of a challenge, except waste a lot of mall space or force you to switch recipes. You really start to appreciate the base game's use of assemblers for everything. Even if you wanted to force an upgrade using anew resource at a certain point in the tech tree you could just require a new tier of the structure like it's done for the supercomputers.
Unnecessarily large structures. Why do I need a large building to make other buildings? Just to make it more annoying to build malls? What is the improvement over using space assemblers or new 3x3 buildings? It's not like you won't automate scaffolding production pretty early. Yes, the building models look cool, congrats to the artist, but having 7x7 buildings doesn't add anything to the game.
No productivity in space. Looks like they didn't want to mess with balancing their loops taking prod into account. It just adds to the burden of logistics, which you have pretty much solved by then.
"Difficulty" by annoyance. In a few places I've ended up teching up to remove some unnecessary limitations. And in general there are places that things are made artificially more complicated for no good reason, just to give you more work to do, even if the work is just copy pasting or setting up another large assembler to generate a new building. Or the whole logi bot attrition (I had added logi bots to my nauvis to orbit replenishment, so I didn't even notice the attrition until I was a level 3 sciences, and even then I just set up an external bot build in Nauvis, I'll section my orbit side factory with LTN and additional pads but that's more for efficiency and my dislike for big bit nets than because of the silly attrition mechanics)
Streamlining in space ships. Also drag. Come on.
UPS. I'm playing on a laptop nowadays and I've refrained from using spaceships, auto glaives and planet killing weapons to keep my UPS about 45 (I mean seriously, if you're going to wipe all life from a planet why do it slowly, killing your UPS instead of a quick thing? I might end up using scripts instead). Granted, this may be a pending optimization thing rather than a critique on the design.
Related to the above, early spaceships have a small enough carrying capacity and high enough liftoff costs I ended up using rockets for planet to orbit logistics. For Naquiuum transport to the solar system my early ships didn't carry enough to make it worth it. I ended up having an asteroid field that required only 200k liquid fuel to ship things back so I switched to rockets and that's been working well. I had an idea to have trains shipping things around, and of how to bridge LTN to have interplanetary LTN, but the storage density just wasn't worth it. I might revisit that, but again, I get a few extra ms on script updates for SE whenever a spaceship is running so it's not worth it, I just extended my rocket logistic circuitry to all my planet deliveries to and from nauvis orbit. Spaceships are interesting but I haven't seen a good use for them.
In the end I have rocket deliveries to Nauvis Naquiuum facility, with dedicated landing pads (so the source silo just sends whenever the pad is empty, no special circuitry). I'll look into scaling it up, but I'll likely just copy paste that build with the pads and everything instead of trying to force some spaceship to/from orbit thing.
Granted, I've probably sunk a couple hundred hours and I'll see it through, but as an expansion I'd recommend K2 instead of SE.
Again, a lot of the above are about taste, not a bug in the mod or anything. Maybe the designers like it the way it is, so we just have to deal with it. Maybe it's related to my not "playing the right way", as my use of bots in orbit makes the loops (scrap, junk cards) a small annoyance rather than a challenge, and my use of large patches means I need less planets. But often I look at a new tech to set up and just go "oh another one of these annoying things, let me copy paste and route some pipes" rather than an actual challenge.
SE is a nice mod that you should experience once, but I see it more like Sea block than like the next big thing.
Thank you for the long yet valid and constructive reply!
Some of your points I agree with, although the pluses still massively outweight them for me.
In general I'say K2 and SE are the polar opposites in many things. I did enjoy K2, but I find SE a lot better in design.
- AAI industries I'm not terribly attached to, and I agree that it's just extending the early game, moving you further away from the real stuff. I enjoyed having at least a couple things different from the start so I didn't mind much.
- Beacon overload I adore. Being able to retrofit beacons into existing spaghet is something I always wanted, and the wide area beacons allow for basically any build, which is fun as you design each thing differently, not the same 10 or 12 beacons around every machine.
- On some recipes the pipe connection is quite interesting, like the hypercoolers. That Factorio pipes treat the output-output connections of neighbouring buildings as same fluid system, and considers it fluid mixing, is another story.
- I'm really not a fan of big buildings, in fact I outright hated them on K2. Here I hate them a lot less, because SE usually has a lot more inputs/outputs going into a building, so you at least need the space for something, in K2 you don't. The cost of scaffolding is something, but you could just make scaffolding a bit more expensive instead. I agree they could be a bit smaller, making fitting inserters to some recipes harder would be a good thing.
- Productivity would indeed mess a lot of the loops up. I don't mind that missing at all, and you still have the choice to have productivity on a planet, or ship the finished product.
- There are a few places that are really tedious, but if something took too much work, I'd just let it run by itself and work on the next thing.
- Without streamlining the spaceships would be even more of a rectangle, though I get your point.
- As there exist planets without biters, I haven't once expanded to a planet with biters. And on nauvis I ended up disabling biters myself. The plague rocket indeed is not really useful at all, as it just makes bigger UPS problems.
- I've kind of avoided using spaceships for as long as I could, and eventually rockets were already so efficient that justifying spaceships wasn't so easy at first either, but the sheer amount of crude oil and rocket fuel I needed for the distant rockets was pretty obscene and pushed me to vastly prefer antimatter fueled spaceships. Also, I didn't automate spaceships on distant trips + planet takeoff, I had separate spaceships going from orbit to surface.
I don't know how much did I have unexplored of Nauvis, but I wouldn't mind infinite or super rich resources. There's so much stuff to do constantly, that abandoning your spaceship construction project or high tier science layout just for going back to Nauvis and expanding to new stone deposits, doesn't feel too great. But I didn't mind too too much.
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