V453000

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 s...

On Nauvis I generally just ride trains for long distances because that's fastest.

Whenever there's no rails and I just want to get somewhere without mashing WASD, I ride a spidertron.

However, SE adds Jetpack equipment that lets you fly. The more of those you have in your armor, the faster you can fly.

In the late game the jetpacks become seriously quick.

I'm no circuitry wizard myself, but just with simple logic you can do pretty much everything. It's IMO more about telling what the conditions for some action should be rather than understanding combinators in and out, though of course that helps.

I wanted to have a clean experience so I added an absolute minimum. I only added the Mandatory dependencies, not the optional ones (except high resolution SE graphics).

I added things to allow the Navigation uplink insert modules https://mods.factorio.com/mod/ModuleInserter

and to mess with circuit wires ...

This is quite obviously something that crossed my mind many times.

Going to space is probably the most obvious idea that we're indeed considering.

Overall it definitely feels like it's trying to be an expansion, and in concept it succeeds quite well. Though of course if we were to get inspired by this, the results would still be quite different. Overall I'd say much, much, muuuch less technologies and recipes for sure, a part of having Factorio well moddable is by not adding excessive amount of things, so mods have the opportunity to add things on top. If mods have to replace or remove things, conflicts between mods are more likely.

In general the pacing is really hardcore, often times in SE there are segments that simply take completely mental amount of brute force production throughput, which is a good thing as it makes steps meaningful, and expanding production is IMO the most enjoyable thing to do in Factorio (part of why we don't need 666 recipes). But ...

Thank you Earendel, this has been an absolutely unimaginable experience.

I was consistently and repeatedly surprised, very positively, throughout.

The fact that the mod adds much more than "just another 300 recipes", it adds actual meaningful and super interesting mechanics that really stretched my brain many times, and I enjoyed the hell out of that.

I am thoroughly impressed at the quality of the game design decisions that go into Space exploration.

I absolutely cannot overstate how much I appreciate that such a big mod doesn't attempt to do "all the mandatory things". Like adding the "obvious must haves" like loaders, inserter source/drop target customization, extending lengths of underground belts/pipes, adding overpowered weaponry or just adding more machines of the same type with tiers, "Machine Mk++". Instead it adds only meaningful, interesting things. Upgrades mostly aren't just straight forward, and introduce new and different problems.

I'd say K2 is closest to vanilla, just changing a bunch of things, adding a few science packs making the game longer, and adding some IMO unnecessary bloat like loaders/warehouses/inserters able to drop on close side. Overall I'd say it's easier than vanilla, as you have tools to solve basically anything. Multiple things I consider completely broken, like pollution filtering to get rid of biter attacks for minimal price, extreme lengths of underground belts and pipes to the point it's really hard to see which one connects to which. The conversion of resources to matter is pretty cool if you choose to use that. I finished K2 in about 60 hours.

Industrial revolution (I haven't played IR2 yet so I just assume some core things carry over) is interesting because it adds so many intermediate recipes that hand crafting really is really painful, motivating you to automate more. Progressing through the stages is also quite fun so that's not a bad idea to start with either. I didn't...

You play SE with a tech cost multiplier? That's serious masochism :D

It's a screen from the Launch trailer :)

This is really great!

Maybe that's only there with AAI industries, which isn't a hard pre-requisite I think.

This is seriously awesome.

They are just items lying on the ground :)

There's multiple things that weren't in any FFF. :) Note there were only 3 FFFs since 1.0 release.

And that's how you learn to use filter inserters. :)

Honestly, I don't see how it looks nice in any way XD

W T F did I just watch.

Yeah and I misread the previous post thinking it was about cannons, with a lot of caffeine in. Didn't help apparently.

You mean the cargo rocket sections? No, I thought they meant the capsules for the cannons. I reuse rockets as much as I can, I don't use cannons at all.

Ooh the cannon capsules are reusable? I didn't know that. :)