Re: Pymods Feedback

Overall I like Pymods. But I do have quite a few criticisms to raise. These aren't really in any particular order.

I think it would be pretty fair to basically multiply all finished yields in Raw Ores by something like 4/3. I like the overall ratio of what you get from investing in higher tier recipes for the most part, this is more about making the early game less of a crawl.

IMO the buildings in general are too hard to make. This is both in terms of raw materials and in terms of overall complexity of fitting them together from a reasonable set of intermediates. The raw materials issue eventually becomes not such a big deal, but it does make the early game slow, in a way that you can't really even do anything about for several hours. (Consider for example how much you have to spend on your first fawogae plantation, crystal mine, botanical nursery, and wood processing unit. Then consider just how slow a factory with only one of each of those is...) You would think that the complexity part would feel like content, but it doesn't. It's so complicated, and the throughput needs of a mall are so low (at least for the Py structures), that you just mindlessly throw together a sprawling bot mall and call it a day. A belt mall is basically not possible because of the insane dependency graph between the buildings themselves.

IMO the buildings above mk2 cannot justify their price tag except through their UPS savings. For things that take productivity, even the UPS savings are questionable, because of your peculiar approach to module slots. Even mk2 is only really any good when it triples the craft speed, not when it doubles it. This might be different for people playing with aliens, since then space is at more of a premium.

There are some recipes that are objectively bad, particularly in Raw Ores. This has been greatly improved in the time that I have been following Pymods, but I'm still pretty sure that there are some high grade -> molten or reduced -> molten recipes that are strictly worse than their predecessor just in terms of ore to molten ratio, and they consume extra side inputs as well. If you really don't want us smelting those, just prevent us from doing so. Doing the math only to find out that the new recipe you just got is objectively worse than the one you already had is not fun.

There are also some places where expensive side inputs overwhelm the utility of a seemingly more efficient chain. This is usually at max tier metal production.

IMO the structure of PyHighTech should be shifted to generally make the game more automation-friendly early in the game. Specifically, I think the handcraft recipe of circuit board 1 should instead produce "circuit board 0", which can be made automatically or by hand and is used in a relatively limited number of things. Then the automated recipe of circuit board 1 would stay the same, it wouldn't feel so bad to delay getting it set up, and there would come a well-defined point before working on circuit 2 where you need to get it set up. As it stands, not only is it rather complicated, but automated circuit board 1 also costs more total stuff than handcrafting it. Thus the optimal early strategy is to automate wood and cable and then feed your early game mall with handcrafted circuits, which just seems wrong.

I don't really know why, but for some reason utility science looked vastly easier than it is. (Maybe this had something to do with production science not actually being all that difficult.) This led me to start working on making utility science pretty quickly, because I wanted to use the goodies that it unlocks to fix some of the bottlenecks in my base (rather than just building more of the stuff I already had). I quickly gave up as I came to fully understand the magnitude of the task. It might be nice to introduce a science pack in between production and utility that consumes circuit board 3. Maybe that pack could be used to unlock sintering instead of utility, to smooth out the pain of the late game.

Please adopt the vanilla convention for the science pack technology, where there is a tech that just unlocks the science pack and has all the techs that you will need to start making that science pack as prerequisites. As it stands there is already a third-party mod that achieves this (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/pyscienceorganizer), which I helped make, but there's no guarantee that this will stay up-to-date with any changes you make, especially when PyAL drops.

In general it also might be nice to split up some of your huge techs like Coal Processing 2. This would also give more of a sink for automation and logistic science packs early in the game. That sink would be nice, because right now you wind up with a very long period in between logistic and chemical science where you have nothing to research. That period feels bad, just as it does in some other overhaul mods.

I suspect it is already on the todo list, but it would be nice if rockets were more complicated. Not necessarily more total material, but just more complicated...think of Bob's to see some of the kind of things you might do. Right now utility science is more difficult to make than space science. (But admittedly I am saying this without having actually unlocked rocket silo, just based on looking at the recipes rather than actually building a factory that launches rockets.)

Statistics: Posted by Blokus — Sat Sep 14, 2019 11:58 am