Re: Pymods Feedback

Point of view context: I've played through automating circuits 2, just before pyPH was released. I've no idea what "tholins" are, maybe they would have changed things.

The power generation options are far and away the best part of the mods. Most everything else feels like it's being a pain in the tuchus for the sake of it.

The key word there is "options." You can get coal from fawogae or wood. You can coke it and burn it, or process it and burn fuel, or process the fuel and burn better fuel. You can burn the leftovers from your factory, or have a stand-alone plant and truck out the ashes once in a while, or something in between and use intermediates more efficiently.

But if you are making circuits 2, you are going to make literally every recipe you have access to. There are no options. It doesn't matter what order you do them in, because none of the components are useful for anything until you get circuits 2, which you can't make until you do them all. This isn't obvious, when you look at circuit 2's recipe. It comes in little gotchas, like the building for a sub-sub-component requiring a tiny amount of stainless steel (and the whole processing chain involved in that). It makes for an incredibly frustrating experience to have to do everything badly just to unlock options to do it slightly better.

I'm using circuits 2 because it's the most egregious example, but that kind of terrible design is found throughout the pyMod suite. I recall early lead production being a similar PITA, though I don't recall the particulars of what hoops it made people jump through.

Again, this is a somewhat outdated perspective, hopefully things have improved. My overall impression is still a positive one - I liked the production chains, I liked designing a base sensibly using them all, I even liked that all of the buildings were enormous. I did not like the staggering inefficiency of it all, or the tech tree gotchas, or the way progression ground to a halt at each new step while dozens of new chains had to be sorted out.

The stainless steel thing was sort of improved since chemical science now consumes stainless steel itself. But yeah, the huge number of intermediates that are each separately useless until you've gotten through all of them for some particular item can be a real drag.

I also agree that I like options and start getting kinda bored as I grind through one of those long lists of intermediates and only rarely being given an option about what recipes to use along the way.
Statistics: Posted by Blokus — Sat Sep 21, 2019 2:22 am