Very nice! You adressed everything I agree with, before expansions were rather an annoyance/chore to clean rather than a real threat, more difficulty and engagement with biters and their expansions is better, the size of them in early game was probably just a bit much in the last updates (DW), there ...

In my current game I use barrels (lubricant), I send them by train to some producing bases along with plastic and sulfur so I don't need petroleum gas in these bases. I have a few long pipelines with petroleum gas where I've had to adjust the pumps to only pump while fluid amount in pipe is > or ...

I think it's a bug because I have noticed at least another biter base that never sent attacks despite being hit by pollution and there was no water on the path nor was it very far from the polluting base.

For me so far my opinion of the expansion changes is positive, I've been playing only 1 DWM game since 2.1, and I think :
• It makes the game more difficult, and I like it because before this change I would get to a point where I was able to set up a large perimeter of defenses securing a good ...

I have something like that in my game too, there is some water between my polluting base and a biter base that gets hit by quite a bit of pollution, but this base is never attacking. There is also a land path but drawing a line between the two bases would go through water.

Actually DWM is a lot harder in 2.1.7+ now, isn't it ? Biters expand big, and they do attempt to come back in cleared areas, at least.. some of them, repeatedly. They are hard to stop as they are much bigger groups and begin creating spawners faster, and create 20 spawner bases close to your bases ...

It is really a very interesting aspect of Factorio that beyong reaching the final game objective (winning the game), you have various long-term goals that you can pursue after in different ways that justify continuing the playthrough beyond the win, but also give a direction towards how to win it ...

Oh yeah, is this still possible in 2.0 ?
https://forums.factorio.com/download/file.php?id=46232
Yes it's possible. And now in 2.1.7/2.1.8, biters expansions early on are massive : D it's quite a bit harder in that sense. They instead don't seem to re-expand where they have previously expanded as ...