Re: Blue science is too hard to get
Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 12:30 pm
Maybe the player should build some laser turrets, some solar cells and some accumulators.Zavian wrote:I think the real issue is that oil is a significant amount of work to setup (roughly as complicated as mining + smelting + red science, but needing new stuff a new player might not have played with before). (I can't recall whether oil was part of the tutorial campaign). For a new player it can be intimidating, a real 'what on earth am I supposed to do now' moment. Then after they cobble together their first refinery + plastic build, they might get stumped because light oil/heavy oil might back up and shut the refinery down.
Then after getting that working, you still need to build something as complicated as your initial mining/smelting/red + green science setup to actually produce steel + engines + red circuits. So setting up blue science is really around 2-3 times as much work to setup as red + green science combined. Introducing some new science pack between green science and blue science that needed say plastic or batteries or solid fuel (or any other starting refinery product) and something made from already introduced materials (iron, copper, stone, gears, wire, and green circuits) would probably smooth the difficulty curve. Alternatives include, restructuring things to move plastics + red circuits to science pack 4, or making blue science simpler by making it blue science require 1x fast inserter + 1x red circuit + 1x steel.
Once you get used to oil, then it isn't really any harder to setup than mining + smelting.