My space age review

[angramania]

Let me also explain, why I unfortunately find quality to be similar.:

In a mid-early stage you start with it and start to experiment with it. It is interesting, indeed. But it always felt massively incomplete and like it wasn't intended to try the mechanic this early:

Example situation: Randomness just assigned me a brand new assembly machine of quality 2. But am I supported to put it directly into use? No, it basically rots in my inventory.
...
The chance system is so rare, that the clogging happens late. But I don't get a automated warning. Nor an optional warning. After some failed approaches I massively experimented with a manual warning system and came to a great one circuit solution.
...

There is different approach. Put quality modules only to AMs for intermediates, let normal quality ones flow further, and store uncommon+ somewhere for future use. When you need something with quality, craft it using recipe for this quality and intermediates from stock. This way you will not have random AM2 or other final products. You will have only those you wanted to have, and in the necessary quantity. Examples: armor, weapon, personal equipment, solar panels and machines for particular space platform. Absolutely no need for circuits, just simple splitters with quality filters.
The same mechanic but different choices made by player.

And then in the late mid game / early late game, a new method appears: Upcycling everything at a very early stage. ...But replacing basically everything with legendary is now so cheap and so easy

Legendary for everything became affordable in the very late game. And again it is up to players to decide if they want to wait so long or have some intermediate stages.

And now it feels like there was only one way intended, right from the start, and this way was exactly this.

It was clearly not intended this way. I suggest to reread Friday facts about quality. It was designed to allow different approaches on different stages of the game.

it felt to me like it was the biggest overhaul I remember

Really? You have not overhauled most of factory after getting Foundries and significant part after getting EMP? What about classic overhauls after getting robots, logistic network, T3 modules and beacons?

[Tertius]

Given the challenge to create all kind of legendary quality production buildings has been solved and you're able to create these,
what is the difference between a set of factories made of normal quality buildings producing normal quality items and all 12 science packs, to a set of factories with the same size footprint but all made of legendary quality buildings creating legendary quality items and the same 12 science packs as well?

The answer is trivial: the difference is just throughput and output volume. You create the same, with the same factory, just more.

The only challenge added to the game is how to create the legendary production buildings. But the factory to perform research in the end, it's the same. Just faster. You can even use the same blueprints as long as the throughput of a belt doesn't exceed that of a stacked green belt and you don't care too much about ratios. If you care, you design the same factory again for legendary, this time just with different ratios. But essentially, it's the same.

It's an additional task for the player, better than no task at all. But it's shallow in comparison to all the other technical challenges in the game. Good upcycling is the only real challenge with quality. However, the items you get enable you to build worse factories and let you get away with that, because you don't need to take that much care any more to build something with decent output.

And about upcycling, I complained about lack of direction. Others may call it freedom, I call it lack of direction because it's not intuitive which approach for upcycling is decent and which is just wasting resources for almost no result. Interested players fire up Excel at this point to compute ratios and throughput of production lines to get an idea. However with Quality and its formulas people fail to do this because combinatorics and statistics is a difficult math challenge and usually not even understood in the math lessons on high school.

The game lacks a mechanism to let the player see ratios of input and output of a complex factory such as an upcycling facility without him having to actually build this factory, so he cannot easily compare different approaches. The only option is trial and error. Or looking it up on Youtube. For example, the player is unable to create a simulation before he actually builds. A simulation that would free the player from designing a real working factory just for comparing ratios. The rate calculator mod is something most close to that idea, but since it doesn't determine which machine will output to which other machine, it isn't able to calculate the real input/output of a complex machine setup.

With quality, the game provides a very complicated mechanic but not sufficient tools to get an understanding that's required for using it.

[Panzerknacker]

The fact that you can't think of a better one is one thing, but you can't imagine people playing differently ? Have you seen any videos of people playing the game ? To me it feels i can't find 2 that present quality the same way , in that regard i can't agree with your opinion, i believe it is based on lack of information on what is possible to do in the game.

What you seem to fundamentally misunderstand about gamedesign is the concept of balance. While you can have multiple ways to do something in a game, it would be even more interesting and desirable if there was a tradeoff, a reason to go with either of the options over the other in a certain situation, instead of having one single option that is always the best.

What he is trying to say is that the recycler loop for Quality is so powerful that it invalidates other designs when it comes to how well they perform.

What you are constantly implying is that the game does not need to be improved in terms of balance because you can have your personally imposed challenges with mechanics of the game 'because you can' for the sake of trying to be creative even though those methods don't make sense from a competitive perspective.

[mmmPI]

What you seem to fundamentally misunderstand about gamedesign is the concept of balance. While you can have multiple ways to do something in a game, it would be even more interesting and desirable if there was a tradeoff, a reason to go with either of the options over the other in a certain situation, instead of having one single option that is always the best.

I believe you are either doing provocation, or trying to ragebait, i don't think you can seriously consider there is a best method for Gleba or quality, it would be ridiculous to always use the same one depending on your game goal. You obviously have trades off and strategy in the choice of the method and the moment and the scale.

I don't see how repeating there is only one method has a chance to improve the game, it's not true, it's objectively not correct, and show a refusal to consider what the game actually is imo, you are not making any prooposal just making unsubstanciated criticsm, while at least ES64U2 attempted to explain their thoughts, which allowed to more precisely phrase the disagreement, in your case it feels to me like an empty (unfaithful) reformulation.

What he is trying to say is that the recycler loop for Quality is so powerful that it invalidates other designs when it comes to how well they perform.

I can read for myself what the other people write. What you say here isn't correct, i'm not sure why you'd attribute this to someone else. The meaning of "powerful" here is pretty vague, you can't do recycling loop before you go to Fulgora, but you can do quality on Vulcanus by throwing stuff into lava or even in space from completly renewable and free asteroid ( with and without reprocessing quality). The notion of "powerful" or not makes no sense to me here, one method is available "earlier" and one method require more ressources invested in the infrastructure to produce faster, one is "infinite but slow". And you can also decide to upcycle the materials instead of doing recycling loop. Really it shows the stuff you're missing on imo.

Currently the method that appears to be unbalanced is reprocessing asteroid to increase their quality, which is very different from a recycling loop. This one was announced by devs as "rebalanced" in the next update. Which i believe in practice show how erroneous the claim that the recycler loop is the best method for quality is.

What you are constantly implying is that the game does not need to be improved in terms of balance because you can have your personally imposed challenges with mechanics of the game 'because you can' for the sake of trying to be creative even though those methods don't make sense from a competitive perspective.

I don't imply the game cant be improved , i'm explictly saying it probably can, i mean devs are working on 2.1 , but i'm also letting you know that your claims appear invalid, your claims aren't that the game can be made better, your claims are that there is only a single best method for quality which isn't the case. If you are doing recycling loop all the time in all game for all item, you are in practice choosing one method, because of your own personnal consideration. It doesn't mean it's the best and most powerful method x). It unfortunatly look like the one that's the more intuitive for you to understand when and how to use. I am enclined to believe you could learn from other players when they use quality. Joining random multiplayer servers really goes to show how people use it and they don't do the same !

Not that any of is this is related to the topic in this thread unfortunatly. You know you can now bump your own suggestion on this forum instead ? x)