Development and Discussion

[evandy]

Yes the cupric did change a bit, this is to compensate the use when playing with components. I plan on having components fully working in the next release, and this will also use the silver for the angel boards and components. I don't think the silicon will be an issue as you'll use plenty to make wafers (also you get 6 wafers from 1 mono silicon instead of 8 now). It's a bit of a compensation so you'll generate a bit more silicon and a bit less copper early game. Once you got your green science, you'll go to dedicated sorting (stiratite + bobmonium -> tin ore) in order to decrease the amount of silicon, and the amount of copper production.

You still need cupric for platinum anyway. I could use silver in one of the metal catalysts? and then when playing with bob, introduce silver to some recipes yeah... Any specific ideas? I'll think about it.

Definitely hoping for some major balance to the Cupric and Ferrous chains... they just don't make sense to use right now, especially with the new direct-sort for Platinum (which is great, don't remove it). My personal thoughts as follows:
Thorium - I LOVE that you have a direct-sort for this, but making heavy water for deuterium is WAY easier. Either need to make that process worse, or the use of ferrous/cupric Crystals for Thorium makes little sense.
Each level should be balanced to make it efficient for a specific usage scenario. Ferrous should be the high-bulk items (iron, steel, etc.) Cupric should be focused on Circuits To me, I'd love to see something like:

• Crushed Ferrous - Iron/Manganese for Iron and Steel Smelting at x240
• Ferrous Dust - Add Cobalt & Nickel (and remove the Manganese!!) to extend the iron & Steel outputs at x360
• Ferrous Crystals - Add Chrome & Tungsten for higher-tier Iron/Steel extension. Maybe make a 480 Molten recipe to use the outputs at this level.
• Crushed Cupric - 1:1 Copper/Tin for BeBs
• Cupric Dust - Add Silicon, balanced to make Electronic Circuit Boards
• Cupric Crystals - Add gold to be used for Electronic Processing Boards

Open to options here, but the main idea is that the Ferrous/Cupric chains have a specific PURPOSE, where the reward is a nice no-side-effect balanced chain of production.

\Wow. Angels Components /really/ makes me think Industrial Revolution. I don't have a problem with the concept, per se, but IR feels very "same"-y with the multiple levels of the different components. I haven't played with them (obviously) but I'd be in favor of more different components, and less every-component-made-with-every-possible-metal. I'd like to build lots of /different/ production chains, rather than blueprinting the same thing over and over with only a metal-type change.

I plan for sure to use different recipes for each component. Most recipes just have plates as placeholders, to indicate there difficulty and when they unlock, rather than having the full details figured out yet. Keep in mind that it's more of a sneak peak to what it will be, rather than a final product.

Awesome - can't wait to see it. Will reserve comments for now, other than to recommend that there be no more than 2 or /maybe/ 3 levels of any given component.

[evandy]

Cupric chain ores should be more aligned with ores used in science pack production. I would argue that usage of ore for buildings does not matter - science packs use order of magnitude more ore, especially on marathon/high tech multiplier.

Agree with the ores having a purpose, but I would balance Cupric not for Science packs, but rather the different levels of circuits.

[danyax]

Cupric chain ores should be more aligned with ores used in science pack production. I would argue that usage of ore for buildings does not matter - science packs use order of magnitude more ore, especially on marathon/high tech multiplier.

Agree with the ores having a purpose, but I would balance Cupric not for Science packs, but rather the different levels of circuits.

Agree, but the ultimate use of circuits is science, usage for building just does not cut the mustard. In my proposal I tried to balance based on circuits use for science packs. For example, basic electronic board is used only after blue tech. I have less experience of higher packs, so any input is welcome.

[evandy]

Cupric chain ores should be more aligned with ores used in science pack production. I would argue that usage of ore for buildings does not matter - science packs use order of magnitude more ore, especially on marathon/high tech multiplier.

Agree with the ores having a purpose, but I would balance Cupric not for Science packs, but rather the different levels of circuits.

Agree, but the ultimate use of circuits is science, usage for building just does not cut the mustard. In my proposal I tried to balance based on circuits use for science packs. For example, basic electronic board is used only after blue tech. I have less experience of higher packs, so any input is welcome.

Circuits are used in a zillion things (including, but not limited to science)... Advanced circuits - 117 recipes, Electronic Logic Boards - 113 recipes, Electronic Processing boards - 84 recipes. They are so widely used, and in such a huge demand, than Cupric should be balanced to make them directly IMHO.

[danyax]

Circuits are used in a zillion things (including, but not limited to science)... Advanced circuits - 117 recipes, Electronic Logic Boards - 113 recipes, Electronic Processing boards - 84 recipes. They are so widely used, and in such a huge demand, than Cupric should be balanced to make them directly IMHO.

Is does not matter in how many recipes circuits are used, it does matter how often those recipes are used. The only highly repeatable use is science packs. So ultimate balance should revolve around science pack production.

[Arch666Angel]

Cupric and ferrous caheins were intended as a baseline for construction and electronic components in industries. So be patient what the guys will make out of it. Always remember that the balance around industries will be different than regular or bobs.

[lovely_santa]

I do agree that the ferrous/cupric recipes needs balancing... And I really want to try to get it right.

Ferrous sorting should give the bulk items, mainly iron because steel is using a lot of it, while cupric should focus on circuits.
There is 1 limitation: once you add an ore to a recipe, the higher tiers must also give that same ore, so what evandy suggested about removing manganese from the ferrous dust but leaving it on the crushed is not really an option, as the higher tiers are more of an improvement of the previous tier.

People say to balance the ore amounts out versus the amount required for production. This is very hard, think for example about the different levels of productivity increase that the metallurgy smelting is giving on its own. I am sure that at each level you can find a combination to accommodate for the small amounts of not-ratio items you'll get. You can always compensate by adding dedicated sorting to 1 ore for the missing ores? No one says you have to do one or the other.

I do agree that maybe increasing the yields of the so mixed sorting ores are better but give other ores as side products. I would rather decrease the amount of ores you get from dedicated sorting (maybe 4 or 5 instead of 6?) than increasing the yield of the mixed sorting...

It might indeed be easier to balance these recipes out 1:1 as ingredients for smelting. I'll look into proposing something that fits this, with the results in mind.

And as angel said, I might first look into the components to get a better idea of what combinations might look good together.

[lovely_santa]

...
Thorium - I LOVE that you have a direct-sort for this, but making heavy water for deuterium is WAY easier. Either need to make that process worse, or the use of ferrous/cupric Crystals for Thorium makes little sense.

...

I might implement some sort of Girdler-Sulfide process to extract heavy water. It's a 2-step process (in a loop, and cascaded):

1. The first step is to extract heavy water (D2O) from regular water. It has 2 towers (Chemical plants). The cold tower takes a mix of 2 types of water (purified and saline I would say? IRL this is demineralised and deaerated water). The hot tower is fed with regular (hot) seawater (probably steam(?) in factorio). Between these towers runs a (closed) hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S) loop as carrier for the process. In the hot tower, the deuterium will transfer from the water mix to the hydrogen sulfide gas, making it 'enriched' hydrogen sulfide gas. This enriched hydrogen sulfide gas is then pumped into the cold tower, where the deuterium transfer is taking place to the water mixture, resulting in enriched water (HDO). By cascading this process, the enriched water can contain up to 15-20% D2O.
2. In the second step the enriched water is concentrated to "reactor-grade" heavy water HDO (>99% D2O) is done by distillation. The normal boiling point of HDO is 101°C, about 1 degree higher than normal water. (So this would give about 5-15% D2O and 85-95% steam).

This is an energy intensive process (a lot of water gets boiled to produce a relatively small amount HDO). Deuterium is then obtained by electrolysis to seperate the deuterium from the oxygen as you know from bobs recipe already.

So the recipes would look a bit like this (nothing is final here):

• "Steam cracker" recipe:
  • INPUT: steam + hydrogen sulfide gas
    OUTPUT: enriched hydrogen sulfide gas + purified water
• "Advanced chemical plant" recipes:
  • INPUT: purified water + saline water + enriched hydrogen sulfide gas
    OUTPUT: hydrogen sulfide gas + enriched water (7.5% D2O) + sulfuric waste water
  • INPUT: enriched water (7.5% D2O) + saline water + enriched hydrogen sulfide gas
    OUTPUT: hydrogen sulfide gas + enriched water (12.5% D2O) + sulfuric waste water
  • INPUT: enriched water (12.5% D2O) + saline water + enriched hydrogen sulfide gas
    OUTPUT: hydrogen sulfide gas + enriched water (15% D2O) + sulfuric waste water
  • Note: Between each step, the enriched water will be heated up from the hydrogen sulfide gas (which will get heated from the steam), so you'll need to cool it down in between recipes
• "Electric boiler" recipe:
  • INPUT: enriched water (15% D2O)
    OUTPUT: heavy water + steam (probably some loss of D2O due to overheating, so < 15% D2O output)
• (existing) "Electrolyser" recipe:
  • INPUT: heavy water
    OUTPUT: deuterium + oxygen

Netto gain/loss:

• Consumes saline water + regular water
• Consumes (small) amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas
• Produces (small) amounts of sulfuric waste water
• Produces deuterium + oxygen
• Produces steam, which can easily be fed into a turbine or so... (deuterium is ment to create power anyway...)
• Produces purified water (can you ever have enough anyway?)

[evandy]

Cupric and ferrous caheins were intended as a baseline for construction and electronic components in industries. So be patient what the guys will make out of it. Always remember that the balance around industries will be different than regular or bobs.

Fair enough - Industries will change a lot, so interested to see what we end up with.

I do agree that the ferrous/cupric recipes needs balancing... And I really want to try to get it right.

Ferrous sorting should give the bulk items, mainly iron because steel is using a lot of it, while cupric should focus on circuits.
There is 1 limitation: once you add an ore to a recipe, the higher tiers must also give that same ore, so what evandy suggested about removing manganese from the ferrous dust but leaving it on the crushed is not really an option, as the higher tiers are more of an improvement of the previous tier.

People say to balance the ore amounts out versus the amount required for production. This is very hard, think for example about the different levels of productivity increase that the metallurgy smelting is giving on its own. I am sure that at each level you can find a combination to accommodate for the small amounts of not-ratio items you'll get. You can always compensate by adding dedicated sorting to 1 ore for the missing ores? No one says you have to do one or the other.

I do agree that maybe increasing the yields of the so mixed sorting ores are better but give other ores as side products. I would rather decrease the amount of ores you get from dedicated sorting (maybe 4 or 5 instead of 6?) than increasing the yield of the mixed sorting...

It might indeed be easier to balance these recipes out 1:1 as ingredients for smelting. I'll look into proposing something that fits this, with the results in mind.

And as angel said, I might first look into the components to get a better idea of what combinations might look good together.

I'm curious why the limitation, but if that's the rules than fair enough. I /do/ think that keeping the Manganese is pretty important here as an early extension of Iron and Steel. I'm just not sure if it's still useful at the higher levels. Maybe if the tier-3 Ingot production still used the Manganese it might balance better?

Agreed that there will never be <i>perfect</i> balancing of ores, but even something rough helps drive impetus to use it. There needs to be a good reason to do Ferric/Cupric sorting over catalyst sorting. If you are just going to use catalyst sorting to balance out the Ferric/Cupric anyways, then what's the rationale for doing it in the first place? (could be efficiency, could be convenience, etc.) Right now, as you have said yourself, Tier-1 Ferrous sorting has that (Easy source of Manganese, used to extend Iron/Steel). Looking forward to see what you all come up with; glad it's on your radar and you are thinking about it.

...
Thorium - I LOVE that you have a direct-sort for this, but making heavy water for deuterium is WAY easier. Either need to make that process worse, or the use of ferrous/cupric Crystals for Thorium makes little sense.

...

I might implement some sort of Girdler-Sulfide process to extract heavy water. It's a 2-step process (in a loop, and cascaded):

...

This is an energy intensive process (a lot of water gets boiled to produce a relatively small amount HDO). Deuterium is then obtained by electrolysis to seperate the deuterium from the oxygen as you know from bobs recipe already.

I'd love to see some really complex fluidic process to end up with the heavy water and/or deuterium. I don't think that just "energy intensive" is enough, as you just get tons of energy back OUT with the Deuterium power cells... and the whole process still needs to be power-positive. Unless it's something like so much energy to kick-start Deuterium reactors that it forces you to go through Thorium and/or Plutonium just to be able to afford the whole thing? Bob's been working on this too, of course, with the need to get fusion catalysts and such from the fuel processing chain, so maybe that will be enough to help drive Thorium usage. Still think that Ferric/Cupric crystals for Thorium isn't quite right here... but, then, Ferric/Cupric crystals don't really pay for themselves in general (yet, see above discussion).

[lovely_santa]

...

I'd love to see some really complex fluidic process to end up with the heavy water and/or deuterium. I don't think that just "energy intensive" is enough, as you just get tons of energy back OUT with the Deuterium power cells... and the whole process still needs to be power-positive. Unless it's something like so much energy to kick-start Deuterium reactors that it forces you to go through Thorium and/or Plutonium just to be able to afford the whole thing? Bob's been working on this too, of course, with the need to get fusion catalysts and such from the fuel processing chain, so maybe that will be enough to help drive Thorium usage. Still think that Ferric/Cupric crystals for Thorium isn't quite right here... but, then, Ferric/Cupric crystals don't really pay for themselves in general (yet, see above discussion).

I was thinking on nerfing the fusion catalyst, instead of requiring 1 catalyst for 10 fuel cells, require 1 catalyst for 1 fuel cell, and maybe even decrease the chance of obtaining it from the earlier versions (50% from deuterium fuel, 25% from thorium fuel, 10% from uranium). This way you require the previous fuels to maintain deuterium fuel anyway?

[evandy]

...

I'd love to see some really complex fluidic process to end up with the heavy water and/or deuterium. I don't think that just "energy intensive" is enough, as you just get tons of energy back OUT with the Deuterium power cells... and the whole process still needs to be power-positive. Unless it's something like so much energy to kick-start Deuterium reactors that it forces you to go through Thorium and/or Plutonium just to be able to afford the whole thing? Bob's been working on this too, of course, with the need to get fusion catalysts and such from the fuel processing chain, so maybe that will be enough to help drive Thorium usage. Still think that Ferric/Cupric crystals for Thorium isn't quite right here... but, then, Ferric/Cupric crystals don't really pay for themselves in general (yet, see above discussion).

I was thinking on nerfing the fusion catalyst, instead of requiring 1 catalyst for 10 fuel cells, require 1 catalyst for 1 fuel cell, and maybe even decrease the chance of obtaining it from the earlier versions (50% from deuterium fuel, 25% from thorium fuel, 10% from uranium). This way you require the previous fuels to maintain deuterium fuel anyway?

It's a shame you can't tell whether a Plutonium enriched cell was used, as there are no "used cells" for this from Bob. If you're going to go 1 catalyst --> 1 cell, then a deuterium cell should give a guaranteed catalyst back, plus a percentage chance of an extra.
Used up Uranium (or Plutonium) x5 - 0% fusion Catalyst
Used up Thorium (or thorium-plutonium) x5 - 5% Fusion Catalyst
Used up Deuterium x5 - 5 catalyst (for sure), 10% chance of an extra catalyst.

This will drive you to use a blended nuclear setup as you climb the tiers, and force use (or storage) of plutonium too. I wonder if we can get Bob to cause an explosion or fallout if someone destroys a chest with plutonium in it.

[lovely_santa]

...

I'd love to see some really complex fluidic process to end up with the heavy water and/or deuterium. I don't think that just "energy intensive" is enough, as you just get tons of energy back OUT with the Deuterium power cells... and the whole process still needs to be power-positive. Unless it's something like so much energy to kick-start Deuterium reactors that it forces you to go through Thorium and/or Plutonium just to be able to afford the whole thing? Bob's been working on this too, of course, with the need to get fusion catalysts and such from the fuel processing chain, so maybe that will be enough to help drive Thorium usage. Still think that Ferric/Cupric crystals for Thorium isn't quite right here... but, then, Ferric/Cupric crystals don't really pay for themselves in general (yet, see above discussion).

I was thinking on nerfing the fusion catalyst, instead of requiring 1 catalyst for 10 fuel cells, require 1 catalyst for 1 fuel cell, and maybe even decrease the chance of obtaining it from the earlier versions (50% from deuterium fuel, 25% from thorium fuel, 10% from uranium). This way you require the previous fuels to maintain deuterium fuel anyway?

It's a shame you can't tell whether a Plutonium enriched cell was used, as there are no "used cells" for this from Bob. If you're going to go 1 catalyst --> 1 cell, then a deuterium cell should give a guaranteed catalyst back, plus a percentage chance of an extra.
Used up Uranium (or Plutonium) x5 - 0% fusion Catalyst
Used up Thorium (or thorium-plutonium) x5 - 5% Fusion Catalyst
Used up Deuterium x5 - 5 catalyst (for sure), 10% chance of an extra catalyst.

This will drive you to use a blended nuclear setup as you climb the tiers, and force use (or storage) of plutonium too. I wonder if we can get Bob to cause an explosion or fallout if someone destroys a chest with plutonium in it.

Why would you need to stack plutonium? it's used to make plutonium-uranium (basicaly uranium) fuel cell and plutonium-thorium (basicaly thorium) fuel cells. And why do you want a net positive loop exactly of deuterium fuel cells instead of a mix of all of them? It gives a challenge to balance them out, decide which one to use at a time...

Allowing you to climb the tiers like you described could be nice as well, as a requirement you need to burn through quite a bit of fuel to have multiple deuterium cells going... What about
Used up Uranium (or Plutonium) x5 - 0% fusion Catalyst
Used up Thorium (or thorium-plutonium) x5 - 5-10% to get a fusion Catalyst
Used up Deuterium x5 - 4 catalyst (for sure) + 99% chance to get the 5th back (so you have an extremely small lose)

[evandy]

Why would you need to stack plutonium? it's used to make plutonium-uranium (basicaly uranium) fuel cell and plutonium-thorium (basicaly thorium) fuel cells. And why do you want a net positive loop exactly of deuterium fuel cells instead of a mix of all of them? It gives a challenge to balance them out, decide which one to use at a time...

Allowing you to climb the tiers like you described could be nice as well, as a requirement you need to burn through quite a bit of fuel to have multiple deuterium cells going... What about
Used up Uranium (or Plutonium) x5 - 0% fusion Catalyst
Used up Thorium (or thorium-plutonium) x5 - 5-10% to get a fusion Catalyst
Used up Deuterium x5 - 4 catalyst (for sure) + 99% chance to get the 5th back (so you have an extremely small lose)

I was thinking that giving fusion catalyst from only Plutonium cells would be nice (and therefore require that they be made and used). But Bob didn't leave the breadcrumbs for that.

Personally, I feel like once you "have" a fusion catalyst you have proven that you have the infrastructure to make it, and that taking it away from the player is a bad feel. I don't mind keeping Thorium around as a breeder reactor to make more Fusion catalyst, I just don't really dig losing the ones you have. If you want to keep Thorium in the loop long-term, then maybe something like:

Used up Uranium (or Plutonium) x5 - 0% fusion Catalyst
Used up Thorium (or thorium-plutonium) x5 - 5-10% to get a fusion Catalyst
Used up Deuterium x5 - 5 catalyst (for sure) + 0% chance to get an extra

I don't really see the point of restricting it though; I still think that you should just get the extra catalyst from Deuterium. You don't actually need to use the Thorium cells for power (you can run them in a standalone disconnected reactor and waste the heat), so even with a net-negative loop like you suggest I don't think you're really requiring that much more complexity at run-time. Your call (along with your fellow devs) not mine, of course, but that's my thought and reasoning behind it.

[MakeItGraphic]

I don't understand 'Stone Brick' (Recipe) at all. First it requires stone to make. Which is fine by itself but then you can make stone with 'Crushed Stone' to form anthropic rocks. Even if this was possible IRL why is it done in an 'Assembly Machine'?

Would it not make more sense that a 'Furnace' using heat and pressure on the 'Crushed Stone' is used to form said anthropic rocks?

Then back to the 'Stone Brick' is this not actually a stone block not an actual brick (with clay, and shale)?

Stonemasons use a wide variety of tools to handle and shape stone blocks (ashlar) and slabs into finished articles. The basic tools for shaping the stone are a mallet, chisels, and a metal straight edge. With these one can make a flat surface – the basis of all stonemasonry.

And then logically stone blocks should be made in 'Assembly Machine' not 'Furnace'.

It just seems backwards to me.

[Xeorm]

I don't understand 'Stone Brick' (Recipe) at all. First it requires stone to make. Which is fine by itself but then you can make stone with 'Crushed Stone' to form anthropic rocks. Even if this was possible IRL why is it done in an 'Assembly Machine'?

Would it not make more sense that a 'Furnace' using heat and pressure on the 'Crushed Stone' is used to form said anthropic rocks?

Then back to the 'Stone Brick' is this not actually a stone block not an actual brick (with clay, and shale)?

Stonemasons use a wide variety of tools to handle and shape stone blocks (ashlar) and slabs into finished articles. The basic tools for shaping the stone are a mallet, chisels, and a metal straight edge. With these one can make a flat surface – the basis of all stonemasonry.

And then logically stone blocks should be made in 'Assembly Machine' not 'Furnace'.

It just seems backwards to me.

I wouldn't take any of the recipes in general at face value. Some bits flow nicely, like ingots -> molten -> plates. But taking an ore and filtering and then sorting to get the variety of ores? Kinda silly. Crushed stone -> regular stone is similar in being silly. However, it works well with the vanilla progression where they don't have a clay or similar material to form into bricks. Turning stone into bricks is odd, but w/e. Refining kinda tough thing into tougher thing works in my mind, even if it doesn't quite make sense in how real world materials work.

[yzorr]

I do agree that the ferrous/cupric recipes needs balancing... And I really want to try to get it right.

Ferrous sorting should give the bulk items, mainly iron because steel is using a lot of it, while cupric should focus on circuits.
There is 1 limitation: once you add an ore to a recipe, the higher tiers must also give that same ore, so what evandy suggested about removing manganese from the ferrous dust but leaving it on the crushed is not really an option, as the higher tiers are more of an improvement of the previous tier.

Can nickel ore also be used in iron plate production? Ratios are up to you; this could just be a minor aid to iron production, not a manganese replacement. I know that iron+nickel=invar; can we just say if iron can do it, invar can do it, at least in factorio-ab-world, and so even though it's invar we're calling it iron? (https://www.nickel-alloys.net/invar_nic ... alloy.html)

Right now, if you produce nickel ore pre-chem, then like glass there are one or two parlor tricks that you can perform with that nickel ore around invar. After that, if you persist in producing nickel, then the best move is putting that nickel ore into a warehouse and shooting the warehouse. The use for nickel comes way down the road. That's unique.

[evandy]

Can nickel ore also be used in iron plate production? Ratios are up to you; this could just be a minor aid to iron production, not a manganese replacement. I know that iron+nickel=invar; can we just say if iron can do it, invar can do it, at least in factorio-ab-world, and so even though it's invar we're calling it iron? (https://www.nickel-alloys.net/invar_nic ... alloy.html)

Right now, if you produce nickel ore pre-chem, then like glass there are one or two parlor tricks that you can perform with that nickel ore around invar. After that, if you persist in producing nickel, then the best move is putting that nickel ore into a warehouse and shooting the warehouse. The use for nickel comes way down the road. That's unique.

Nickel and cobalt together can be used to extend iron and steel iirc.

[yzorr]

Can nickel ore also be used in iron plate production? Ratios are up to you; this could just be a minor aid to iron production, not a manganese replacement. I know that iron+nickel=invar; can we just say if iron can do it, invar can do it, at least in factorio-ab-world, and so even though it's invar we're calling it iron? (https://www.nickel-alloys.net/invar_nic ... alloy.html)

Right now, if you produce nickel ore pre-chem, then like glass there are one or two parlor tricks that you can perform with that nickel ore around invar. After that, if you persist in producing nickel, then the best move is putting that nickel ore into a warehouse and shooting the warehouse. The use for nickel comes way down the road. That's unique.

Nickel and cobalt together can be used to extend iron and steel iirc.

Yeah, but that solves a sorting problem with floating, which is an unusual and problematic direction. A better direction would be eliminating nickel production with direct catalyst sorting. Neither of these directions mitigate the best placement of nickel being inside a destroyed warehouse.

If nickel is going to be a result of sorting, I think it deserves better.

[Xeorm]

Played around a bit with the new industrial and tech stuff. Playing on my default of expensive mode too. Figured I'd give my first impressions:

1. Two bugs sprang to notice pretty quickly. Picking up some buildings deconstructed them to their components. And in order to make red science you apparently need solder, which needs red science to make. Both annoying, both I'm guessing will be fixed.

2. Wow. That's a lot of components. Takes a bit of time to really get which does what, especially as the icons are busy and not too clear on what is what. I'm assuming with practice that'll be easier. Did give a lot of weight towards building the actual buildings though that vanilla doesn't have. There's good reason not to have it in vanilla, but here it did seem alright.

3. Oh wow, that's a big time increase to hand-make most items. The first drill takes what, 3 minutes to hand craft? Damn. It's not bad, but it does make early automation nice. I missed that there was a burner assembler, but that should help some.

4. On the topic of assemblers, I would like if you're going with the big-medium-small model that the big/medium/smalls had their own model and icon. Confusing to think about which is which. Not sure I like the model either. I was really happy with the vanilla experience when the item restrictions were removed. Made things easier in a way that helped a lot. Didn't find myself missing the extra complexity, because it always seemed like the wrong kind of complexity.

5. I didn't like the tech changes. First impression was that I liked Angel's getting their own tech tree-esque thing. Getting the player to go down for algae initially? great. Adding more steps to making the tech items themselves? Also fine. It looks like it gets complicated for some of the later tech items, but I'm ok with that. Then I looked farther down. The tech archive looks great, and it's what I need to research higher tiers? Sure. Stash it away in my thoughts for later. Then I looked at the time it takes to research. An hour for the first tier, before any modifiers. And it can't be sped up, because you only get one of the item. Ouch. Look further and it just gets worse from their. 18ish hours for rocket silo tech? Yikes. That's not something I'd want to do in a real game.

As well, the usage of different labs seemed annoying to me more than anything. It's more investment in infrastructure, but it doesn't look like any of the labs take all that much to make. So there's some additional hassle in getting logistics and stuff to make them work. Then I was thinking about modules. Which are actually expensive. Making a bunch of modules would cost a lot, but it's worth it because of how much science you make. Making a bunch of modules for each brand would actually take a lot of materials. Easier solution would be to change a blueprint every time I wanted to change what branch I was researching. That thought empathized to me how little I liked the idea in practice. Sounds extremely tedious, rather than interesting.

[yzorr]

Played around a bit with the new industrial and tech stuff. Playing on my default of expensive mode too. Figured I'd give my first impressions:

1. Two bugs sprang to notice pretty quickly. Picking up some buildings deconstructed them to their components. And in order to make red science you apparently need solder, which needs red science to make. Both annoying, both I'm guessing will be fixed.

2. Wow. That's a lot of components. Takes a bit of time to really get which does what, especially as the icons are busy and not too clear on what is what. I'm assuming with practice that'll be easier. Did give a lot of weight towards building the actual buildings though that vanilla doesn't have. There's good reason not to have it in vanilla, but here it did seem alright.

3. Oh wow, that's a big time increase to hand-make most items. The first drill takes what, 3 minutes to hand craft? Damn. It's not bad, but it does make early automation nice. I missed that there was a burner assembler, but that should help some.

4. On the topic of assemblers, I would like if you're going with the big-medium-small model that the big/medium/smalls had their own model and icon. Confusing to think about which is which. Not sure I like the model either. I was really happy with the vanilla experience when the item restrictions were removed. Made things easier in a way that helped a lot. Didn't find myself missing the extra complexity, because it always seemed like the wrong kind of complexity.

5. I didn't like the tech changes. First impression was that I liked Angel's getting their own tech tree-esque thing. Getting the player to go down for algae initially? great. Adding more steps to making the tech items themselves? Also fine. It looks like it gets complicated for some of the later tech items, but I'm ok with that. Then I looked farther down. The tech archive looks great, and it's what I need to research higher tiers? Sure. Stash it away in my thoughts for later. Then I looked at the time it takes to research. An hour for the first tier, before any modifiers. And it can't be sped up, because you only get one of the item. Ouch. Look further and it just gets worse from their. 18ish hours for rocket silo tech? Yikes. That's not something I'd want to do in a real game.

As well, the usage of different labs seemed annoying to me more than anything. It's more investment in infrastructure, but it doesn't look like any of the labs take all that much to make. So there's some additional hassle in getting logistics and stuff to make them work. Then I was thinking about modules. Which are actually expensive. Making a bunch of modules would cost a lot, but it's worth it because of how much science you make. Making a bunch of modules for each brand would actually take a lot of materials. Easier solution would be to change a blueprint every time I wanted to change what branch I was researching. That thought empathized to me how little I liked the idea in practice. Sounds extremely tedious, rather than interesting.

Is AB philosophically converging with Pyanodon? I've eyeballed AB 0.18 modules, and reasonably tiered (4+) modules in 0.18 have noticeably more steps to produce.

There's interesting ground to be covered here, but I'm interested as a fan as to where this particular set of mods is going.