The first thing that feels quite bad about Space Age is rockets. At first I thought that rockets seemed great as they were so much cheaper than 1.1. But when I saw how little you can put in each rocket, they actually feel very expensive, especially because they're almost always wanted in large bursts. It's easy to accidentally underbuild, and then you're like, well I don't want to rebuild my whole base to add five more copper belts, especially because I want to use the new stuff from other planets in my next build, so I guess I'll just wait. The bigger issue though is the crafting time of each rocket. Considering how little they carry, the item transfer into orbit feels really very slow. I decided to upgrade my platform for a safer transit to Vulcanus and this involved about fifteen minutes of sitting around waiting for the expanded platform materials to be sent. It feels really bad to send necessary but ultimately cheap items, like belts or pipes. But it feels really very bad to send items like foundries, recyclers, etc because you fit so few of them per rocket, your platform just ends up sitting around for ages waiting to load them. Some items like uranium ammo or personal armour just feel punitive. I get that you wanted the platforms to be self-contained, but it may have been better to restrict space gun turrets to only firing "space bullets" made in space, rather than heavily nerfing transport for an item the player worked hard to get.
The bottom line is that transporting stuff around just feels like a huge barrier that frequently results in a lot of waiting and awkwardness.
The second issue is about the rewards for each planet. I have to admit that originally, it seemed great. Foundries with +50% prod? Sign me up! Actually, Vulcanus's rewards were.. quite empty. The biggest issue is the need for Calcite to operate the Foundries - I ended up not bothering using them on Nauvis at all because shipping both Calcite and Foundries is horrible (see above) and you can't automate it locally until you've been to Gleba. But the second biggest issue is that mining productivity is much easier to come by and with steel prod as well, I kinda.. just didn't really feel the need for increased prod on Nauvis. The only way to significantly improve my base would have been to make a megabase, but this doesn't feel appealing if you feel like you're just going to have to redo it when you get electromagnetic plants or bioflux or whatever. For Fulgora I also looked through the list and.. well, the only one that seems really interesting is mech armour. Ultimately the vast majority of the planetary rewards are simply of the "number go up" variety rather than new mechanics or fun toys, but when the player receives them, they are in no position to start megabasing, so it's not actually particularly impactful.
Meanwhile Quality.. is pretty hit-and-miss. I got super lucky and got a Rare Power Armour MK2 which is pretty nice. But 90% of my time working with Quality, I just kinda hated it. Not for any principled reason, but because you can't handle byproducts without the recycler. The game gives you Quality modules quite early, so you feel like you should use them, but it's actually really painful because you can't use Uncommon materials in Normal recipes. This actually makes Uncommon items way less valuable than Normal items. The fact that different Qualities do not stack together kinda just makes managing them a pain. In practice it seems like the only way to use Quality when it's given is to stick it on some final mall items, like assemblers, but if you only figured this out afterwards, you're stuck with thousands of uncommon red chips you can't use and 500 normal assembler 3s you won't need to replace so no opportunity for Quality anymore. It seems like a mechanic where making a mistake feels very punishing.
I also felt like there are quite a lot of restrictions that feel really unnecessary. One example of this is not being able to transport rocket silos. I get that it makes logical sense, but really, it's just annoying to have to transport all the ingredients, then handcraft it immediately upon landing. The effect is the same, it just takes me longer and costs more. Not being able to make the recycler on Nauvis seems kinda pointless as it doesn't require any Fulgora-specific resources. You can't prepare chemical plants/oil refineries before pumping oil. You can't prepare lightning rods- really? They're not a valuable item. It would not ruin the game if you could make them on Nauvis and bring them with you.
The .. hardness .. of limitations on Vulcanus and Fulgora also feel pretty weird. It's slightly difficult to express why I didn't like them, because I'm a Warptorio enjoyer and that mod is all about building in much smaller spaces. On Vulcanus, you start in a tight spot (literally) because of all the cliffs, and you're not going anywhere really without cliff explosives, which you can't get until you're done. On the other hand, it feels like the production chain takes up a lot of space, with a lot of large Foundries. But the biggest issue here is impermanence. The player doesn't want to invest in their Vulcanus base because they know that when they come back with Lavafill or elevated rails or cliff explosives, or after they've built a small base so they can automate rails or whatever, they would do things very differently. But the starter zone is just too tight to comfortably bash out what you need. It feels like an awkward spot of "don't invest here" but also "can't do it quickly". The base required is also just a bit too big to change easily after you've done it, so any mistakes feel like you are just starting over. I way underprepared how many rockets I needed but couldn't fit anything more in without rebuilding everything. Fulgora is in a bit of a better place, but you can also end up in a similar situation where you built three quarters of your base, then you realise you don't have enough area to collect enough lightning strikes, but you can't get a robot connection to the island you now realise you should have built on so moving your base would be an incredible pain. It feels like another place where the player can get trapped easily.
Finally, let's talk about the cargo hub. At first this seemed to work reasonably well. However it became a pain point pretty fast because there's a very limited unloading space. I'm trying to unload a bunch of sciences and different buildings all at once with very limited space. It feels like the only solution is to just use bots for everything which doesn't feel great.
TL;DR: If you make mistakes in Space Age, it feels like you get punished very severely. The rewards for each planet feel pretty lacklustre at the time at which you receive them. And rockets cost way too much considering how little they can do.
I'd make the following suggestions:
- Have the player be able to keep their inventory when using the space platform. It would make it far more obvious how to bring items when starting on a new planet, and make the experience way smoother as you don't need to spend a bunch of rockets building your platform and then a bunch more rockets sending up goods. This change wouldn't impact automated hauling either.
- Halve or even quarter the number of rocket parts needed. Additionally revisit items with a disproportionately small capacity, like Foundries, uranium ammo, power armour, etc.
- On Vulcanus, make cliff explosives a trigger tech after mining Calcite, so they don't come too late.
- On Fulgora, make the island minimum size a bit bigger, or make smaller islands always in roboport range of another island.
- Always allow the player to downgrade an item's Quality if desired
- Grant the asteroid Calcite tech when it's really needed- after completing Vulcanus, not Gleba (or maybe either of the two). That way the player can actually use those Foundries.
If you play by muscle memory and fail to account for the new logistic challenges brought on you by the new features, I'm sure it can feel punishing. On the other hand, if you're playing it like you're new to the game.. well, your first attempt is always going to be a horribly inefficient spaghetti mess that keeps punishing you until you rebuild it. Just when you thought you had it figured out, you get to liquids and it's a mess all over again.. You spend time experimenting with things and figure out how to do things better. That's the draw of the game to me, so if dealing with quality felt punishing to you, that should be a positive thing in my book. Next build you figure out a better system for dealing with quality intermediate items. Could be the best feature in SA as far as I'm concerned. Shame I can't make epic petroleum gas and legendary steam.
