can't wait to test it.Another 2 topics then:
1) general balance and pace of the progression
2) fishers and other blood/heart income
3) mines
ad1)
So what is the balancing point here? And how long should it take to get to a certain number of talents/lvls .
To be competitive with vanilla items mid-game our tool should be roughly as good as a steel tool. Simply because it is VERY easy to get very early. So our tool ideally should start with low stats but also should be very easily upgradeable to a point where it's about the same as steel tool.
Beyond that point.. well.. hard to tell.
Main question here is "Why would I lvl it up even further than that?". The thing is that I can't really see the reason to do that. Yes, you COULD want to be it a bit faster and I feel that personally I would want to have a better tool but the real question is HOW BADLY DO I WANT IT?.
It is a trade off... instead of lvling up my tool I'd probably prefer to invest in.. well.. plenty of other things.. like maybe armor or weapon or mine or fisher or generator etc.. and each of those seem like a better investment (with much better payoff) than lvling up my tool which is more like a 'quality of life' investment.
So the bottom line here - I feel like simple leveling up the speed of a tool is not good/beneficial enough to be worth investing in beyond the steel-lvl speed (because you can invest in other things to get better/more useful things)
What about armor? Here the situation is similar. Probably should start low but at the same time it should not be hard/take long to get a point where its stats would be comparable to Basic Modular Armor with simple upgrades - again, simply because it is easy to get quite early (it's still green science pack tech).
Beyond that.. well.. it is where things get hard to compare. Obviously the ability to use shield extenders+fusion reactor on top of movement speed gain is a huge upside. You have to somehow compensate the lack of those items. One way is to lvl up armor AND hp regen. It would probably give the similar effect of having a shield which is recharging fast with reactor(s). This way you probably could tank the incoming damage.
The only problem here is how long would it take to get to that point? You need HP regen which is T6(or T5?) and a LOT of armor lvls. Unfortunately I have no idea what is the base hp regen nor how is armor leveling up... but I imagine that it would be a HUUUGE investment of blood/hearts.
Which brings up the next topic:
ad2) So we've got fisher and cursed tree farms. I assume that those 2 are the intended main sources of the blood income, am I right? (the 3rd source would be 'living blood' collected by blood tanks near the defensive positions/kill zones but this is hardly the reliable source IMO especially early and midgame when attacks are quite rare. The 4th source would be a blood donation but I assume it is intended only to kick-start production line very early in the game)
From my very limited experience with this mod (well, it's my first game) it feels like the blood income is slow. I have 4 cursed tree farms + 2 fishers (lvl5 and lvl3) which seemed to be a reasonable amount. Well, it's obvious now that it is just not enough. The problem is that even if I were to double this it still would be quite slow not to mention the space required and pollution (but those seem like a good tradeoff of not requiring power to run).
It FEELS like (and I must stress out the word 'feels' here. I did NOT run any numbers/calculations here so I might be very wrong) it would take a loooooot of time to get enough talents to lvl up all things which I should lvl up. I mean
a) a tool to at least steel lvl
b) armor to somewhere around basic modular
c) hp regen to a point where I could tank even small groups of biters
d) bow to a decent lvl...
and those are just a bare minimum of the mid-game.
Ofc you would probably want to invest also in some fishers/mines in the mean time which pushes your blood demands even further.
It also feels like fishers are a bit slow for their cost. T3 talent is not that cheap. Lets think about how expensive the fisher is or in another words - how long it would take to 'earn' enough blood having 1 fisher to buy new one. I just tested that a lvl 5 fisher produces about 10blood per 2min50sec. Lets assume 3min for easy calculations.
T3 talent = 10 T1 talents (=1000 blood going with 100blood->T1 conversion) or = 10*6parts = 10*6*4 hearts =240 hearts which is equivalent to 240*2.5 blood = 600 blood if going with hearts->blood conversion.
So blood produced by fishers is obviously worth much less than hearts in terms of converting into talents. So how long it would take to buy new one? We need 1000 blood @ 10 blood per 3min rate.. so about 5 hours. Yeaa... not rly a good investment in terms of return rate.
(and that is lvl 5 fisher so bare in mind that in real game it would probably take even longer because you start @lvl1. Could also take less because I'm not sure how it scales at lvl6+ but you get my point.. it is just not worth the investment in early game. Farms cost almost nothing and give you much more blood)ad3) miner. This one might be a bit OP imo. My miner is lvl9 currently and it was not that hard to get to that lvl. Now it takes about 85 kW so roughly about the same as single vanilla miner but doesn't produce any pollution and is 18 times faster.
It certainly LOOKS OP at the first glance but I'm not sure about that. At this speed you would mine the spot in no time.. which means moving it = loosing all levels. Also you can have only 2 of them (with no additional investments). Those two factors are quite a big tradeoff so it might be just enough to justify its ridiculous speed. Definitely needs testing..
Oh and one additional observation: I'm quite sure it is OP in modpacks with unlimited ores because well.. you don't ever have to move it which negates its biggest downside and balancing point... but I guess it is a problem of modpack creator, not the mod creator.
it will take emm.. let me calculate it..
) highly polluting trees and the mines that are fed by pollution.
