Light wrote:The major point to adding a mod and its popularity usually revolves around adding necessary components to flesh out a neglected vanilla feature or improve upon the base design. So lets recap what Bob's and Angels does.
- Bob's Mods - Adds a tier system to base components and adds some intermediates for that higher tech. It may have added a few too many intermediate ores considering how underutilized some often are, but it adds just enough buildings and upgrades to keep things useful from early to late game.
- Angel's Ores - Changes the mining method to require crushing and purifying for raw ores rather than direct mining from 10+ different ore patches. The outcome is largely dictated by the players preference on how to handle this system but it's not too cumbersome to use to great advantage, plus it cuts down on mining outposts considerably.
- Angel's Petrochem - Adds a lot more layers to one of the most lackluster of vanilla features. This mod permits dozens of different setups to obtain the end product with unique combinations and designs. There's just enough to not be too cumbersome to figure out, but it does take a fair bit of time to get it down.
These three mods do their job nicely and thus are very popular.
This is a great summary of the benefits of playing Bob's Mods and Angel's Mods together...and why I can never go back to vanilla. I agree with the suggestions that smelting could be improved by introducing tiers like the current plastics tiers in petrochem. Also, one point I'd like to make, smelting functions off of the baseline that you have already refined all of the raw materials to their base ores, iron ore, copper ore, zinc, rutile, quartz, etc. I really like the variety in Angel's refining where you can mix different biproducts to get the resources you need. Maybe with smelting, using different intermediaries, for example, smelting stiratite chunks would produce multiple molten layers based on different melting points to get better yield. Or mixing two refined crystals with a catalyst and smelting it would much produce better yield of specific finished metals at the expense of losing some of the biproducts in the refining process.
My Factorio Complaint: For those familiar with the dev team's 0.15 research overhaul ffp, I am very concerned about the drastic increase in the demand for iron in their proposed new recipes. I know it's not final, just an early look, but I've been playing with the research revolution mod, and once I reached blue science, my iron demand (and steel) basically shut down my factory to the point where 50% of what I'm doing is simply to produce more iron. For those currently watching Arumba's "Rocket per patron" series, what's his #1 problem? Every episode he's complaining about steel and iron production...or trying to figure out where he left his car.
Angel/Bob's mods create exciting variety in recipes, raw materials, and production chains that are a great fit with the idea of research/science. My frustration has doubled over the fact that we are now potentially going to be using completed products like assembler 2, turrets, electric furnaces for science research? Seriously? I like the proposal of adding Military, Production, and High Tech science packs.
I went through all of the mods for my solo game and updated the science pack recipes to get rid of the 0.15 iron demand, but leave the military, production, and high tech products and give them a truer science recipe. Here's what I did, and I think these balance the variety of raw resources in Angel/Bob's mods. *I'm not a mod maker, this is just what I am trying out to balance the resources. I feel that without this style to the science pack recipes, we don't experience the full extent of what Angel and Bob have designed.
Military: Piercing ammo, grenade, explosives (better ingredient than gun turret...still working on tech tree because Angel's petrochem requires nitroglycerin causing huge )
Science 3: Battery, White Circuit Board, Fast Inserter, Steel Plate
Production: Lithium-Ion Battery, Advanced Green Circuit Board, Filter Inserter, Titanium Plate, Silicon Nitride
High Tech: Silver Zinc Battery, Advanced Blue Circuit Board, Speed Module, Tungsten Plate, Alien Artifact (it's high tech and unlocked with alien tech research)
TL;DR -
1. Playing Angel and Bob's mods together is awesome!
2. Smelting could benefit to tier recipes like plastics in petrochem
3. 0.15 research overhaul is way too heavy on iron demand and risks pushing Angel/Bob's mods drastically out of balance.