I'm enjoying this mod quite a bit so far. I'm 22 hours in with electromechanical circuits, red, and green science automated. I've enjoyed fiddling around with bulk setups for coke, steel, and bronze production.
I love building relays for early logic, and I like the way early circuits migrate from wood to phenolic resin to fiberglass substrate for the same basic circuits. It seems odd that even in the late game the player will still be building electromechanical circuits though. Here's one proposal: have a "basic logic circuit" which is built early on with relays, with added later recipes utilizing transistor ICs later.
The dual recipes for brushed motor and standard inserter are quite troublesome. My suggestion would be to introduce another tier of inserter that is built with iron components and is electrically powered, but only has the speed of the burner inserters. This would give a clear reason to upgrade to the steel-based units without stretching out the burner period and the accompanying annoyance of keeping burner inserters fueled.
I'm really looking forward to playing more of this, and I may cheat myself a Chemical Reactor to continue, even though I know it's not really ready yet. When's the next release and/or Github repository coming?
My notes from playing so far, and browsing through the tech tree:
1) As has been mentioned, the Standard Chemical Reactor is inaccessible due to the dependency on nickel piping.
2) Iron Refining is green science, but there is no access to hematite except as a byproduct of chromium, and much later with blue science, chalcopyrite or vanadium co-refining at blue/purple science. It seems there is a big gap after blast furnaces for improving iron/steel yields.
3) There is no advantage to limestone washing over the basic stone->limestone transformation. Most of the other basic mineral processing recipes get a 2x yield improvement, or at least a 2x reduction in recipe time, but for my iron smelting needs I wound up with 8x coal-powered basic mineral sluices to acquire limestone.
4) The basic waste water disposal recipe in Crude Phenol Washing requires a Standard Chemical Reactor, so there doesn't seem to be any application for it before the full Waste Water Treatment tech renders it obsolete.
5) The Automatic Feed Lathe Mill requires Steel Tooling, which requires wood and stone bricks in its initial recipe, which seems unlikely as a component in a milling machine.
6) Fast inserters and inserter stack bonus are a
long way down the tech tree, since despite being red/green techs, they are gated behind blue science via brushless motors. Brushless motors in turn are gated behind blue/purple science by way of requiring aluminum casings. I'd suggest changing this, possibly by introducing some limited stack bonus before stack inserter a la Bob's.
7) Steam Locomotive requires Internal Combustion Engine Unit and Electromechanical Control System. I'd like to see this reduced to simply a large amount of steel forgings and gear assemblies, or possibly introducing a "piston assembly" that could go into the internal combustion unit, steam locomotive, and maybe even the basic pumps.
8) Duplicate Salt recipes under Acheson Process and Sodium Processing?
9) There's a nice improved recipe for Graphite Blocks in Carbon Processing, but no way to get Graphite Powder aside from smelting coke or as a byproduct of grinding silicon plates. Intended?
10) The Fluid Waste Recipes that consume 1 gravel and yield 1 gravel seem unnecessary.
11) Standard Solder Alloy plate recipe duplicated in Soldering II.
12) Why does a Gas-Discharge lamp require alloy gears?
13) I would like to call the bronze bushings by their proper name; I don't think it's any more confusing that "bearings" for your target audience.
14) Move the resol-based coil recipe to Polymer Resins I from its current home in Electric Motor I.
Graphically:
1) Fine Solder Wire coils and Fine Tinned Copper Wire coils are difficult to distinguish. I'd recommend giving the reels distinct colors, since I presume (and I support) you want to keep the colors of the actual wire true to life.
2) Similarly, magnetite and limestone are too close in color and hard to distinguish.
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