I had a quick look at the
PyAL showcase videos (thanks, Otaku Showboat !), and I'm amazed - it's even more massive than I thought !
Dancing cats ! Giant Worms ! Acid-making Xenomorphs !
Also, being to be able to eventually produce "health packs" in the form of cultivated fish (?) - just like you can in Angel's - is great !
Speaking of showcases, looks like Factorio will soon need some quick showcase videos like this one, just to illustrate all the diversity out there ?
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However, I'm slightly concerned about the start of the game :
In 0.16, setting up your first red science was much harder than in other mods, but still fairly feasible, you "only" needed to set up :
- Aside from the usual vanilla drills and furnaces, and electric power, already
much more expensive due to the 1/8 plate/ore starting ratios,
- One Destructive Distillation Column (280 copper, 160 iron, 0.5 raw wood) for coke.
- Find a (non-starting?) tin ore patch, pipe steam to it (or water, and boil it in-place), and smelt some tin plates. This was fun, though YMMV if it involved taking down a small biter nest, doing this with just your light armor (320 iron, wears down fairly quickly), iron axe, pistol,
very expensive (84 ore per mag of 10 bullets) or cheaty (on respawn) yellow ammo and some precious fish might either feel like a big achievement for some people or feel like an impossible task for others.
- Make a Soil Extractor (624 iron, 440 copper, 50 tin, 10 stone, 1.6 raw wood).
- Make a Fawogae Plantation (600 copper, 440 iron, 250 tin, 300 soil, 151 raw wood - that's 39 live trees already, you lumberjack !
)
- One Crystal Mine - the trick here is to re-use the previous soil extractor, now that it has extracted plenty of soil, for "only" (920 copper, 640 iron, 3.9 wood) total.
Plop down that mine, smelt some glass, and you can start to handcraft that red science at the rate of 1 for 40 quartz, 3.3 raw wood, and 2.78 coal !
And early and
really important techs like Automation (includes long-handed inserters !), Turrets, Walls, Submachine Gun (not Shotgun yet, as shotgun shells require Lead) are all fairly cheap at 10 red science each !
Now, even this was "enough" to have some new players quickly "noping" out of playing Py.
From that preview, for Py(AL), in 0.18 :
Each red science bottle now
also requires ~40 iron and copper ore ?
You now need a
dozen non-optional buildings just to
handcraft red science ?! (With correspondingly higher resource requirements than in 0.16 ?)
And also you need Aluminium to make buildings for red science now ? (Which AFAIK isn't a starting ore either, and requires setting up coal gas just to be able to mine it !)
Aren't you afraid that even
more players are going to straight out "nope out" as soon as they see what they need for red science ?
(At least in 0.16, the scaling from no science to red to green (and "I'll deal with blue later"), while fairly steep, still felt "achievable" for a brand new Py player ?)
And remember that it has to be playable on default settings, with vanilla map generator - leaving players with the bare minimum to be able to deal with biters for so long risks compounding this issue ?
Ok, in
some ways, 0.17 got easier : being able to dodge worm attacks, indestructible armor & pickaxes... but still, imagine both tin and aluminium have nests on them, are fairly far away, and you had the bad luck of starting with hardly any fish nearby...
(Ok, I would probably just restart when seeing a starting area like that... but what about less experienced people ?)
(I don't remember, IIRC there were plans for more biter interaction - weapons, biters dropping resources... were these postponed as being too ambitious - for now ?)
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P.S.: Did I get this right : you're going to need on average 64 MILLION animal "modules" Mk1 for a SINGLE animal "module" Mk4 ?!?!!.
