BlakeMW wrote:
This is also the reason why both the tank and modular armor are utterly pointless once you got blue tech set up. You'll already have the red circuits pumping out, so plopping down assemblers for blue circuits is really simple, so (when it comes to your protection) there's literally NO reason whatsoever to build anything but power armor at this stage, which is significantly more powerful than both the tank and modular armor combined and, as an added bonus, does not require you to setup cannon shell production.
Modular armor is really, really cheap to get, once you're producing batteries you can throw down a processing unit assembler next to them and hand fill a chest with some advanced circuits and electronic circuits to make a few processing units. You can then get about 4x portable solar panel, 2x battery and a energy shield or two. With the energy shield buff it's surprisingly non-useless (as long you don't expect to fight all day). There's also my old trick of using (up to) 4xPortable Roboport in Modular armor with
no power supply at all, you just hoover up the robots when they try to recharge, since you can transfer all the roboports to the Power Armor setup it makes a very cheap way to get started with blueprints and deconstruction planner and there's no useless crap to get rid of besides the Modular Armor itself.
Now the Tank... the poor poor Tank. But it still makes a bloody good battering ram and capsule deployment vehicle (sadly cannon shells are simply inferior to capsules), and with a total research cost of only 90 blue science (50 Military 3, 40 Tank) and the cost is "basically free" compared with power armor.
Also it still makes a really good combat option for a devoted personal roboport user who can't be bothered with extra gear for combat - and now that repair packs heal 200hp a pop the repair bots work really, really well. Each time a repair bot touches the Tank it heals 1/5th its hitpoints.
You're right that it's absolutely possible to squeeze out a suit of modular armor a bit earlier using this method, but frankly why would you?
There are only 4 reasons for leaving a base at this stage in the game:
1, to scout for resources (something your radar, which you built ages ago, is doing for you already)
2, build outpost bases (which you probably don't even need yet due to your starter fields still having plenty of resources left)
3, clear nests to expand
4, gather alien artifacts
If your starter fields are very poor or your factory has been running inefficiently for a long time you might need to gather extra iron at this time, or perhaps if there was no oil at the start. The necessity of oil to even make the modular armor excludes that, however, so we're left with just a shortage of iron and maybe stone if the initial field was very tiny. At any rate, normal steel armor (craftable using only red tech) makes you near-immune to small biter attacks, and medium ones don't really show up until quite some time later unless you've pumped a lot of pollution into them non-stop. With red ammo magazines you can easier clear any non-big pre-mediumbiter nests that lack large worms without issue, all this done using only red and green tech that you get naturally.
Outposts are limited in their use at this stage for the very same reason: no reason to build them yet.
Artifacts are useless until you got at least blue tech up and running, so, yeah...
To build modular armor you need 10 blue circuits, and since they require both gas and red circuits you're heavily incentivized to plop production down at a permanent location in your base, because it just means extra work if you don't, and you'll need more of them later anyway. Factorio is a game about automation, after all, and if a player hasn't figured that out by this point then something is definitely wrong.
The investment cost is minimal. Now, before your starter oil fields start to fade production of oil is plentiful, thus the difference between 10 blue circuits and 100 is almost negligible. Researching something for a few 100 extra blues to get power armor means you wait with your going-out-of-base expedition only an hour at most, unless you intentionally delay it by researching many other things first.
The benefits for going for modular armor are so limited in their scope that I see them as completely pointless compared to just straight up getting power armor and be done with it. I've suggested before that I think modular armor should not require blue circuits because of this. It's a green level tech that requires materials that're only available once blue tech is up and running and grossly underpowered compared to the power armor, so therefore should be available to you much earlier to make it more relevant.
Hell, even iron armor is more relevant that modular right now because it's piss-easy to make and allows you to survive accidental hits from small biters in the super early game.
TL:DR
Once you got everything you need to actually produce that suit of modular armor you're just a stones throw away from getting a suit of power armor instead, so why not just do that?
This is just one of the problems of the current balancing of the technology tier system.
Honestly, I think it could be greatly improved just by throwing the alien artifact tier (purple) into more complex territory, making it harder to get production for and putting power armor in that tier instead. And delete the blue circuit requirement for modular armor to make it available earlier, too.
This way, red would have iron and steel armors, green would (actually) have modular, blue would have the tank, and purple would have power armor (mk1 and 2)
I say this because I really DO want to build the modular armor. It's a great item with creative systems, introducing a player to customizable armor modules and how to juggle on-board power requirements. It just arrives far too late to the party.
lol
