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Okay, so I do mini-bases, not mega-bases, so I wall myself in and get to the rocket without much else from outside.

But here's my takeaway of 0.15:

- Steam boilers are very short-lived now. Can't see the use of them once you get a single nuclear station up with even just three turbines on one heat exchanger.
- Oil is a bit over-provisioned. I made a train for an oil field (12-15 pumpjacks?) and it basically fed enough to get the whole game's research and never died down in over 40 hours.
- New sciences are WAY TOO HARD. I spend most of the time just waiting for the purples and yellows. Have to say, I researched for atomic bomb and then got bored when I was underwhelmed by it. Research definitely takes a lot more than it used to, and literally couldn't be bothered to get to using the white research that I got from space (pretty much, in a small base, it was a toss-up between putting resources into nuclear research, into launching a rocket, or into getting nuclear self-sufficient... I could only do one at a time and had to devote all my resources to it while it was happening, and each took a number of hours to complete)
- I got nuclear power early on. Had to stop my steam because I was just burning coal for no reason. One screen of nuclear and a couple of small fields of ore will power 100MW for 40 hours easily.
- The other nuclear techs: Too expensive. Especially the last one that lets you turn bad-uranium into good-uranium (especially with the requirement to have a sink of good-uranium to kick-start the reaction!). At 15 hours, I launched a rocket. But by 30-40 hours I had only just got self-sufficient nuclear generating almost 1:1 good and bad-uranium, but it was a huge slog seeding a decent amount of conversion reactions from each other to get there. Now, though, it just churns out constantly and I need do nothing. Free power for my entire game so long as I have even one crate full of uranium ore (literally! I have HUNDREDS of fuel rods and I barely use them to power the entire base from two power stations).
- Nuclear bomb is... well, meh. Sure it can take out a base, but the research to get to it is stupendous, which means you can already just walk into bases (I play standard settings) and take out whatever you want with a flamethrower by then anyway. Though, could we put a delay on re-firing it? I put my first 5 nuclear missiles in, fired at an enemy base once and it went prhup-prhup-prhup and I'd lost most of them in seconds. Damn dangerous for something with that wide an area of effect, and wasteful for something that expensive (they all exploded on the same point!).
- The aliens not having anything of use means there's little point venturing out. As it was, I liked to wall myself in and then I *had* to go out to get purples. Now I spend almost my entire game in-base with one cross-water (i.e. perfectly safe) train run to a remote oil.
- Graphics: Can't say I even noticed the high-res stuff. I'm sure it is, but I wouldn't really care about having it or not.
- Map: Improved, definitely, but the stupendous-zoom-to-see-the-ground is just offputting for me. I don't think I used it once. Also, pressing "E" used to close the map, but doesn't any more. Most annoying, especially if something happens while you are looking at the map.
- Fluid trains: Just obsoleted all that barrelling for me. I had one oil train with a single fluid tanker and that did my whole game's worth of oil, direct into the tanks/refineries, so much easier and requires almost zero steel.
- Aliens seem tougher? I rarely bothered to venture outside unless I desperately needed more resources, but they seem to knock my tank much more than before. No nuclear bomb firing option from the tank?
- Some buildings still don't have signals, I know its early days. But it would be nice to act upon what the nuclear processing plants have inside them, especially for using the final nuclear research.

Looks, to me, like it still needs some balancing or is focused on mega-bases.

Experimental, I know, so it'll all come right in the end.

I also do mini bases instead of mega bases. And I agree with quite a few of your findings. But I do think 0.15 is a VERY good update.

While you can have nuclear power quite fast, it's random chance of 0.7% for the U235 caused a few outrages for me. I kept my steam alive for this very reason, base kept running at 50% power. Mining and processing enough uranium is still a challenge right now, as the amount of uranium on my map is very low.

The new research progression is nice, except for the giant amount of high tech and production requirements. The amount of resources required here explodes, and thus so your base needs to suddenly explode as well. But, you do get a nice progression where you actually use each tech (I've used modular and power armor now, and haven't research power armor MK2 yet) while before you could just rush to power armor MK2.
I do like the better progression, there is still a bit of a road block as I mention, but some tweaking can solve that. The split into the 3 different highest levels of research really puts you at a choice there, what do I automate now? And do I do a makeshift or a full blown production? The tougher higher research really makes sure you use more of the lower tech.

The large iron/copper requirements on the later research did mean I am venturing into alien infested areas now. And I am running a high richness map, which on 0.14 means you can just stay at your starting spot and launch a the rocket from there. On 0.15, well, my initial fields are running dry. My second fields are starting to slightly run dry already.

(I am still researching the nuke. But, it feels very expensive to research, but I can comment more on that when the research is finished)

EDIT: Fired a nuke, wiped a small enemy base. Decent, but not compared to the cost of the nuke research and production cost...

I agree, it's a good update.

But that doesn't mean it's perfect...

The nuke is underwhelming and the amount of research and uranium refining to get to a point where you can just wander back to base and pick up 10 nukes is HUGE.

Then you walk out, take out a couple of bases, and they're gone. To be honest, by that point, I have energy shields and portable lasers and portable fusion enough that I can just sit in the enemy base and let them do what they want because the lasers will take out the buildings and aliens before they kill me. And that required MUCH less resources and time than even a single nuke.

And given that I had the rocket many hours before I had the nuke, I'm not sure I'd bother again!

It doesn't seem a mini-base-friendly update, you are basically required to go out and plumb in more iron and copper (and I even exhausted stone because some science requires electric boilers - or something - that needs a ton of stone) which means aliens-clearing and trains. And by the time you're needing that you don't have the weapons and by the time you have the weapons you could have done everything else anyway.

I love mini bases. I yellow belt of copper and iron was all I used to launch a rocket in 0.14

That simply is not as practical now as the new science is way more expensive. My new mini base is going to have to start with a standard 4 copper 4 iron and 1/2 of stone

ledow wrote: - Steam boilers are very short-lived now. Can't see the use of them once you get a single nuclear station up with even just three turbines on one heat exchanger.
- I got nuclear power early on. Had to stop my steam because I was just burning coal for no reason. One screen of nuclear and a couple of small fields of ore will power 100MW for 40 hours easily.
- The other nuclear techs: Too expensive. Especially the last one that lets you turn bad-uranium into good-uranium (especially with the requirement to have a sink of good-uranium to kick-start the reaction!). At 15 hours, I launched a rocket. But by 30-40 hours I had only just got self-sufficient nuclear generating almost 1:1 good and bad-uranium, but it was a huge slog seeding a decent amount of conversion reactions from each other to get there.

I think you've answered your first point by these other ones. While you can jump straight in with nuclear and ditch the coal fired steam relatively quickly, the infrastructure to keep it running longer term is expensive in terms of research and infrastructure building. The alternative is to keep coal fired "old" steam around to support your base while you fill out the tech tree and build up the supporting infrastructure to make nuclear work long term. A similar, though less extreme case can be made for solar. Basic solar panels are available quite early and aren't too expensive, but you can't rely on them until you also have accumulators, which are gated behind oil processing for sulphuric acid.

While the higher tiers of new science are expensive, I've found they keep the game challenging for far longer than the old system. Red and green science have never been more than a learning exercise for the beginner, and old-school blue science was a pain to get started, but once it was running, the essence of what makes the game fun, namely figuring out how to make things efficiently just went away, as all you needed was more of the same raw materials, plus a bit of biter grinding and the whole tech tree was done. Now there is a more evenly spaced and deeper progression brought the different colours of science from the trivially easy red to the super expensive yellow and white.