Love the general idea!

Short feedback:

My suggestions:
Introduce fluid (steam) at military science.
- In military science change explosives to electric mining drill.
Introduce basic oil (plastic) at Pack 3.
- Remove battery from Pack 3 (replace with something).
Introduce acid (battery as roboframe) at Production science pack.

For the removed explosive and moved battery requirement you could compensate with additional cost.

Long description:

Military science: Since v0.15 I always made Military pack even before Pack 3 and it made my life easy on bitters and was easy to setup, however explosives involves oil and oil often means expansion toward bitters.. which would be easier with military tech already.

Science pack 3: Oil is should be introduced easily, Oil is the perfect way to add hardness (complexity) but not just more smelting to science. I feel battery is a bit too much and breaks the constant sense of progression as it require a full oil processing setup. And oil in one step, forces you to make a huge detour from your main goal of progress.

Production science pack could have the battery instead of Pack 3.

High tech science pack is perfect. I love the nuclear addition.

I don't see how mining drills contribute to researching warfare... Although I do agree that explosives should probably be replaced with something else. Although with cnc's minable sulfur mod, it wouldn't be so bad.

Imagine if there were 2 tiers of military research.. like how there is production and high tech.. explosives could be in the more expensive one, and then have the expensive one as a requirement of military tech above a certain point.. that'd be interesting.

cough Although personally, I've basically handcrafted my way to flamethrowers and then never touched military science ever again. I like trains, not war.

@VaderY You are criticising valid points here and I already thought about exactly this stuff as well. Therefore I changed "explosives" to "electric Mining drill" and "Battery" to "Fast inserter". I think these changes fit the devs mindset much better, too.

@Kryzeth Mining Drills don't fit the style of Military science indeed, but they make a LOT of sense from a gameplay perspective. Planning to fight the aliens normaly means you want to expand your mining area, so you will need mining drills for that!

Hahaa, I suppose so.. although by that logic, vanilla's current method of science (military = turrets, blue = mining drills, production = assembling machine) makes just as much sense, as you need turrets to kill the bases before you can plant any miners.

I think in their latest FFF, they mentioned their logic for the new packs; when you get to blue science, you start needing to expand mining, getting more resources (iron) to fund the production packs, which make sense to use the production machine.

Just that Turrets are pretty much obselete once you have military science, because you can build laser turrets and better weaopons than, but Mining Drills, you'll always need.

I mean technically, once an outpost has run out of resources, you can just reuse the mining drills, so you don't really need to continue infinitely crafting them; just like turrets. Neither one really works in this scenario (unlike assembling machines).