Hey TheIronRelic,
Thanks for this mod.

Question. You have Empty Barrels as a recipe ingredient for the Buoys. That needs steel.
So you can't build a Port before researching steel and you can't build a barrel until much later....

I think that the recipe should be updated to not use steel, just for the Port and Buoys. This way you can use the small ship in the beginning and once you have steel, you can use the larger Cargo Ships and Tankers.

Just a thought. I've updated my version and removed the steel requirement and changed it to iron.

Hello!

I do have Empty Barrels as part of the Recipe. The original Cargo Ships mod has steel as a prerequisite for automated ship transit and uses barrels as part of the Buoy recipe, so that's why I kept it in.

I've considered changing it to keep ship advancement as concurrent with train advancement but didn't want to shy away from deviating from the Cargo Ship's and IR3's original spirit. In IR3, many things that are trivial in vanilla (steel, nuclear, bots) are gated behind serious research.

I'll consider adding an option to set the recipes to use iron instead of steel. What did you change the recipes to to use iron?

My first time playing with IR3, so everything is still very new and figuring stuff out, so I'm probably not the best to ask for balancing advice.

The problem with barreling, is that it's much later than steel. So even just removing the barrels and keeping steel would help a lot.

But for iron, I think replacing the steel with reinforced Iron plates would be good.
Again, just my opinion.

It would seem that fluid recipes involving barrels could conceivably be omitted from unlocking barrels themselves, would they not?

Might I suggest a few alternative recipes:

1: (using copper wire seems way too simple, also the buoy needs protection for when you run over it)
4x Iron Plate
2x Electronic Circuit
2x Rubber
1x Short-Ranged Radio
1x Glass

2: (let's make this harder)
4x Steel plate
2x Electronic circuit
2x Rubber
1x Lamp
1x Sensor

3: (for those who want ALL the complexity, we'll go for broke just for you)
1x Reinforced steel plate
2x Electronic circuit
2x Steel-framed glass
4x Rubber
1xShort-ranged radio
6x Pipe

Ships are expensive to produce, so it should feel like it too.

We just played a game up until green science and stumbled across this issue, solved it by unlocking barrels in the console.

Just to give a real-life example on the motivation why something like Morofry's first suggestion might be nice:

We, at green tech, are just starting to run out of resources at our starter island, but at the14h mark the bigger island have too many and too big biters for us to effectively expand at our tech level. We can however expand to a lucky few small uninhabited islands with fewer resources available, making for a nice and exciting progression.

At this point we need more resources to leave green tech, but we also need the buoys to get the resources from far away.

Allright I'll adjust the recipes. I like something along the lines of Monofry's first and second suggestion a lot.

Thanks man!