Hi!
I did a thorough playthrough from beginning to the start of a megabase
with this mod, and wanted to give my personal thoughts on it - hopefully
it entertains somebody, or is of help to somebody deciding whether to give
Krastorio a try.
To give you an idea about my favourites, I typically play heavily-modded
games (typically 200 mods, so mod compatibility is important to me),
usually multiplayer, I love Bob's mods, and I just can't get along with
Angels or Pyanodons because they take out the most fun aspect for me -
exploration and building trains to hunt for ores.
I found that the information page doesn't lie - while the art style
doesn't particularly interest me in a mod, Krastorio does add a lot of varied and
very good art to the game. It does complicate gameplay, but recipes
and buildings stay mostly within reason, and it has very good mod and
multiplayer compatibility. The authors are also very responsive with bugs.
I will mostly compare Krastorio to Bob's mods, both because Bob's mods are the
standard to compare any extension mod against, and because, in my opinion,
Krastorio has no other rival than that, which is a tremendous achievement
in my eyes.
Both Bob's and Krastorio have their share of tedious recipes, but I
find that Bob's recipes always make sense to me, while Krastorio's
recipes often feel a bit random - nothing like Angel's or Sea block
though, always staying managable.
Krastorio seems easier to me than Bob's, and in a sense
slightly more varied - while Bob's has more and more complicated recipe
chains (and a lot more ore types to hunt for, which is good for trains),
they are often in a more or less straight progression - you can upgrade
assembler level 1 to 2, to 3... to 6, without really changing your layout,
and new ores predictably give you access to new layers of entities which
are made in pretty much the same way as previous tiers with added/replaced
ingredients.
Krastorio, on the other hand, also gives you new furnaces, assemblers
etc. and a few more ores and unique buildings, but the machines all have
their own distinct art style and are much bigger, which changes a lot
more parameters than Bob's way of adding tiers - you need more space
(which you have in the endgame), you can add more beacons, you have more
space for inputs and outputs and so on, so in effect, Krastorio gives you
another round at designing your factorio near the end-game. Or in other
words, Krastorio gives you a lot new content, without overwhelming you.
Initially I thought that this would mean more tedium, fearing I would
have to redesign everything again, but this didn't happen, mostly because
there was no compelling reason to use larger assemblers other than scale
(they don't have more module slots, the main reason why I would want to
upgrade), so for me, the effect as that I could redesign those parts that
I wanted to redesign, but I didn't feel forced to redesign something just
to get 10% higher productivity - redesigning was limited to cases where
I would have built a new factory module anyway, and I found this very
pleasant.
In the end, Bob's recipes were easier for me to remember because they
both made more sense and are more repetitive, while Krastorio's machinery made more sense to me,
as better and faster should also mean bigger and different.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Krastorio's added science types, which made perfect
sense to me, and had alot of fun scaling those up. The matter research branch
was surprising ("wow, you can make everything out of water, how is this
balanced?"), but found that that part, too, is very well balanced (hint: energy isn't
as free as I had thought when you need a lot of it) and again gives you a new
end-game/megabase layer of alternative recipes.
Requiring drill head items to be able to drill some of the additional resources was
a new twist I haven't seen in another mod either, giving me another tiny
logistics problem to solve.
Also very welcome were the train rebalancing - cargo wagons have 100 slots, but
trains do use a lot more fuel. In fact, I didn't know this when I played and
my reaction when I found out was "wow, I never had fuel issues before, but in this game,
I actually have to scale up nuclear fuel production to non-negligible
levels" - again a very welcome surprise that, for the first time, made me
seriously think about train fuel logistics.
The only area where Krastorio currently doesn't add much is oil/liquid/gas
production - while cargo wagons are 2.5 times bigger than vanilla,
fluid wagons were not bigger (when I started), there are no improved
Oil Refineries and so on, and while Krastorio adds a few unique buildings such as
filtration plants and gas production, it doesn't seem to do very much with
them and those areas felt a bit like unneccessary/underdeveloped addons.
However, my impression was that this isn't an oversight but simply
something the developers will touch in a later version - for example fluid
wagon capacity has been doubled in a recent release, so I assume that some
future version will address these areas.
So pretty much, everything Krastorio promises it does fulfill, which is
not a guarantee with similar mods (in fact, it seems to be the exception).
You do have to heed the warnings - as Krastorio is an alternative to e.g. Bob's,
it doesn't work with it (and it wouldn't make sense if it would), although Bob's
mods are so modular that you can try and add a few - for
example, I added Bob's enemies, assuming it didn't conflict, and indeed it
didn't.
In general, for a mod of this size that, unlike Bob's, is not explicitly
supported by other mods, mod compatibility is very high. Also, I
didn't use any of the recommended mods for Krastorio other than FNEI -
and didn't miss anything.
Lastly, let me reiterate that these are my personal impressions - my summary is that I was positively surprised at what this apparent "fringe" mod contains and how well it is balanced.
As for future games, I regret to say I will probably stay more with Bob's, though - it adds more ores and content (other than art), is better supported by the rest of the mod ecology and is more modular, allowing me to play many very different games by combining Bob's mods in different ways, something
I cannot really do with Krastorio.
As an alternative to other extensions that is less complicated than Bob's but more complicated than vanilla, while still giving you a well balanced game and a lot of content, Krastorio is absolutely without equal - I tried a lot of "Vanille Extended" type mods, and none can't even begin to rival Krastorio.
