Note: There be spoilers here read or not, your choice.
So I just finished 100 or so hours playing through this new version of MSI. I played it solo, I had many mods, including but not limited to. Miniloaders,, quickstart, spidertron start, enemy loot drops, reverse factory, military science loot, modular turrets, the ruins mod, jetpack. And the requisite mods like RPG etc.
I played on an island map with rich resource depth (to compensate for lack of ore patches), near death world settings, but with a large starting area, Biter expansion on. Note with enemy loot drops, biters become a resource.
As a solo player, I think this mod would be too difficult for most players if it were played vanilla only. As a multiplayer this would be fine or maybe turning the biters down. In general there were too many difficult to control areas on the map where going to retrieve items would be impossible. Particularly on an infinite map where huge amounts of biters could be attracted to your researching or retrieving crashed ship components. I did find the game generally most enjoyable.
Thoughts:
Locked Technology.
Whilst I found the pacing ok and the technologies locked behind certain gates was generally acceptable, there were instances where I found myself having to destroy ship components so they would spawn in different areas that were easier to access. Some of the military missions in particular were extremely difficult, simply because killing mother sized Spitters with nothing but yellow ammo and a machine gun, when it has 100,000 hit points is very tedious (not to mention dangerous, and you cant get better ammo or weapons until you beat the mission. Can be a Catch 22. Likewise running green wires and power poles all over the map can be a drag (literally) when you have to go through heavily infested areas. Fortunately on the island map I was able to go around with landfill in many cases. Also being an island I think caused many missions to spawn in similar positions, particularly on small peninsulas and out lying islands (even on my Landfilled areas). This was handy because sometimes the green wire was already there. I also cheated a bit with Waterfill to create moats and trap giant bosses so they wouldn't over run my meager early defenses. My suggestion for single players would be to ease up on the boss hitpoints in the early game.
Containers and Rockets.
I think the balance here is all wrong. I don't have a problem with big numbers but I think they are a bit wonky. In my game I had to make (among other things)11 containers of rocket fuel at 45000 per container. That's almost half a million rocket fuel I needed to manufacture. The half million figure is fine (it took ages btw) but I would rather see more containers with less product and maybe have a cargo rocket version you can launch that takes 10 containers at a time. It would at least seem like your achieving stuff more quickly. With the factory I had it was taking me about 45mins to fill a container and I had finished all the available missions so it was kind of wait around or redesign the factory for a limited run which I was too lazy to do. At this point I was safe in my factory so I just walked away and let it run for a while. I also think you need more container missions, I only had 5 or 6
Sniper Rifle.
You see this sitting there in the tech tree for the whole game going "oooh I wan't that" but it is locked up as the 2nd last tech you can get and by the time you get it it is functionally worthless and totally not worth the research cost, 30k Military Science alone plus the same again for the special ammo. The ammo is good but it's not as good as Uranium ammo in the sniper rifle (not a level 10 damage anyway). For example a medium worm takes 2 special ammo to kill, but with the uranium ammo it's a one shot kill. If I play this again I won't even bother researching the sniper rifle or it's ammo. My suggestion is the research cost needs to be about 25% of what it is, it needs a damage bonus of about 2000%, not 500% and it needs to be available way earlier in the game. By the time you get it it is functionally useless. At that point in the game if I want to clear biters I would use either artillery or nukes.
Protomolecule.
This adds an interesting twist at the end of the game. However I think you need some more story line bread crumbs through out the game. It feels very much tacked on at the end atm. Maybe have David complete other missions that lead gradually to the discovery of the Protomolecule. David id very under utilized, you rescue him and then he has one mission and then just sits around until you start building your rocket silo (I wasn't risking him in combat or the droid either) and then all of a sudden he is needed and consequently destroyed (consumed?) on that mission. The sudden appearance of the Protomolecule enemies is a bit of a shock (a good thing) and the artillery is devastating but with a bunch of nukes and the jet pack it was neutralized fairly easily. It was all off shore of my island too so was easily isolated, although I could see unprepared bases getting overrun quickly if playing on a large land mass. I never found out if the PM soldiers fight the biters. That might be entertaining.
Super Soldiers. WTF please tell me how to kill these guys. I basically had these guys isolated on the island (yeah! water fill) they took over where my second rocket silo had to be built so they weren't that much of a pain but they are basically impossible to kill, if they got onto your base there would be almost nothing you could so. The aforementioned sniper rifle is utterly useless against them, Artillery, rockets etcs don't do nearly enough damage, even if you can hit them as they move so fast. I managed to get 1 down to about 50% hitpoints after dropping about 20 nukes on them, but by the time I got back with more they had regenerated. I even dropped 3 MIRV (mod) nukes on the bunch with little to no effect. nearly 3 million hit points and regen of about 100/s essentially make them impossible to kill (at least on your own) Get rid of the regen and it might be possible with some time. I just ignored them until the antidote was researched and then nuked them from space. Side note: a Powersuit Mk4 (mod) with 12 personal defense lasers and 7600 points of sheilds lasts about 30 seconds against 5-6 of these super soldiers. In that time you can barely scratch the little buggers.
Just my 2c worth and thanks for making a wonderful mod.
