TL;DR; This mod belongs in the list of mods you absolutely have to play.

I am one of those people who like exploration and certainly gain motivation from a background story. My dream map would be something like Nauvis Post Collapse, but with a lot of existing factories spread out over the map so you can choose to either research your stuff, or try to use (and defend) existing factories (Nauvis Post Collapse has some but they are mostly incomplete, so completely useless until you research the things youirself, at which they become even more useless since you can build them yourself). This mod, despite not explicitly being designed for this, comes very close: almost all the missions have existing goodies for you to find or use, most of which are optional.

Having played this mod a while ago when it only had 6 missions or so, I decided to play it once more once I saw more missions are available.

I have developed tutorial maps for other games in the past, and making foolproof (or even "working in most conditions") maps is close to impossible, so I can feel the absolutely enourmous amount of work that has gone into these missions: making things "just work" in a complex game such as factorio is extremely difficult, and this mod pulls it off for the most part.

The individual missions are very varied, featuring standard base building (under various conditions, such as limited resources, limited technologies, limited space and so on), RTS-style building (where you have to build using robots), pure fighting with a few puzzles and more. Personally, I most liked the maps which featured building under constraints, and least liked the pure fighting missions, but I enjoyed all of them, and they are different enough to your normal factorio mod to all be interesting.

Story-wise, each mission has functioning goals that make sense in context and kept me going - they work pretty well standalone. The overall story arc is there, but... I couldn't make much sense of it, with missions not really fitting together and feeling more like individual vignettes in ther life of the engineer (which clearly they aren't). Despite this, if you enjoy factorio (which has almost no story or goals) then this mod has no trouble fueling your motivation with a (comparatively) rich background- and in-mission story line.

Difficulty-wise... I found it ramping up somewhat evenly, but brutally: If it says hard, it means hard. I am not a good fighter, and especially the higher missions can be brutal. Sometime s there is a way to simplify things (for example, by using efficiency modules to reduce pollution and therefore attack frequency), or maybe sometimes I found the right approach, and sometimes not, causing unnecessary difficulty, but the difficulty level mentioned certainly did apply, no small feat. This also means there is great replayability here, too, because you can successfully try out different overall approaches - something I wouldn't attest most other factorio mods, which, once you have a set of blueprints, are mostly "solved".

I also enjoyed the "even if its unfinished, we give you some end goal" attitude very fulfilling - you are not left hanging at the (temporary) end of the story, but you get a kind of bonus goal: In my earlier playthrough, this was eliminating the "real" enemy, far away on a map full with biters and no artillely, and in this version, it's a "build a rocket silo on a 128x128 map". Both of which are, by then, refreshingly different again.

In fact, this mod made me do what normally would be unthinkable for me - play without cheating in bots (because the beginning is boring) and even challenge myself by completing the 128x128 rocket silo challenge (feeding coal into my furnaces manually till the very end, but I did manage).

As a minor nitpick, it would be nice if, after fulfilling the objectives, you could continue playing - what happens now is that you can continue with the next mission or simply exit, in both cases losing your game and having to go back to an autosave.

Overall, this mod belongs into the list of great have-to-play-at-least-once mods such as bob's and space exploration, and fits into a very undersupported niche, namely story-based missions, which are practically absent from the mod portal.

In one word: Thanks!

Hello,

Thank you for very great review :D. I'm very glad you like it.
Since it has been some time that I did an update of this mode, it is still unfinished. I promised to do at least one final mission (mission with 128x128 map isnt final mission :D). But my time is very limited because of the job and other things.

I hope I will finish it eventually.

Once again, thank you for review. ;-)

I've been having fun with this but I do have a couple suggestions.

1) It gets really tedious having to redo the early game (getting basic items like belts/inserters automated, red and green science, do all the early research again) on every mission. I stopped playing after mission 2 when I realized mission 3 put me back in an even worse starting position than the others had. Might be nice to have later missions include a legitimate starter base so you can focus on different parts of the game. (I've only seen through mission 3 so maybe it already does this on later missions).

2) It would be nice to have more visibility into the eventual goals of the mission. On mission 1, I thought "not sure how big a base this mission expects me to build but since it's mission 1 and the whole campaign is supposed to be 20 hours, I'm not going to go too crazy. That was a mistake, and I barely limped along with my partially-hand-fed blue science setup for over an hour trying to research the tank. One mission 2, I thought "wow, not gonna make that mistake again" so I did a full-up legit 1/s blue/grey science base. Once I finally got that set up, I researched laser turrets in a few minutes, handcrafted the 7 I needed to win (I never used them - I had already cleared out all the bases close enough to attack), stomped a couple biters using the machine gun I'd been using all game, and poof mission over (and my nice science base is gone to be replaced by literally nothing at the start of mission 3).

Revealing the final objective fairly early in the mission would make it easier to judge how much time and effort to put into your base.

Other than than - the scripting is flawless, the story is excellent, the maps are interesting and well laid out. I really want to complete this scenario pack. I just hope I don't have to build an early game base 7 more times to do it.

Hi, thank you for feedback

The mission 1-3 are really outdated and I am still thinking how to polish them better to get them more entertained. The mission 2 and 3 are the worst from my point of view.

In mission 2 I see problem with objectives, which sometimes do not have sence (I did not have much experience with LUA code in that time).
In mission 3 you actually can complete the mission in one hour, if you are very smart, but still is not good from my perspective. Also I recomend scout the area and do the optional objectives-

If you will play mission 4 and above, you will not have problem with weak ressearch anymore since you always starting with red and green ressearch from that levels. And most of the time, you always have funcional starting basic production facilities

Also, 20 ours was originally calculated to 5 mission, but now players playng the campaign with average 40 hours. So it is much longer then before, yet the new missions are more complex and keeping you busy (depens on the difficulty).