I feel like I gave the Gleba start a pretty solid effort, but I'm throwing in the towel after making some good progress into green science. I enjoyed the Vulcanus and Fulgora experiences, but I want to reinforce what others before me have said: Pentapods just are not anywhere close to balanced for starting a base from nothing. I feel like I could power through and get to space, but I'm having a hard time finding the fun.

Everything else about Gleba is fine. Logistics are challenging but manageable. I was able to get early power by hand-processing yumako and feeding the mash to a boiler and steam engine. I used mash to power early science, so I wouldn't miss seeds and have to travel far for more fruit. There's plenty of iron and copper in rocks to meet all your starting needs for smelting.

The pain starts when trying to find the first pentapod egg. Normally this is top priority when landing on Gleba, since everything depends on making biochambers. You need one egg for the first chamber, a second egg to make more eggs, and then you are off to the races. Except when starting on Gleba, even the smallest nests can spawn strafers, which you just can't solo with light armor, a machine gun, and a handful of unleveled ammo. I tried turret creep, but even with ten turrets, the strafe bombs picked away at their health faster than I could repair, while the strafer mostly stayed out of range. You need a ton of iron to have a shot, but you can't produce much iron until you already have biochambers, so it's a real chicken and egg problem. Eventually I resorted to kamikaze attacks. I managed to waste some turrets and take down one nest, then died, then repeatedly ran back and did multiple corpse runs in order to ferry the eggs to a safe spot before they could hatch. I tried hunting for easier nests, but only the first place I found was free of stompers, which are absolutely impossible to fight.

So I managed to stabilize once I got two eggs, but it took hours to set up a decent bioflux production line with yellow belts and yellow inserters. By the time I had decent iron production rolling (about half a yellow belt worth of ore) my cloud was expanding and I was going to have to deal with the stomper area. I tried tons of turrets, similar to killing vulcanus worms, I tried a car. Nothing makes a dent in those things without major firepower upgrades.

IMHO the Gleba start could be a bit of pleasure for the right kind of masochist, but the balance of pentapods currently puts it out of reach for non-hardcore gamers. I could reduce my production and just hide from the stompers for long enough to get blue science going, but, well... I don't wanna.

I understand this is a hobby mod and I really appreciate all the work you've put into it. It's a great way to inject some novelty into the beginning of the game, and I'm just a little frustrated that Gleba can't be made more manageable.

Copy pasted from another gleba discussion post:

I finally got around to changing the evolution graph to move small/medium strafers/stompers further back so you have a chance to get started and get rid of any problematic large egg rafts before they start spawning anything game-ending. I haven't been able to test it, but it's much better before, and I hope I didn't overcorrect.

Hey there, I'm just seeing this now after over a month. I just wanted to pop in and say thanks! I gave it a little test spin and it's a huge improvement so far. Also thanks again for making such a cool mod, it's really well thought out and adds a lot of new twists on the familiar base game, for every planet.

Sure thing! And thanks, I haven't really been able to test the changes fully but I'm glad to hear that it's an improvement.

I've been playing this quite a lot to try and beat the 3.5 hours time to just launch a rocket Nefrums did in the race. I've managed about 3 complete runs, mostly a little over 4 hours. In that time, I've had no problems getting initial eggs. I typically get 2 or 3 towers for each plant as you need almost a full belt of yumako to sustain blue science. In all that time, I've only triggered an attack due to spores once, so I don't bother with any defenses. Partly this is due to careful map choice. I'm not saying it's too easy - I imagine that if you continue to play the need to defend would rise quickly, but it's certainly easier than I was expecting. Many thanks for an awesome mod.

I'm not a speed runner, I've been playing a pretty slow and methodical game on Gleba, with a plant bus and only a couple of towers per fruit type. I have found this run pretty challenging but manageable.

In the mid-game, I had to clear some nests out of the cloud, and also drive around a bit to search for bigger stone patches. By then there were small stompers, and I was very glad that coal and rockets were moved to earlier in the Gleba tech tree. Using my tactic for small demolishers on Vulcanus, I stirred them up with a few rockets and then lured them into a block of turrets with red ammo. When stompers started showing up in groups of three, I had to focus on researching a tank and some ammo upgrades, but it never felt unwinnable. I'm close to researching rocket launches, and I'm really looking forward to logistics networks. Managing seeds and spoilage using only belts is a real headache and requires a lot more landfill that usual. Fun though!

Copy pasted from another gleba discussion post:

I finally got around to changing the evolution graph to move small/medium strafers/stompers further back so you have a chance to get started and get rid of any problematic large egg rafts before they start spawning anything game-ending. I haven't been able to test it, but it's much better before, and I hope I didn't overcorrect.

I'm hoping that can be a setting. Some people may like the more "balanced" approach, but personally I enjoy the challenge of near-vanilla Gleba. I also wish that the asteroids were unchanged as well, because it is absolutely possible to survive Gleba asteroids to build your first station, you just need to be strategic about it.

Regarding the Stompers in OP's post, cracking the stomper nest in my Gleba-start playthrough was a fun and interesting challenge. I discovered that the key is to techrush rockets, then make a sacrificial field of regular turrets spaced with like 10-15 tiles between them to prevent stomper AoE from wiping them out too quickly. Aggro the stompers and strafers from the nest, lead them to your turrets, then quickly circle back and kill the nests. Flee to a secondary nest of turrets and rocket down the stomper while it kills your turrets.

I had to do a LOT of save-scumming to figure that out, but if you treat it like a puzzle it's totally solveable.