Hello Bilka, thanks for making this mod. I enjoyed the unique challenge it brought, but the early game is extremely grindy due to the low 2 ore/biter drop combined with the high iron cost to kill biters. A direct laser turret beeline powered by hours of the trusted grenade-on-your-own-face-technique seems the only viable strategy to obtain resources other than iron while also being able to survive in the medium biter era (which fully invalidates gun turrets economically, they become a net resource drain no matter how many damage upgrades you have on them)
TLDR: If you play this mod and want a fun early game experience (where you don't want a 16 hour manual grind to hard beeline laser turrets before being able to set up a simple automated red and green science starter base), set all scaling factors in data.lua to 4 as below:
small = 4,
medium = 4,
big = 4,
behemoth = 4
Actual scaling between biter sizes isn't needed (as lategame you can move to killing biters without it costing any resources), editing the scaling is just the easiest way to increase the average ore drop per killed biter to 8 instead of the default 2. Without this change, gun turrets are not a viable farming method for resources other than iron (after dmg1, it costs 1,2 iron to obtain 2 ore of any kind, so you need an order of magnitude more iron nests than anything else, and once you factor in the distances between nests, which all need to be connected with long ammo supply belts, that's just not happening. Of course you could succeeed in setting that up eventually, trimming down the number of enemy nests of other resources to just 1-2 each to make it initially viable, but the other big problem is, gun turrets are fully invalidated at medium biters no matter how many damage upgrades you can put on them: it will simply cost 3-5x more resources to take out a medium biter than you gain from it, so you'll just drain and die once you run out of any stocked resources.
I actually put some thought into that number "4" I presented, it leads to the following net resource distribution which seems about right for a balanced early game, as 10 iron nests can now support themselves + 10 other nests with just 30% of the total iron needed for ammo:
10 iron nests: 560 iron ore/min (800-240 spent on "mining ammo".)
1 stone nest: 80 stone/min
3 copper nests: 240 copper/min
3 coal nests: 240 coal/min
3 oil nests: 240 oil barrels/min (=1200 crude oil/min)
Ammo cost is 12 iron/nest/min (ammo cost scales up with evolution but so does resource gained from killing the biters, the % of iron spent on ammo stays the same on small biters). It's 10 biters/minute/nest at 0% evolution, and increases to around 12 biters/nest/minute at 25% evolution)
560 iron to 240 copper/coal seems low, but as you'll set up iron first (for ammo), coal 2nd (for power), you'll be stocking up iron for a long time before you start spending iron to gain copper and eventually oil. However, more iron is better, and it shouldn't be too hard to find a larger starter iron nest nearby instead (my playthrough started at a 20 nest iron mine). You can go many ways from here, but trimming down a clustered multi-resource starter nest to provide just the right balance of other resources might be a fun idea. Anyway, Medium biters are now roughly "resource-neutral" depending on ammo damage level, so they won't instantly destroy your economy as soon as they start appearing. You'll have plenty of time to reach laser turrets with a normal base instead of the manual grenade grind I had to go through.
Sorry for the storywall, someone in my stream mentioned they'd want to fork this mod and asked around for what to change, so I presented my experience and suggestions in a bit more detail here. If you want to browse through my playtrhough experience, the streams can be found at twitch user mikehendi or, once they disappear there, on youtube channel MichaelHendriksLive. Eventually I'll edit the whole playthrough down in a single digestible video, but it'll likely take a while.
Cheers!
