Factorio 2.0.42 - Castra 0.5.4
Bottom line up front - Mod presents some interesting potential, but doesn't fully utilize/implement what it's trying to do.
Played through the planet over the course of about 18 hours. Other mods were present; however, I decided to not use any modded buildings/recipes on Castra to keep the run as vanilla as possible. I did bring starting resources in from Navis, but largely abstained from relying on orbital logistics to solve the planet for me. I did finish with Vulcanus first; however, I did not setup any foundries until the end of my run with the planet. So this run is close to being a 'Castra first vanilla' run as I could get it. I have Castra to the point that it is producing it's science packs unsupervised, but I have not begun researching jammers and other tech from it.
The core mechanic of having enemy nodes that spawn prefabricated items is interesting. It does require you to setup a bot network to automate scooping up resources. It falls in line with most of the other DLC planets; which, have some sort of feature which limits the space that you have to work in. The enemy nodes force you to either build your base around them, or build a main base and then figure out logistics to pull in resources. I will say that the 1 minute timer on datapacks might be to strict. I kept most of the nodes in my base alive, but I could see an issue where clearing nodes would make building science nearly impossible.
Making dropped items marked for pickup automatically was a good choice as having to sweep them manually would have been a chore and would make the whole planet non-automatable. I was expecting to have to rely heavily on these resources; however, it turns out the main focus is on processing the new ore on the planet. As a note, I never had enemy tanks spawn and only saw small amounts of enemy base growth. I did use the editor to spawn in a few tanks to make sure they functioned, but apparently I never hit whatever trigger they need to spawn in.
I would really like to see this dropped items mechanic used more, possibly adding more items to the list, or giving the player some degree of control over what spawns. I'm not sure how difficult this would be to program, but, my idea would be to let the player provide resources to the buildings. Powering the nodes, hooking up fluid intakes, I'm not sure if item insertion would be possible. The return would be higher end items spawning from them. More red and blue circuits based on what you provide or other finished items like T3 assemblers, chemical planets, etc. In addtion make nodes that are being supplied more likely to spawn enemies, which would create a risk/reward scenario for players. You get more items out, but also have to fight of more threats.
The supply chain and ore processing situation is unique enough, but created a lot of downtime where I was exclusively waiting around for my base to produce enough iron plates. I understand that the iron plate limitation is one of the main points of the planets design, but the end result is even after having solved the layout issue it felt like there was no real way to speed things up.
The core mechanic is dealing with a large amount of waste byproduct from recipes. This idea exists on basically every DLC planet; however, Fulgora, Vulcanus, and In Space you are given ways to void infinite amounts of trash items. Castra doesn't have any of those (If I had visited Fulgora first my 18 hours might have been 6). Sulfide gives sulfur and water. Sulfur goes to copper+milerite to make iron. Water goes to steam turbines and fluid cracking. I was able to prevent water from backing up by using the games original sulfur producing recipe to burn excess water (setup with a logic condition). Excess sulfur . . . was a continuous problem. I eventually setup and overflow splitter and suffered it filling up my storage system. I eventually found the sulfur to rocket fuel recipe, and am exclusively using rocket fuel to power steam engines in order to burn of excess.
This loop does some interesting things. It basically forces you to use older tech in order to balance out the system. If I had laid down a nuclear power plant, or 20000 solar panels and accumulators, I wouldn't have had the ability to regulate water consumption. It was a difficult challenge, and one that the DLC planets don't make you tackle. Typically when you get to a planet the recipe's you find there are the ones best suited to that planet. It also gave me what I think is the funniest construction loops. I'm not sure if this was intended, but in order to deal with excess tin: I would turn tin into yellow ammo, and then spread that ammo out to turrets that were set to shoot at the enemy nodes, but not so many that they could ever kill their high health regen.
My largest recommendation would be to rebalance the iron gathered from the sulfur+militrite+copper recipe. Running . . . 96? 128? Chemical plants did not saturate a red belt; which is what made the planet lag on so long.
The lack of actual enemies I think was the largest hold up on the enjoyment of the planet. This is not just because I was expecting to do a lot of fighting here. A constant threat would have been somewhere to sink extra resources. I know "add more enemies" is a big ask, but it really is what's needed to make the planet feel more interactive. The tanks that I spawned in were functional (I assume bitter AI with slow movement speed and simply using the tank model sprites). It shouldn't be to much more work to add a car enemy with the same technique. The drones (logi, construction, defender, distractor) are also potential enemies to include, and could fill in the role of melee biters. Ignore their flight and jus thave them obey normal ground rules, and their attack could be a short ranged zap like from the fulgora arch gun. Rather than adding enemy spawns to the main nodes drop table use assemblers as sub buildings, I guess like biter spawners. T1, T2, and T3 assemblers could be used as the varying spawn buildings for each enemy type.
The only issue here is there's no way to tell automated turrets/spidertrons to attack enemy buildings/walls/powerlines.
Long rant over: The mod is pretty decent where it stands now, and I assume enemy tanks not spawning is either something to do with my save, or the mod not being fully done yet. I hope you consider some of the tweaks proposed above.
