Just played through this one and I really enjoyed it! I loved the focus on exploration. Having structures and secrets to find makes the environment a lot more engaging. The base game tends to be pretty boring to explore, as you know you're just gonna find the same five resources and random smears of terrain. It's a major shortfall of a procedurally generated map, so a curated experience like this is novel. Having no biter growth also changes the experience a lot. They're still a big part of the game but it's not this frustrating slog of them always cropping up everywhere and taking back land you already cleared. With the map set up the way you did there are areas that are clear and areas that are dangerous, and you can turn one into the other if you really need to. The process of walking a precarious path alongside a badly infected forest was exciting, and I liked that addition. The ambushes really played up the survival aspect too, making the biters threatening without them needing to have a ton of territory to do so. It was also fun to try and get the ambushes to attack enemy bases that I was infiltrating. Very satisfying to use your enemies against each other.
The map is genuinely satisfying to navigate. The presence of paths through it makes the car actually viable, where standard maps have way too many obstacles for it to be at all useful. I've barely used the car as anything other than a giant chest in the past, so that was fun. The ability to see bugs chasing you and simply escape them is quite novel and it never got old. "Bugs got you down? Just leave! Escape the place where the bugs are! Embrace the power of moving rapidly in another direction!" The presence of a scattering of specialized bases seemed to beg you to use trains, but car was so quick and easy I never got around to setting up rails for anything other than the nearby mining base. That was a cool idea too, having neutral/friendly organizations in addition to the ones you're trying to sabotage.
Early on I really liked poking around and finding one or two plates or ores and collecting them together from locations scattered all over. It really gives the situation a more scavenging/survival feeling, which is what you're meant to be doing at that point. Trying to scrape together something workable is a very different vibe to the normal hyper-optimization mindset of a playthrough. And honestly I prefer sorta hacking together something that works ok as opposed to spending a ton of time orchestrating a complex megabase.
The enemy bases were a fun aspect. Figuring out how something works when someone else built it is an under-explored facet of the game engine, and it feels satisfying to put your Factorio knowledge to work in finding the best way to sabotage a base so that you can break in and take it over. The beacon puzzles were interesting too, forcing you to think creatively. I presume that I could've done complicated circuit analysis and hacked my way into those things to get the prize, but I found that you could also just break them and that worked well enough.
I feel like it would be helpful to list what technologies are not in the mod, as there were many times that I would've liked to know that. It took a long time for me to figure out how to get into the oil processing base, and part of that was because I was researching more, thinking there was something later in the tech tree that would help. It wasn't until later that I realized game-breaking advantages like landfill and artillery wouldn't be in this one as they would trivialize the game's main challenges. Knowing that earlier would've saved time and frustration.
That happened with Bastion Gamma too. I researched everything and built up as much gear as I could to try and get in, but there were just too many turrets and no way to disable them. Just a couple artillery shells ( I found like 8) didn't open up enough of a gap to survive for more than a couple seconds. I'm guessing that my solution wasn't one of the intended ones given that I walked into a "This area isn't finished" spot in the course of pulling it off. So yeah that one feels a little bit overdone. Still, a really enjoyable experience! I had days worth of fun exploring and thinking things through. I won't soon forget those moments of trying to remotely deploy a roboport onto an island so that it could remotely deploy enough other roboports and power sources for my bots to reach the prize. Creative and fun stuff! If you're still working on this one I'd love to see what more you can do.
