Hello,
So I've been playing Dimension Warp (from now on going to be referred as DW) for a few weeks at this point, and have reached the quasi "endgame", and would like to give a review along with some suggestions for future upgrades. As a note, this is a 100% "vanilla" run, so some of these issues can be resolved thru other mods.
To begin, this is a fairly faithful port of warptorio2 in 2.0+, with some additions to help out with the Space age expansion. It has a very nice QOL start from base warptorio with the delay in pollution untill x amount of red science is unlocked. Unfortunately for me I got a bad 1st Nauvis (pure desert, no trees) so had to deal with the major increase in biter bases. Other than that, after properly starting (unlocking production, smelting, electricity & harvesting platforms) progression was fairly smooth.
Issues with DW however tend to come up in the midgame. One of the "modifications" is a roughly 50x increase to sending rockets into space. With how the mod is developed, space science isn't as immediately needed so the cost increase is a fine addition, allowing you to somewhat slow down and focus on automating some higher science (purple + yellow). This wouldn't overly be a issue if where not for 2 very large issues that pop up; a lack of space, and a lack of resources. Normally in warptorio, one of the challenges is to store massive quantities of resources for when your platforms are not mining, usually in the smelting platform, however due to lack of size (80% of space was covered by electric furnaces), my resources had to be stored on the bridges connecting the harvesting and smelting platforms, which do not get size upgrades until the last 2 harvesting platform researches. This combined with the smaller harvesting platforms at this stage left me starved of resources, massively artificially inflating the time between when you can actively progress, along with very little room in production platform to even automate science, let alone the rocket silo + parts. This feels like a oversight or just a way to inflate the time required to even start space science to fix these issues. Also having to spend 2.5x the iron making space platforms also did not help, making it feel "forced" to send wires to space and make the platforms there, which then also inflates the time stuck here even more. All while having to juggle your main platform's defenses and miners.
After you get thru the slog of space science, the game opens up and gets a lot better, where you actually have the room to produce science & store the required resources. Eventually around Fulgora, you start to switch into quality modules & buildings. This tends to be where the next major issue happens, what I would like to call "reroll hell". Because of the dimension warp timer modifier, you are forced to either: warp and sit and wait 15+ minutes (your around warp 50 by fulgora), or save and reload to get a planet where you can actually do something. Having limited storage as well in this point (I had ~300k-500k base storage for ores) means you tend to need to go to every planet after one another. (ex. Nauvis > Fulgora > Vulcanus) This whole portion of having to reroll for a planet is another major time waste if you plan to go the "intended route" of not save scumming.
Gleba is gleba, enough said. It was a really good decision to make it so freshness timers are extended and that agricultural science did not decay, else this combined with rerolling would feel even worse.
Finally Aquillo comes in to shake things up with it's mechanics. One slight issue at this point is the fact of pumps being slow (with like 400%+ mining prod) the whole 1h 30m in each planet does not feel like enough time, along with Gleba's requirements on farming making it nearly a waste to produce overgrowth soil due to said limited time. And this is the point I'm currently at, so I cannot talk about promethium sci, but that only boosts research prod, hence the review now.
So TLDR:
- The grind to space science is really janky, having very little space to actually automate science other than blue, green and red, (I had to hand feed black, purple and yellow for several hours) along with the production of the rocket components
- Having to either sit and wait 15+ minutes to get a planet the exact same as the one your are on completely sucks, forcing you to save scum else waste time getting actually nothing accomplished
- Later planets like Gleba and Aquilo have very little time to produce their resources compared to Nauvis, Fulgora, or especially Vulcanus (I've only needed to mine here like 5 times at like 90 warps)
So how can we fix this? Well I'm not exactly sure how the mod is coded, so cant say for certain if it will 100% work, but here's some suggestions
- If we want to keep the increased resource cost for space platforms (which is fine), there needs to be more space to store the resources required to produce science & rocket parts, along with space to have the machines (unless you want bot hell, which I guess can work at this point)
- After unlocking more than 1 planet (Vulcanus, Fulgora or Gleba), the warp button should have a "steering" ability, allowing you to select the planet you next get, while likely keeping modifiers random. This later would be upgraded to "perfect steer" to a planet, allowing you to select the planet & modifier while also making the timer stop, likely at a increased cost to balance it out.
Anyways, thank you for this mod, it is very nice to have a good warptorio port in 2.0. While it also still feels incomplete, hopefully my experience can better improve the grind.
