I am currently struggling a lot to progress into the electricity age playing on all default settings. I do not mind building big to compensate for the insane scaling research costs, but there are not enough raw resources (throughput) to build big enough for research. With the 3:1 ratio of poor ore to ingots until you get to deep drills, which will still cost ~20000 science packs after unlocking Electricity Science, everything is unbearably slow. Expanding for more ore patches is also almost impossible against medium biters especially the armored ones. With the steam bots building would be no issue but I feel like there needs to be some tech to improve the poor ore chunks —> ingots ratio before electricity. I do not think having to wait 45 min for every research because it is impossible to get more than 2.5 belts of ingots is fun, while defence is just getting more difficult and biter evolution is faster than tech progression. Maybe I totally missed something but right now the scaling seems way off.

Are you using quarries? Approx 4x~ the mining speed of Miners with 90% resource depletion.

The default tech scaling is linear which is actually initially more punishing than exponential or quadratic until later—adjusting the startup options takes effect immediately as of 1.2.39.

Perhaps the default map preset ought to have the poor chunks boosted?

E: 1.2.40 adds a Steam quarry and decreases their resource drain rates to 65%.

I am not using burner quarries because they seem to be more trouble than they are worth. Transporting burnables to every single one and the ashes away takes a lot of the space that could be used for more miners. I do not think they would provide enough benefit over steam miners. Steam quarries are a great idea and make scaling before electricity a lot more reasonable. With them I do not think the default map preset needs to be adjusted. For now I will just rush for electric quarries. Thanks for the quick response! Btw I really like the mod so far and am excited to keep playing!

Steam quarries made it into 1.2.40 🫡.

Additionally the default science scaling ceiling setting was adjusted from 12500 -> 2500 in 1.2.41.

no wonder after this update my science requier from almost 1000 down to 199
before that update I have some huge trouble defend the biter using yellow ammo cant get them out from my pollution because dont have tank