Again. I had fun. Though the same concerns as last time came about.
- the early game is great. Figuring out a cycle that produces ores is cool. Especially when you don't have a lot of productivity and have limited hexs. In my playthrough I lucked out and got an engine to iron plate conversion which enabled infinite iron with enough engine assemblers. Copper was much more difficult since I only found a green circuit loop and had to fudge a random chain of iron ->steel->copper once yellow and purple science were alive.
- mid game had the same issues as last time. Namely, its the same as normal space age and the best strategy is to ignore the hexs. Not bad, but not as enjoyable as engaging with the mod. That being said. The dungeons are fun before railguns/spidertrons etc...
- late game is meh. Once tier 1 planets + space logistics are solved, aquilo has too few trades to be interesting. My second playthrough had increased asteroid density which was a fun challenge to build ships around, but again, not engaging with hextorio. Secondly, upgrading trades is ridiculously tedious. You either have to painstakingly go item by item doing multiple buy/sell operations (by using bots to manually move a stack or two into the hex core). Or you fill your inventory with several stacks of every item using inventory size buffs/belts and go one buy one doing quick trades. Then you have to do the electrocute task. I didn't bother completing it this time and made me really wish for an automated method to get to silver stars at least. (Maybe after you get to aquilo it unlocks a button/building that automatically tries to fulfill buy and sell orders on a planet if the input items are in your logi network?) or maybe a way to colsolidate generators/sinks? So you can do it all from one place instead of jumping all around the map. I also found practically all n to n trades where n>1 useless.
But enough complaining.
I have a suggestion and a request. After downloading the json for all trades you can extract this:
Item fulgora gleba nauvis vulcanus max-min/min
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
coal - 217.7821 0.1200 0.0600 3628.701667
iron-ore 11.2334 28.4357 0.1000 283.0919 2829.919000
piercing-rounds-magazine 11.8175 2626.7890 9.0792 1.1553 2272.685623
copper-cable 0.2193 68.4970 0.1461 0.0333 2055.966967
firearm-magazine 2.7063 589.3293 1.5039 0.3334 1766.634373
grenade - 3827.2940 6.4303 3.2735 1168.174889
heavy-oil-barrel 2.6597 2193.6970 8.1101 3.0327 823.7911419
shotgun-shell 3.0707 763.2707 1.7033 1.2472 610.9874118
What this says is that in my seed, I could buy coal on vulcanus, and sell it on gleba and get 3,600x roi. This, I think, is what is fun about the mod for me. Unfortunately, this kind of interplanetary logistics (buy on one planet, send up to platform, ship it, sell it, return coins) isn't really viable UNLESS you implement automatic selling from the hub (like what you have for trains). Okay, that isn't exactly true. You can totally unload onto belts or trains, but at some point you have to rely on bots for throughput. But anyway, the value of this is that you have to eat the cost of shipping (blue circuits, lds, rocket fuel) to make a profit + the effectiveness of the process depends on the speed and cargo capacity of your ships.
Unfortunately, I don't really know how to implement this in a way that doesn't get invalidated by the existing systems. You'd probably have to do one or more of the following: (IGNORE 1-5. I think 6 (intelligent trade creation) solves this)
1. cap productivity at 25%-35%
2. make advanced items (t2, t3...etc) more valuable compared to lower tier items. (if iron-ore is 1 and iron-plate is 2 currently, make iron-plate 3 or 4)
3. have larger interplanetary differences and/or introduce exponential coin costs.
4. hard code certain items being cheap/expensive on certain planets. (for example blue science is cheap on nauvis, middling on gleba and fulgora, and expensive vulcanus). You'd make rocket part ingredients expensive everywhere so to make a profit you have to craft them yourself.
5. include the mod that allows multiple landing pads per surface.
6. Add a check that when generating a new trade it won't generate coin->item if item->coin already exists. (this doesn't fix two+ cycles but definitely makes infinite coins less viable the moment you get enough productivity. It also maybe breaks aquilo? Or makes it harder at least. I think technically this is the only requirement for what I'm talking about.
But anyway. I don't know if this is compatible with the current defaults. If anything its a kind of game mode and a different experience. Imagine making all trades 1 to 1, but having no easy cycles (on game creation you create a directed graph of all items and you make all edges point to other planet trades). So you can buy red circuits on nauvis but you will never be able to buy green. For that you have to go to vulcanus etc...
But anyway. Thank you for making the mod. It's one of my favorites.
