As it stands, Homeworld Redux is currently mostly a direct port with only minor changes to handle Factorio changes since 0.13. It needs a lot more work than that though to fix some of the issues it has, especially balance due to all the fluid and barrel changes. So, here's a thread to discuss feedback on potential changes.

Things that will change:
1) Redo the tech costs to be in line with factorios 1 to 1 pack change in 0.15. Shouldn't be a huge change. There's only a few techs and they don't cost much.

2) Oil barrels. Letting the stack size be huge REALLY unbalances the main game. Most likely it'll be replaced with a custom barrel-like item that holds more oil each, but can't be unbarreled. This'll allow easier transport over long distance than barrels do now, but won't break the game.

3) A way to retry any missing rewards, possibly a different way of handing out rewards. Might have them added directly to the players inventory when they open a portal, if it's possible.

4) What rewards are given out. Right now they're unchanged, but science has changed a lot since 0.13 and those rewards aren't really as valuable as they were. Also, I'd like to disable the military based rewards if the map has biters disabled. Maybe give set rewards, rather than random one from a pre-set list.

5) Terraformers need some fixing as they don't work quite right. Also they need to have modules disabled as none of them work properly. I don't recommend using any of them.

Things that will probably change:
1) Tiers: both the numbers and what items are requested. There's already code for it in the old versions git which i might bring over. Instead of 6 tiers, there'd be 9 with roughly double population required for each level. It'd still end at 2M pop, but there'd be less waiting between tier upgrades.

2) Along with the above, requirements would be reworked so they go in more of a progression - basic items for lower tiers, items those items make for higher tiers, and end game items for the highest tier. Coal, uranium fuel cells, landfill, and cliff explosives would likely be added. Possibly artillery shells too. We want a sense of rebuilding a society, so a natural progression there would be good.

3) Prevent the homeworld portal from taking items that aren't needed. Not sure if this can be done easily but it'd be nice to not have it gobble up random items.

Things that might change/ideas for changes:

1) Redo the sand collector to work more like the farm. Instead of relying on a sand resource (that's currently probably WAY too common), it'd instead produce at a variable rate based on how many sand tiles are under it. This would make sand an infinite resource, but would mine much slower than currently. Sand is used only for a) glass for wine, which is only used in one tier, and b) as a component to concrete. That last use might be removed, as it's a bit out of scope for this mod. Alternatively, might make the sand patches significantly less common, but infinite. I think ideally a sand biome would have one small cluster of infinite sand in the center, but I don't think that's really possible with the resource system.

2) Speaking of farms, I'd like to redo them and separate out the various resources so that a single farm produces ONE thing. This would make balancing out all the items much easier, especially as the tiers go on and the needs for each change wildly. Perhaps this would be done with a new tech tier that allows taking the farm and specializing it to a single resource, each with their own requirements for the best tiles to place them on, instead of water always being best (for instance, growing grapes would work much better if there are cliffs nearby. They like hills.)

3) Also with farms, they might work better as an assembler type building. On the one hand, this would mean no soil based bonuses (probably, not sure if it's possible to lua-script productivity bonuses). This would allow for adding the individual crops as recipes, and a second version of each which uses water to increase yields. Likely these would take some of the crop to use as seed material.

Lemme know any feedback you guys got, ideas/sugges

I like most of what I'm reading. this mod is a huge undertaking, and has a lot of potential.

I'm not sure I like your idea about farms though. If possible, i'd like to see it more like a real farm. You start it out as a patch of dirt, and load it with a seed (not sure how to gamify that though). It would grow its product at an exponential rate. The more it has, the faster it grows (up to a max limit). That way if you take too much out, the production falters. The building would have to output a signal based on contents so we could automate it later on, but early farmers would have to manually choose what to take out.

Also, and I know this wont be a popular opinion, but I don't feel even the smallest amount of urgency from this mod. The homeworld is dying, but if the population reaches 10.. they're okay to stay that way forever. I think the population should be capable of reaching 0, they should die, and you should lose.

Unless of course you at least trickle feed them. Wood and Fish are tier 1, and that's pretty easy to provide in at least small quantities. When you start the game population should start at 100, with a small trickle dying every day. Maybe 4 dying per game day. That gives you 25 game days to at least send them SOMETHING to keep them from completely dying off. It also means you need to interact with the mod ALL the time.

Right now my wife are playing a very heavily modified game (custom chosen) and although Homeworld Redux is here and we're stockpiling bread, fish, etc, we're not really playing with the homeworld mod. We know that at some later time we're going to have to attack the tiers, abut otherwise we're not acually caring about the homeworld, because those 10 citizens are just fine on their own.

I think they should die without my help, muahahaha.

EDIT: I'm home sick from work with the flu, my brain might be a little fevered. If anything doesn't make sense, just ask, i'l answer it when i'm healthy.

B3) But I like dumping my trash on the homeworld! They get a delivery full of useless stuff and are all like "What the hell are we supposed to do with this?" and then they see a sticky note I put on it "Sorry, this is all just trash I didn't want, enjoy."

C3) I like the soil bonuses and using pollution in the calculation of a farm's ability to work. The game already works in a bad way causing people to want to pollute as much as possible rather than to try and not pollute.

Sean's suggestion of urgency; This is true, I don't particularly like the fact that there's no risk involved, as I said before in another topic I believe.

But rather than lose, it would be a setting that says whether or not you lose if the colony dies. That way you can continue on anyway if you lose the colony, or set he setting to lose the game after the colony dies.

Trickle feed isn't a good idea however, because it is exploitable. Throw a single fish in the portal and send it back for 100 people to beat each other over to grab? If you send 1 fish per day, then only 1 person per day should live. If the population drops below 50, then it should not be recoverable, as genetic mistakes would be highly increased. So you'd need to send at least 100 fish a day to keep your pop at a healthy minimum. Which isn't exactly hard after all.

I haven't played this mod in a while so I can't remember if it uses fuzzy numbers claiming that 1 = 1000, but yea, once you drop below a certain number, its not exactly possible to bring the species back from that brink.

Right now I'm rather tired so I can't explore more ideas towards this, but I will try it again when the next big version comes around. I'll even go modless to try it as the only mod.

A2) Great, the large barrel stacks really are unbalanced
A4) sounds good
A5) I'm kinda confused as to the purpose of terraformers. I used one and a single recipe to concrete my entire base, but other than that they seem kinda pointless.

B1) Very good!
B2) Nice. You may even consider adding or replacing some required items from other mods like Bob's, if those are installed
B3) I kinda like using the portal as a void chest, but I see how dumping trash on your homeworld wouldn't be in line with the mod's purpose. I can live with this one.

C2) Separating them out altogether sounds fine to me, but consider an alternative: Having a farm that just produces wheat, then one for wheat/hops, one for wheat/grapes and one for wheat/veggies. Should still allow you to produce just the tier's requirements, but without making it too easy. I like the current way farms react to soil and pollution, so expanding on that is cool.

Also some minor QoL improvements would be nice. Like allowing us to build more portals earlier. And I don't like the 'unrecoverable' pop drop someone else mentioned. While realistic, having to start over after you focus on something other than the homeworld wouldn't be nice.

I'm willing to spend some time helping to develop these, if you'd like. I'll try to keep an eye on this thread.

What I want to know at this point, if this is now MP-Friendly and working. The original ones isn't which I recognized fast enough and it would be nice to see that this mod will work in MP to.

Maybe over one portal for the hole game so that all players can spend to them, if one portal per player isn't working. I would suggest here one portal per game with higher requirments ... eventually multiplicated by factor 1.5-2.5 per additional player slot.

The only issue this has with MP are desync issues, which are hard to pin down when you didn't write the original code. I THINK I have that resolved but I haven't had the ability to test if the fixes are working. Devs have tools for reading desync reports that we don't have, but it looks like the fisheries were the issue.

Merge with these MOD?
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fws Redacted
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/stargate

This Category should be in MOD pack.
and would have a nice caveat in the description that should be installed before game starts