Thanks for creating this mod! I'm about 13 hours in, and I'm starting to get settled in. I played with biters turned real low (though not off) so I could have time to explore the new mechanics. I'm roughly at: Clockwork (267), Orchid (100), Ember (28), Plasma (12), Gunfire (0; ignored it). I have red/green/blue science set up. I've build out some fishing, farming, and aquafarming (but no land animal farms yet).
Overall - I like the direction of the new mechanics! Each caste has a cool new use so far, and I enjoy trying to optimize the city in addition to the factory. I also liked the little touches in the messages, the discovery that the Orchid Caste doesn't like being next to animal processing facilities, and variety of new crops/animals/etc.
Gameplay annoyances:
1. My biggest problem right now: I'm stuck in a bit of a negative loop with Clockwork penalties due to injuries. Specifically, I have a lot of people (of all Castes) sick with Yeast Infection (probably 60%+ with Yeast Infection specifically, and I probably only have ~30 non-injured Clockworkers out of my 267), and the rest have various sicknesses. My plasma workers can't keep up because they keep getting sick themselves. I have built Artificial Limbs, Bandages, and Isotonic Saline Solution so far. Curing yeast infection seems to require Antimycotics, which requires a huge increase in factory complexity. I'm hard-blocked by lack of Zetorn right now, which requires 500 Orchid points. I could theoretically build it (and I may just bite the bullet here next), but it would require huge increases in food and actual housing blocks...which probably in turn requires more Clockwork. Suggestion: either nerf Yeast Infections a bit, change the recipe, or create a new earlier-phase recipe to cure it.
2. I put (raw) fish into the market hall, and didn't realize until too late that they were non-consumable. Suggestion: don't allow raw fish to enter the market hall to reduce confusion.
3. Suggestion: Have market halls work like train wagons and be able to set filters. Micromanaging market halls with inserter conditions to maintain a healthy balance is not great. Same with pharmacies/hospitals.
4. Suggestion: Necrofall plants showing up on the ground is kind of annoying. I've automated it on a farm, but there's no way to automatically get rid of it around the composters. I have a deconstruction planner in my inventory to manage it, but I shouldn't have to do this. Nit: the "Squeak Through" mod doesn't work with necrofall plants :(
5. Improvised housing is...meh. Can I limit the overflow so no extra buildings/people show up? I keep deleting them to keep my city tidy - I don't want to expand my city when I don't have enough food/resources to build proper housing.
6. Suggestion: unpowered housing should have the unpowered indicator. I discovered this way too late that a bunch of buildings didn't have power.
7. I don't quite understand the happiness mechanic. It seems trivial to get a positive number, but I don't know what pushing it higher actually does.
8. Suggestion: Make the Orchid Plant Care Station work like the Market Hall. Why does it have an "internal" 999 storage, and also an extra 40 slots of inventory?
9. Suggestion: Remove the (non-water) input requirement for farms. I need to set up a little loop for every farm to hold a minimum number of plants, but there's no good reason that it would fail (unless there's exceptionally poor harvest seasons? but then the player needs to intervene by handcrafting some plants, and that's un-fun). This seems to be extra busy work for the player with no real payoff. If you wanted some kind of complexity, I could see a new building to process the plant into its seed form or perhaps adding fertilizer. But just the bare item itself doesn't add a whole lot, and you already have the requirement that you've "discovered" a new plant before you can make a farm for it anyway.
10. Suggestion: Make the nightclub more interactive somehow? It doesn't require workers (what??), and it has 30 slots of inventory (why??). Maybe adding food/drinks to it could make people happier.
11. Suggestion: Some way to recycle older housing that got upgraded?
12. Trash site doesn't show a radius (either a visual one, or in the right-hand info panel when hovering over it). But it does exist, since it highlights the ones in range (looks to be 100x100ish?).
Bigger directional suggestions:
13. Can the weather be dependent on particular areas of the map? Right now it seems to cycle between weather seasons, which serves to add RNG without strategic considerations. I can imagine that a desert tile might be non-rainy, and players would need to find good farming areas and build bases around that.
14. Perhaps way to get people to "commute" further to work? Sometimes I want to set up some facilities further away from my existing core of buildings, but I don't want to commit to a full food/water/waste setup.
15. I feel a little constrained by Clockwork right now (can't scale up as much as I want to by adding much larger smelting/mining arrays). It's not clear to me as the player how many citizens I should be aiming for, and if the scale still works out. Should I be getting thousands of Clockworkers? Tens of thousands? If so, having some intermediate milestones (like the Orchid 100 and 500 milestones) could nudge the player in the right direction. Perhaps sometimes as simple as locking further upgrades in Clockwork points productivity behind specific population limits? In general, I think the mod should be a little opinionated as to whether the player should eventually get so many tech upgrades that you can build megabases without having to set up more huge food/medicine/supply chains, or whether it should be more constrained and each individual Caste member has a more direct impact (closer to something like Rimworld).
Finally - I've had fun with this mod and I'm impressed! I hope this came off as constructive as possible and not negative. The balance is really hard to get right and there's so many moving pieces that work pretty well together.
