Hey there,
Thank you for taking the time to make this mod. Warptorio was one of my favorite mods back in Factorio 1.0 and I was excited to play it with the 2.0 Space Age expansion tied to it. Overall, I think this mod is a good start with good potential but has some sorely lacking features and design philosophies that if fine-tuned could make it great.
I'll start with the positives. I really enjoyed being able to go to all the other planets right after getting red and green science completed. Getting access to all 3 types of productivity buildings even before researching chemical and military science felt amazing. I kept playing back and forth between mining raw ore and smelting with the foundries versus stocking up on lava so I could use that and get lots of stone. I used the garden floor for all the bio manufacturing such as sulfur and plastic with a small space dedicated to heater steam turbines to take advantage of the unlimited water. There was a great "aha" moment for me where I was struggling to find crude oil and thought how the heck I would do chemical science when I realized I could get all the oil outputs I wanted from Fulgora's heavy oil and the underground garden. Plus, being able to put all the heavy oil I wanted straight into my flamethrowers carried me for many dozen hours. This mod challenged me to consider several vanilla mechanics and recipes to come up with the best solutions which was the most fun I had with it.
Fulgora and Vulcanus were super useful for getting the resources I needed, but after unlocking the Garden, Gleba quickly became obsolete as there were no specific resources I would need from that planet. I tried going back and forth between Fulgora and Vulcanus but it looks like you had accounted for that in some way as I was constantly being sent to "previous planets" where I would get sent waves that were impossible to deal with. I found the best solution to be to switch between Fulgora, Vulcanus, and Nauvis to avoid this as much as possible. However, I couldn't always remember the previous planet I was on and wasn't always given the option of where I next needed to go within the timeframe I had to leave.
I felt that my options for bringing resources back to the platform were limited. I would have to set up all my mines close to my platform and subject them to potential attacks from the waves in order to help quickly move the material back to the platform and quickly take it down before I left the planet. The longer I played, the more I began to miss the warp harvesters and teleporters from the original Warptorio mods. They could have been super useful on Fulgora, Vulcanus or even Gleba and Nauvis for helping to get planet specific resources or general abundant resources including but not limited to uranium, tungsten ore, calcite, sulfuric acid, scrap, jellynut, and yumako.
I wish I could say I finished the game but sadly this is not the case. After my evolution tipped above 50%, the game was not playable for me anymore. Despite having all fire and physical projectile upgrades up to space science packs, it was not enough to deal with the massive hoards of strafers that spawned. I could handle the biters and spitters, but not those things. In my opinion, the timeframe between waves going from 2 minutes down to 14 seconds within 10-15 minutes of being on a planet felt terrible. It forced me to only stay on a planet 15 minutes at most before I had to warp out. This made setup and takedown of mining outposts much more tedious and take a moderate portion of time spent on the planet doing so versus actually obtaining resources. I was really hoping for that rewarding feeling of upgrading my base so I could stay longer on specific planets but that never felt the case. I only felt like I was barely keeping pace with the rising evolution until it was too much for me to handle anymore.
Here are my recommendations in level of importance:
1. Rework the waves system and evolution. I recommend a slower ramp-up of time between waves and resetting evolution between warps. You could make the evolution ramp back up faster than in vanilla. I saw in the settings you could change the ramp-up of the waves, but I could not set it lower than 10. Please consider lowering that minimum setting. You could even keep in the swarms of strafers but those should only be spawning like 30-60 minutes into staying at a planet IMO.
2. Add warp harvesters and teleporters, or even just the teleporter itself if you don't want to add the warp harvesters themselves. This would be a massive QOL update.
3. Rework the garden floor to reintroduce Gleba as an important planet. I recommend removing the garden floor but still keeping the unlimited water resource somehow. The player should still need to go to Gleba to get Yumako and Jellynut. However, there is the expiration time of the fruits to consider. Maybe increase the expiration date or add a technology to craft a container to hold them in that keeps them from expiring as quickly? Upgrades to it could allow larger inventory sizes. Warp harvesters could also help significantly with this design philosophy in mind.
4. More item and fluid warping between floors
5. I saw on one of the discussion threads you made it so quality modules could be added to beacons? This is a massive game changer and should be referenced in the information section of your mod page.
I wish I could give more recommendations for Aquilo but again unfortunately I just couldn't make it that far. I would hope it didn't have enemy spawns on it but I can't rule out the impossibility. If there is no way to warp heat across heat pipes, I would highly recommend adding that as well. I think that was another item and technology in the original Warptorio that could make getting resources in Aquilo feel more rewarding.
I would be glad to play this mod again if some of these changes were implemented.
