Tl;dr I had a lot of fun with how challenging the mod is except for the striders, upcoming changes in 2.1 will fix a lot of stuff (like fluid mixing in holmium science)
Preface:
This was my first attempt at warptorio ever as well as being solo without having played space age or factorio in about a year. I did have a few additional mods with some reloading when I messed up and so it's not 100% pure, I had AAI Loaders (I made 12 through the whole playthrough) and fireproof bots so keep that in mind (I kept losing bots due to friendly fire, like 100's per warp zone before I installed the mod at like warp zone 200). I have tons of time in non-space-age factorio but have only played through space-age once and barely messed with quality during that playthrough. I watched part of eggsceptional's video and started the mod going in as blind as possible. I did notice that the asteroids are coming from all sides and no longer had collisions with walls (a good change imo due to cheesing space defenses) and it made it required to have a diverse defense setup. I did have quality enabled so that also changes my perspective as a quality noob and a slow player in general.
The early game (the first like 20 hours):
The early game is, in my opinion, really really well balanced. While you can stockpile red/green/military science, I didn’t stockpile much (less than 1k per science type) as I wanted to experience the mod as much as possible. The waves feel balanced once they start and I feel like it does exactly what it needs to, which is to hurry up and get off of the first warp zone. The first few times you’re in the transition flying to the next place is kind of tough if you are like me and hoped some walls would save you from asteroids (they don’t). My early defenses consisted of gun turrets and flamethrowers in a ring around my base. Overall a 10/10.
The early-mid game (20-50 hours):
Unlocking the factory/garden really opens up the game. My early power was reliant on the garden platform and made a huge difference in how I played. Each expansion to any of the floors felt like relieving pressure as you could squeeze in a few more production facilities. I had unlocked all planets besides Aquilo and had spent a lot of time making production facilities like the foundries and biolabs. This is where I made an interesting choice. I was going to use the bacteria processing from Fulgora to increase my output of metal to meet demand. It was finicky and took a while to get right, but after a while I had the perfect balance to meet my iron/copper demand and it just worked for quite a few warp zones (80+?) until I started adding the output of asteroids to my furnaces. At this point my defenses were gun turrets with red ammo and missile turrets.
Mid game: (50-100 hours):
This is where my frustration started and I actually stopped playing for a while due to several issues. Aquilo is a hellscape. The first 10-ish times I went, there were no fluorine geysers, lithium brine geysers, and nearly no rocks to get lithium from nearby (not on the mini-map). It was probably just bad luck, but it felt terrible to unlock Aquilo and just get nothing besides the ammonia. In addition, this is when the large asteroids started being spawned (if I remember correctly) and I had no way to get railguns due to luck so I knew it was only a matter of time until huge asteroids were going to spawn. Not only that, but quality enemies had started spawning, so I was being barraged by uncommon biters, stompers, and striders. This started what I like to call “the defense dps race”. With uncommon enemies coming in swarms, I didn’t have enough dps with rockets and gun turrets to take care of swarms, so I had to re-add flamethrowers.
This, dear reader, is when I quit playing for a few days due to frustration.
I needed those flamethrowers for DPS, but what else did I need? Pipes. Pipes that carry lava, heavy oil, fluorine, brine, and any other fluid I needed. But flamethrowers fire destroys pipes and bots are too stupid to recognize that a place is on fire and they should not replace pipes when the old site is actively burning, so I was losing pipes and bots. This is also when I realized that STRIDERS ATTACKS HAVE SPLASH DAMAGE. So, when they’re going to repair something like a wall, they die to a strider projectile splash because it hits the wall and the bot, then the projectile spawns the wriggler on the wall, so the flamethrower shoots the wriggler and puts fire on the wall, which then a conga line of suicidal bots then go try to repair the 5 damage the wall took and I lose 20 bots on a wall that took 5 damage from a wriggler.
Striders will continue to be my sworn enemy until I beat the game.
I nearly called it quits right there, at like 100 hours in. No matter what I did, I took an ungodly amount of damage from striders and it felt like nothing I did could help staunch the hemorrhage of resources. So I made a call to install the fireproof bots mod. After installing the mod my bot deaths were immediately halved. No longer were the bots running into fire and dying, they were just dying the normal way. This in no way made the waves easier, stompers still destroyed swaths of my base, biters still killed pipes and mining outposts, but after the wave was dead, I didn't lose double digits of bots to fire. This is when I started enjoying myself again. Was I dying? Yes. Was it still hard? Yes. But I was having fun trying things I hadn't tried before like slowdown capsules and poison capsules to stall large stomper waves and behemoth biter packs. My defense at this point was rare stone walls, flame throwers, rare gun turrets with rare red ammo, and a mix of rare and normal missile turrets, with normal railguns.
The late game (100-180 hours):
By this point I had finished all of the sciences that I wanted/needed. I was going to prepare for the final science push. My factory floor was packed with machines placed randomly while the asteroid upcycler went to work making asteroids up to epic, then legendary towards the end. I did the calculation and did the math of how many science packs I needed to do the final research without productivity. 12500 of each science pack was necessary so I went about stockpiling them as I went through the warp zones. As each pack filled up, I would remove its production and use those buildings to build the other sciences until all of the Nauvis science was filled. I was making epic and legendary items of nearly all Nauvis supplies including ammo and rockets. All of my gun turrets and flamethrowers had been upgraded to epic as well. I had nearly all modules at epic or greater, and was just waiting for electromagnetic and metallurgic science to stockpile. Once it was all ready I went to Fulgora and started the final research. Fulgora is, by far, the best planet for defense. Power for the tesla turrets and the heavy oil oceans provide tons of firepower. Vulcanus is second because of the cliffs, with Nauvis, Aquilo, and Gleba all being pretty bad, with Gleba being the worst imo. The ending fight was fun, plenty of enemies and a few close calls managed with slowdown capsules. The enemies were all epic quality which made things all the more dangerous if I wasn’t in the right place at the right time. I finished the game with 181 hours in and 523 warp zones visited.
Balancing wise: the striders, dear god the striders. The striders caused so much damage it felt nearly impossible to not take damage. It's probably a skill issue, but by the end of the game I was losing turrets, belts, walls, bots, heat pipes, lightning rods, literally everything. I, personally, would want the striders to either have 1 or 2 less range or not scale at the same rate as the other enemies. I was still losing bots, turrets, and production facilities to other enemies, but a squad of (epic) medium striders would at least kill a rail gun with the first wave of projectiles every time a wave came in. There were times where it felt so frustrating to play because even if I went out to meet the striders in front of my turrets, I could get a slow capsule off on them but then get killed by their projectiles and then they would still kill my turrets.
Holmium is a non-issue after you get the first bit of production up. A balancing issue is that you can fly/drive/walk to different islands on Fulgora and just pick enough up from the holmium shards that I would regularly have 1000 holmium ore and then just teleport back to the base and then leave as soon as the warp timer was over. I understand that most resources are “free” in the space age update but I literally never ran out. I would run out of tungsten, uranium, ammoniacal solution, lithium, stone, iron, copper (pre asteroid production). Not once did I run out of holmium and I was constantly producing with it.Maybe increasing the holmium solution requirements for the promethium chunk recipe would make up slightly for the 400% productivity chain you get with holmium?
The Factory floor being a plus or circle and never being a square is a hilarious choice that made me laugh and frustrated me at the same time. Maybe an infinite research with promethium science to fill it out into a square would be nice/making the factory floor bigger, but it’s a good logistical challenge nonetheless.
Some bugs?:
On ribbon worlds, the spawning of previous bases goes out of the map and is unreachable.
On Vulcanus ribbon worlds, your base can spawn inside of demolisher territory with the demolisher coming out of the void inside your base, destroying a portion of your base is unavoidable.
The red text telling me I was going to the shattered planet kept popping up when the warp destination would change but I couldn’t tell if it did anything other than pop up and be kind of annoying?
