devak wrote:
Aside from unlocking oil and the drones, yea that's all you're getting out of mid-late game.
Ug. Ok, I think I've largely explored most or all the oil stuff. Haven't researched or played around with the drones part as I didn't really feel a need for them within my base (same with trains).
Yeah, I can't say I feel a strong urge to play beyond this point.
I realized resource bandwidth would quickly become an issue very early on when I started playing. Hence why I built a large "bus" into my first big base. My base in this world is designed around a similar concept:
Except with a larger "bus" and having left even more room for expansion. As a result, I haven't felt a need for using faster conveyor belts other than the default yellow ones, let alone logistic drones or anything along those lines. I haven't even had to double up on many of my conveyor belts yet. I don't much like mixing 2 resources on a single belt as they then become a pain to separate if you only need 1 in a future project, so I tend to only use both sides for a single resource if I'm running low on bandwidth for it.
I guess in theory this results in a larger base that is supposed to be harder to defend, but I've had very little in the way of issues with attacks, probably due to having forests on most side of my base which are soaking up a good chunk of the pollution I'm producing. I also chose my base location to be able to take advantage of lakes to act as barriers on a large portion of my perimeter and reduce the amount of space I'd have to actively defend.
murillokb wrote:The "RTS" stage I mean is the point where you use drones for everything.
Destroyer drones do the killing, logistic drones do the transporting and construction drones do the building.
In my opinion that opens a new gameplay option BUT it overpowers everything else.
Gotcha. Yeah, as I describe above, I just haven't felt much push towards that. I also played around with some combat drones in the campaign scenario where you're supposed to wipe out a bunch of hives, and didn't really find them to be worth it (found it easier to just drive in circles shooting rockets and retreating to repair my car when it took too much damage), BUT, I don't believe those were destroyers (defenders and poison maybe?), so I guess I haven't seen the full progression there.
The other drone types I just haven't felt a push towards. The armor upgrades (I'm at modular right now) seemed to be the most attractive thing left in the tree for me, and that kinda lead me to wonder if I was just going to be action-game grinding alien artifacts until the end.
It's ok as a diversion here and there I guess, but much like MC, the action element is definitely NOT the strong point of this game :)
And yeah, the game has issues with part overshadowing each other all over the place. I've played with trains in the campaign for example and thought they were super cool. However, in my current game I've felt no desire to use them whatsoever as conveyors seem much cheaper and much more convenient even over long distances.
It's really the same kind of stuff that I've talked about in the past with regards to MC and how the maximum tech the player has access to is ultimately what they will wind up playing with the most, and thus basing your design around "upgrades" to existing features has a tendency to make earlier stuff obsolete very quickly, and largely useless.
You kinda end up working against yourself in that you're working to make your previous work irrelevant. I ran into this a bit with Better Then Buildcraft, and have put a lot of thought into it since, but given this whole creative/automation genre is fairly new, I guess most people are still figuring a lot of it out.
Yes, I know there's tons of rebalancing coming but I don't know how they will solve this without making drones too weak or weapons/belts too effective.
Of course, if this were any other forum you'd be getting "if you don't like it, don't use it!" as a response, and we'd all have to start punching kittens ;)