So if you ever played Crazy Gregtech from 1.4/1.5 where it rewrote a bunch of mods and made everything hideously expensive and tried to force you into automation.
Now imagine they removed the forced manual crafts like plates etc. were for a while.
Now they put in a smooth curve for the automation so you get your first automated thing pretty early and the answer is never "go grind manual mining for 2 hours" or "quarry half the world and come back in 2 hours when it finishes", but instead is "build more automated lines" or "find the weak link in your current chain and optimise/expand it more".
Modded minecraft certainly feels like an inspiration, but this takes that plumbing/building/optimisation aspect of it and boils the game down to most of that. And since there's a single designer and no mod arms race, everything feels like it fits together, and has a balanced progression.
I like it more, especially since so much of modern modded minecraft consists of building a single pipe and attaching appropriate outlets to it (AE2 being one of the worst offenders).
Also another suggestion for people who like the automation/optimisation aspects of games, OpenTTD is pretty good for scratching that itch once your networks get bigger.
Now imagine they removed the forced manual crafts like plates etc. were for a while.
Now they put in a smooth curve for the automation so you get your first automated thing pretty early and the answer is never "go grind manual mining for 2 hours" or "quarry half the world and come back in 2 hours when it finishes", but instead is "build more automated lines" or "find the weak link in your current chain and optimise/expand it more".
Modded minecraft certainly feels like an inspiration, but this takes that plumbing/building/optimisation aspect of it and boils the game down to most of that. And since there's a single designer and no mod arms race, everything feels like it fits together, and has a balanced progression.
I like it more, especially since so much of modern modded minecraft consists of building a single pipe and attaching appropriate outlets to it (AE2 being one of the worst offenders).
Also another suggestion for people who like the automation/optimisation aspects of games, OpenTTD is pretty good for scratching that itch once your networks get bigger.