I made short work of the utility and production science and I did manage to scrounge together enough military power to take down behemoth biters when I reached 0.9 evolution. I found new appreciation for the odds and ends in the Factorio arsenal like combat robots, poison capsules, and non-explosive depleted shells. In previous versions there was little reason to interact with miltiary that wasn’t a laser defense grid and some artillery. I am pretty set on going to Vulcanus first mostly for the artillery and cliff explosives tech. I think a lot of the challenges in Space Age are going to be novel to me; the only mod(s) I got far in was Krastorio 2 and I don’t recall it creating new types of production puzzles. Krastorio 2 was more of a remix of the base game with additional endgame content that I barely tapped into.
Just about two weeks ago, I launched my first rocket which is normally where I would stop. I’ve never messed around in the endgame for more than a couple hours with friends. I felt a little burnt out on the factory took a small break which has cascaded into a two week break. This is pretty typical for me and I’m thinking I’ll get back into it after my family’s Thanksgiving festivities end. I usually flip flop between a keyboard game and a controller game and I had beaten Death Stranding (decently long commitment, enjoyed it) right around when I made that first post and didn’t have a controller game for a couple days while I binged the last of Factorio base game. This lead to me overcorrecting and I played Link to the Past for the first time and chased it with a replay of Link Between Worlds. I really hope my hiatus wasn’t long enough for me to get programmer shame/amnesia of my base. I don’t want to look at my extensive Nauvis work and go, “What idiot made this?”