I get a strange de ja vu feeling, as though this has been
covered before.
The problems with Continuum, I feel, were as follows:
* Ham-handed attempt at resource scarcity by simply reducing the resource spawning or resource production, which makes the early game so pointlessly grindy that most people simply won't bother getting past it. Yes, there were eventually ways around it, but you had to get TO that point... and very few actually wanted to bother. For example, two planks per log and two sticks per two planks to dramatically increase the amount of wood you had to chop. This didn't make wood any more scarce, as a renewable resource you can easily farm, it just meant you had to spend five times as much time grinding lumber in the early game.
* Further missed opportunities in actually delving into the meat and potatoes of resource scarcity. While I just got done complaining about the blatant and ham-handed attempt at resource scarcity, the biggest tragedy in this was that they didn't follow through with it and continue resource scarcity being a theme and requiring an increase in resource acquisition automation from time to time as your factory production increased. For example, take Regrowth as an example where this was handled properly, and let's look at the steel production.
In Regrowth, Steel production was a multi-step process requiring two different machines. First you had to get the iron done. Then you had to turn iron into wrought iron in that one mod's furnace I can never remember, but it ONLY accepted Charcoal. Now remember, Charcoal is merely wood that has been cooked up. Then it requires cooking in the Blast Furnace for actual steel, which required Coal Coke and ONLY coal coke. So for every piece of steel you required, you not only required iron, you required wood as well. In other words, the wood consumption of steel production was... (sorry, but I can't resist the pun) baked in. You didn't really think about it, but it was there, and needed to be taken into consideration when automating steel.
But Continuum didn't do this. In the early game, you need to set up a pretty big tree farm, but once you get even the most basic tech, that requirement simply vanishes, not only because you get the lumber mill to increase your wood production but also because things just stop requiring wood to be crafted. So by the time you get to the point where a large automated tree farm is possible, it is no longer necessary. Which felt like punishing a player for doing something right.
If you are going to have resource scarcity as a cornerstone of your mod, then bloody well
make it a cornerstone and not some obnoxious hoop to jump through that is completely ignored from that point forward.
* Unfortunate misuse of E-Fab. It was used almost exclusively as a time gate which merely upset everyone and a waste of this mod's potential. This is actually kind of most of what was touched on in the last thread, and the comments there are largely valid and standing on their own merits, so I'll just let you go review the last thread to see where this went. Suffice to say... the mod had a huge amount of potential, that was absolutely, completely, and totally wasted.
* Lack of understanding of what makes an Expert Pack enjoyable vs a 2x4 being applied repeatedly to the back of one's head. Every aspect and component of the pack seems to have been made under the philosophy of "Okay, this mechanic... how can we make it take longer, or require more grinding to get there" instead of "How do we create an infrastructure which takes more time and resources but in an interesting manner". Grinding does not automatically equate difficulty, and unless you introduce it in an engaging manner, it simply comes off as boring pointless grind for the sake of boring pointless grind. This, I feel, was the pack's primary failing, and such a tragic one because the E-Fab system had a solution for you already pre-packaged, if only the devs had bothered to actually USE it! You had a brand new and complex crafting mechanic which could accommodate everything from items to fluids to energy and more, all in the same multi-block format, which could have easily accommodated an enormous amount of resource requirements to produce a final product in a way that was both novel and engaging. Instead it took existing recipes, butchered them, and stuck on arbitrary time requirements.
In conclusion, Continuum had so much potential that was so entirely wasted. There could have been so much that could've been done with the ideas and concepts that just weren't implemented. So many ideas and options that were played with, toyed with, and discarded like so much dross. A bit more polish, and it could've been THE defining Expert Pack. Unfortunately, it fell victim to the Hype Train and everyone shouting "WHERE IS IT?" until they finally just kicked it out the door. Even later patches didn't really solve the underlying problems, they just made them slightly less problematic. My biggest problem with Continuum wasn't the complexity or even necessarily the grind... it was that these problems could have been turned into engagement for the player with the resources and materials already at hand... but weren't.
