Their continued all-star Linux support is worthy of applause.

I love this game but am kinda disappointed with the patch after almost two years of hype. I was hoping for a total overhaul of the quality mechanics, not just a random nerf here and there. And there is still the big problem that by the time you unlock late game cool tech like foundation, fusion, and legendary quality, you no longer have much use for them. And I am still convinced Gleba was a terrible idea even though I have conquered it twice now.

I’ve heard the Gleba gripe in many places but I don’t understand what people are frustrated about. I really liked the challenge. Care to elaborate?

My main gripe was fixed in this patch. Planting and harvesting with the agricultural tower can now be controlled with separate conditions. So now there is a better way to avoid wasting so much fruit and therefore, reduce spore pollution.

It seems like the developer intent based on spores and spoil times and farm space constraints is to harvest small amounts as needed and build just in time products. But the tools to do that a suck, and the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles. If products stop moving, you are kinda fucked because there is no good way to distinguish between fresh and nearly spoiled goods other than simple inserter priority rules.

It all works but feels wrong and dumb.

Totally agree. I tried the JIT approach; I could never get it to work, and I've never seen anyone else do it either. The wisdom has always been to keep everything flowing and accept spoilage (or kludge it with lots of bots and then move on). This patch makes it a more feasible, I think.

I'd love to see splitter filtering by freshness (e.g. nutrients at >=80% freshness) but I don't think that's in the cards.

> the best solution is just massively overbuilding all products and burning huge waste piles

Yes, you have figured out Gleba! Once you build with this mindset, you will achieve enlightenment.

People don't like Gleba because it forces you to play differently and not just re-do the optimized builds over again.

Hey man thems fighting words. I like doing different builds but hate feeling rushed with a nonstop ticking clock on an otherwise chill building game.

It's the opposite really! On Gleba, you are subsisting on an infinitely fertile river. On one end, the resources flow for ever and ever. On the other end, the resources burn for ever and ever. In the middle, you create whatever you want, for free, for ever and ever. Do not disturb the flow, but draw from it and feed into it. This is a zen of Gleba.

Just make sure you bring many artillery shells and Tesla turrets for extra zen.

I haven't checked, but have they done anything about my personal balancing gripe: trains vs conveyors?

Now that they have faster conveyors and stacking, they've become quite viable for moving large quantities long distances. Which is fine, but it feels like the right way to do that should be trains. My thought is that quality wagons should be able to hold a lot more and quality trains should move a lot faster, and/or fast fusion trains.

Yes. Quality boosts storage for wagons and speed for trains. Also unloading is more compact due to inserter belt side selection.

I did a 1m eSPM base though, and I don’t think the totality of all of that would bring me back to trains. Belts are extremely reliable, and I have never managed to make trains so.

Trains don't need to be optimal, they just need to be viable. The fun makes them optimal. I think the quality, speed, and belt improvements did enough to return them to this balance (but I have not played, so I can't say myself).

I agree they’ll be viable. They’re much harder to use but roughly equally good.

Also my late game experience is probably not representative of the phase just after victory where trains may have a slight edge - there could be a sweet spot there where the decoupling is worth it because you can horizontally scale through bottlenecks.

By the end I was using dedicated patches for each science so trains just get in the way.