It’s for players like me who did not go beyond the base game.
Mods have performance and compatibility issues, and they don't always get bug fixes or updates very often. It'll be nice to have an expansion to the base game that's officially supported and which all other mods will have to be compatible with instead of the other way around.
Apart from the space part, which is arguably already present in the Space Exploration mod (a mod made by a developer who got hired by Wube to work on the official game, if I'm not mistaken), this new expansion promises:
"the ability to control train systems better, better blueprint building, better flying robot behaviour and many more."
That sounds great to me.
You are right, he even seems to be behind the Space Age expansion:
> A lot of people are going to make comparisons between the Space Age expansion and the Space Exploration mod. I've worked on the game design for both: On Space Age I made the first space + planets prototype builds and plus I've been involved in most of the gameplay discussions since. On Space Exploration, well it's my mod, I made it.
I even tried some of the full blown mod packs like Seablock, Space Exploration and Krastorio2 to extend the base game. However, they all seem to be designed with this underlying theme that you should challenge the player by making everything pointlessly grindy.
I really haven't played much since but I'll probably give this expansion a try.
Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy.
The other issue is that Angel's is kind of an incomplete mod by itself, it relies on something else to actually use all the new things it makes, and that other one is Bob's [1]... and Bob's is very much complexity for complexity's sake. Most of the vanilla items in the games are instead have extra dragged out production chains for seemingly no reason other than to make things more complex, and the modpack has evolved by finding one of the few things that hasn't been touched yet and complexifying that yet further.
[1] To be clear, Bob's predates Angel's by a lot, and Angel's was largely developed to create more interesting ways to make the things that Bob's added.
I mean, sure - once you get oil and flame turrets it is basically game over for biters and that can get boring pretty quick if you always rush straight to it.
Edit: Also trains. I don't know why but I can just play with trains for hours on end in Factorio.
Despite that, as a modded wazooer, I am excited for this. Keep up the good job, wube!
I find that every time I mod up a game (e.g. Fallout 3, NV, 4), I find the bugginess and lack of consistency just inevitably ruins it after a few cheap thrills. So I wasn't about to do that to Factorio.
I'm super excited for this expansion--I miss the days playing til 5AM with my friends (and we all have work the next day at 9AM), because we literally couldn't put the game down. Brings me back to childhood.
I haven't finished it, but I really liked the very early game monowheel vehicle. Oh, also the burner lamps, and the research notifications, in fact so much I add them to all my games now, regardless of the modpack !
The "Eco unfriendly" achievement shows about 60% of people who launched the game played for more than a couple hours, which is quite normal. So out of those, about 30% of players finished the game.