Funny, I almost tagged
Tuco
the other day to see if you'd started a Space Age/Space Exploration game yet, since it appears to have been updated finally.
I haven't decided if I want to yet. And if I do, if I want to add K2, or some other mod on top of it, for extra craziness. My one SE playthrough was just SE alone.
I bought Dyson Sphere Program and only got about an hour into it and so far it hasn't grabbed me yet.
As far as I can tell, Space Exploration has been updated to use Factorio 2.0, but not the Space Age expansion.
Space Exploration Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games . I wouldn't do another playthrough until it's fully realized.
SE is basically built by one guy (Earendel) so slow development is totally normal but I'm kinda surprised it's going this slowly based on my naive assumption that he was guiding the Space Age development along the paths he wanted for Space Exploration.
I don't know if I'll ever play it though. I think about Factorio now and then and my personality is such that I wouldn't do another playthrough unless it was to build an even bigger version of my factory. And my factory in Space Exploration was so absurdly massive even with everything I learned building it, it would still take me >400 hours to build a substantially bigger one! And the natural limitations of the game mean that a bigger factory would break the normal structures of the game such that I would be creating copies of them rather than making bigger or more efficient ones.
For example, at 48:27 the Acrosphere balancer couldn't be made better.
Having seen around 50 of them it's the best one I've seen in terms of UPS and throughput for that size. If I doubled my production I would simply make two of them with the exact same build, which is lame. The reason it can't be made bigger is that it relies on a central warehouse for the balancers, which make it very reactive. If it was made bigger, you'd need more drones and they'd fly longer distances and you'd need more arcospheres, etc. If anything I'd make 4 to 8 smaller ones, which could be neat but wouldn't be as aesthetically pleasing in my opinion.
Another example is the Core Mining that's integral to the game. To scale up my factory I would need to explore more planets. The only planet I explored multiple of was the vitamelange planet. Building the first version was a fun, new experience. The second one was a boring copy with no new puzzles to solve.
Anyway, that's what goes through my head whenever I think about playing Space Exploration again.