How do you deal with lack of gold?

[miauly]

I've already posted this in another thread, but since this one is a dedicated one, I will chime in.

I do not find the lack of gold in the mid-game any fun. Yes, you can deal with it, no, it's not adding difficulty or variety in the game play, it's adding tediousness. If anything, gold is the variety - you could do with it before steel, but then you need to calculate more carefully, maybe tweak something, etc. All of the other things that go away with swamp biomes are pushing the variety at least to some players - dealing with dreckos is something different for a player to do if they are used to fiber, going off of mushrooms too is again a different way to feed dupes for someone, etc. But going without gold is how different at all? It's just the same steel production you will do anyway, just earlier and in a more patchy fashion.

Getting to the end game first time on Arboria and finding yourself first stuck with steam rockets (or getting pufts going) to find out later that you are locked out of super coolant - also won't be a fun experience for a new player. And it's a quite possible experience to have - new people will first start a lot of new maps, they will possibly try out different ones as well, because why not. And Arboria is not in the end of difficulty list, so it might be they will get their first space-able colony there, thanks to oxyferns and ethanol.

[wronny]

 

1 hour ago, miauly said:

It's just the same steel production you will do anyway, just earlier and in a more patchy fashion.

The lack of gold doesn't need to change how you do your steel production to provide an interesting change. Changing the order of things is more than enough for that, as that has knock-on effects:

If I want to do steel earlier, I need lots of lime. To get the lime I'll either need to get down to the oil biome quicker than usual or, on arboria at least, harvest fossil from the tide pool biomes and maybe start ranching Pokeshells as they're one of the better lime sources available. If I take the Oil route, I'll also need suits much earlier than usual, so I'm off shearing wild dreckos to get some early Fiber [...]

So the lack of gold amalgam is lots of fun to me as it turns my entire mid-game upside down.

1 hour ago, miauly said:

And Arboria is not in the end of difficulty list

As I said earlier, why would it be? Outside of missing a biome with all its materials, it doesn't do anything special - particularly early on, unlike the asteroids from Rime to Volcanea. 

Once the Super Coolant issue gets resolved, the positioning of all asteroids except Oceania is fine.

[chemie]

10 hours ago, abud said:

Dev said it is intended though. Or I'm the one that misunderstands your sentence? Of course, there are some implications, that's why Ipsquiggle ask us to discuss it.

 

Well, he did say they wanted some things missing but I did not take the comment that they wanted to block the entire end game on some maps.  Variety is good.  Dead end missing tech is bad.