So I have been thinking about things i regret having done in GT6, mainly the absurd Tier System with 4-5 Tiers of each Machine. What I should have done instead is something more similar to what i did with the Burning Boxes, and abolish Tiers entirely.
Here a few examples
Kinetic/Rotation Machine Materials should’ve been layed out like this:
Various Bronzes:
Basic worst Stats Machine.
Various Brasses:
Power Efficiency Machine at same Speed as Bronzes.
Various Basic Steels:
Speed Machine at cost of Power Efficiency.
Titanium:
Both Speed and Efficiency.
Heat Machine Materials like this:
Clay, Ceramic and Bricks:
Basic worst Stats Machine
Invar:
Power Efficiency Machine at same Speed as Clay.
Various Basic Steels:
Speed Machine at cost of Power Efficiency. Yes it is Steel too.
Tungsten:
Both Speed and Efficiency.
Electric Machine Materials like this (everything uses Copper Wires):
Various Basic Steels:
Basic worst Stats Machine
Aluminium:
Power Efficiency Machine at same Speed as Steel.
Galvanized Steel:
Speed Machine at cost of Power Efficiency.
Either Chrome or Chromed Steel:
Both Speed and Efficiency.
As you might have noticed, Steel is usable for all types of Machines, since Iron is so abundant it should at the very least be usable everywhere if needed. Also the Machines dont really have Tiers for Recipes in this design, meaning even the shittiest Machine can still do the Job just fine even if much slower.
When it comes to Power Consumption and “Overclocking”, I figured making just bigger Multiblock Versions of the Machines should’ve sufficed, that way if you want to upscale, you just need to build bigger Machines instead of spamming many smaller ones.
A Side Effect of Steel being usable everywhere is that you basically only need Iron, Copper and Gold (vanilla Metals), and wouldn’t even require any specific Ores unless you wanted higher quality Stuff. And even then most can be done via Byproducts and Decomposition too.
You feel you made the system too complex? It’s true there seems to be one major progression and many smaller offshoots around them.
One of the hardest parts of learning Gregtech was the fine balance required to make many machines function. It would appear as if you could mix and swap most blocks but in reality you have to use the perfect combination of devices, the right level burning box, the correct pressure boiler, the exact energy generation of a dynamo. Do you mean you would have preferred to make this system more adaptable?
Yeah its kinda a bunch of bandaid fixes to inherently flawed systems. Things should just work, but one bad design choice forced me into another and suddenly its this “everything needs to be perfect” setup…
I think the biggest problem with GT6 is the lack of something that truly divides the stages, which results in too much complexity in the early, making it easy for beginners to give up, and the lack of content in the lategame also makes it difficult for people to continue playing.
Indeed, stacking too many levels like the GT5U is foolish, and stacking with the same functionality machines for more than 8 tiers will only make people feel annoyed. But this also means that through a tier system, it is easy to set many key nodes to clarify the development direction, so that the game process is relatively fixed and not too chaotic. Taking the circuit of GT5U as an example, although players are complaining that this system is too complicated, through some key materials and components such as polyethylene, epoxy resin, and various wafers, it is possible to lock in the predetermined development direction and determine the main game flow by “using the things from the previous stage to make the next stage”. This also makes the GT5U series still the mainstream technology modpack to this day, while the GT6 only has a small number of packs.
i prefer having less definitive “stages”, it makes it feel more sandboxy which i enjoy, i think if you were to change gt6 in such a way to remove complexity and add more definitive stages it would harm it, and i dont think that is worth it for making the game more approachable, but i also dont necessarily think that its just a lack of stages that makes gt6 difficult to understand for beginners (mainly, i think it is having a large number of unique systems that have little obvious documentation)
I do see what you’re saying though, the prospect of running a carbon crucible on a bronze burning box is daunting, yet possible. I like that idea. the battery boxes were a step in that direction, you can charge them at lower energy levels and they discharge at the voltage you need.