Very long review: too long for a standard review.

[Gnord]

Mindustry is basically two games: Serpulo and Erekir. There's very little crossover between them. The mechanics for each are similar and yet different. Each has some advantages and disadvantages.

Overall pros:
This game is like a Factorio clone, that doesn't do Factorio as well as Factorio, but does enough other things differently and right, that it's still unique and fun, and not just "a standalone Factorio mod".

Overall Score:
I put almost 200 hours into it over the holiday vacation. It's no Factorio, but it has a lot of interesting and unique mechanics. Mindustry has more RTS elements where Factorio is more (veeery zoomed out) solo-adventure. The planetary region exploration, multiple planets, unique features, all make it a worthwhile game to check out for people bored with Factorio, and looking for something a little different.



[BEWARE, extreme spoilers, exploits, etc, ahead]

Serpulo:
Pros:
The world is more open, and allows and rewards early exploration.
Decent user mods available.
The various block icons are very distinct and easy to remember/recall.
Upgraded factories are more complex, but more efficient. It's a nice balance choice to choose simplicity vs efficiency.
All resources (eventually) available on all locations through clever late-game buildings.
A location can specialize in a single resource, and export that resource to someplace else. You can resource-chain from region to region for efficiency within a region, upgrading resources from region to region.
When you're killed out of a region, it's great that your old layout is preserved, so you don't have to redesign it.
Most intuitive overall conduit connectivity expectations.
Progression/Advancement is both useful and necessary.
Plastanium conveyors are pretty great once you figure out how to use them.
Sharing massive quantities of resources between maps when starting means you can jump straight to top-tier production for most maps and skip the grind.
Every map feels all the available space and resources are useful/valuable.
I like that not everything is destroyed in a region when the enemy breaks through, and you lose your base. You can rebuild very quickly with the old layout pre-saved, and off-path buildings let you have an edge on replaying a map you previously lost.

Cons:
Every map feels like all the available space and resources are necessary.
It's not immediately obvious that you can jump straight to objective locations. Most regions are adjacent-expansion only, and nothing tells you that you can SOMETIMES skip areas and sometimes not.
It's sometimes challenging when you have 5-10 zones under simultaneous attack.
In some circumstances, you need a resource to get a resource, and it's impossible to produce it in a location unless you already have it - Mitigated late game though.
So many things operate on "just power", which simplifies things a little too much. Especially when power is so readily available.
Conveyor bridge mechanics become very frustrating in the late game.
Minus the achievement, there's almost no reason for there to be so many regions in Serpulo.
The adjacent-only expansion also means a lot of grinding that slows down the potential exploration fun. Every region is also pretty monotonous, since resource availability is based on difficulty rather than unique map features.
Despite having significantly larger number of total units than Erekir, they feel a lot less unique and distinct overall.
Unfixed core placement/alignment means not all core placements/shifts are created equal. Sometimes destroying your core, and re-launching a smaller core is an optimal strategy (and feels badly designed). The single "always poorly placed" core (always on an edge), gets a little old too.
For all the units that are available, they don't have the uniqueness of "feel" that the Erekir units do.
Plastanium conveyors are very un-intuitive at first.
Simplicity of Serpulo "formulas" really undersells the need/utility of blueprints.
Cheap/Overpowered high tier units are basically an almost instant I-win, on most enemy-base maps.
Conveyors and conduits have a lot of extra and unnecessary blocks & connectors that are easier and simpler on Erekir, with minor tweaks.


Erekir:
Pros:
Ducts have the best bridge mechanics.
Linear advancement means you can't get lost or side tracked.
Conduits are fully functional with a small number of total blocks. Overall the best combination of simplicity and functionality of the 4 duct/conduit/conveyor/conduit systems.
Multi-core system is pretty cool. Fighting enemies that are on-map, rather than just spawning in waves is cool.
Better unit variety: Mech/Tank/Hover units are great variants, and feel unique and useful.
Resource availability more tied to unique map features, though late regions tend to need everything.
Fixed core placement is nice.
I like that most of the buildings and resources continue to be useful every map. Nothing gets outdated.
Each "unit" of resource is much more valuable on Erekir. This is a nice balance over Serpulo where "you need 200k of a resource, yuk yuk!"
I like the power & water upgrade sequences. It's hard, and has to be managed and upgraded every time, but it's not outrageous.

Cons:
The complete inaccessibility of resources stored in the core sucks. Unloaders should work on the core, and resources on your ship should be droppable to any container.
Every map forces you to go through the SAME sequential power ramp up, every map.
Disappointing if you played Serpulo first.
Low mod availability. Serpulo mods show up in Erekir, but aren't usable there (just clutters the gui).
So many of the Duct icons are nearly identical in both coloring and iconography, but serve different functions. Even after dozens of hours of play I still get confused and can't find the one I want.
If a region is missing a resource, then you're just totally locked out of building certain things in that location (at least so far, I haven't quite finished Erekir, but I see no hint of resource export/sharing yet).
Almost no reason to go back and revisit old Erekir regions after additional advancement.
Lots of maps that are too small, with a couple really big maps that have many times more space than you'll use.
Repair feature is so late, and expensive. It's often cheaper to just destroy and rebuild a thing. It's not until you need to repair constantly or in mass quantities that it's worth building the building for it.
Unit tiers are significantly less of an improvement, and mass-producing tier1 trash is viable surprisingly late in the game, fighting much higher tier units.
Wall spamming is too cheap and too powerful of an exploit.
When replaying a failed map, you lose all your layout and progress, and have to rebuild everything from scratch.
Every single factory, miner, and everything else requires multi-building sequences, all with bad ratios, meaning something is always going to waste or has to be offloaded to the core. The complexity in the late game is getting exhausting.
Many maps have "impossible" resource placement which means the resource effectively doesn't exist, because it can't be mined where it is.
Beam nodes are initially fun, but after a point, it's just unnecessarily irritating and space-consuming compared to Serpulo's power nodes.
I hate the 2x

Overall cons:
Can't plan a blueprint, and save it without actually constructing it first.
Research tree structure is a little bland.
Core database should really be separated by planet. Especially since unlocking Thorium and Phase Fabric also unlocks it too early on Erekir.
Unit control is clunky. Overlaps with building controls and can lead to confusing inputs.
Pathing control with mods doesn't always work as well as it should.
Air units tend to spawn in really inconvenient, unlabeled places, and then approach your base in unpredictable ways.
Mod community and availability in Mindustry is pretty weak. The devs should produce in-house, some high-quality mods to set the bar for what's possible and frankly... define what a quality mod should look like.
No freaking clue what logic blocks are used for, or how it works, or why it exists.
Can't delete units once you've no use for them. You have to sink them in slag, or find an exploit to destroy them.
I hate the 2x2 reinforced pump. It's too small, and the liquid areas are always too uneven, and you need too many of them. And Erekir conduits don't always connect the way that you feel they should. And it's very hard to get a liquid in and out, when it's mis-aligned adjacent to other pumps.

Development Recommendations:
You could probably come up with a best, most efficient, most intuitive overall featureset with a combination of Serpulo's connectivity expectations, and Erekir's simplicity and fewer block types.
Conveyors are just so much better than ducts. The bland/identical iconography of ducts alone is just so bad that it makes me not want to use them. Duct bridges definitely function better than any other bridge though. Make every bridge work like duct bridges, and remove every unnecessary block. And make all the icons/blocks VISUALLY DISTINCT! Use conveyor color schemes. Put the old conveyors/ducts/conduits in mods, and re-release better/simpler ones as the main option. Let the players restore the old stuff with a mod if they want.

The absolute worst crime this game makes is something essentially all RTS games have had figured out since Warcraft 1: DON"T CHANGE THE BLOCK LOCATION AND ORDERING! It's extremely irritating that most new blocks reorder and relocate all the old blocks. This is especially bad on Erekir where all the block graphics/icons are so similar and losing the location-memorization means you have to slowly hover and re-read every single one, and re-write your memorization. And then just when you're starting to get used to the change, a new one is unlocked and BREAKS EVERYTHING AGAIN! Extremely irritating. Happens on both planets, but it's especially bad on Erekir.

[Alula]

holy mother of christ

[Screebok]

holy mother of christ

[bluecheese]

jesus christ, the "very long" part was right

[Gnord]

Seemed fitting for such a long and tedious game. But fun!

[Achmoye 🐙]

Thanks for review. What bothers me most is the pace of the game.
It'd be great to have a faster unit production, and less clunky (the space you need for T5 production and logistics is pretty tedious)

[Gnord]

Yeah. Blueprints are probably the intended help, but I don't know how to integrate them with unit production without vaults. A reusable blueprint is also wasteful of resources, so... yeah. I hear you.

[Gnord]

I recently realized that the Mindustry track laying interface could be used in Shapez to great effect.