glad i could help

2 Suggestions.

An upgrade that makes the mech explode on death destroying the mech itself but does really good damage to enemies.

A chance for enemy mechanoids to have upgrades.

Upgrades are taking too long and if the mech dies, you have to do it aaaalll over again. I suggest having an option for reducing upgrade time, or make it so that they only lose their upgrades when dismantled, not dying. Mechs are supposed to die a lot, after all.

Right now, I make it a rule in my playthrough to allow myself to sacrifice 2 Advanced Components to reduce 1 day of upgrading, and even with this it still feels very annoying when my Lifter with full Speed and Processing upgrades accidentally wander into a fight and dies.

Play-through feedback:

Once you fully upgrade your mechs, you will find this mod really OP. A single mechanitor with 2 fully upgraded Scythers can slaughter an enemy base with 30+ pirates only getting bruises.

However, when it comes to the balancing, it is made by '' high resource investment '' , '' long upgrading time '' and " severe death punishment ". This is not cool. It means the things you do with this mod, is simply gathering more resources and wait for it to get done. That's not playing a game, that is Sisyphus-style servitude. What's more, when you finally fully upgrade your mechs as a late-game achievement, you will easily lose your goal for further playing.

I really like this mod's idea, but the actual playing experience is terrible. Anyway, I've got some ideas for improvement, for your reference, just suggestions, not demands.

--> Instead of allowing players to maximum every upgrades, you can limit the overall numbers of upgrades each mech can have. For example, a Scyther can have 10 upgrades in all, players can choose 5 melee upgrades, 4 speed upgrades and a jump pack to make a highly mobile fighter, or 5 sharp armors and 5 blunt armors to make a tank.

This will allow players actively making decisions and increasing playability, instead of simply maximum everything. Instead of telling players " there's a final goal to get the one-for-all answer ", an easily-achievable but local-optimum stop point may be more fun.

--> After adding the overall limitation, you can reduce the number of tiers and increase the buff bonus for each tier, reduce upgrading time, and probably add a way to reverse upgrades, so that players can quickly test out their designs.

-->If possible, the overall upgrade number limitation can be configurable in mod settings so that players can decides if it's OP or not by themselves.

@Antisodium yeah, been noticing some bad design decisions lately, which is why I'm planning on making a different version [which at this point is gonna be a third one lmao].
Some bad aspects will in, some form, have to stay due to technical [or mostly lack of necessary skills] issues. For example: the mechanoid resurrection recipes are hard coded to remove every health condition, I'm gonna have to work around that.
I've been learning more tho, I'm making some stuff for other mods that should come in handy for this project. One example being checking for amount and conditions of specific buildings on the map, basically meaning that instead of a bunch of upgraders, there can just be one [after adjustments to upgrading times] and a bunch of different support buildings with different effects, basically something similar to VE's Ancients, it should also end up resulting in better performance, which is a plus.
Balance-wise, I'll likely have to collect more feedback. I've been mainly balancing it with the intention of it being used with other mods, but this is definitely a bit much currently.
It'll probably be a while before that's out or I even start working on it, so that's a great opportunity to get more suggestions. To anyone else having any: no need to sugarcoat anything, if something's bad and plays bad, just say it, I want to improve and learn from my mistakes, but that kinda requires me to know about them first :Y

@MrKociak Thanks for reply ＆ waiting for your new mods :P

By the way: Someone else in the comment gives you a suggetsion to the mech resurrection problem (not in english so I translated it, in case you miss it): You can add some recipes to change the upgration slugs to consumable items (maybe something works like vanilla resurrection mech serum?) and add back the same hediff to resurrected mechs on use, at some costs for balance probably.

(I'm not a coding expert and may be doing some daydreaming haha XD

Maybe move small upgrader to standard mechtech and make it use signal chip instead, s mech upgrading would be available earlier?

Upgrading takes forever even if i use devmode to finish it instantly, it gets filled reasonably quickly but the time it takes for a mech to decide to go in there is really long.
I wish the next verision would have it be possible to have done all the upgrades to max at the same time, instead of one after the other.

From the stats i can see it would be reasonable to do like cap it at 5 levels.

Maybe make gestation speed affect upgrade speed? It really takes forever.

I have an idea that could fix the fact that mechanoids lose their upgrades when they die
Instead of putting a mecanoid and resources into the upgradeur
We use another machine to make an "upgrade module" (which takes a long time)
And we use the upgradeur to apply it to a mechanoids which takes much less time
And when the mechanoid dies it will drop all the "upgrades modules" on the ground
This would avoid the loss of resources and time upon death.
It would also be possible to make different "upgrade module" for small and large meccanoids or certain types of mecanoid in particular
The flaw is that it doesn't keep the meccanoid unusable while crafting the upgrade
This could be fixed by making the machine that makes the module require a mecanoid of the same type to be present "for analysis" or "for synchronization"

@damien that could work nicely. I've been thinking of doing something siliar, maybe going back a bit to how I've done it in version 1. If I recall correctly, it adds a single "upgrade module"-like item , the amount of the item being consumed per-upgrade would depend on the type of upgrade and the type of the mechanoid.
The only difference is that once the mech died, the upgrade would be gone, which can be changed easily.
I'll think about it more while I'm working on my little bionic modularity and cyberpsychosis projects

soft incompatibility with https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2033979700 , as it selects drones for upgrading, despite the fact it shouldn't.

sometimes it will get stuck completing an upgrade cycle

to reproduce have the upgrader set to "work speed" or any generic upgrade and "select random" with no filters
reported to other mod as well

@Kreigar guess that's something I'll fix in v3 [cuz yeah I'm making another remake lel]

Originally posted by MrKociak:

@Kreigar guess that's something I'll fix in v3 [cuz yeah I'm making another remake lel]

I happened across this thread while viewing the mod page. I'd like to say that this mod concept is very cool. I've found that mechanoid design in Rimworld promotes a quantity over quality playstyle that is always skewed against the player's favor - so this mod equalizing the scales is a neat idea to implement.

I'm very interested in seeing your implementation of this V3 you mentioned. I'm sure you've already seen the upcoming 1.5 update and Anomaly DLC for Rimworld. I hope you are reinvigorated to continue development on this mod concept. Cheers!

@TacoLite
I'll be continuing with v3 soon-ish.
Probably once I'm done with a very large project I've been working on for a while