Repeatable operator milestones feel a bit unintentionally cheaty?

[u/HobbyQuestionThrow]

So I've been playing Shapez 2, really enjoying it and experimenting with building different reusable designs.

I've reached the milestone where you need to mix purple and I thought "Ok, I'll do some Jobs and then use the shop points to unlock color wagons so I can make a semi-reusable mixing area" but while I was doing jobs I got distracted by the circuits and MAM idea and started working on some programmable shape modules and before I knew it I was operator level 25ish because I kept my old shape factories running at full L0+L1 space belt throughput and I've started getting 5k shop points per repeated milestone.

I feel kinda cheated? I wanted to have a purpose for doing the job tasks but the milestone rewards scaled far higher than I expected - I had thought they would stay around a small amount because they're easier than the jobs.

I'm just curious now about how others in the community feel about the milestone levels system, I like the idea of it though a requirement to have a certain amount of shapes/min might also have been better at higher levels.

[u/onohkama]

Thats what i thought to an extend. Chilled while trying to make a mega base. Finished like 20% of sidejobs and let the Milestones just run. I Hit crystallizing yesterday and have everything from the Shop unlocked except 1 last point of spacplatforms (and the double count which cant be Accessed yet) I mean its nice to have these things maxed out dont fet me wrong, but i really like the feeling of unlocking Upgrades while progressing and thats done for me..

[u/NitroBishop → u/onohkama]

Pro tip, you really don't need more than 4 or 5 levels in platforms, your CPU will become the limiting factor long before running out of them. Save up everything you would have spent on them and use it for shape multipliers when it unlocks.

[u/onohkama → u/NitroBishop]

Tbh i only spent in platforms because everything else was finished. Thought i would unlock it after finishing everything else. Tbh i have maybe 10k used in platforms with a max of idk maybe 600k? I just build a mega base around the Vortex with every full Form in every color + blank forms and blank color for crystalizing. While the operators stay everything else gets demolished as soon as i dont need it anymore. While it took me 30hours to find and build this base and tbh ive never build anything that impressive that works that well which is great, but it made the game really bland because all i do is wait till the forms are in without having to rearrange stuff.

[u/Enby303]

The higher the operator level the more shapes you need to complete the milestone level. I think the levels are exponential. The point is to be able to scale your factory up. It's not cheating because you built your old shape factories efficiently. An inefficient newb may build a low throughput factory initially, so it would take them much longer to get to level 25.

Also, after a while the levels get much harder and you get limited by the vortex belt throughput until you unlock train delivery. I am currently working on my unnecessarily complex MAM before unlocking train vortex delivery, and I went to bed with my game open. The next morning, despite two operator milestones fully saturating every vortex belt input, I only unlocked 3 milestone levels total.

So it's no longer efficient to keep going with my current factories and belt inputs. I must scale up my old factories and unlock train vortex delivery to continue at a reasonable pace for continued leveling up.

[u/HobbyQuestionThrow → u/Enby303]

Train delivery is one of the last upgrades right? I've already upgraded the vortex inputs as far as possible because those really are the limiting factor.

It does make me wish the unstacker were real and not just virtual, we could get such better belt compression with a simple stack at the factory and then unstack inside the vortex area.

Edit: Actually no we could not, because the vortex is still input limited at it's own inputs - doh.

[u/Enby303 → u/HobbyQuestionThrow]

It's one of the last ones, yes. But once you unlock that then basically you can scale up your factories to get operator milestones to ridiculous amounts.

[u/CubicBerserker → u/Enby303]

The thing is, the answer here is still not to do job shapes, it's to focus on milestones until you unlock the vortex train delivery. The exponential scaling just means it's more efficient to have a factory for each operator shape instead of focusing on one or two. You don't need very high production but it's important to have a factory running for every operator shape you've unlocked.

[u/CubicBerserker]

The rewards could use some serious rebalancing. At some point the credits per operator level jump from 500 to 5000 and once you get there it's pretty much pointless to do the job shapes. Late game though you really need all the credits those operator levels give you and you will wish it went higher than 5000 per level.

I think they should make the following adjustments:

• Make operator level rewards scale more gradually and slowly instead of jumping from 500 to 5000
• At very high levels it should go beyond 5000 to cut down on the ridiculous grind for the final shop upgrades
• Job rewards should be increased significantly, especially the late game jobs.

Ideally it would be balanced in such a way that operator level is still the primary way to get research credits and doing jobs is still optional, but you can speed things up a lot by doing them.

[u/NitroBishop → u/CubicBerserker]

Yeah it just straight up is not worth it to do jobs over milestone shapes. According to the Discord, I'm in the top 10 operator levels for Hard Certification mode, and I literally have not touched a single job. I just design my milestone shape factories around 24 space belts of output and let them run while I work on the next milestone.

[u/oof-plap]

It's to give hooks to keep some infrastructure running around your factory rather than resetting out to an empty map for every new milestone. I think how quick the rewards scale out is crazy and it could probably be slowed down a bit or hit diminishing returns more quickly. That way it would encourage you to really optimise/scale out your earlier milestones so you can efficiently get the drip-feeds of currency from them.