Breaking Ground Reviews

[KerikBalm]

I thought that it might be a good idea to have a thread for posting reviews of Breaking ground. Ideally, people would just post reviews, and there'd be no back and forth (but feel free to edit reviews in response to points others bring up).

So my review:

First, I will not compare with mods. If a mod does something, that's no reason for the developers not to do it to. Penalizing the developers for making the game mod friendly is a very bad thing IMO.

As I see it, this expansion has 3 elements, surface experiments, surface features, and robotics.

1) Surface experiments: IMO, this is the weakest part of the expansion. While it seems like a good idea at first, there really isn't much depth to setting up surface experiments. Every surface experiment pack will end up looking virtually the same. 1x control station, 2-4 power units depending on if you use a skilled engineer to set it up, 1 com unit, 2 data trickling experiments (1 go-ob, and 1 weather station if there is an atmosphere, 1 ionographer if no atmosphere). There's nothing Biome specific, the experiments will stop producing data, you just deploy the same basic experiment set up each time, once per Biome. All the experiments and needed power units can fit inside a single large storage container, and the experiments can just be haphazardly placed around the control unit.

There's not interaction between the deployed parts and vessels. Don't think you can set up a surface mining operation and have kerbals deploy solar panels on the gorund to power your drills and ore converter. IMO, this is a missed opportunity. The inventory system + the kerbal deployment does give me hope for some more depth being added via mods.

There's also the Seismic experiment... I suppose thats a bit fun, get science from crashing into a planet, preferably closer to it... until oyu max out the science. Basically its giving a science bonus for clean disposal of transfer stages

2) Surface features: You finally have a reason to go more than 2 meters from where you land (to plant a flag), because you'll need to search your landing area a bit for these, sometimes quite far.

Some of them are fairly boring (plain old rocks or small craters), but what do you expect for most worlds? (I was kind of hoping for small mun arches). Some are pretty cool with animations and sounds (erupting geysers, cryovolcanoes). They could have gone farther to add liveliness to Kerbin (remarkably boring for a world like Earth), its got only 2 types of surface features, with nothing to be found near the poles or deserts. Both types on Kerbin can be found in a trip from KSC to the mountains to the west. While they do encourage exploring landing sites on other worlds (for some bodies you need to explore multiple biomes), they don't really encourage exploration of Kerbin itself. Another pity is the lack of featurs under the water. Therefore most of Kerbin and Laythe's surface area remains featureless, and there's nothing to see underneath Eve's oceans (more the pity because Eve subs are viable now).

Fortunately, they are easy to mod, and by mixing and matching features from various worlds, there can be much more to see on each world. I can't wait to see custom surface features from modders (I'm really hoping for coral formations on Kerbin, for example)

3) Robotics: oh yes, the highlight of the mod.

First, despite what was said in early videos, you can make quite effective planes and helicopters out of these. Plane top speed can be in excess of 200 m/s without abusing part offset too much. I myself have made a tilt rotor that can cruise over 160 m/s, and lift a payload of over 40 tons (with a cruising speed reduced to just over 100 m/s). You can cruise around on eve on prop power at over 100 m/s (finally, a better way to move around on Eve), probably faster if you fly up higher. While I don't think these will allow Eve SSTOs (without some exploits), they can serve to lift your rocket up higher and significantly reduce dV needed to reach orbit. I found Duna to be fairly easy to fly on with props as well despite its thin atmosphere

The rotors also enable fully electric submarines using propellers. This is opens up a lot of fun possibilities for stock planets, and mod ones as well (go explore Tekto's oceans now)

The robotics also allow for a lot of other fun things. Tilt engine VTOLs naturally have become all the rage. You can now configure custom control surfaces too. Unfolding space stations, station centrifuges, unfolding rovers (wider track and wheel base= much less likely to tip over = can safely go much faster), even cranes. There's a lot to be done. I haven't actually used the KAL-1000 yet, but custom walking animations seem easy enough to configure. For the moment I consider walking designs to be impractical novelties (much slower than rovers), but the axis system and alternative axis +control group configurations are great. Articulated docking arms are great for connecting things on the surface, or recovering deployed items (although that's a bit harder to design. This is where the DLC shines, the depth and creativity added by this far outclasses the other 2 elements of the DLC.

In conclusion, the best part of this DLC is the robotics, I can't compare it to Infernal robotics, but this is definitely a feature that adds depth and fun to the game, and the devs absolutely should have put it in the game. It synergizes well with the surface feature aspect, as you now have a reason to explore the vicinity where you land and the tools to do that much better. I just wish the surface features were more developed on Kerbin, and they had underwater features for Kerbin, Eve, and Laythe. None-the-less, some surface features (the Laythe Geysers in particular) are really cool, and over all they did at a lot of surface features since every body (except Jool) has at least 1 unique surface feature (and planets, not moons, have at least 2), with Duna have 4 types. The Surface experiments and inventory system seem to have a lot of untapped potential, perhaps mods will fill this in, but as of now, they don't add all that much