I'm the opposite. Longtime Serpulo fan who really enjoyed the game and just can't stand the Erekir RTS style game at all. I don't want to build or direct troops in a Factorio game. That's literally the opposite of what I want.

Bummed at the direction of the game and how they abandoned Serpulo as they pivoted. Serpulo never got finished/balanced and likely never will now.

Me too - I've almost finished my second play through Serpulo, but Erekir didn't click with me at all.

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My one observation/criticism is that as you progress through the game, it shifts through different stages, making the game very different to play:

Early - essentially start from nothing (or very little) on each map, balance mining and infrastructure development while simultaneously protecting yourself

Mid - usually not feasible to start from nothing, but taking resources with you to a new map often makes winning very easy

Late - you absolutely have to rely on massive external resources to stand a chance, meaning you have to spend a lot of time developing the infrastructure to ship resources to wherever you're playing next. (Also, the code that 'ships' resources between sectors seems unreliable and maybe buggy.)

I really enjoy the challenge of balancing within 'early'; mid is a lot duller, as is the infrastructure development.

> I don't want to build or direct troops in a Factorio game.

You won't like upcoming Industrial Annihilation then probably.

I enjoyed Planetary Annhilation and this game claims you can let the AI do all of the RTS and just base build, so I would enjoy it.

"Build impressively productive bases as your primary focus and delegate advanced artificial intelligences to do the fighting for you. Or, roll up your sleeves, and get hands-on by leading the real-time strategy action yourself."

If in Mindustry the AI completely controlled the units, I would be fine with that.

I am just long past my 200 action per minute starcraft RTS clicking days. Hyper-controlling individual units is not a fun meta.

These days i use wemod or cheatengine to bypass the challenge in games. I buy games to support the arts, and play games to see the story or experience the art. But the second a game has a time sink element, i break out the cheats to bypass it. I don't mind challenging content, but i give each game maybe 5-10 "reload from checkpoint" before i bypass the content with a cheat.

back when i used to "compete" in starcraft, i don't know what my action rate was or anything. I didn't micro that much, either. I never played terran, only protoss and occasionally zerg if my opponent was a well known zerg-er. at one point i was top 10 in the world, and i forget if that excluded or included cheaters. That was something we used to joke about, me and my competitive gaming friends, especially the RTS leaderboards - "ranked 23rd, but everyone above me is an obvious cheater!" After starcraft and Total Annhilation, went on to getting ranked top 10 in a few FPS (never counterstrike, barely played, oddly), and leaderboards on indie games. Having a newborn took the steam out, no pun intended.

I think it’s nice that you can do both. There’s also ways you can turn Serpulo into RTS if you gather enough guys :)