Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy. Yes, you’ll need to scale your home base up more than in the vanilla game, but the space construction all involves different challenges than merely scaling out. The space sciences are each a different kind of puzzle. And it adds three new kinds of logistics network (cargo rockets, rail guns, and space ships), each with different strengths and weaknesses. Automating them well requires building circuit networks, whereas automating the vanilla networks is very much optional.

Space Exploration is by definition grindy since it aims to expand the base game. If I need to make one new set of space science there’s literally 5 new intermediate products I have to produce just to get that science. Those things aren’t used anywhere else in the game. Just for producing that science. That bothers me.

  Space Exploration goes out of it’s way _not_ to make things pointlessly grindy.

Your definition of grindy is not my definition of grindy - maybe "pointlessly" was a little harsh on my part. It's cool though - different people have different opinions. I have built vanilla bases large enough to have a fairly significant amount of SPM so I am pretty well versed in using circuits, trains, etc.

Yeah, Space Exploration is full of cool new challenges that aren’t “let’s make it as miserable as possible just because”. Angels, now that’s grindy.

My experience is that Angel's isn't all that grindy in itself--its main problem is instead that it feels excessively matrix-driven in development by itself. And there's a subsidiary problem that a lot of it ends up feeling kinda pointless (especially bioprocessing), so some of the interesting challenges it presents ends up being ignored because there's no reason to actually engage with them.

The other issue is that Angel's is kind of an incomplete mod by itself, it relies on something else to actually use all the new things it makes, and that other one is Bob's [1]... and Bob's is very much complexity for complexity's sake. Most of the vanilla items in the games are instead have extra dragged out production chains for seemingly no reason other than to make things more complex, and the modpack has evolved by finding one of the few things that hasn't been touched yet and complexifying that yet further.

[1] To be clear, Bob's predates Angel's by a lot, and Angel's was largely developed to create more interesting ways to make the things that Bob's added.

By Angel’s I meant Angel’s + Bob’s, I don’t think anyone ever recommended Angel’s alone.

Doesn't the early game get boring? Or how do you push past it after so many playthroughs?

I actually enjoy the early game for some strange reason and different map seeds always presented a different set of challenges (especially on deathworlds) because of water, cliffs and resource locations.

I mean, sure - once you get oil and flame turrets it is basically game over for biters and that can get boring pretty quick if you always rush straight to it.

Edit: Also trains. I don't know why but I can just play with trains for hours on end in Factorio.