Just did Deep Storage -> Cargo Bay -> Life Support -> Power Plant on my no-quicksave Normal difficulty Survival Mode run. I'm enjoying this playthrough way more than my first, from combat mechanics to resource management and even to level and encounter design. I've surmised that the game was meant to be played this way -- enemy attack animations are cheap and unavoidable if you let yourself get cornered, yes, but this isn't supposed to be an immediate death sentence, it's supposed to be a punishment for failing to properly lock down your enemy that costs you resources rather than prompting a reload. In my save-heavy Nightmare run I had over 50 unused medkits by the end -- right now I have only 8 because I use them fairly liberally, and I'm actually crafting them enough to run low on Organic cubes. Suit Repair kits are still obscenely overabundant, but medkits, psi hypos, and Organic material counts overall are actually balanced quite nicely... well, until I did the psi water quest, which promises to throw that all out the window. The enemy encounters ramp up more than I remember, somehow, and Life Support and the Power Plant are better levels than I remember (Deep Storage and Cargo Bay are indeed meh, though the microgravity part of the former was pretty challenging and I like the brief platforming section in the latter). I think the fact that resource gathering isn't almost entirely pointless in this run is making all the difference.
I think my appraisal of the
weapon durability numbers might have lead people (including me) to the wrong conclusion. Since I don't repair my gear, I've actually had to swap my pistol/shotgun/GLOO gun at least five times each (starting at 50% durability on average). 200/500 sounds like a lot, but you'd be surprised how quickly you can run through that many shots. I still think those numbers should be tuned down a bit, but they aren't the big problem -- it's the Repair skill granting 25/35/50% durability for each Spare Part per rank. This means for the price of only 1 Neuromod, you can use 1 Spare Part to give yourself 50 shotgun shells of leeway, or 125 pistol shots. Those numbers are insane. I would propose 10/25/50% repair numbers, and slightly faster weapon degradation (say, 150/300/500 for the Pistol/Shotgun/GLOO, dunno about Disruptor or Q-beam). For comparison, you need 3 Spare Parts to Repair/Fortify turrets and 6 Spare Parts to repair control panels on e.g. Recyclers and Fabricators. 1 Spare Part for that much durability from a starting skill is an absolute joke.
I like the attempt to balance out OP alien skills with turrets firing on you and the Nightmare spawning like mad, but the latter eventually just accelerates your growth towards becoming an unstoppable god who melts enemies with their mind. More tradeoffs like this would have been nice to offset the fact that the alien player can forgo reliance on resource-intensive weapons, tools, and grenades by complementing or fully replacing them with equivalent psionic abilities. My psi playthrough has been a lot of fun, as the powers add a great layer to combat and exploration, but I can tell with freely available psi that things are quickly going to go off the rails...
The trauma and oxygen systems have barely come into play, which is quite disappointing. Weapon and enemy variety is still lacking in the base game. Story and quest structure still a snoozefest as well. But I'm far,
far more engaged than I was in my first run, and while weapon degradation has certainly been a big part of that, so has the change of course in my manner of play. Shotgun and medkit spam is actually the more enjoyable way to play the game, who knew.