Anyways, true story, I really suck at APM, so obviously I'm going to denigrate the whole concept. If you're good at it, than I can understand why you wouldn't want imported blueprints to be allowed.

It's like my favorite saying goes, I wish they could invent a popular video game that is hyper difficult for everyone but me.

" solvability is the enemy of gameplay", for you maybe, for me it is the essence of gameplay. I see Factorio as just a search for shortest path in a very large and complex graph. You see it as 'donkeyspace'.

If you'd checked the link, you'd see it's not "for me" but a specific term used by professional game designers with decades of experience on major label titles to discuss designing interesting games. Donkeyspace is a thing to be cultivated for a game to be worth playing.

But the real solution there is PvP and not speedrunning.

That's ... no ... Dokeyspace is a think PvP games need in order to be more interesting. If you want to understand motivations, reading all of Sirlin's Playing To Win is a good start. (Edit: I think the Solvability article is part of a separate series about his other design work, it's all worthwhile & interesting.)

gameplay enjoyment is purely subjective. Not sure what I can possibly say if you don’t agree to that.

edit:

Here's a trick that works extremely well on WD Hard. I discovered it from extensive (too much) deathworld marathon play: artillery targeting remote. It's really worth the time to craft it. Much greater range and well placed shots can take out several spawners per shell, and you don't waste shells on worms. You can also manage agro much better.

You can also use it for defending as well to take out large swarms massing at the walls. Tricky, but doable if you're talented at that sort of thing.

I got projectile damage up to level 10, and then started putting everything into mining productivity. Might be a bit overkill on damage, we'll see how it goes.

You can actually get artillery up an running around the 3 minute mark with blueprint import (depending on oil location), though shell production is minimal at that point. Hand crafting red circuits helps. You could probably do it even faster, like 1 to 2 minutes depending on the shortcuts you take (eg: use coal from rocks for plastic production).

Initial slow shell prod isn't a terrible idea, as you don't necessarily want to blitz spawners until you get your phys damage up.

In theory, you could try to take out all the spawners, but I really don't see that as a feasible strategy in WD Hard. Better is to take out just enough to upgrade and give you breathing space to launch a rocket. Balancing between phys dmg and miner prod is important.

Amazing! In only about a week (?) WD is up to 8 participants, and there's barely any strategic cohesion across them. The "meta" is wide open, if it exists at all. The top 5 runs make bases that separately do:

• single giant parallel RF & LDS & RCU build in the late game
• small parallel RF & LDS builds and then a big late RCU mixed build
• RCUs then LDS then RF each in separate builds
• a weird new mixed build to cache blue chips & modules, then RF, then RCUs, then LDS, all big
• small early any%-looking mixed build for LDS and RCUs then a giant RF late

The strats are all over the place, good times. Someone makes LDS before red chips, someone else puts down pumpjacks before putting any kind of miners on copper. There's even a sushi belt around a silo. Madness. Defensively:

• one builds landmines, landmine pushes for a bit of gun damage & lots of mining productivity, mainly defends with landmines on & around walls
• one turret pushes, gets a lot of turret upgrades, a bit of mining productivity, skips landmines
• one landmine pushes for mining productivity, a lot explosive damage upgrades, and some gun tech, then landmines close around the base & lets the turrets die
• one prioritises grenades, throws them out from a moving car, a bit of old school DS worm dance too
• one does mass close landmines, ignores the wall entirely, only really pushes for mining productivity

But they also grow different, variations include:

• a pretty normal looking mall for basic intermediates then handcrafting everything
• a very normal mall making intermediates right after the smelting lanes like a sensible person
• a mostly normal mall on the side of a big green chips build
• a mall on a simple bus which keeps getting recipes reassigned
• an entirely handfed "mall" that keeps getting reassigned, let's call it "self service"

So yeah, very many options! Good times. My favourites are the runs that see the silo attacked as the rocket builds, they don't overspend on defense :D