Your experience matches my expectation from having played MZ0 (amazing) and then comparing to what they had changed. They had set up such a beautiful functioning mechanical ecosystem in MZ0. It couldn’t have been an accident. There are too many moving parts that mesh too nicely to have just fallen into it. Somebody over there did that on purpose.

And then they had the opportunity to do the same with Coriolis. Different theme, different, gears, different sources of stress…but it could have been built with the same mechanical eco-system…and they just muffed it.

I didn’t compare designer credits to see if it was the same or different team, but huge missed opportunity. I said in a Coriolis thread the day after I read the game “If I ever run this, I’m going to run it with MY0”

Fortunately Forbidden Lands is based on the full MY0 tool kit. They just released a new beta I’m hoping to read this weekend. I’ve liked the mechanics I’ve seen, but I haven’t seen the “ark” equivalent yet, which is supposed to be in this release. Unfortunately they got 1 strike with me for the hatchet job they did on the setting. The quickstart setting was so clean, so perfect, so uncluttered…then they went full stupid on the last release and really bummed me out.