Grilledfish: Haha, I actually keep the game installed even though I finished it ages ago because I like to load it up occasionally just to watch my solution to the last puzzle. It's a work of art, I tell you.
For level 2 and 4 (Fusion Reactor and Plasma cell) my solution was very unbalanced. For the outer frame, I'd create a rectangular box and then use the drillers to empty the middle. The excess other elements would either be wasted or prevented from leaving in the first place and only dispensed one by one as needed. My cycles score was too high because of that but I got a decent footprint and quite a low block score. They're not works of art though - quite ugly, unlike some of my puzzles in previous levels.
The problem is that these levels appear to be artificially made more difficult by purposely putting the inputs in awkward places and far from the ones that would have to be joined. This doesn't make the puzzle itself more difficult, but it does make it more annoying. The final level is the biggest culprit in this regard. Central core shares an input with with one of the horizontal diagonals. Seriously? On top of that the parallel movement takes priority over perpendicular, making it all that harder to separate them.
