SyncViews wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 1:04 pm As I understand solar panels degrade (1%/year?). Dust build up on the panels can cut their efficiency drastically as well, requiring cleaning (and inproper cleaning will damage the panels surface). Along with all the usual problems with things corroding, rusting etc. (power cables, metal supports, etc.).

I like this idea, but I'm not sure any of it will rectify the situation:

• Dust and maintenance - most players already have roboports built in into solar setup.
• Replace covering / repair - it will make consumables (copper?) a fuel for solar power plant. Do we need power plant that burns out copper instead of uranium or coal? Just another ore to burn.

Qon wrote:

MeduSalem wrote: But Steam Power requires initial resources, albeit low compared to Solar Power, but from there on you have to feed it resources (coal/solid fuel) forever to sustain the power production.

You didn't read my post? Steam is also a one time investment if your coal mines never run out. And at sufficiently large distance, the coal fields are rich enough to not run out unless you run the game afk 24/7. I don't know what formula they use to calculate richness, but it seems to be enough from my limited testing. If you want a coal field that lasts 1000 hours then go 20km away from spawn and setup a powerplant there. Wall it in with lasers and a small repair pack factory with nearby effectivly endless ore patches. Will not need any maintenance by the player. Will not need any logistics back to base. Only connection necessary are the big powerpoles.

But if you want to run a server that is on 24/7 where thousands of game-hours are possible then solar is an option...

Yeah no... I didn't read all of the previous posts in detail since my last post from March. Would have been almost 8 pages of lecture or something.

But well... I might not run it 24/7 but... a long time... I am sure my 0.12 map has seen 1-2 thousand hours because of it. Wouldn't have been able to sustain that with coal at all. Not without building new mining sites all the time... since I don't play with mods (so no RSO mod for me)

But you are right with the 0.13 patches... they are almost endless at reasonable distance basically enabling infinite Steam Power. But then again I am not really sure if I am that much of a fan of increasing richness over distance anyways. Seems pretty much like they took the easy shortcut to deal with the resource distribution and allocation problem for the meantime. I wish they would re-think the entire thing from scratch taking some inspiration from the numerous threads out there, some of which actually have interesting concepts even with "endless patches" as hidden rewards found in rifts and whatnot.

That said I also find it highly unrealistic that with 0.13 the player crashlands exactly at the spot where the resource richness is the worst and it becomes gradually better the further away from the crash site.

MeduSalem wrote: But Steam Power requires initial resources, albeit low compared to Solar Power, but from there on you have to feed it resources (coal/solid fuel) forever to sustain the power production.

You didn't read my post? Steam is also a one time investment if your coal mines never run out. And at sufficiently large distance, the coal fields are rich enough to not run out unless you run the game afk 24/7. I don't know what formula they use to calculate richness, but it seems to be enough from my limited testing. If you want a coal field that lasts 1000 hours then go 20km away from spawn and setup a powerplant there. Wall it in with lasers and a small repair pack factory with nearby effectivly endless ore patches. Will not need any maintenance by the player. Will not need any logistics back to base. Only connection necessary are the big powerpoles.

But if you want to run a server that is on 24/7 where thousands of game-hours are possible then solar is an option...

I read through this entire thread, and there's a lot of good discussion. I'm also a relatively new player (~90 hours and two rocket-launching saves).

I don't think there needs to be any changes to solar whatsoever. I'll try to lay-out three reasons.

1) Many parts of Factorio are "plop and forget" or nearly so. A lot more than you might appreciate. In fact, for most things the only continued interaction is input/output balancing. Sure, you occassionally replace things, but generally, you're mostly doing additive building, so the original stuff is still a one-time situation. The only reason solar is more plop and forget is because it's usually placed far enough away that it doesn't conflict with other items in the same way that a capacity-constrained main bus requires rebuilding other things. If you want to deal with your solar more, place it in the middle of the base, so it gets in the way of everything and then you can fiddle with moving it all the time. I'd even argue, as one person pointed out in a previous page, "plop and forget" is pretty much the objective of Factorio. There's always going to be tension between how fully you automate something and how much oversight and management it requires and trying to find the fun in therein.

(I want to stress that I'm only raising the "plop and forget" argument because other people have made it. Personally, I have absolutely no problem if limited game systems are like this.)

2) Players lose perspective once they get highly experienced. I'm not good at this game, and solar really helps me out. In fact, I simply wouldn't find it fun if I had some coal/solid fuel supply hiccup resulted in a death spiral. I'd probably quit playing that save and possibly the whole game, especially since there's no way to save scum since the overall problem is longer-term than autosave can rescue you from. Solar is so cool and useful to new and intermediate players. It's one of the only systems that the player can trust to function on its own, so you can focus on the actual factory. Many of you think that solar is cheaty, but for newer players, it's a not at all. Any change that makes power meaningfully harder will not be received well by less experienced players. Having an under or unpowered factory is panic inducing, frustrating experience when you're new. I'm not saying that the game must be easy, but it needs to be crystal clear about potentially fatal situations, and I don't think there's much way to do that with power. Jeez, just look at the perpetual confusion of new players to produced/consumed stats. How are you going to explain that a random event means they can't use solar for 2 days? How can you do that in a way that gives the player a chance to overcome it (and remember that could mean needing lots and lots of new accumulators before the event)?

3) The ideas about solar/accumulators(/laser turrets) requiring maintenance or resources sound awful. First, I guess logistics robots are now requried. I mean I use them and have no qualms, but for any player that doesn't want to use them, can't practically make use of them without robots. Of course, many of us use Madzuri's solar/accumulator/roboport blue print, so we have perfect robot coverage on solar. I guess the thing is that people who go massive with solar won't be impacted because they're already using designs that incorporate roboports to self-assemble, so what's the point? Okay, I need I need some assembly plants and resources to produce X to maintain the stuff. Whatever, it just marginally slows down the game and makes it more of a grind. Additionally, like most robot delivered production lines, there's nothing all that interesting for the player to do. Just like how people have correctly pointed out that tweaking costs or output just means more time or building more X. Furthermore, as others have said, until belts, inserters, assembly machines, turrets, pumps, and everything else that moves requires maintenance and replacement parts, it makes no sense for solar.

I can't find the post right now, but a couple of people have pointed out that the issue isn't solar, and I strongly agree. Solar is fine, although tweak the values if you must (it's just maniupalting a time factor ultimately). The problem is that there's just steam and solar. There's no other options, especially late game. I think nuclear power would be a great mechanic because it can be "interesting" in that there's input and output, but the output would be the only resource in the game that requires disposal. (Whereas everything else is either constructed, consumed in a machine, or an intemediate input.) If there was a meaninful third option, then players can choose what they want to use, which is the whole point of a sandbox game.

I think the reaction to unpredictable solar has been pretty consistent, but I'll throw some more fuel on the fire. Nobody wants tremendously unpredictable power. As I mentioned in #2, having a serious power failure without warning (even when due to your own negiligence), simply isn't fun. Oh, you built your base entirely with laser turrets? Well, fuck you buddy. It's simply too devistating, and I can't think of any meaningful way to inform the player about how much they're going to get screwed ahead of time. The problem is that there's no organic way to expose the player to eclipses without seriously negative outcomes. To make it work, you'd have to change pollution to instantly disappear when machines stop to give the inexeperienced player any chance of defending. Rimworld is not a good comparison for eclipses because threats are far rarer, bases are smaller, and outposts are nonexistent. Also, somebody please explain the celestial phenomon where an eclipse can last anywhere from a few minutes to several days. The physics doesn't make a lick of sense, even for multiple moons or other bodies, so how is the player supposed to anticipate such long eclipses? The circuit breaker/sensor is a wonderful idea, but like everything with the circuit network, it must be strictly optional. Impossibly long eclipses make the circuit network mandatory.


I play four "building" games with power: Factorio, Rimworld, Cities Skylines, and Prison Architect. It's an unfun chore in all three mostly because I can't see electricity or really do anything with it. It's just a number running through some equations. Practically all of these ideas involve making the chore more involved which supposedly makes it more fun or interesting. I'm unconvienced.


If you guys want to "maintain" your solar arrays, it's easy. Shotgun the crap out them, and now you have a maintaince cost measured in repair packs and full replacement parts. If you guys just want more to do and fiddle with in the game, there's no reason why that must come from solar. It could be some totally new production lines. It's more a question of whether there's a sufficient amount to do in totality of the game rather than in an individual system.

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I will offer one additional aspect to the replacement batteries for accumulators and laser turrets. The battery electrolyte shouldn't just wear out or disappear. It should leak into the ground and produce pollution. That radically changes how you can lay out solar arrays and where you need to clear biters. Presently, you can build massive arrays unguarded due to lack of pollution, but if they made pollution, it means they need defenses and will draw biters. I still think the whole concept is tedious, uninteresting, and fundamentally just a way to prevent idleness in large (not necessarily mega) bases, but I suppose you get some depth.

frekkerebba wrote:The way I see it solar panels is the only structure in the game that do not require any automation, and that is the problem. I think I would feel better about them if they required some kind of automation to work.

Was toying with the idea that panels are fragile and that they take damage from the environment over time. Then the player would have to automate repair packs and have bots repairing the panels as they take damage.

They do get dirty, IRL. If there was a dust storm for some reason.

The way I see it solar panels is the only structure in the game that do not require any automation, and that is the problem. I think I would feel better about them if they required some kind of automation to work.

Was toying with the idea that panels are fragile and that they take damage from the environment over time. Then the player would have to automate repair packs and have bots repairing the panels as they take damage.

I'm just another voice chiming in that solar is 'boring', but I don't know how to fix it either.

More variety would help (wind - better power/footprint and more variable, etc.)

I've personally taken to avoiding accumulators myself. Coal for nights, solar for days. I've also enjoyed building a split power factory: Steam power the perimeter(lasers, repair roboports, lights, etc), and solar power the factory. So my factory only runs during the day. It's neat to watch everything slowly come to life as the sun comes up.

MeduSalem wrote:Phoenix' suggestion with Solar Thermal energy instead of Photovoltaic is probably the best solution the community came up with yet.



I would have done something similar by fiddling around with the accumulators instead by implementing something like a wear-off system based on charging/recharging. The batteries would degrade over time depending on how often they have been charged/recharged.

The process would have involved swapping "degraded" batteries with "renewed" batteries in accumulators every now and then.

The "degraded" batteries would then have to be emptied of their electrolyte, which has to be reprocessed and then refilled into the empty battery shell again or something like that.

During the process some new sulfuric acid has to be added to the electrlyte again but that's purely optional. I'd change the way Sulfuric Acid is created for that so it doesn't require Iron Plates.

The battery shells are an one time investment and would be re-used infinitely, but the little drain on sulfuric acid to refresh the electrolyte every now and then could be similar to the loss of heating oil in Phoenix' approach.

Might not be the most realistic production cycle but it would also provide a similar puzzle effect. The thing I don't like about is that it could put Steam Engines in an even worse spot because if one uses Steam Engines together with Accumulators for whatever reason (I have not found a reason to do that yet but doesn't mean there is no reason) you'd be double punished. That's why I held back on the idea for so long because I thought of it as an obvious flaw.



Overall I think Phoenix' suggestion is probably still the better solution because it would only require 2 new items (heat exhcanger, heat oil) and the solar panel sprite could be repurposed with some additional coding.

Maybe Phoenix' approach and mine could be combined in some way so that there is a puzzle element and/or trade-off element to everything.

Interesting! This is a good way to think about a decay mechanic that doesn't have you just spam repair packs (and reminds me a lot of LFTR type nuclear power.) The one thing I'd add is that what batteries fluid decays into doesn't necessarily need to be sulfuric acid. If needed it can be it's own type in order to isolate working with it from the general production chain.

I think something good to add here would be Rwn's interesting idea in the Electric energy dev proposals a bit ago. To put it short, it would give each type of power a limited ability to change it's power output and add some consequences, usually fuel inefficiency, if it had too much power supply and not enough consumption.

Now in all honesty I think this idea is best suited to nuclear power as it can be rigged so you need to keep a consistent, MASSIVE baseline power demand or something violently explodes*, but when combined with your idea it could work very well for PV solar too.

For example, if --- as Rwn suggested --- PV solar cannot supply less than it's total available power and overcharging accumulators is what makes their batteries decay either in addition to or instead of when charged/used.

Now, I take it your intent is for battery decay to work a bit like damaging a power plant in the typical RTS: It loses max power storage first and only much later does it completely shut down. And if so I think that's an excellent way for it to work because it means that, while there is an ideal solar to accumulator ratio, you also get a problem where having a little too much power one day will denature the batteries so it's just a little easier to overcharge them the next day.

Which makes it a little easier to overcharge, which makes it a little easier to overcharge.

So you get this exponential effect going on: You can sort of cheese the system by having a secondary, more flexible, power supply** but in the end the higher your solar power fraction the easier it is to overcharge, the faster your accumulators decay, which forces you to have a bigger battery renewal system.

So a system that's near parity with production to consumption or one which has a high steam fraction will experience little to no battery loss.

A high solar fraction or a base that has far more power than it needs will need a massive renewal system.

And a base that's total solar needs a massive battery renewal system or it will have trouble expanding without the extra flexibility that a steam sector provides.

You can also have a secondary advantage: With accumulators soaking up as much power as they're given, they'll help to reduce decay in other inflexible systems. So if your nuclear reactor or solar panel takes damage if it can't find a source for it's power, the accumulator takes the brunt of that first, and it's far easier to renew the batteries than to repair the nuke plant or the solar panel.

*Nukes: Awesome for Megabases, far more situational for everyone else.
**Although, is it really cheesing the system if it's by design?

Okay, a few points,


One: this is a bit of a nitpick but

bobucles wrote:The best solar solution is going to affect the net value of panels as little as possible, while achieving the maximum output in how players have to rethink their gameplay. I don't think that's an unfair statement to make.

The first half of this isn't really important, except as a thing that emerges from a dozen other factors. The value of solar panels can be changed a lot so long as,

1: The effort the developers put in is worth the engagement of the players out.
2: The value of solar panels as a solution is weighted against the engagement player has setting up solar panels, vs setting up any other power system.

So in short, I would say that the value of solar panels should be balanced against the difficulty of the puzzle they provide. ("Interestingness of the problem" in my previous words)


Two: This bit?

bobucles wrote: That's what we like to call a "puzzle", and one with a rather modest difficulty.

Is very condescending. For these forums at least. Seriously, if we didn't not only know what a puzzle is, but also decide for ourselves that Solar as it stands is a boring puzzle, we wouldn't be complaining about it the way that we are.



And lastly, but certainly not least, because you skipped my bit, I'll note that while I opened up solar-thermal as way to make a resource cost work without repair packs (by having a very small oil cost at the highest efficiencies instead), in actuality it falls under a very different category:

4) Increase the system complexity of solar.

Fairly simple: a more complex system give the player more principles to work with, more pieces to the puzzle as it were, and they think harder to set things up. Once things are set up however, everything is fairly simple to copy into a blueprint and paste.



So, allow me to go into this in a bit more depth:

Solar-roadwaysthermal. Step one: The basics.

The reason I proposed Solar Thermal, and the beautiful thing about it, is that its complexity scales with its efficiency: You can very easily have an offshore pump at one end, run pipe through a few dozen panels, run a steam engine off the heat, and call it a day. You'll run into problems with losing working time of course as the fluid needs to evaporate each morning, but the imaginative player has many ways to counter that, from simply adding backup boilers to, accumulators as we know them, to storing hot water produced by day, for use by night, though that last one will likely require turning off the flow at the right time. Something much easier with coal power.


Solar-thermal: Step two: Heat exchange.

But of course, this is only the beginning. With heat exchangers and heating oil the system is more complicated to set up, but once it works, it works perfectly. (or with minor heating oil loss over time, whichever works)

The oil and water pass through the heat exchangers through separate pipes separate lines and both fluids are allowed to flow freely, basically as a 3x1 or 3x3 boiler that uses no fuel, and as they remain in the same heat exchanger their temperatures slowly equalize. With this, two fluid cycles exist instead of one: one for oil gaining heat in solar panels, losing it in heat exchanges, and returning the the panels and the offshore pump --> heat source --> steam engine chain we all know and love.

The core idea with heating oil and heat exchangers however, is that in order to heat up a given amount of water, you only need a fraction as much oil, meaning that the oil travels slower. If your fluid is traveling a third as fast, it's spending three times as long solar panel, and thus each panel is three times as efficient.*

Now there are two ways to do this: Either the oil can get much hotter much easier, or it can have a higher specific heat than water. (read: the recipe for the heat exchanger only drops it one degree for every three degrees it heats up the water) I favor water having the higher specific heat and oil having the higher temperature, because means that a countercurrent exchange, while it is naturally more efficient, is not strictly necessary, instead being a neat trick players reward themselves for finding. Which is a theme here: This entire setup with solar-thermal is the game finding a dozen ways to say "Hey, you don't have to do this, and it is a bigger problem/harder puzzle/small extra thing to consider... but it's better." and teaching players to chase that voice.

The fact that oil getting hotter but having a lower specific heat is more realistic... is just icing on the cake really. That said, this specific heat stuff isn't actually necessary and if it's not worth changing the code, there are workarounds.

In any event, you've set up your solar plant with heat exchangers and heating oil and now you're doing great: You've got a setup where you've got a bunch of of solar panels setup to run, three times as efficient as before.


Solar-thermal: Step three: Optimization.

Finally, and this is the insidious part, eventually you're going to hit a peak: Pumping capacity.

With inline pumps, fluid can only travel so fast and so far. About 750 tiles for a single pump working at 30 units/second but that length decreases massively as you add more speed.

Now I haven't actually tested this, but from everything I know it makes sense that out in the reaches, you can just send oil through your pipes in parallel. Up back at the base and for longer steam engine lines, where your mixing all those fluid lines together at the central power hub, you need to pump differently. And thus the player is encouraged to learn the mechanics of high speed pumping.

In the end, the greater the throughput of the heating oil, the bigger the solar farm can be, and the more engines it can power. And once you hit a peak, or are happy with what you want, you just copy the pieces of the setup into your blueprints, and paste it down again when you need it anew.

Final notes:

All of this is based on a few very simple and knowable principles:

1: Solar panels and heat exchangers, like boilers, don't pump fluid but merely heat up or equalize the temperature of the fluid(s) as it remains within the object and the object has a source of energy.

2: Steam engines burn through a set amount of water per second to produce power. More steam engines need more hot water.

3: Fluids in Factorio have a speed limit, based on distance, which can be overcome via adding more pumps, more frequently.

So you go from step one! "Hey! Free boilers by daylight!" To step two: "Oil and heat exhangers triple the efficiency!" To step three: "Pumping mechanics help make my system bigger!"

So this is why I proposed solar-thermal: it's three new items, a solar boiler, a fluid that gets hotter than usual (and it can even just be light oil, heavy oil, or petroleum gas with some code changed), and a boiler that equalizes the temperatures of different fluids with a bias based on specific heat, but it gets this complex. And each machine is pretty simple and behaves with very consistent principles.

And it's still only ever as complex as you let it get. It's a patient puzzle that challenges the player in their own time.

Footnote:

*Why specifically three times as efficient? Three reasons: First and most importantly it's a big number that rewards the most complicated part of the setup process. Secondly, using oil as a working fluid needs to be at least twice as efficient as using water as a working fluid, in order to match the flow rate of offshore pumps to the flow rate of small pumps and make the third stage meaningful. Finally, in the real world water has a specific heat of ~4 and boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Oils have a specific heat of ~2 (a little more for petroleum based oils, a little less for vegetable oils) and the peak temperature of steam engine based solar thermal energy is around 600 degrees Celsius. So realism as a tool to inform gameplay.

I dont use solar almost at all, in part because i dont like the cheatyness of them, in part cause i like the task of feeding boilers.
and i DONT like this suggestion. it would force me to use solar panels in my outposts, because i could no longer use pylons along my rails to the outposts, and theres no water for steam near some of the outposts at all.

I do kind of like the phoenixian's idea, but i think in this case we'd still need something about the solar panels to agravate biters. otherwise, it'll just make the fields bigger, and not change anything else.
But in the end, i'll probably only really start using solar, when there is some sort of maintanance/cost associated with them, one that can be automated, but one that is continuous. be it repair packs flown in by robots (solar panels deteriorating over time) or some sort of material that needs to be fed into accumulators to store energy for night time. I think no matter what you do to make solar panels less attractive, as long as they provide free energy for a one time investment, they will be cheaty and worth it in the end (for a base that lives long enough).