Solar panels less of a no-brainer

[starholme]

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.

[Afforess]

3) I'm sure you would have had some fun collecting the zillion ressources needed to power you Marathon factory with solar+accus

On the topic of a lighter subject, yes, I've done that, and it's quite fun! I have 4k solars / accumulators on Marathon maps with 300+ hours. My latest playthrough has been a Marathon with no solar though, and that is the true challenge. I've already exhausted over 10 million coal ore [thanks YARM!] (approximately 15 RSO sized deposits) and have to keep expanding to more. I currently am mining 10 active coal ore deposits to power 200 MWs.

My next concern is that I can't make the game any harder. Maybe I need an "extreme" version of Marathon that is 5x slower than Marathon is.

[Zhab]

15 coal deposits over 300+ hours ? That is nothing... That is like one patch every 20 hours... Even 30 deposits would still be 1 every 10 hours.

I'm going to assume that you had access to robots for most of that time and that building loading and unloading train stations should be a trivial task. At the very least, it should no be any harder than spamming solar/accu down. With all that in mind, I would say that the extra maintenance of finding new coal deposits is barely worth mentioning.

[Afforess]

15 coal deposits over 300+ hours ? That is nothing... That is like one patch every 20 hours... Even 30 deposits would still be 1 every 10 hours.

300 hours was for my solar/accumulators playthrough. I have only been on the coal-only game for 125 hours.

I'm going to assume that you had access to robots for most of that time and that building loading and unloading train stations should be a trivial task. At the very least, it should no be any harder than spamming solar/accu down. With all that in mind, I would say that the extra maintenance of finding new coal deposits is barely worth mentioning.

Finding coal is not hard, clearing a path through biters so trains can arrive is the slow part.

[Zhab]

300 hours was for my solar/accumulators playthrough. I have only been on the coal-only game for 125 hours.

Right, makes more sense. I was starting to think that I was overestimating coal usage even in a megabase scenario.

[starholme]

Yet another idea to throw in about solar and upkeep.

Solar panels get dusty in real life. A real solar plant requires some level of water usage for cleaning mirrors/panels/whatever. Depending on location, rain does some of this for you.

In factorio, we could have pollution make the panels dirty, slowly dropping the max output. I haven't thought of a particularly good way to handle cleaning yet.

I don't want it to use much water per panel, otherwise solar is tied to lakes just like steam.

Only reasonable idea so far:
Create a new 'sprayer' entity (I'm inspired by the treefarm mk2 here) that has a range. You supply the sprayer with cleaner, it produces dirty cleanser/water, and cleans each panel in range. Create cleanser from water and sulfuric acid(or whatever). Have a recipe to reprocess dirty cleanser/water into clean water, with some small loss (5%, 10%?).

The basic idea being that your solar fields now need some upkeep, this upkeep is tied to your pollution, and there is a logistics portion to deal with (moving liquids around). So solar is a little more interesting/complicated to set up and maintain. Water usage is far less than steam, and you can recover a portion if you want, so no nearby water source is required.

The panels should still have a minimum output when dirty. 10% maybe? Has to be low enough that cleaning or moving the panels out of your pollution cloud makes sense, rather than just building more panels.

[MeduSalem]

Yet another idea to throw in about solar and upkeep.

Solar panels get dusty in real life. A real solar plant requires some level of water usage for cleaning mirrors/panels/whatever. Depending on location, rain does some of this for you.

In factorio, we could have pollution make the panels dirty, slowly dropping the max output. I haven't thought of a particularly good way to handle cleaning yet.

I don't want it to use much water per panel, otherwise solar is tied to lakes just like steam.

[...]

If one would make the efficiency dependend on how dirty the solar panels are, then pollution alone wouldn't suffice to make it an interesting experience, because once you start ramping up Solar Power the less pollution you cause so the upkeep would become negligible over time. That is if you aren't using a very dirty factory without Efficiency Modules etc

The panels would have to become more dusty over time automatically no matter what, but how fast they become dusty is influenced by pollution and their location in the game world, like for example in which biome they are located in. If you place the panels in the desert they will become dusty more quickly due to sand than outside of the desert where there is no sand.

Let me go further... If one would make efficiency of Solar Panels dependend on the biome as well (like more energy output in deserts) then that would mean the player has the choice:

• Put Solar Panels in the desert... More energy per panel, but also more upkeep due to sand making panels dirty. = Smaller Solar Farm, More Cleaning Machinery & Water Consumption
• Put Solar Panels outside the desert... Less energy per panel, but also less upkeep due to dust. = Bigger Solar Farm, Less Cleaning Machinery & Water Consumption

As long as the gain would outweigh the additional upkeep it would be worth it.

[icanfly342]

What if you could store the energy for only 1 or 2 nights.
e.g remove accus and use hot water storage from solar-thermal or electric water heaters for the storage.
Water cools down slowly.
Or have accus loose power over time (would be a little weird though)
+ weather / eclipses
Solar would still be excellent for saving fuel, but couldn't be used as exclusive power source.


Maybe in the future we get different climates:
- hot dry climate, you can use solar like you can right now
- moderate climate, ok solar but can be unreliable
- arctic climate, very little solar possible

[Lallante]

I would balance solar by introducing procedurally generated random weather, making accumulators more expensive and come much later in the research tree than solar power, and allow logic (e.g. smart inserter control) to be triggered by time of day / daylight status. Accumulators should also degrade over time and require replacing (just like RL batteries) after, say, 100 cycles of charge/discharge. We should also have other forms of energy storage and generation with their own strengths/weaknesses.

[korda]

Hi, I'm new to factorio and to this forum and perhaps this gives me different perspective (since I'm not building those massive factories or making speedruns that you are talking about )

So far I've made it to the point when I'm starting to build my first rocket on single player and I'm somewhere in the middle of tech tree in multiplayer game with my friend - so I guess it means I have less experience and perhaps thats good because whats trivial for you guys is still not for me. Ok enough, sry for long introduction

IMHO panels aren't that cheap or that easy to get. When I first got them it took a while to redesign factory to produce them in bigger quantities (since I wasn't making enough of circuits) and then it took me few attempts to find good balance between accumulators and panels, especially after I started to mass produce those laser turrets (I guess there is some data on wiki that would make it easy for me - but then again I guess you can make the most of things no-brainer if you use designs made by others).

From my perspective steam engines are easier to build and when I had opportunity I chose them even though I've had hundreds of panels already since they were way easier to defend (because of how compact they are compared to solars+accus). I've made blueprint that can be placed next to each other and building them is only bit less no-brainer that building solar panels. The amount of coal they use is so small that after 20+ hours I still haven't used all the coal in not-so-big patch near my starting location (although my base is probably small compared to stuff you guys are building - though I needed a few roboports to cover it all... and I've overproduced drones, so now I have few thousands of them). (to be fair I've build a lot of panels too - but mostly because I have problems with water, not with coal)

On the other hand I have few remote outposts that are so far from water and coal that setting up energy production using steam engines would be really hard/annoying - there I've learned to utilize panels (I hadn't been producing much of them before building some outposts).

I can imagine that my problems are puny for you - but perhaps you are simply looking for another way to add some complexity to game (since you know every single trick and every single strategy and now you need another challenge). IMHO that extra complexity should come from late game content (that game is still lacking - according to few other topics I saw here) and perhaps both panels and engines will become obsolete at some point with nuclear energy and new challenges...

For me making panels dependable on resources will just make them useless for remote bases (especially if that dependency will be on water that you need for steam engines anyway) and making them hard to upkeep will take away that satisfaction of build-automate-forget you can now have with outposts...

[Lallante]

Korda your use-care is an argument for a third kind of power generation, not a reason to leave solar as is.

[Zhab]

Korda, I believe that you are actually a good representation of the majority of people who bought this game. Not every Factorio players will become a die hard addict who keep playing this game on and on even after several thousands of hours. Whether or not a new player eventually evolve into one of the few addicts, as a beginner solar power is far from being over powered. I would be willing to wager that you don't see solar power as boring yet either. Would you say that you enjoyed the time you spent figuring how to get a proper solar array up and running ?

[Lallante]

Zhab again thats an argument ot make it difficult to scale up, not to keep it exactly as it is.

I've yet to meet a Factorio player who has put in more than about 20h who hasnt basically "completed" power production because they have unlimited free solar.

[korda]

Korda, I believe that you are actually a good representation of the majority of people who bought this game. Not every Factorio players will become a die hard addict who keep playing this game on and on even after several thousands of hours. Whether or not a new player eventually evolve into one of the few addicts, as a beginner solar power is far from being over powered. I would be willing to wager that you don't see solar power as boring yet either. Would you say that you enjoyed the time you spent figuring how to get a proper solar array up and running ?

Well it was less tedious than getting steam engines to run smoothly but on the other hand not that interesting to build. The worst thing about solar panels is that you don't really know if you have enough power stored in accumulators to survive night (unless you can do the math with megajoules and megawatts I guess). The energy network stats are useful, but it's hard to plan to plan ahead - you can only wait and observe until next day and that kind of sucks.

I see that someone proposed using sun power to run panels with pipes with to heat fluids. I believe that this could be changed a bit to make infrastructure to be bit more interesting but perhaps original idea would be bit too annoying.

I think that this idea could be improved: you need to build one more expensive building and it would then support area where you can place thermal panels - but piping would be automatic (kinda like current electric poles), perhaps there is not even a need to show them, if that would be too much hassle to implement. The building cost would be nice cost spike, and it would require bit more planning, but after that you could just place panels for a while (I assume that area would be kind of big). And if maintenance cost would need to be implemented it could be reduced to maintaining one building.

[Ghoulish]

I don't feel solar panel needs to be balanced. The raw cost of solar panels and accumulators is high, and the time needed to clear a large enough area shouldn't be forgotten either.

A typical steam setup (1 pump, 14 boilers, 10 engine, 14 inserters, 50 belts and 2 drill) cost:
70 stones
396 Iron Plates
30 Copper Plates
Tech needed: none
Easily crafted from pocket

The equivalent in solar power (not even counting the power poles needed to interconnect everything):
5838 Iron Plates (lots of it actually steel)
3892.5 Copper Plates
1530 Petroleum Gas (which need to be process all the way up to batteries)
Tech needed: 10-13 (depending on how wasteful/efficient you want to be with oil)
Needs factory complete with oil setup

The above to me seems pretty fair. You have the ease of setting up steam (and the speed you can do so) Vs. The frankly laborious task of clearing areas for solar panels, and setting up the production to make panels etc in the first place.

Rather than solar panels getting changed, I'd rather have new methods to generate power, burning oil, geothermal, wind, hydro electric etc. Situational methods one could use to generate power dependent on whichever local resource might be at hand.

[onebit]

Solar is unbalanced, but maybe it's OK? It makes the game more approachable. It's frustrating to run out of power due to a coal shortage and have the base shut down. Solar lets players not worry so much about power while concentrating on launching a rocket. Even with reliable power it's still challenging for a new player to launch a rocket. Most first timers will end up with a mix of steam and solar which makes for an interesting base.

[MalcolmCooks]

I don't usually play with solar panels. The way they work, however, feels absolutely right to me. What bothers me about them is the following:
The power output of solar panels is too high. When I do use solar, instead of making large solar fields to generate power centrally, I usually slap a few down around radar outposts to ease the load on my steam plants. After a while of doing this, I look at my power production and am surprised by how much of my energy is being generated by these relatively few solar panels.
However
just reducing the effectiveness of solar panels is a bad solution. People who want to use solar will just... put down more.
Adding randomisation through weather effects is also a bad solution because the problem can be solved just by... putting down more solar panels. We can suppose that the factorio guy has developed solar panels to the point that they are reliable despite varying levels of sunlight.

The bottom line of this discussion is that each player expects something different from solar panels. Some people want them to stay the same, some people (like me) would prefer them if they weren't so powerful. But neither of these positions are absolutely correct. Factorio is by it's nature a very customisable game. You can change the map gen options to give you varying amounts of resources in varying distributions, and even further with mods, to suit your preferred playstyle.
So here's my idea:
Add a solar efficiency option to the map gen settings
That way people can choose to have solar panels just as efficient as they'd like them to be. It seems like the best solution to please everyone and is another way of changing the game difficulty.

As a side note, the other thing that bothers me about solar panels is the recipe. See, nowhere in the game is sillicon or other semiconductors a feature at all. I can look past it for green circuits by imagining they use some other method of logic besides transistors but it begins to make me wonder when it gets to solar panels and advanced circuits. What part of the solar panel recipe is.... the actual photovoltaic part? I have no idea. But whatever, that's not really important to the game. After all burner inserters make just as little sense

[Zhab]

When I do use solar, instead of making large solar fields to generate power centrally, I usually slap a few down around radar outposts to ease the load on my steam plants. After a while of doing this, I look at my power production and am surprised by how much of my energy is being generated by these relatively few solar panels.

This is exactly what I am talking about. Building a few panels here and a few panels there... bits by bits... as hours of mining and factory time slowly goes by... With everything automated where you do little more then wait for your factory to finish building stuff that you can place down. All of that make it very very easy to not notice just how much ressources were needed to build those panels. Before you even notice you have all this "free" power and you feel like you barely did anything to get it. But that is just an illusion.

[MalcolmCooks]

This is exactly what I am talking about. Building a few panels here and a few panels there... bits by bits... as hours of mining and factory time slowly goes by... With everything automated where you do little more then wait for your factory to finish building stuff that you can place down. All of that make it very very easy to not notice just how much ressources were needed to build those panels. Before you even notice you have all this "free" power and you feel like you barely did anything to get it. But that is just an illusion.

There is no true resources cost for anything, really. In an infinite map resources are infinite too, the only cost of anything is time.

[MeduSalem]

The bottom line of this discussion is that each player expects something different from solar panels. Some people want them to stay the same, some people (like me) would prefer them if they weren't so powerful.

In my opinion the root of the problem why people are actually complaining about Solar/Accumulators is not that they are so powerful, but rather that they offer only boring gameplay.


If people would let this fact sink in for a moment they should realize that the argument of "solar panels/accumulators being less of a no-brainer" is right when considering the gameplay aspect Solar Power offers. Once you automated the production of the panels/accumulators (most of which you have to do anyways to produce Science Pack 3's due to similar intermediate items... Steel Bars, Batteries for example)... there is no real gameplay to it anymore. You use a blueprint to just stamp down more of the same boring 2 items and that's it. No satisfaction because of how no thought process is involved whatsoever.

And that's fundamentally different from Boilers+Steam Power, because let's face it... Blueprinting Steam Power setups isn't comparable because then you would only view a small excerpt of the work that goes into setting up a Steam Power plant. You have to adjust the Oilrefining process (including to deal with the Priority problems of the fluids), build additional infrastructure to deal with the higher amounts of Solid Fuel, etc... This is what eventually makes the Steam Power plant a much more satisfying experience once you get it work. And that feeling remains when you wander through the Power Plant watching all the ingenious little production cycles doing their work.

Solar Power can't compete with the achievement feeling Steam Power offers and that's in fact the reason why there should be more to the Solar Power to make them a worthwhile experience.


Also consider that most games normally offer an increasing difficulty curve in the game, while Factorio... well yeah...

Difficulty Scaling.png (12.73 KiB) Viewed 10501 times

May be a bit exaggerated but basically you get the idea. It already starts out much more difficult than most games because you are put against the odds, but once you hit the magic wall of Robots/Solar Power/Laser Turrets becoming available the difficulty falls back to zero, because all you do after that is just waiting the last few technologies to be researched.

There is no true resources cost for anything, really. In an infinite map resources are infinite too, the only cost of anything is time.

Exactly and that is why scaling up initial setup costs, or even comparing setup costs in the first place is a useless concept. Especially when considering the fact that the Solar/Power problems derive from boring gameplay.


Resoruce costs might have some relevance for Speed Runners who want to find the fastest route through the research tree, but for anyone else taking their time to actually enjoy the game it isn't all that relevant how much setting up a particular contraption actually costs. If people would bother about that there wouldn't be any megabases, or people launching rockets as fast as possible.