Derp yep forgot about that xPBlakeMW wrote:Might want to divide by 10.
Thank you for telling us your post is not worth reading by showing a total lack of respect for opinion and suggestion. Saved me some time.Tev wrote:God, people are now crying about uselessness of solar power now?
Productivity modules give ridiculous amount of fuel value benefit for this process, especially with speed beacon. For example, you get 35 * 1.3 - 25 = 20.5 heavy oil instead of 10, and then you also crack it into 20.5 * (3 / 4) * 1.3 = 19.9875 light oil, and then you also convert it into 19.19875 / 10 * 1.3 = 2.59 solid fuel, which amounts to 64.959375MJ of energy from just heavy oil - and recall that you only paid 80MJ of coal and 3MJ of fuel for heating steam for that. Recipes are fast enough to make machine consumption negligible compared to productivity module benefits, and with additional speed beacons on all phases you can further divide per-item energy consumption by 3. I'd leave the rest of the calculations as an exercise. Anyway, benefiting from coal liquefaction is much easier than gaining fuel value benefits from rocket fuel production (though the latter is possible as well with careful beacon setup). Even more so because you're not forced to convert gas to solid fuel, but you can use it to craft useful recipes instead and avoid cracking light oil in the rest of your factory, which would more-than-double the fuel value benefits from gas.BlakeMW wrote:Might want to divide by 10. Coal liq turns 10 Coal into (15 + 10 * 3 / 4) / 10 + 2 / 20 = 3.25 Solid Fuel. The 10 Coal = 80MJ, the 3.25 solid = 81.25MJ.Deadly-Bagel wrote: You can use Coal Liquefaction to turn 10 coal into 10 Heavy, 15 Light and 20 Petroleum. You could use the Light Oil alone for 15 Solid Fuel to burn way longer than the coal (should also make up the energy cost of the Refinery).
The nominal energy cost: 420kW * 5s + 210kW * 0.25 * 3s / 1.25 + 210kW * 3.25 * 3 / 1.25 = 3.864MJ
(1 Coal Liq cycle + 1/4 a Heavy Oil Cracking cycle + 3.25 Solid Fuel cycles)
That nominal energy cost can be reduced by 80% to 772kJ by efficiency modules, which makes the solid fuel have a very slightly higher energy value. BUT if you're using that solid fuel to burn in a boiler and run the process, then you lose 50% of the energy value of the fuel, in which case not even efficiency modules allow the process to break even.
So the coal->solid fuel conversion is only favorable if you're using solar/nuclear power and want the resulting fuel for purposes other than generating electricity.
Yep, the developer team has implemented an awesome solution to this problem by buffing all other power sources. I'm amazed at how well it went.Tev wrote:God, people are now crying about uselessness of solar power now?
I think he mis-read. This is the thread where people complain that solar panels are overpowered. I would agree with that sentiment.NoQ wrote:Yep, the developer team has implemented an awesome solution to this problem by buffing all other power sources. I'm amazed at how well it went.Tev wrote:God, people are now crying about uselessness of solar power now?
Yeah, I remember arguing the same thing about a year ago. The main problem from a practical perspective is that altough the benefit is technically there, you do need to use prod3+speed beacons to get real benefits - and you still want to use those prod3 modules in the recipes with a higher payoff or in case of greater scarcity (i.e. at the moment iron is the scarcest resource). Coal liq is down at about copper wire and it's not using a scarce resource as usually coal is not a limiting resource, so there are many recipes which will be higher priority for prod3 modules, and the ROI on the expensive modules is not that good.NoQ wrote: Productivity modules give ridiculous amount of fuel value benefit for this process, especially with speed beacon.
I see your point.Koub wrote:Maybe those who still think solar are still too OP compared to the other power sources available in vanilla could step back and ask themselves "where am I located in the panorama of all Factorio players, from the most casual to the most hardcore player ?"
As an analogy, you people look to me as people running the hard rock 100 and complaining that iron man and marathons are way too easy and should have their distance trippled.
Deadly-Bagel wrote:I've been wondering what it is that's set it apart from 0.14 as it seems a lot more tedious now, and I think there's two main reasons. First of all solar power was your endgame so you were going to need it anyway. Mostly this just makes solar a waste of resources but I was just wondering why that would make it harder to set up in the first place. I realised it's due to the new cost of science. Previously steel wasn't a commonly used resource in the early game, you needed it for solar panels and furnaces, maybe a few rails. Now, any research using Science Pack 3 and Production Science Pack not only needs a LOT more Iron but it now needs 7 steel per. This isn't only a drain on the resources themselves but you need a lot more power to mine and process it, meaning you not only have less resources to put into Solar Panels but you need more of them.
I assume you're including the Kovarex process and maybe not accumulators because just the Nuclear Power research requires 41,500 Iron and 12,000 Copper while each Solar Panel and 0.84 of an Accumulator uses 45.88 Iron and 31.70 Copper (also a significant amount of Sulphuric Acid not included in calculations). If you consider Iron and Copper ore equally valued then 53,500 / 77.58 = 689.6 Solar Panels plus their accumulators = 29MW, FAR lower than your 151MW figure. Additionally the vast majority of the Iron required for the research is as Iron, for the Solar Panels more Iron is used as Steel which requires significantly more power and time to make.BlakeMW wrote:Quick back of the envelope looks like the opportunity cost of researching nuclear is about 3600 solar panels, or 151MW (at 42kW for day-night average)
You forgot to consider the increased cost of Solar Panels, which in terms of ore are 2.214x as expensive so by your calculations that's 272.8MW , by omitting Kovarex research you're only getting 52.4MW in Solar Panels. And this is assuming Science is actually 4x as expensive, sure Science Pack 3 looks about that but SP1 and SP2 aren't even close. Additionally the cost of expanding Nuclear is far cheaper, and as you require a LOT more power to build all the extra components in hardcore mode you're going to want to expand.BlakeMW wrote:On Marathon/Deathworld because techs are 4x as expensive you can probably get 4x as much power: 600MW of solar/accu for the price of the research alone.
It roughly takes 1-centrifuge to 1-reactor. Every 1900 seconds, a U-235 is popped out on the average (creating 10-fuel cells). It takes 2000 seconds for 1-reactor to consume 10-fuel cells.BlakeMW wrote:I have been wondering about the actual value of the Nuclear tech, i.e. how many solar panels you can buy for the cost of researching Nuclear.
I'll take stories that never happened on the internet for 500thereaverofdarkness wrote:I see your point.Koub wrote:Maybe those who still think solar are still too OP compared to the other power sources available in vanilla could step back and ask themselves "where am I located in the panorama of all Factorio players, from the most casual to the most hardcore player ?"
As an analogy, you people look to me as people running the hard rock 100 and complaining that iron man and marathons are way too easy and should have their distance trippled.
I sort of feel all of the power sources are overpowered, and inventory, and trains, and...
I'd like more settings to make the game more difficult, so I can choose to play that way even if other people don't want to.
P.S.: I did carry about 40 kg of equipment over a 25 mile course in Marine Corps boot camp once, and I scoffed at the other recruits complaining it was difficult because I thought it was easy. We were given 3 meals over 3 days plus the occasional snack and I sold my meals. So maybe I am a bit more hardcore than I give myself credit for.
All techs require 4x as many beakers on Deathworld/Marathon - it makes techs very expensive compared with "stuff" and tends to disrupt the balance when faced with the choice of using more of a low tech solution, or less of a high tech alternative. For example you might just choose to spam poison capsules rather than invest in combat robots because you can get ludicrous amounts of poison for the cost of the robot techs.Deadly-Bagel wrote:And this is assuming Science is actually 4x as expensive, sure Science Pack 3 looks about that but SP1 and SP2 aren't even close. Additionally the cost of expanding Nuclear is far cheaper, and as you require a LOT more power to build all the extra components in hardcore mode you're going to want to expand.
Ah yes I vaguely remember reading that somewhere, fair enough. Don't intend on doing a marathon run, maybe once I upgrade my laptop.BlakeMW wrote:All techs require 4x as many beakers on Deathworld/Marathon
Enrichment only needs to be considered in this way if the available Uranium Ore deposits are so small and sparse that they can't support a reactor with U-235 and generate a surplus. This seems pretty unlikely unless you're playing a starved world in which case good luck wasting all those resources on solar. Even if you intend to only use ~50MW max through the whole game, research and a single reactor is comparable in cost.BlakeMW wrote:Now for enrichment
Yes but you're almost certainly going to need it eventually, all those extra productivity modules are going to consume a hell of a lot of power. In my regular game running Prod3-boosted Iron furnaces and Circuit production I think I was chewing through 450MW easily, think I had eight reactors in the end so in the long run nuclear is absolutely the most viable option. However, short-term isn't that simple. The investment of resources for solar power pays off immediately as it is invested over time, your power supply will slowly improve as the panels are built and placed. Nuclear power only pays off once it is all invested, you've done your research and built a Reactor, Centrifuge and Steam Turbines. Especially on a marathon world it can be difficult to supply enough power from coal boilers alone to actually get to that stage, and good luck using any quantity of modules. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of the modules themselves exceeded the return on just that research, so you're better off researching nuclear first, then building modules. Maybe you could use T1 modules however you'd suffer 30% speed penalty AND almost double power consumption for an 8% return. The speed penalty depends on your supply vs demand (if supplied components are less than production capacity then the speed loss isn't relevant) and power consumption depends on if you have enough power, as to whether T1 modules are viable.BlakeMW wrote:My conclusion would be that ... on Marathon/Deathworld it's more dubious. On my current Deathworld my factory is at the point where I can consider investing the 4000 R,G,B beakers into nuclear power and the factory is using about 50MW (coal power). So it looks to me that at this stage nuclear is still a very expensive proposition relative to alternatives.
It doesn't really make a difference, because the iron investment for research is just as great for that of building solar panels and on a starved world you're not going to have heavy power requirements.Deadly-Bagel wrote: Enrichment only needs to be considered in this way if the available Uranium Ore deposits are so small and sparse that they can't support a reactor with U-235 and generate a surplus. This seems pretty unlikely unless you're playing a starved world in which case good luck wasting all those resources on solar. Even if you intend to only use ~50MW max through the whole game, research and a single reactor is comparable in cost.
This is well reasoned. It's definitely a big advantage that you can start the solar/accu investment a lot earlier, and build on it. I think for a world where all you want to do is launch a rocket then roll a new world, nuclear is definitely not worth the investment compared with solar/accu, or sticking with coal.Yes but you're almost certainly going to need it eventually, all those extra productivity modules are going to consume a hell of a lot of power. In my regular game running Prod3-boosted Iron furnaces and Circuit production I think I was chewing through 450MW easily, think I had eight reactors in the end so in the long run nuclear is absolutely the most viable option. However, short-term isn't that simple. The investment of resources for solar power pays off immediately as it is invested over time, your power supply will slowly improve as the panels are built and placed. Nuclear power only pays off once it is all invested, you've done your research and built a Reactor, Centrifuge and Steam Turbines.
You can also use as much coal power as you like as there is heaps of coal left on the ground behind the ruthless pursuit of more iron patches - even using 100% coal power I only seem to consume about half as much coal patches as iron patches.Especially on a marathon world it can be difficult to supply enough power from coal boilers alone to actually get to that stage, and good luck using any quantity of modules. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of the modules themselves exceeded the return on just that research, so you're better off researching nuclear first, then building modules. Maybe you could use T1 modules however you'd suffer 30% speed penalty AND almost double power consumption for an 8% return. The speed penalty depends on your supply vs demand (if supplied components are less than production capacity then the speed loss isn't relevant) and power consumption depends on if you have enough power, as to whether T1 modules are viable.
[/quote]My conclusion is therefore that it would be more beneficial for everyone if Solar Panels were made significantly cheaper.
As you said the cost is comparable. On one hand nuclear takes longer to see a return on but the sheer amount of steel required for the panels is harder to make.BlakeMW wrote:I think for a world where all you want to do is launch a rocket then roll a new world, nuclear is definitely not worth the investment compared with solar/accu, or sticking with coal.
Sometimes I eff them up so bad their power requirements are near zero.BlakeMW wrote:Once you've fully effed up a factory the MW requirements can be ludicrously low
