Balance Barreling + Fluid Transport

[Rseding91]

I agree. The fluid transportation is not well balanced.

Both fluid wagon and transportation by barrles need to be turned down drastically. A singles full fluid wagon can easily handle a big oil field, you only have to consider how long it takes to gather 75k Oil and compare it with ore transportation. Completly out of line.

Fluid wagons capacity should get reduced to 1/3. (and also barrels)

The capacities of the current fluid handling things are exactly as we want them to be If you want them different you can always mod them to be something else.

[JohnyDL]

Nasabot: they can deal with a whole field sometimes other times not. Depends on the size of field how well drained it is whether you module and how close it is. With small near fields 1 train = 3 or 4 patches, with far large fields, moduled up and still mostly at peak performance a 4 fluid wagon train might not hold what you can pump in the time it takes to travel that far.

That and why? You want to make the game harder for the sake of 'balance' while a lot of people already don't enjoy working with fluids at all. Anything to make life a little easier, given the precedent set by a train waggon being the same 'area' as 9x3 on the ground I'd be actually pushing to buff regular wagons or at least have Tier 2 wagons that have 3 or 6 regular chest inventories that can be linked or unlinked like the fluid wagon and limit each section to 1 type of item so you can have general train cars that are smaller but can have a lot of items, useful for personal trains or bulk trains that can have 3/6 different items of up to 3/6 chests full rather than a nerf on something that works perfectly fine.

[Hannu]

As for the whole Mega base - cost doesn't matter argument, mega bases are so late game that the point is mute, if you're playing that long it doesn't matter the cost you'll do what works best for your system (like generally I don't like massive numbers of bots on screen in my base so I use player logistics only) so it doesn't matter about if they're nerfed or not you do what's best for you, the game seems to me mostly balanced for the mid game anyways (between getting into blue science and considering building the rocket) that's the point the game is at it's most interesting and that's where this argument should sit, when you're first setting it up you don't have bots yet (no oil -> no lube -> no bots) is even a few hundred steel at that point the cheaper option, how about the price of belt vs pipe?

I did not talk only about megabases. Even at midgame the costs of buildings are very small compared to cost of research. For example, my typical mid game base uses two red belts of iron. It is 50 iron /s or 10 steel/s. If I use all steel to barrels, I can get 600 barrels in one minute. It is certainly more than enough for all fluid transport needs of such base. I also do not have to wait the resources for any other entities, except sometimes concrete and blue belts when I begin to build my "official" base with massive buses and 100000 concrete tiles. If I expand to "normal" base with rocket capability (let's say 100 iron / s (4 red belts)), I have to never wait for any production things. I get almost all needed research faster than I can build and I have always full boxes of production entities when I build new production lines. Only waits are for power armor 2 and its equipment, because they need slow and resource intensive modules and blue circuits, and for rocket.

I would like to try a game in which all infrastructure would be significantly more expensive compared to research. So that I would have to think what I can do and plan expansions carefully instead of building 5 times more than enough for "future needs". Marathon mods or settings change balance even more wrong direction because they make research much more expensive. But it is another topic and does not belong to here.

[JohnyDL]

Mega base thing was mainly at Optera one post above yours Hannu but okay

If you compare production costs to overall production, they are nothing. All production entities are practically free in Factorio. Only few percents of resources goes to building of production stuff, especially if you do not use level 3 modules everywhere.

Especially if you use bot logistics to make barrel handling a trivial task, barrels are so overpowered that there is no other than rolegame reasons to install pipe lines except short manifolds from an unbarreling assembler to production plants and from pumpjacks to a barreling assembler.

This obviously depends on your personal style and set up. Many players especially new players tend to scrape by their first few games, even if they get the whole I can make this faster by getting more production early on it's never enough, they focus too hard on science with too little resources.

Bots are not available on first set up they just aren't you need oil for bots so you can't use bots until you have at least some oil QED.

Botted oil also depends on Logistics networks, power, the desire to have bots fly from one location to another and back again, etc.. depending on the distribution of oil (which entirely depends on settings) that could be hundreds or thousands of tiles distant, you'd need multiple bots roboports as well as the barrels and a computer that can handle the entities for the throughput you want. Easier with stack bonus and bot speed. It takes longer to set up and is only really of benefit for you if you need more than the standard line of plastic, 2 acid machines, 2 lube machines, a little flamer ammo and solid fuel/rocket fuel.

As for the whole Mega base - cost doesn't matter argument, mega bases are so late game that the point is mute, if you're playing that long it doesn't matter the cost you'll do what works best for your system (like generally I don't like massive numbers of bots on screen in my base so I use player logistics only) so it doesn't matter about if they're nerfed or not you do what's best for you, the game seems to me mostly balanced for the mid game anyways (between getting into blue science and considering building the rocket) that's the point the game is at it's most interesting and that's where this argument should sit, when you're first setting it up you don't have bots yet (no oil -> no lube -> no bots) is even a few hundred steel at that point the cheaper option, how about the price of belt vs pipe?

I did not talk only about megabases. Even at midgame the costs of buildings are very small compared to cost of research. For example, my typical mid game base uses two red belts of iron. It is 50 iron /s or 10 steel/s. If I use all steel to barrels, I can get 600 barrels in one minute. It is certainly more than enough for all fluid transport needs of such base. I also do not have to wait the resources for any other entities, except sometimes concrete and blue belts when I begin to build my "official" base with massive buses and 100000 concrete tiles. If I expand to "normal" base with rocket capability (let's say 100 iron / s (4 red belts)), I have to never wait for any production things. I get almost all needed research faster than I can build and I have always full boxes of production entities when I build new production lines. Only waits are for power armor 2 and its equipment, because they need slow and resource intensive modules and blue circuits, and for rocket.

Your mid game then is what I meant by OP, here

You're suggesting nerfing something cause it's 'too OP' when your base is also 'OP' to many people. If you're dealing with 32+ lanes of copper and Iron and need to make 10 lanes of plastic to keep up that's cool but remember that's not the only way to play and many people's computers can't handle that even if they wanted to. Setting up production always costs, it costs time as someone else said but also costs resources you're right that compared to science and rockets they're probably only a few % but Science and Rockets are not your base don't really give you bragging rights ("Yeay I got to infinite science 100!" "So what, that's just a number, my base is HUGE, look") they're a resource black hole to justify bigger bases.

Okay I exaggerated a little but if you're already thinking of 100,000 concrete and multiple full backed up belts you've earned the better tech, you may not yet have that level of stuff but that's what you're working towards and thinking about

I would like to try a game in which all infrastructure would be significantly more expensive compared to research. So that I would have to think what I can do and plan expansions carefully instead of building 5 times more than enough for "future needs". Marathon mods or settings change balance even more wrong direction because they make research much more expensive. But it is another topic and does not belong to here.

Have you tried expensive recipes or marathon mode in 0.15? it's not entirely what you want (science gets more expensive too) but it really will make it a challenge compared to what you're used to, it's taking some experienced players 2-3x longer to get to the rocket with those recipes on and you really do have to think about every piece of iron and copper

[ssilk]

This is a balancing suggestion. Moved.

[Syrchalis]

I think all that needs to be done is fluid wagons to be lighter. 3 of them slow down a train so much, while 4 cargo wagons have a negligible impact on the speed of the train.

The reduced effort and neatness of fluid wagons is what makes me use them, plus the fast unloading.

Otherwise the balance seems fine. What use are barrels if they don't have some relevant upsides?

[PetWolverine]

Just because something is more expensive doesn't mean it has to be strictly better. Take electric furnaces as an example. They pollute less than steel furnaces as long as your power doesn't come from coal, and they can be faster or more productive if you have modules to put in them, but if you blindly replace steel furnaces with electric ones they can actually be worse. Because of this, they make for a more interesting upgrade than stone to steel furnaces.

Barrels are great for small quantities of fluid, e.g. priming a coal liquefaction plant using heavy oil from another location. They allow fluids to be transported via bot, which means you can get them to crowded places where there's no room for pipes. They allow you to exceed the throughput limitations of pipes, even just using belts and not bots. Belts of barrels don't require power along their length, where a long stretch of pipe will require some pumps. Belts of barrels are walkable, and splittable without causing throughput issues, while pipes are not.

On trains, even if you couldn't fit more fluid in a cargo wagon than in a tanker, barrels allow a wagon to carry both fluid and items in the same wagon, so e.g.a uranium mine could have a single train stop for a 1-1.

Tankers are cool. They look cool, and they add variety to train stations that otherwise are all stack inserters and chests. I'm of the opinion that there should be a reason besides aesthetics to continue using tankers into the lategame, when the cost of barreling becomes negligible. There will still be reasons to use barrels, but for high-capacity long-distance transport of liquids, tankers just seem like they ought to be the right tool for the job. Right now, by the numbers, barrels have every advantage.

As for how to balance them, reducing either the stack size or the capacity seems reasonable. A stack size of 5 or a capacity of 150 (not both!) would make room for fluid wagons without making barrels useless. Stack size doesn't have much effect on transporting them by belt or bot, so it's probably the lighter nerf, even though it reduces cargo wagon capacity by more.

[BlakeMW]

At the moment "pumped pipes" offer a liquid throughput quite comparable to barrebelt. For example pump->underground span->pump is 3000/s or 12 barrels/s, by way of comparison a red belt is 26.7 barrels/s - but you need a return route for the empty barrels, take that into account and a pair of such pumppipes is 24 barrel/s equivalent - almost the same as red barrelbelt, but arguably simpler by virtue of not requiring barrelling/unbarelling (the pumps themselves are cheap and use very little power: at 3000/s it's only 7.5kW per pump)

Of course it has been said that a rework of pipes is in the development pipeline so such comparisons may be pointless.

FWIW I think barrels are ridiculous, a logistic bot carrying 4 oil barrels, is carrying the equivalent in raw materials of about 100 ore! This makes the cost of using logistic bots for even relatively bulk transport of liquids quite negligible - altough as noted above there are alternative ways to get very high liquid throughputs over short distances at negligible cost. As ridiculous as barrels are, they do come with the significant downside of needing to be packaged/unpackaged.

[Engimage]

While bots do transport barrels at some rediculous rate you will also need to transport back empty barrels and this makes logistic investment significally higher.

IMO barrels as they are are totally useless. In 90+% of situations now pipes are better. In some rare cases in bot factories they still might find their use so I would never tell they are OP in any way.
They would certainly be OP if they would not require empty barrels and would just barrel the liquid w/o crafted barrels and unbarreling would just turn it to a liquid.

[Zxaber]

I suppose my only real issue with barrels is that they basically remove a neat change of pace in the game (dealing with liquid over solid items) and are also the best choice in every metric except initial cost. Don't get me wrong, I like them being in the game. There's a few situations where they actually make a neat solution, like a uranium mining outpost that needs an input of sulfuric acid to mine ore. This is hands-down a solution for barrels, since you could just dedicate a spot or two in a cargo wagon to handle this task, without needing a whole extra wagon. But barrels get this in addition to also being a better mass shipping method; Jack of all trades and a master to boot.

It just seems weird that we now have a fluid wagon with no tangible benefits besides saving a slight bit of work. They look cool and have a fancy animation, but then the novelty wears off and you find you're better off just using the same crude shipping blueprints from 1.4.

Just my two cents.

[BlakeMW]

It just seems weird that we now have a fluid wagon with no tangible benefits besides saving a slight bit of work. They look cool and have a fancy animation, but then the novelty wears off and you find you're better off just using the same crude shipping blueprints from 1.4.

In my Deathworld game where I've just researched Atomic Bomb I'm currently using a train consisting of 1 locomotive and 1 fluid wagon to gather most the oil from my territory (except a little which is direct piped) - about 30 pumpjacks in total spread over 3 patches. The fluid wagon is only 1/3rd full upon return from the 3 oil fields. What on earth would I gain by using barrel wagons? What tangible benefit would there be to barrel wagons that justifies having to mess around with barrel logistics?

[PetWolverine]

It just seems weird that we now have a fluid wagon with no tangible benefits besides saving a slight bit of work. They look cool and have a fancy animation, but then the novelty wears off and you find you're better off just using the same crude shipping blueprints from 1.4.

In my Deathworld game where I've just researched Atomic Bomb I'm currently using a train consisting of 1 locomotive and 1 fluid wagon to gather most the oil from my territory (except a little which is direct piped) - about 30 pumpjacks in total spread over 3 patches. The fluid wagon is only 1/3rd full upon return from the 3 oil fields. What on earth would I gain by using barrel wagons? What tangible benefit would there be to barrel wagons that justifies having to mess around with barrel logistics?

At that scale? None. Nobody's disputing that fluid wagons are easier, and your oil processing is not at the point where you'd benefit from barreling.

I'm using fluid wagons in my factory too, and I'm scaling toward 1 RPM with expensive recipes, so it's not like I don't think it can be done. But I'm using fluid wagons in spite of the fact that, at my scale, barreling would be a more efficient use of my increasingly crowded rail lines; I'm doing it this way because I like tankers.

[BlakeMW]

I'm using fluid wagons in my factory too, and I'm scaling toward 1 RPM with expensive recipes, so it's not like I don't think it can be done. But I'm using fluid wagons in spite of the fact that, at my scale, barreling would be a more efficient use of my increasingly crowded rail lines; I'm doing it this way because I like tankers.

I'm still not sure why it would be more efficient - nominally a fluid wagon holds 75k fluid while a barrel wagon holds 100k BUT to use a barrel wagon you need to accommodate the empty barrels - the easy solution involves splitting the wagons to half fulls half empties but that halves throughput - theoretically you can deliver full barrels one way and empty barrels the other way and enjoy that full 100k, practically it is tricky to guarantee you are bringing enough but not too many empty barrels and to make sure there is no accumulation of empty barrels anywhere - barrel issues are 100% gone with fluid wagons.

And even if there is some reason why barrel wagons are better for 1 RPM factories that is a terrible reason to say a feature is useless - that'd be like saying "yellow belt has no role in a 1RPM factory, it doesn't even need to be in the game". The point I was making in my previous post is this: researching atomic bomb on Deathworld is about 5x the effort of launching a rocket under standard settings so it's not a trivial effort, in fact it's far further than the majority of players will ever go in the game. So having put about 5 times the effort into a game than it takes to launch a rocket, and still be only using 1/3rd of a fluid wagon for the entire oil requirements indicates that the threshold where fluid wagons starts to feel in any way limiting must be absurdly high - if a feature is useful for 99% of players it's useful, period.

[PetWolverine]

...[T]heoretically you can deliver full barrels one way and empty barrels the other way and enjoy that full 100k, practically it is tricky to guarantee you are bringing enough but not too many empty barrels and to make sure there is no accumulation of empty barrels anywhere - barrel issues are 100% gone with fluid wagons.

This is easy. I do it at my nuclear plant to bring fresh fuel cells and return the used ones. It's a 1:1 ratio, so you wait until the train is full of empty barrels before leaving. For higher throughput, you have two stops in succession, one for dropping off full barrels and one for picking up empties. Make sure you use stack filter inserters since you won't be able to set a filter on the wagon contents.

And even if there is some reason why barrel wagons are better for 1 RPM factories that is a terrible reason to say a feature is useless - that'd be like saying "yellow belt has no role in a 1RPM factory, it doesn't even need to be in the game".

That is indeed a terrible argument. Strawmen usually are. What I said was:

Tankers are cool. They look cool, and they add variety to train stations that otherwise are all stack inserters and chests. I'm of the opinion that there should be a reason besides aesthetics to continue using tankers into the lategame, when the cost of barreling becomes negligible. There will still be reasons to use barrels, but for high-capacity long-distance transport of liquids, tankers just seem like they ought to be the right tool for the job. Right now, by the numbers, barrels have every advantage.

Emphasis added. Okay, amend that to "besides aesthetics and ease-of-use", but barrels are more efficient. Wouldn't it be nice if the cool way were also the efficient way?

The point I was making in my previous post is this: researching atomic bomb on Deathworld is about 5x the effort of launching a rocket under standard settings so it's not a trivial effort, in fact it's far further than the majority of players will ever go in the game. So having put about 5 times the effort into a game than it takes to launch a rocket, and still be only using 1/3rd of a fluid wagon for the entire oil requirements indicates that the threshold where fluid wagons starts to feel in any way limiting must be absurdly high - if a feature is useful for 99% of players it's useful, period.

Very impressive. Deathworld indeed makes it hard to build on a huge scale. That actually seems to be the point of it, so playing in that mode and saying "My base isn't big enough for this to matter" doesn't prove a lot. Most people don't build megabases, but I would venture to say most don't play on Deathworlds either.

I'm not saying this is some huge issue where fluid wagons are useless and the game is unplayable. I'm actually arguing for a mild nerf to barrels rather than any buff to tankers, because while fluid wagons are sufficient, there is a drive to optimize everything, and it seems very strange that that would involve replacing fluid wagons with cargo wagons full of barrels.

[BlakeMW]

All fair points. However I can't see the reasoning why barrel wagons should be worse than fluid wagons. After all you don't get a lot of extra capacity by using barrels, you only increase from 75000 to 100000 (+33%) and that's only if you manage the empty barrels perfectly. So the contra argument is this: using barrels is extra work so shouldn't it be better than the easy and convenient option of fluid wagons? In terms of gameplay, shouldn't you be rewarded for taking on the complexity of barreling, barrelling and empty barrels? Especially since you actually have to do it optimally to get that 33% increase and that 33% increase is on top of an already extremely high throughput.

[PetWolverine]

So the contra argument is this: using barrels is extra work so shouldn't it be better than the easy and convenient option of fluid wagons? In terms of gameplay, shouldn't you be rewarded for taking on the complexity of barreling, barrelling and empty barrels?

There are lots of places where that reasoning makes sense, but in some cases doing things a certain way is harder because it's the wrong tool for the job, e.g. replacing a belt with a long row of inserters handing things to one another. (I'd like to see a factory that uses an inserter bus!) Using barrels for high-volume fluid transport strikes me as like hammering a nail with a screwdriver, so I was surprised when I learned it's actually more effective. And 33% is a pretty big difference IMO.

For what it's worth, reality seems to back me up: Assuming a boxcar of barrels is limited by weight and not volume, that's 200,000 lbs. (~90,700 kg) of payload, which at 275 lbs per 42-gallon barrel (125 kg per 160 L), fits 30,500 gallons (116,000 L) of crude. A typical rail tank car can hold 34,500 gallons (131,000 L). So they're pretty comparable in real life, but tank cars win. I mention this not because realism arguments are super important to game design, but because I would have been swayed (and surprised) in this case if it had come out the other way.

[makrom]

Barrels should have clear advantages over huge tanks - and they do. But these advantages should be ease of distribution, handleability, modularity and so on, not the sheer capacity when moved in bulk. There are good reasons why some goods are transported in containers while others are transported as general cargo. For most goods, using containers is way more convenient, but no one would think of transporting huge loads of stone, coal, oil, and so on in intermodal containers on a regular basis rather than having dedicated transportation devices. A tank with a volume of 100m³ weights less and has less volume than 400 250l barrels.
As it is at the moment, fluid wagons are a cheaper but weaker alternative to barrels. While this does give them some justification, it doesn't exactly reflect their superiority regarding transportation relevant physical properties. I totally get how things are simplified in a game, but in this particular case, it just feels like it's the wrong way around.

[BlakeMW]

For what it's worth, reality seems to back me up:

Putting aside reality for a moment, the visual design of the Factorio Wagon is significantly less space-efficient than a IRL rail tanker, as factorio engineer simply straps 3 vertical tanks to a flat deck. Considering the "packing circles into a rectangle" problem it is entirely possible you actually could fill the deck area with a greater volume of smaller diameter barrels by using hexagonal packing.

[Frightning]

While bots do transport barrels at some rediculous rate you will also need to transport back empty barrels and this makes logistic investment significally higher.

IMO barrels as they are are totally useless. In 90+% of situations now pipes are better. In some rare cases in bot factories they still might find their use so I would never tell they are OP in any way.
They would certainly be OP if they would not require empty barrels and would just barrel the liquid w/o crafted barrels and unbarreling would just turn it to a liquid.

I'm pretty sure I voiced this very concern when the devs first revealed that the Tanker wagon was in the works for vanilla. I figured it would invalidate barrels from a practical perspective, and it seems that indeed it does.

[Qon]

The capacities of the current fluid handling things are exactly as we want them to be If you want them different you can always mod them to be something else.

I'm going a bit mad reading some things people propose here on the forums. Thanks for staying sane and caring about the quality of the game. I appreciate the factorio teams eye for detail in every aspect of the development.