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While you are trying to set up oil processing camp you can see that both Plastic and Sulfur (the main products required in bulk) both require Gas to be made. This leads to several issues.

1. While oil pumpjacks are slowly depleting decreasing output you can see a shift between supply volumes to Sulfur/Plastic chemical plants because of cuncurrency handling. Chemical plants are supplied on a kind of priority basis - I am not sure how exactly - but it leads to one plant working and another one basicly shutting down.
2. There is no use currently for Light Oil. So before you research Advanced Oil Processing you generally waste it (apart from possibility to make solid fuel but you pretty much rarely need that early to mid game). And even with Advanced Oil Processing you still get mostly as much Light Oil as Gas so you are forced into making many Light Oil to Gas converting chemical plants.

So I propose shifting one of Plastic or Sulfur to require Light Oil. Nice and elegant solution.

Additionally you may opt to replace Coal with Solid Fuel for one or both recipes which will not only make Oil Processing more independant but will help making camps dedicated to production of a single material.

Moved to balancing, cause it is basically a balancing question.

your true, but it's more simple to make all from gas.
Just need to stock light oil to convert it to gas after research Advanced Oil Processing.

Use light oil for Plastic and Sulfur involve that we MUST have receipt to convert gas to light oil.

I think it's too complex, and actual situation is good.

fregate84 wrote:your true, but it's more simple to make all from gas.
Just need to stock light oil to convert it to gas after research Advanced Oil Processing.

Use light oil for Plastic and Sulfur involve that we MUST have receipt to convert gas to light oil.

I think it's too complex, and actual situation is good.

You can make both plastic and sulfur without Advanced Oil Processing. All required research needs only red and green bottles. However Advanced Oil Processing requires blue ones as well so the gap is pretty big.
Also bare in mind that advanced oil processing itself as well as oil type conversions require water which might not be available on site. Sure you can say - this is good to force a player build more railways to transport crude oil and such but I see only limits here.

I think chemical plants consume fluids depending on how close they are to the source (number of tubes). when tubes are dry that matters. pumps affect that and pumps can be connected to circuit network with fluid tanks.

I'd like plastics to be kept on coal because it's the only use for coal near end-game

In the current state of things light oil has no use at all. Maybe it should be just removed from the game?
At least I am offering a way to use it. Or just banish it.

Uh, light oil is twice as efficient for making solid fuel as petroleum, you need solid fuel to make the rocket. It only makes sense to use the light oil to make solid fuel saving the petroleum for other stuff.

BlakeMW wrote:Uh, light oil is twice as efficient for making solid fuel as petroleum, you need solid fuel to make the rocket. It only makes sense to use the light oil to make solid fuel saving the petroleum for other stuff.

I'm surprised by how many people DON'T notice this.
Also, more efficient than heavy oil too, though I don't know if it's more efficient to crack heavy oil down to light oil then make fuel blocks, or if it's more efficient to just make fuel blocks straight from heavy oil. I suppose it also depends if the efficiency is "More fuel blocks from oil", or "More fuel blocks per energy unit".

bobingabout wrote: though I don't know if it's more efficient to crack heavy oil down to light oil then make fuel blocks, or if it's more efficient to just make fuel blocks straight from heavy oil. I suppose it also depends if the efficiency is "More fuel blocks from oil", or "More fuel blocks per energy unit".

The conversion from heavy to light oil is really efficient, 4:3 (or 4:3.6 when using prod3 modules).
When you convert 4 heavy oil into 3 light oil, you gain 1 whole extra solid fuel block, in a boiler it would produce 12.5MJ of electricity, the recipe only consumes 0.72MJ so you have almost 12MJ of pure profit, that's without eff modules!

If you use Prod3 modules you get another 0.6 extra solid fuel which is worth 7.5MW, which is again much more than the energy required to perform the conversion, which at worst is 3.12MW and can be reduced to about 2MW using appropriately shared speed beacons.

Whatever way you look at it you should always convert heavy oil to light oil for making solid fuel.

And most of time now coal is not an issue so it is unlikely you will need solid fuel until rocket tech.
And when you are at rocket tech things tend to change dramatically anyways.
What I was talking is early to mid game when your oil tech starts kicking in

PacifyerGrey wrote:And most of time now coal is not an issue so it is unlikely you will need solid fuel until rocket tech.
And when you are at rocket tech things tend to change dramatically anyways.
What I was talking is early to mid game when your oil tech starts kicking in

Why use Coal for burning once you have Solid Fuel available?
Coal actually has uses starting at about the time you get oil up (a number of green level techs unlock things with recipes that use Coal, including Military 2 itself).
Better to do as much fueling from solid fuel as you can (supplementing with Coal only if you need more fuel than you are producing in Solid Fuel).
Also, Light Oil itself is used directly to make Flamethrower ammo.

Maybe not that relevant, but if you'd like to experience some new kind of gameplay, maybe try to utilize solid fuel in all possible ways?