portable solar panels

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Zool
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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Zool »

I also agree, that the PSP is a bit underpowered - if you make it 20kW each with the same actual production costs, it still summs up to 16 of them providing 320 kW at daytime compared to 750 kW 24/7 with the fusion reactor - it opens up a couple of options for early modular armor without going too far.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Frightning »

Foreros wrote:
Frightning wrote:
BHakluyt wrote:Since 0.15 I have started two maps, more or less railword and the difficulty is a bit above default. The problem is that it takes ages to get to the maxed armour and fusion reactor. In both games I just chased to get roboport, panels and modular armour as quick as possible. The problem is that it reallly still is a struggle to construct things with the current PSP output. It would make the game a fraction quicker (about 5 hours for me) to be able to actually use the first roboport with modular armour early in the game. Just pump up the PSPs a fraction. Like 5kw more.

Maybe add a PSP MK2 somewhere between the first PSP and unlocking the first power armour...?

A power armour MK3 with more slots will be awesome too, but make it require space science packs.
This is more the reason why PSPs need buffs than anything else, in my last 0.14 world, I've been using Modular armor with 1x Nightvision, 2x Energy Shield (MK1), 3x Battery (MK1) and 5x Portable solar panels. The Batteries give enough reserves that I can clear about a half dozen biter bases (even 60 hours in, since I still haven't gotten to seeing Behemoths yet) before my Batteries run dry, but then I have wait for like 15+ minutes before the Batteries are recharged before I go out and do that again. At this point, the biters are expanding as quickly as I can push back, so I'm finding myself perpetually with biters within my pollution cloud because I can't clear them all out in one run, and by the time I'm ready for a 2nd run, they've made as many new bases inside my pollution cloud as I managed to remove last time. If they were even 2x the current 10kW max I wouldn't be having this problem, and as you can see, my setup draws almost no energy outside of combat, with a Roboport instead of one of my shields, I would be constantly starved of energy from charging bots, which is just sad.
I wont tell this as a cheat, but you can get the bots directly from air and they will instantly go out fully charged, if you have energy problems. I dunno if it work even in 0.15, but in 0.14 I have used a 4 roboport setup with power armor for go outside and clear woodlands for new bulding grounds. Protected by few big electric poles with 8 laser turrets I've been fully protected during this farming outdoor trips.
I'm aware of the that trick, but it's honestly kinda sad that you're pretty much required to have to abuse it just to get by powerwise with PSPs.

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bobingabout
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Re: portable solar panels

Post by bobingabout »

Zool wrote:I also agree, that the PSP is a bit underpowered - if you make it 20kW each with the same actual production costs, it still summs up to 16 of them providing 320 kW at daytime compared to 750 kW 24/7 with the fusion reactor - it opens up a couple of options for early modular armor without going too far.
Without actually saying it, that's what I was thinking also. If an array of 16 of them produced about half as much as a fusion reactor, they'd be pretty balanced.
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Re: portable solar panels

Post by BlakeMW »

Modular Armor with PSPs at 10kW is a truly massive upgrade in capabilities compared with Heavy Armor. It's only bad compared with Power Armor 2 with Fusion Reactors, it's awesome compared with Heavy Armor.

The level of constraint on how you have to utilize the energy feels about right to me. You don't have as much energy as you'd like, and that makes it more interesting, and it makes the upgrade to Power Armor w/ Fusion Reactor feel more satisfying - kind of like unlocking Logistic system for logistics, or Military 3 for combat (like before Military 3 your ability to deal with big worms in direct combat is extremely limited, with military 3 you get poison capsules and can also immediately then unlock the Tank and Distractors - the big worms are a constraint on expansion meant to keep you in the starting area until you've unlocked the gateway tech of mil3 after which you can run round curbstomping them).

The cost is also fine, it's 53 resources/kW for PSPs (night-adjusted), and 70.5 resources/kW for Personal Fusion Reactor. I suppose it could be a little cheaper, but it's already pretty cheap in both relative and absolute terms.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Roxor128 »

I think the portable solar panels are fine for modular armour.

My usual setup for that is 9 panels, 2 batteries, nightvision, a shield and a roboport. Quite the jack-of-all-trades setup. I've even had the occasional game where I got all the way to launching the rocket with just that.

When you move to power armour and have the space to put in an exoskeleton, laser defence or multiple roboports, then the portable solar panels start proving deficient in how much they can generate, how long it takes to build enough to generate a useful amount of power and how far away the next improved power source (the portable fusion reactor) is in the tech tree.

I hardly ever get power armour 2, but everyone else seems to say it works just great with a fusion reactor or two.

I think we need some intermediate means of generating power for armour. Something more than solar, but less than fusion. A portable coal-fired boiler which eats away at the coal in your inventory? Not very green, though. An RTG constructed from nuclear waste (as in Undarl's new Fission and Fusion mod)? Or maybe just a promotion of one of the many grid-charge mods?

Laconic Version: Portable solar fits nicely in the early stages of modular armour, is completely replaced in the late stages, but is deficient in the middle, and needs either a Mark 2 or a mid-tier replacement to fill the space.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Frightning »

Now that portable fusion requires high tech science, and thus squarely late game/Power armor Mk2 level tech, I have to re-affirm my position that PSPs are woefully underpowered, even for a Modular armor setup, you have to wait almost 3 full days to recharge 2 depleted mk1 batteries (with 5 panels), those same batteries can be depleted by a few energy shield MK1's in a matter of minutes, fighting biters and their bases at those stages of the game. Worse yet, when you get to Power armor (MK1), you can also research some new toys, such as the basic Portable Roboport, and Exoskeletons, as well as better batteries and energy shields, but other than the batteries and shields, these things are practically unusable at that time because PSPs don't make NEARLY enough power to feed them. Keep in mind that, because PSPs are solar, they're average power output is only 70% of their maximum, and you have to dedicate space to batteries if you want any power at night from a PSP based setup. and yet 16 of them, which fit in the space occupied by 1 Fusion power plant, provide only 160 kW maximum power output, which works out to an average power of 112kW, barely more than 1/7th as much power. It fusion is going to be so late game (which is entirely reasonable), then the PSPs REALLY need a buff, easily 2-3x what they produce now, would still have less peak power than fusion and would make them MUCH more usable than they are now (they could also consider adjusting battery capacity if they think solar is too good w/ Modular armor (at that tech level, you don't yet have MK2 batteries, so maybe making the MK1s a bit shallow would be appropriately limiting).

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by SyncViews »

I think they are perfectly fine still for modular armour. Somthing in betweeen (using say a vouple hundred red circuits) might be useful, but not just a significant buff.

Or nerf reactors. IMO they are pretty op as people rarely run out of energy unless spamming lasers and fighting near constantly.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Frightning »

SyncViews wrote:I think they are perfectly fine still for modular armour. Somthing in betweeen (using say a vouple hundred red circuits) might be useful, but not just a significant buff.

Or nerf reactors. IMO they are pretty op as people rarely run out of energy unless spamming lasers and fighting near constantly.
Have you actually been using Modular armor much? A couple bases killed and you have ~3 days of waiting for your batteries to recharge from nearly empty to full. That's been my experience at least. I don't mind the limited energy capacity and some waiting, but imo it's much too long a wait, and that's mainly because of how lacking the energy production from PSPs is. They could stand to produce a good 2-3x what they do now (and would still completely inferior to Fusion save for being 1x1 instead of 4x4; meaning they can be fit in places Fusion can't).
Fusion power isn't OP at all, there are plenty of things can make it still worthwhile to run (MK2) batteries with them, such as personal roboports and/or lots of shields+laser defenses. It's quite appropriately powerful for a high-tech science level piece of equipment (and it's 250 Processing units too, not cheap).

If you look at the science requirements of the various pieces of equipment usable in modular armors, you start to see really quickly that the Fusion reactor, MK2 personal roboport, and MK2 Power armor are the highest tech tech items (High Tech science to research). However, PSPs aren't enough to make use of things such as Exoskeletons, MK1 personal roboports, and are poor for almost everything else (shields at least only draw energy when recharging, or they too would be unusable with PSPs). Many of these things are science packs 1-3 only or that plus military science, which implies that they are meant to be at least usable before acquiring fusion power. There are only a few things realistically usable with PSPs, nightvision (cheap af to run, only on at night), shields (only with batteries, slow to recharge because PSPs power generation is crap), and batteries (slow to be charged because PSPs power generation sucks). Pretty much everything else is too energy intensive, and realistically the player would want to use it often enough that PSPs just don't cut it. Which is profound evidence that they just aren't good enough.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Koub »

When you want to start using personal roboports to be able to bluepring your way, and you have to wait for days after laying down a few dozens things, I do agree, it's just WTF.
There should be something between the current portable solar panel and the fusion reactor, or a significative buff of the portable solar panel so that it's decently usable as power source for whatever modular armor comes before the portble fusion reactor (and that's most of them modular armors).
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Re: portable solar panels

Post by BlakeMW »

Frightning wrote: However, PSPs aren't enough to make use of things such as Exoskeletons, MK1 personal roboports, and are poor for almost everything else (shields at least only draw energy when recharging, or they too would be unusable with PSPs).
Personal robotports are just fine with PSPs, the roboports have an unlisted internal charge capacity (almost equal to 2 Mk1 batteries) so you don't need and shouldn't use batteries with them (if you have a battery it's for an energy shield or something). Now, you can't do everything with the personal roboports on solar, but you can do quite a lot. Depending on your playstyle you have the choice of doing like 4x Roboport 7x PSP for rapid construction but poor recharge rate (probably you'll be hoovering the bots when the charge runs out), or you can replace one or more roboport with more PSPs - at least for my play style I find 3x Roboport 11x PSP to be a happy compromise (also 1 or 2 roboports, plus other stuff like shield and night vision, can be good too). Now it goes without saying you can't constantly use the personal roboports on solar charge, but that shouldn't be necessary. Within a factory you can rely on the main roboports for bulk construction so the personal roboports are for rail, pipeline and outpost construction together with tree deconstruction and offensive turreting. Making the fair assumption of one of the preset game settings* the roboports should build up enough charge to complete such excursions, then you return to the factory and rely on the main roboports again, allowing the charge to build up. It also helps a lot that for short trips (about 4 tiles) robots don't use charge at all, so when offensive turreting if you take care to stand close to the turrets when constructing/deconstructing/repairing no or very little charge will be consumed. While a little suspect from a game mechanics perspective, it does enter into the balance of personal roboports and PSPs.

* Obviously almost any part of the game can be broken through the use of mods or sufficient tweaking of world generation. For example if someone says they use RSO and reduce the spawning frequency, then complain roboports don't have enough charge to complete a railway to a resource patch, I'd find blaming the PSPs to be questionable. If someone is using mods to disrupt the flow and balance of the game, they should add more mods to fix it again (i.e. burner generator equipment or something).

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Koub »

In my last game (vanilla), I have a modular armor with 2 roboports, night vision, 2 batteries (for night) and 9 PSP. Well I have come to a point that I try to catch as many bots as I can before they come back recharging to be able to sustain decent power level in my armor. This totally works in vanilla, but it feels so cheaty.
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Re: portable solar panels

Post by bobingabout »

Double power output of the portable solar panel.
Change recipe to 1 solar panel (The end, just 1 solar panel, nothing else) Get 3 portables out. (They're portable, cut down versions, shouldn't cost 45 tiles worth of equipment for a pocket solar panel)

Done, you are now balanced.
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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Sicnarf »

I do dislike the cost for what you get. However on the power generation front I find them ok for my needs.
I keep two sets of armour one for building and one for killing.
For building two Roboports and the rest solar no battery required the roboports have a build in battery and it has better storage that two level one batteries easy so you are better of with roboports over battery every time. However it won't provide power for night vision so you have to use lights everywhere. This means I have to live without this luxury until I can get Fusion and gives me a reason to place Lights.
For killing 1 roboport, night vision, one battery and the rest solar, turret creep is the order of the day and I leave my bots in my logistic trash until the fighting is over then let them out to repair.

If it is taking to long for your batteries to recharge remove any equipment that is draining power (Except roboports, the moment you reinstall them they will drain all your battery filling theirs) and pop in more solar panels until the batteries are full than put the equipment back in. Solar is not designed to be great otherwise whats the motivation to get fusion? They are designed to be a necessary evil that have their uses but be just limited enough to make you want more. Make them to powerful and it takes away from the late game advantages of Fusion.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by mrvn »

I find the solar panels to be near useless. You need some for night vision. Beyond that the power output is just too small to bother.

Personal roboports store a lot of energy if you do nothing. But any use will quickly drain them and the solar panel takes far too long to recharge them. So you just end up destructing the construction bots waiting for recharge because when you pick them up they magically recharge. No power needed to personal roboports at all.

So if you can live without night vision you can save the space for solar panels completely and just have another personal roboport or two instead.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by BlakeMW »

mrvn wrote: Personal roboports store a lot of energy if you do nothing. But any use will quickly drain them and the solar panel takes far too long to recharge them. So you just end up destructing the construction bots waiting for recharge because when you pick them up they magically recharge. No power needed to personal roboports at all.

So if you can live without night vision you can save the space for solar panels completely and just have another personal roboport or two instead.
That's what I often do, but in both Modular Armor and Power Armor you have free slots (7 or 11) which nothing other than PSPs (or batteries in the vertical space) can go in. So I just fill those slots with PSPs because lets be honest they don't cost much compared with anything that's actually expensive. I only occasionally need to hoover up the bots, mainly because while in the main factory I rely more on the mains grid roboports so the personal roboports can fully charged and only get drained during excursions to build railroad, pipeline, outposts etc - and then it's not normally long before I return to the factory. Also, offensive turreting consumes nearly no charge, because robots which only make a short trip consume no charge and you want to stand next to the turrets anyway so the spitters get less time to shoot down the bots.

Out of sheer laziness (not wishing to bother with hoovering) I sometimes even replace a roboport with 4 more PSPs, the extra 60% electricity makes a big difference - altough having 4 roboports does result in 33% more stored charge.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Engimage »

I think the only thing we are really missing is the ability to charge personal batteries/roboports from main base power grid.
Sure thing I still think that PSP should produce at least twice as much power.

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Selvek »

Koub wrote:In my last game (vanilla), I have a modular armor with 2 roboports, night vision, 2 batteries (for night) and 9 PSP. Well I have come to a point that I try to catch as many bots as I can before they come back recharging to be able to sustain decent power level in my armor. This totally works in vanilla, but it feels so cheaty.
Yeah I wound up doing this too. When your recharge cycle is many minutes, the motivation to cheat the system is pretty strong. In 0.14, PSPs were pointless because the reactor wasn't any harder to get. In 0.15 you need another color of science so there's actually a reason to suffer through using PSPs.

My recommendation:
1) The cost is probably acceptable, but seems pretty silly. And I don't think it adds anything. Maybe reduce to ~ 2 solar panels but add 1 more red circuit to make it feel more "high tech?"
2) Nerf the hack where bots charge for free if you pick them up. This could be done by having bots themselves never store charge - when they leave the roboport, they take some of the roboport's charge with them, and when the return, they "give back" any remaining charge.
3) Add an on/off hotkey so you can disable your roboport to save power (E.G. if you're within the main network)
4) Buff the solar outputs so that with a single roboport and a full armor's worth of PSPs, using the roboport feels "not-painful" for at least moderate blueprint use.
OR:
5) Keep the PSP output the same, but allow armor charging from the main grid.


Armor charging from the main grid would add some tricky question, though, like:
1) Can you charge anywhere that's powered, or do you need a "charging station"? Does adding a charging station mean players will just carry one around and have to plop it down as needed (which feel lame) instead of placing semi-fixed charging station infrastructure?
2) Is placing a temporary solar array block a good way to charge your armor, or a hacky solution?
3) What limits would it need to avoid being too powerful?

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Ranakastrasz »

When I was developing "Modular Armor Revamp", among other things, I wanted to buff PSP and add the ability to get power from the main network. Now, there are like half a dozen mods that do this stuff, but yea.

I found that 3x power on PSP works great, with 2.5 being reasonable. With either, you get a decient level of recharge, but at 3.0x, you have 48(33.6) vs 75 generation, which gives you a good reason to upgrade, while still making early game power somewhat reasonable.


As for external charging, I've seen several methods.

I've personally tried 3 methods, which I refined as I discovered problems. Balance being the least of the issues. Its like the issues between steam and solar panel.
Charging always in field - Always works in a power field. Scales with armor level
Charging equipment - Same as above, but scales with number/power of equipment.
Charging modules outside of combat. - Same as above, but doesn't work for a few seconds after taking damage
--- Main issue was that, A, I tried to balance it with 3 other methods of power generation, and B, you can drag power poles out with you and just run a long line of Big Electric poles to wherever you plan to fight. Its a complex problem.

A crappy solar array was never needed in my experience, just a line of big power poles.

I think there is a mod that lets you toggle roboports somewhere, but yes, I agree.


Battery items - Charged items that you place and produce 100% charged batteries, but when removed return a discharged item you have to craft back into the charged version - Modular Charge Packs
Charging Entity- Charges modular armor in range of the special pole, or other entity. Wireless Charging, Localized Charging

I'm sure there are other methods, but those are the ones I am aware of.

------

Personal roboport. With 2.5-3x solar panels, it works pretty good. Also, if you run one of the mods that makes it impossible to pick up robots that kinda fixes it, (but you really need the 3x solar production) Maybe I should update that mod again?

I suggested making robots front-charge a while ago, but as a programmer I most described how I would implement it as programming, because I can't really describe things well. Your statement was much more clear. Drain energy on launch, but let them land instantly and drop off excess power when they finish. May or may not discard overflow, probably will.

Price isn't that silly as is. Or, rather, it was silly from the beginning, back when 5 solar panels worth 300kw of power somehow produced 10w (not kilowatts, watts) when pluged into your armor. Thing is, they kept upscaling it, and now its managed to reach 10Kw, 1000x more than it used to. The two networks are not connected, so power wise is irrelevant. This is why I had a 100x or 50x power coefficient to all equipment when Modular Armor Revamp was active, because linking the two networks kinda didn't work right, at least until they scaled power up for personal roboports.

Also, price wise, its not like most advanced recipes have insanely high desnity compared to physical size, so realism doesn't enter into it. The price isn't actually difficult to meet either.
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Re: portable solar panels

Post by Frightning »

The change in science requirements has pushed Fusion more towards endgame, which is frankly a nice thing, in 0.14 and before, you could get Fusion with just 123 science packs, which with 3 being earlier in the overall tech progression in 0.15 than before would make it almost a midgame tech (particularly if you rushed to it). Now Fusion is 123H for science, which pushes it back quite a bit in the overall tech progression (now closer to Power armor Mk2, whereas before it was same tech as Power armor (mk1)). This means PSPs are now not just meant to be workable with Modular armor, but should also at least be serviceable with Power armor Mk1 and the associated equipment (Mk2 shield and batteries, exoskeletons, personal roboports (mk1), and even Laser and discharge defenses). The power comparison with Fusion is pretty grim at present:
16xPSPs=160kW max power (112kW average), requires batteries to get constant power from them
1x Fusion (4x4)=750kW max, always on, so max=average, does not require batteries for constant use

Even if we tripled PSP output, it would still be wholly inferior to Fusion:
16xPSPs (30kW max each)=480kW max (336kW average), the average is still less than half that of fusion!

I should add that I actually like the whole: batteries get depleted need to take a break from biter sweeping to let it recharge mechanic of using PSPs, it's just that the endurance versus downtime ratio seems horribly skewed towards excessive downtime v. decent endurance (batteries seem to have reasonable capacity for the purposes at hand).

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Re: portable solar panels

Post by BlakeMW »

It's actually possible to run an exoskeleton from PA1 with PSPs - the exoskeleton requires 200kW but only while moving and you can definitely fit 20PSPs and some batteries in PA1 together with some other useful things. At least with my playstyle 200kW is plenty of power to run both the exoskeleton and roboports. It's actually a little perplexing to me that some seem to have problems trying to use such setups, I guess some players might spend a lot more time running? Or maybe a psychological aversion against building enough PSPs because they are ultimately discarded? THe most forgiving interpretation I can come up with (besides refusing to even try using PSPs having previously decided they aren't good) is players using RSO which means dramatically longer running distances, and dramatically more work building railroads etc, altough that could hardly be a problem with the vanilla game balance - which I find to be nearly perfect.

Setups I've found to be very successful include Modular Armor with 3x Roboport and 11x PSP, and PA1 with 1x Exo, 3x Roboport, 2x Battery and 25x PSP. The PA1 version is hardly even improved by adding a Fusion Reactor, because 250kW during the daytime appears to be more than enough to run 1 exo and 3 roboports, and a fusion reactor provides more power but you can't fit any additional equipment.

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