Factorio Forums

In my campaign it felt like fuel (like solid fuel or coal) was too easy to acquire and or lasted to long. Solid fuel especially seems to burn foreverBy the end of the game. I was able to fill up two steal chess with solid fuel And multiple steel Chess with coal because I was producing about two or three times the fuel I was using. If units of fuel didn't have as much energy I think it would add good difficulty to the game.

That really depends on the map and settings doesn't it. How I currently play I often have to save all coal for plastic bars and fuel my factory with wood until my oil industry is running.

It's also very possible to mine great surpluses of other resources, can't see how coal or oil differ in that.

I actually restart if my starting areas has too much oil, it's ridiculous if there's 20-30 oil patches available right in the beginning.

I don't find it too strong, As others have said it depends on the map generation. Now solar power ..... free unlimited energy with no pollution, that just seems imbalanced to me.

Marconos wrote:Now solar power ..... free unlimited energy with no pollution, that just seems imbalanced to me.

The benefits of renewable energy! You'll say that in real life too when solar power starts rolling out in a few years and it'll be everywhere because it's so imba.

I feel that main problem with solars is that accumulators are just too good. In reality the main limiting factor for wide-scale renewable energy production is that it's hard to store energy and it's quite lossy. In factorio an accumulator doesn't cost too much and is lossless.

Also, having seasons with varying lenght of day would make things significantly more interesting



As for solid fuels being too strong, yeah, they are. I hope at least oil-based stuff gets balanced somewhat once we can feed boilers directly with fluid based fuels. It doesn't really make any sense to produce solid fuels out of methane.

hoho wrote:I feel that main problem with solars is that accumulators are just too good. In reality the main limiting factor for wide-scale renewable energy production is that it's hard to store energy and it's quite lossy. In factorio an accumulator doesn't cost too much and is lossless.

It's the future, and nowaday useable battery for energy grid begin to appear, or at least are worked on.

Also, having good accumulators offset the lack of wind turbines, which don't need suns and make the night less brutal on energy, and it also offset the lack of energy control, since you cannot easily switch off your factory for the night.

Still, if we assume the accumulators are (super)capacitors, the theoretical limit would still only be 50% efficient. This means that if you put in 100 J of energy into it, it can only output 50 J.
I don't know wether this can be implemented(ie. modded) already, but I would like to see some loss in the accumulators. This would make running a factory that is 100% reliant on solar energy and storage much harder to pull off. It would require the same amount of capacitors(if we keep the same max capacity), but would require more energy input to charge them. Effectively this would mean doubling the amount of solar panels you would need to charge your accumulators to make it through the night, while keeping the same amount of solar panels to run the factory through the day.

In the end, this would make building a basic setup, running your factory on solar energy through the day, not any harder, while making the end goal more difficult to pull off.

Well, at the very least that would imply to find a way to automatically deactivate your factory at night. Because currently, when at night you would still dischrge your accumulator to run yours factory without options to keep energy for the importants things like turrets.

you can power a battery farm+lasers with a secondary power grid (from solars/steams to batteries) of course this requires overlapping your solar farms with two substations for both grids.

I'm completely in support of making the accumulators lose a certain amount of the energy put in. That would both make powering your buildings preferable to storing energy in accumulators (making steam engines more useful in late game) and limit the total number of accumulators that is viable to build, because the more accumulators you would have, the more energy you would lose.

As for solid fuel, I think it's a bit useless. Coal is so common there's no real need to use anything else, it's only disadvantage is that it doesn't last as long as solid fuel, but currently there's nothing burning fuel quickly enough to make it an issue. The materials spent to make solid fuel are better used for cracking into gas, which can be actually used for making sulfur.

I think it would be better to give energy consumers an efficiency rating, say for example 30% for stone furnaces, 50% for steel furnaces, 20% for burner inserters, 50% for regular boilers 75% for supercritical boilers (not in the game), etc etc and then make it so the energy gained is multiplied by this negative multiplier, to give the net energy gained. IRL it works a lot like this.

I can only second that statement - there are definitely too many lossless burners, so why make the boiler waste half the fuel?