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Oil needs to be richer in starting area

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 2:47 am
by Cribbit
I believe that the current algorithm is careful to guarantee water, stone, iron and copper in the starting area. I think oil is also guaranteed to a certain extent but it's not high enough. I just spent a few hours going through seeds looking for a good speedrun seed and noticed that lack of oil was my most common negating point. A large number don't have any oil unless you fight biters. Many only have a handful of wells within easy grasp.

A starting area should have at least half a dozen wells within a small radius of the start.

New players have no idea on how to check viability of resources on a new map. It's not something you realize is an issue until well into the game. New players shouldn't have to deal with figuring out how to chase down far away oil in their first game.

Re: Oil needs to be richer in starting area

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 5:35 am
by Koub
What are the mapgen settings you use ? I've not noticed that last time I've started a new map. I reckon I restarted tens times to get a starting area with not too many trees though.

Re: Oil needs to be richer in starting area

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 7:09 am
by Cribbit
Default settings.

Re: Oil needs to be richer in starting area

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 8:27 am
by BlakeMW
I'm also bothered by the fact that oil is not guaranteed in the starting area - although I don't feel it needs to be rich, just as long as there's something. Particularly if you're playing on brutal settings like Deathworld there's a big difference between one shitty low yield oil patch, and no oil patches - with at least a tiny bit of oil you can get Military 3, Tank, Flamethrower, Modular Armor, Personal Roboport etc - so even though you can't go big with oil-dependent stuff, you can at least get your force multipliers up and totally wreck the biters standing between you and more oil, rather than doing stupid stuff like fish-tanking or gun turret creeping.

To be fair on standard resource settings I had to re-roll a Deathworld 30 times before I found one where the nearest oil was out in Big Worm territory (and even in that case, it happened to not be protected by a Big Worm). So on standard resource settings it's pretty unlikely that a player will get royally shafted. But still, I do feel freeplay would be enhanced if we went back to at least 1 or 2 guaranteed oil wells in the starting area.

Re: Oil needs to be richer in starting area

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 9:44 am
by JohnyDL
A single patch is enough to get you started on coal liquidation any oil is better than n no oil but I haven't really encountered this problem with default settings since 0.14

Re: Oil needs to be richer in starting area

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 11:41 am
by stm
I parttially agree with the request. Not that the oil patch needs to be in the starting area itself, but I had several tries to start a game in 0.15, which I did abandon because there was no oil in the vincinity (Or one single patch out of the way below a huge biter base).
The oil patch does not have to be huge and close by (Actually I would like it better if my oil patch would be further away from my current start, but I still used this one, since otherwise I might not have found any usable patch at all.
So I would like it best if at least one patch was guaranteed to be in a certain range of the start, even if not in the starting area itself. Especially since coal liquification needs oil not only to start the process, but also to even research it, which in my opinion is both a very bad idea! If this was changed the lack of an oil patch would change from beeing a kind of game over to a challange.
Stm