Koub wrote:Honestly, the more I think, the more I'd like there wasn't an "advanced poil processing" tech, and that basic and advanced were all unlocked with the same green research. I am able to pinpoint where I lose the pleasure to play in my new games, and it's usually when I have researched most of the green science, and I *have* no other choice but to start automating the blue science. And at that moment, the tedium of having to do basic oil processing just to make 75 blue science packs, I do most of it by hand feeding assembling machines, and once I have my 75 science packs, I feed them in my labs, and there is always one single research I do with basic oil processing when I start blue research : advanced oil processing. I hate having to buffer unused oil byproducts until I can process them.
So, to get back to topic, I'd prefer leaving the solid fuel recipes as is, but merge the Advanced oil processing tech into the Oil processing tech. That way, you have all the options from start, and can start doing whatever pleases you with your crude oil.
You make an excellent point. However I think the solution, contrary to common sense, is to lock advanced oil processing behind other techs which require blue science. When you only need that tiny 75 blue science to unlock it, you can easily delude yourself into thinking you are wasting time, energy, and oil by
not researching it before you setup your oil. I used to play that way until I tried resting on a full pre-advanced oil setup and found it more than acceptable; I honestly had no immediate drive to upgrade to advanced oil processing.
There are some problems with basic oil processing which lead to players finding it sub-optimal, more than anything the fact that advanced oil processing gives you more total oil, but also that use for heavy and light oil is so limited you find yourself buffering it up indefinitely, making solid fuel that you may or may not be using, or destroying the oil. I purposely used a setup which relied on the high income of solid fuel, but to really make pre-advanced viable, I would suggest the following changes:
1.) Advanced should make
LESS total oil than basic. It will still provide more petroleum gas post-cracking than basic will, and with less space and energy required to do it. There is already a substantial loss in cracking oil to lighter varieties, so it makes sense for advanced oil processing to also give slightly less total oil than basic. That way a player will not read the numbers and decide they are losing oil every second they run basic oil processing.
2.) There should be more uses for light and heavy oil. Heavy oil is primarily used for lubricant, but only in electric engine units or express transport belts. Firstly, the player probably isn't using these at green science level, secondly they might never want to use a lot of these as it depends a lot on playstyle. I never use much lubricant in any playthrough. Flamethrower turrets would be a great way to use excess oil, except that they use too little oil. Their extremely potent damage burns through oil actually slower than the flamethrower weapon, 20 times slower to be precise. I think the flamethrower's oil use is fine and I use that weapon all the time. So I would at minimum raise the flamethrower turrets' fluid consumption rate 100x as high; even still it would be much more damage efficient than the flamethrower weapon. But finally it would be useful as a way to dump whatever oil you have too much of. You should even be able to setup a circuit condition to switch which oil the turret is using based on available supplies.
But there should be more uses still. Tons of things could have lubricant added to their production cost. KS Power's oil boiler and diesel generator ought to be added to the base game, providing more usage for solid fuel or light oil as a fuel source. Any player with excess heavy or light oil should feel there is always at least one option fitting their gameplay style to use as much of the oil as they can produce.
Here's some tentative numbers:
Basic Oil Processing: 30 heavy, 30 light, 40 petroleum gas (100 total)(cracked=75 petroleum gas)
unchanged
Advanced Oil Processing: 10 heavy, 30 light, 55 petroleum gas (95 total)(cracked=80 petroleum gas)
only light oil output reduced
And then I'd add some late-game unlocks for lazy people:
Heavy Oil Processing: 90 heavy oil
Light Oil Processing: 80 light oil
Petroleum Gas Processing: 70 petroleum gas
These recipes would be useful if you want to maintain a compact setup and only want one oil type at a time. If you use heavy or light oil processing, you can get more total heavy or light oil than would have been possible with standard processing. Petroleum gas processing yields less petroleum gas than advanced+cracking, but takes far less space and energy. The most important benefit of the specialized processing is that you never have to deal with the bottleneck of having an unused product build up.
So will this make the game stay fun into blue science production? It depends on the amount of patience you have for such a task, but I think it will make great strides in that direction. Rather than stress about your oil, you can relax and enjoy it, leaving blue tech a faint glimmer on the horizon if you don't feel like pursuing it yet. Then later, when you feel like tackling blue tech, you might already have such a strong plastic and battery production chain going that it winds up being pretty easy to setup. Maybe far down the road you'll be launching rockets and placing facilities using blueprints and robots, and you'll stumble across your old oil setup, still using basic oil processing, still providing for your factory. And you'll think...heh...and move on, unperturbed.