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As we all know, oil will eventually end up having a productivity of 0.1. Which is greater than zero, but not by much. However, I had an idea about using that 0.1 to turn the light and heavy oil into solid fuel (gas is just too valuable to not convert, plus the ratio sucks). So the question is... how many 0.1 productivity derricks would be required to run a single set of 10 steam engines (i.e. 1 pump/14 boilers/10 engines)? You could have a perpetually running system as an end-game alternative to solar farms and collectors for night power. The footprint would be a heck of a lot less as well, although pollution goes up.

For this, you could actually go back to basic cracking rather than advanced cracking and have more solid fuel production.

20 fully depleted pumpjacks will still fully load a single refinery. So, your idea is viable, and there's a good upper bound.

Keep in mind, however, that the pumpjacks themselves produce pollution on a per-tick basis regardless of how much they produce, which means that as their yield goes down, you're producing progressively more pollution for the same amount of oil. (Their electrical demand remains constant as well, but that's already low enough in the first place that it's still not a significant concern.) It's usually better to move the same pumpjacks around as wells are depleted, instead of adding more.

Also, solar has a key advantage that becomes extremely valuable in the late game: it's trivially easy to set up solar arrays so that they'll be completely ignored by enemies. This makes them more reliable as you can count on them not being damaged (except through your own stupidity, learn to drive!) and allows you to move power generation out into unprotected areas, giving you extra space to play with inside your walls.

You'd be surprised how much oil you can get from a cluster of 0.1 rated rigs with sufficient Beacons and Speed 3 cards. Bwahahaa!

_aD wrote:You'd be surprised how much oil you can get from a cluster of 0.1 rated rigs with sufficient Beacons and Speed 3 cards. Bwahahaa!

Oil, pollution from the beaconed pumpjacks, plus of course pollution from the upgraded power usage. That's a LOT of pollution

How else are we gonna make the Biters come our way?

_aD wrote:How else are we gonna make the Biters come our way?

rocket defense?