[MOD 0.12.x] Marathon 1.0.3

[KeepOnBuilding]

I have not done much play testing with these recipes yet, so I don't think this is ready for release.

I probably won't have time to play much until October. Certainly I won't have 100 spare hours this month!

Sulfur cycle
I am just about to start on blue science, so I have not really tested the new oil processing recipes. Battery production has been painfully slow, and with 5 batteries required per blue science, I think this might become a real bottleneck.

factorio-calc shows that to produce 1 blue science pack every 10 seconds, Marathon-0.5.3 requires 6 petroleum gas per second. My recipes bump this up to 15. Which seems reasonable. But in practice it seems to be too slow.

I am playing with the latest RSO mod, and I have access to only 15 oil wells, all under 1/sec, within a reasonable distance of spawn. So my play through might not be representative of the general experience. I currently only have 3 wells tapped, so I guess battery production should be slow!

Laser Turrets
Marathon does not override the laser turret recipe, and I think the vanilla recipe for laser turrets is OK:
- They use 20 electronic circuits which are already expensive.
- They use 12 batteries which I have just made harder to produce. Maybe this could be increased to 20?

Oops
One other thing… I added a stone furnace as an ingredient of the burner inserters. Because after all, they need to burn fuel. But then I read in the README that the idea isn't to change recipes. I just backed that change out.

Solid Fuel
Factorio 0.12.x uses solid fuel as an ingredient of the rocket part and satellite. And while it's no challenge to generate this much solid fuel, the current amount is way over the top.

In the early stages of the game before I research fluid tanks, something needs to be done with all the light and heavy oil to keep the refinery from backing up. I set up three chemical plants… one converting heavy oil to solid fuel and two converting light oil to solid fuel.

In the time it took me to make batteries for 12 accumulators and 4 laser turrets (about 150 batteries) I have filled 4 iron chests with solid fuel. I think half a chest would be a reasonable amount to make in this time, or maybe one chest.

Solid fuel has a fuel_value of 25 MJ, so these 4 chests have the same fuel_value as 25 chests full of nerfed marathon coal. This makes coal obsolete once you have oil processing up and running… the only thing coal would be used for is plastic.

I think the amount of solid fuel generated needs to be a quarter of the default.
And I think the fuel_value needs to be at least halved.

Solid_fuel needs to be a fuel of last resort. I think this balance might be better.

I have just pushed a commit with these changes. Please review and if you're willing to risk this being unbalanced in some way, I'll generate a PR.

KeepOnBuilding!

[Afforess]

I have not done much play testing with these recipes yet, so I don't think this is ready for release.

I probably won't have time to play much until October. Certainly I won't have 100 spare hours this month!

Me either. I am away from my primary gaming desktop for the next 10 days, at least. After that, I can test your changes in detail.

Sulfur cycle
I am just about to start on blue science, so I have not really tested the new oil processing recipes. Battery production has been painfully slow, and with 5 batteries required per blue science, I think this might become a real bottleneck.

factorio-calc shows that to produce 1 blue science pack every 10 seconds, Marathon-0.5.3 requires 6 petroleum gas per second. My recipes bump this up to 15. Which seems reasonable. But in practice it seems to be too slow.

I am playing with the latest RSO mod, and I have access to only 15 oil wells, all under 1/sec, within a reasonable distance of spawn. So my play through might not be representative of the general experience. I currently only have 3 wells tapped, so I guess battery production should be slow!

Batteries are a bottleneck in my current game, but mostly because I am automating accumulator production. Sulfer I only had 2 chemical plants making, and not even at full output. I think that making sulfer more expensive / slow to produce will improve the balance. For reference, I am also on RSO.

Laser Turrets
Marathon does not override the laser turret recipe, and I think the vanilla recipe for laser turrets is OK:
- They use 20 electronic circuits which are already expensive.
- They use 12 batteries which I have just made harder to produce. Maybe this could be increased to 20?

Really? Hmm, I must be mis-remembering.

Oops
One other thing… I added a stone furnace as an ingredient of the burner inserters. Because after all, they need to burn fuel. But then I read in the README that the idea isn't to change recipes. I just backed that change out.

I noticed that and completely forgot to mention that. I am a bit conflicted with the change. I agree it does make sense, but in terms of balance, it discourages using the burner inserters even more (and instead encourages players to rush electricity), which is not really the goal. I would prefer the change removed, which it seems like you did, so yay.

Solid Fuel
Factorio 0.12.x uses solid fuel as an ingredient of the rocket part and satellite. And while it's no challenge to generate this much solid fuel, the current amount is way over the top.

In the early stages of the game before I research fluid tanks, something needs to be done with all the light and heavy oil to keep the refinery from backing up. I set up three chemical plants… one converting heavy oil to solid fuel and two converting light oil to solid fuel.

In the time it took me to make batteries for 12 accumulators and 4 laser turrets (about 150 batteries) I have filled 4 iron chests with solid fuel. I think half a chest would be a reasonable amount to make in this time, or maybe one chest.

Solid fuel has a fuel_value of 25 MJ, so these 4 chests have the same fuel_value as 25 chests full of nerfed marathon coal. This makes coal obsolete once you have oil processing up and running… the only thing coal would be used for is plastic.

I think the amount of solid fuel generated needs to be a quarter of the default.
And I think the fuel_value needs to be at least halved.

Solid_fuel needs to be a fuel of last resort. I think this balance might be better.

This highlights different playstyles. I never build refineries until I can also build storage tanks (don't want to waste 1 drop of petrol!). So I never have used solid fuel outside of one of my early first Factorio games, in pre-Marathon days. I think part of the reason solid fuel is useless in my games, is because Boiler power is under-powered in Marathon, because of the massive energy consumption you need in the middle game. I switch to solar power pretty quickly, because it is not too hard to automate new solar panels, and space is often cheap (throw down some walls, and you're done! Biters pretty much ignore the non-polluting solar panels). I am wondering if, in addition to your solid fuel changes, boiler power output get a slight buff? Or maybe nerf solar power output instead?

Fuel sources in general though, tend to drop off in usefulness mid-game. I find myself ignoring coal mines as well. In my current marathon game, I have exactly 3 mining drills mining coal, which is enough to keep my trains fully stocked, and plastic made. The game is designed to hurry the player from the dirty to clean energy factory designs, and the cleaner alternatives don't require fuel sources at all. This seems like a core-design-flaw in factorio and not something that can be easily fixed in the scope of the Marathon mod, though. Maybe no effort should be made to balance this, and a strongly worded letter of complaint should be sent to the factorio devs instead? Thoughts?

[KeepOnBuilding]

I had never used a block of solid fuel either, until I made the rocket parts in my recent 0.12.4 vanilla world. I have never made a factory which uses logistic bots for anything other than replenishing my inventory either. Everybody has their own play style.

I think on the sulfur/oil balance, we'll just have to wait and see how it plays through. My aim is to require at least 8 refineries in the end game. In my last Marathon world I had 170 green circuit factories feeding into research and modules… but only 2 oil refineries… which just seems wrong.

Solar panels… you could nerf them but they are already pretty expensive with all those green circuits. Accumulators are the limiting factor for solar power in my current world, but perhaps when I get a few speed modules and tap some more oil wells, that will change.

KoB.

[Jaridan]

Does Marathon work with Bobs Mod and/or Dytech?

If not, any plans to add support for those mods?

[orzelek]

Does RSO work with Bobs Mod and/or Dytech?

If not, any plans to add support for those mods?

It works with both. New metallurgy 2.0 from DyTech is not yet supported - will be added when it's a bit more mature.
PS.
I'd recommend RSO threads for that kind of questions

[Jaridan]

Does RSO work with Bobs Mod and/or Dytech?

If not, any plans to add support for those mods?

It works with both. New metallurgy 2.0 from DyTech is not yet supported - will be added when it's a bit more mature.
PS.
I'd recommend RSO threads for that kind of questions

Sry, i used the wrong word, i was asking if Marathon is compatible with them, whoops.

corrected the post above.

[Afforess]

Does RSO work with Bobs Mod and/or Dytech?

If not, any plans to add support for those mods?

It works with both. New metallurgy 2.0 from DyTech is not yet supported - will be added when it's a bit more mature.
PS.
I'd recommend RSO threads for that kind of questions

Sry, i used the wrong word, i was asking if Marathon is compatible with them, whoops.

corrected the post above.

Because Marathon just tweaks base recipes, it ends up being compatible with everything, as long as they don't change base recipes also.

If you do ever find an incompatibility, report it and I'll come up with a patch.

[KeepOnBuilding]

Because Marathon just tweaks base recipes, it ends up being compatible with everything, as long as they don't change base recipes also.

But that means you only get the Marathon experience with base recipes. Any ores/recipes added by DyTech/Bob's or any other mod will remain unchanged.

And because Marathon actually makes each iron plate 2.5 times cheaper and each copper plate 5 times cheaper (but you need to use more of them), the balance of other mods might be broken.

Good luck, and
KeepOnBuilding!

[orzelek]

Because Marathon just tweaks base recipes, it ends up being compatible with everything, as long as they don't change base recipes also.

But that means you only get the Marathon experience with base recipes. Any ores/recipes added by DyTech/Bob's or any other mod will remain unchanged.

And because Marathon actually makes each iron plate 2.5 times cheaper and each copper plate 5 times cheaper (but you need to use more of them), the balance of other mods might be broken.

Good luck, and
KeepOnBuilding!

I admit I was tempted but didn't try to use marathon with bob's mods. Main reason is what you wrote above - I'm not sure how the recipes will interact between bob's and marathon changed ones.
Second reason would be - my bob's game with science tweaker already takes more then 40 hours to launch a rocket

[KeepOnBuilding]

Yeah, I think Bob's and DyTech already rebalance the game "their way".

If you want a harder experience with them, perhaps ask on their threads. Either the author or a keen user might help you out.

KoB.

[Gus_Smedstad]

Solid fuel is unlike most of the other things you're talking about altering, because it's an energy source. It's balanced against coal, not copper or electronics. As such, it's about right as-is, and shouldn't change. If you say you've never made any solid fuel, ever, you have no experience with the balance for solid fuel.

Until you have built substantial accumulator banks, you're using either coal or solid fuel for energy at night. If you don't make solid fuel, it's because you have plenty of coal reserves, enough that you're not concerned about running out before converting to accumulators. In my Marathon + RSO game, my nearby patches of coal were quite small, and solid fuel played a substantial part in my energy production because I had a coal shortage.

As Afforess said, there's a basic issue with Factorio that you can reduce fuel consumption to near-zero once you have solar + accumulators. Only trains need fuel at that point. When the factory proper uses zero fuel, that's not something you can adjust by tweaking costs.

I really disagree that solid fuel should be a fuel of "last resort." In our world, oil usage is 95% energy, 5% things like plastics.

Oil is only "time based" once it's depleted, and the oil derricks are only producing 0.1 / second each. Otherwise, it's much like other resources - if you increase costs, you're increasing the speed at which you deplete the field. 0.1 / second is quite small, it's difficult to meet plastics and sulfur costs with that, even if you don't increase them.

A pumpjack produces 0.5 * Yield^2 * 7500 - 375 crude oil before it depletes. Basic oil processing is 10 oil -> 3 light / 3 heavy / 4 petroleum, which converts to 3 / 1.5 solid / 2 solid fuel respectively. Thus 1 oil = 0.65 solid fuel = 325 KJ.

I just measured an untouched oil field and an untouched coal field at comparable distances in a Marathon + RSO game. The coal field had 923k coal or 73 GJ, the oil field had two wells with 438% and 596% yield respectively, for a total of 66 GJ. The energy content of both fields was close, so any idea that oil has "way more energy" isn't based on actual study, it's a seat of the pants reaction because you haven't actually tried to mine out coal fields and store the results.

[Gus_Smedstad]

In vanilla, the bottleneck in advanced circuit production, accumulators, and laser turrets is largely petroleum gas for plastics and sulfur. In Marathon, it's mostly copper for electronics.

In vanilla, 1 Blue science pack = 16.4 iron ore, 16.5 copper ore, 1 coal, and 6 gas, when you include the sulfur and plastics costs.
In marathon, 1 blue science pack = 297.2 iron ore, 670 copper ore, 12.5 coal, and 60 gas. Gas cost has gone up a factor of 10, coal has gone up 12.5x but copper cost has gone up a factor of 40.

If you want gas usage to be in comparable ratios to vanilla, which I think is desirable, the cost of plastics needs to go up from 3 gas and 1 coal to 12 gas and 3 coal, or the plastics cost of advanced circuits needs to go up from 5 to 20 (not 50, which is too far in the other direction). Similarly, sulfur needs to go from 3 gas to 12, or sulfuric acid needs to go to 20 sulfur / 5 sulfuric acid, or batteries need to go from 3 sulfuric acid to 12.

The advantage of tweaking the cost of plastics or sulfur is that you only need to adjust one number, not the costs of everything that uses plastics and sulfuric acid.

[KeepOnBuilding]

Hi Gus,

You're right, I don't have enough experience with solid fuel to balance it. So thank you for your valuable insights!

May I ask for clarification of a few points before I answer in detail:

- "0.5 * Yield^2 * 7500 - 375" isn't right. Perhaps it should be "0.5 * Yield^2 * 7500 - 37.5". The difference is small.

- How do you determine: "Thus 1 oil = 0.65 solid fuel = 325 KJ"?
Solid Fuel has a fuel_value of 25 MJ, so I would say 1 oil = 0.65 solid fuel = 16.25 MJ

- Your 923k coal field. In Marathon each coal ore has 4 MJ, so wouldn't this field contain 3692 GJ of energy?

- And your two oil wells. I calculate that they would produce 205,000 oil to depletion = 3332 GJ of energy.

My equation for oil production at any point prior to depletion:
SY = Starting Yield (yours are 4.38 and 5.96)
EY = Ending Yield (depletion is 0.1)
P = production

P = 3750 * (SY^2 - EY^2)

The 438% well: P = 3750 * (4.38 * 4.38 - 0.1 * 0.1) = 71904
The 596% well: P = 3750 * (5.96 * 5.96 - 0.1 * 0.1) = 133169
Total = 205072 oil.

Then each well with 2 x speed 1 modules will produce 500 oil = 8.2 GJ per hour for the duration of the game.

My point would be that two oil patches probably shouldn't contain as much energy as a massive patch of coal

I think I agree with your second post about plastic/sulfur, and this is what I tried to achieve when I tweaked the recipes. Gas cost is up from 60 to 150. Maybe it could be a little higher.

Thanks for your great posts, and
KeepOnBuilding!

[Bumblechubs]

Is ore supposed to be more 'belt-efficient' than finished plates? I'm finding it a bit easier to pair up furnaces with assemblers and belting ore around rather than belting around finished ingots, especially once electric furnaces are unlocked.

[KeepOnBuilding]

Is ore supposed to be more 'belt-efficient' than finished plates?

Yes! A Marathon main bus carries ores, rather than plates.

Each copper ore expands into 5 plates.
Each iron ore expands into 2.5 plates which isn't quite as bad.

But if you try to use a traditional main bus with plates on it, you will quickly run out of bandwidth.

Have fun, and
KeepOnBuilding!

[Gus_Smedstad]

- "0.5 * Yield^2 * 7500 - 375" isn't right. Perhaps it should be "0.5 * Yield^2 * 7500 - 37.5". The difference is small.

Yeah, I left out a factor of 10% when computing the square during integration.

Current yield / second = initial yield - time in seconds / 7500, with a minimum current yield of 10%.

Integrating, total yield at time t is = initial yield * t - 0.5 t^2 / 7500

We integrate from 0 to time at depletion.
t = (initial yield - 10%) * 7500 = initial yield * 7500 - 750
t^2 is yield^2 * 7500^2 - 2 * yield * 7500 * 750 + 750 ^2
0.5 * t^2 / 7500 = 0.5 * 7500 * yield^2 - yield * 750 + 37.5 <- this is where I made the error in my earlier calculation.

Total yield at depletion is

initial yield * (initial yield * 7500 - 750) - 3750 * initial yield^2 + 750 * initial yield - 37.5
= 7500 * yield^2 - 3750 * yield^2 - 750 * yield + 750 * yield - 37.5
= 3750 * yield^2 - 37.5

Solid Fuel has a fuel_value of 25 MJ, so I would say 1 oil = 0.65 solid fuel = 16.25 MJ

Right, I looked at the fuel value for a stack of 50 in the game, and assumed it was giving the fuel value for the stack, not per unit. In any case, the ratios remain the same.

My point would be that two oil patches probably shouldn't contain as much energy as a massive patch of coal

The coal patch wasn't "massive," it was fairly small. The typical patch just contains more coal than you probably expect.

In any case, you haven't given any reason for suggesting that oil patches shouldn't contain as much energy as coal patches. Your perception of how "large" each patch is doesn't bear; it's about the total energy in each deposit.

Sure, oil stores energy much more densely, particularly when processed, but coal doesn't require refining and conversion to solid fuel before you can burn it, and doesn't require that you research Oil Processing either.

Then each well with 2 x speed 1 modules will produce 500 oil = 8.2 GJ per hour for the duration of the game.

Rather than talk about "GJ per hour," we can talk straight power, since it's energy per time. Base output for a depleted well is 0.1 barrels per second, or 1.625 MJ / second. Since 1 J = 1 watt-second, that's 1.625 MW, or 40 solar panels (I understand solar panels average out to 40 kw when you include the day / night cycle).

That's not actually all that much. Oil wells aren't all that common, and my end-game Marathon factory drew 280 MW, powered by 8000 solar panels. I'd need 200 depleted oil wells to run the factory indefinitely the way the solar panels did, and I assure you my territory did not include 200 oil wells. Counting, I had about 50 in my cleared territory, though I wasn't using most of them, just as I wasn't using 15 of the coal fields in my territory. I covered a lot of ground in my continuing quest for copper, but going with a Steam economy would have required that I go even larger or run out of energy eventually.

[Ackos]

Bitter evolution at 60%, getting attacked on multiple fronts. Laser (vanilla) fire has drained all my power. What a mess!

[Afforess]

Bitter evolution at 60%, getting attacked on multiple fronts. Laser (vanilla) fire has drained all my power. What a mess!

I recommend non-power based turrets, especially before 70% evolution. I have another mod, "AmmoBox" which fills this gap.

[Ackos]

Yea, pulled down some lasers. The problem was i was critically low on coal and oil for fuel. I finally went hunting and have taken out some of the problem nests, so i could develop a new coal field.

[Afforess]

How time flies. Has it really been 3 months since 0.5.3 was released?

Marathon 0.5.4 is out, with a slew of balance changes, mainly contributed from player discussions here and the contribution of KeepOnDigging! I've been play-testing this release for over a month, and ironed out any issues before release.

Marathon 0.5.4 works for all releases between 0.12.0 and 0.12.15 (and will likely continue to work for future releases as well!)

Marathon 0.5.4 is save-game compatible with 0.5.3 and older releases. You can upgrade existing games w/o concern.

Thanks to everyone who has tested & contributed changes, and especially Benoit Girard, who founded the mod.