Solar Panel return on investment

[Echmech]

Solar --> I built it, I'm done, nothing left to do here, ever

I just "finished" my first game (freeplay scenario) and I feel like this is sadly what it comes down to. Yes, it takes some space and it takes a few hours to recoup investment compared to steam engines but in the end it's the only reasonable way. I started out using oil for solid fuel but it didn't take long until I needed all that oil for lubricants and plastics, even with quite a few far off oil pumps.

One solution to the "problem": Make solar panels deteriorate, just like the oil-wells. Go from 100% to 20% slowly over 10 hours time starting from 30 minutes after placed or something like that.

Or make them deteriorate at a faster pace but also make them "repairable" meaning you need a division of bots to constantly polish and refurbish them. I think this would be most in line with the other mechanics of the game.

[liq3]

I personally don't care about the return on investment for solars outside of speed runs. I build them, they provide endless energy for the rest of the game. I build enough, (and I have) and I don't have to use steam engines ever again. My current game is at 40 hours (I can and did build the missile defence at about 20 hours on a separate save), and I haven't had to worry about coal since 20 hours in.

[Echmech]

I build them, they provide endless energy for the rest of the game. I build enough, (and I have) and I don't have to use steam engines ever again.

That's the problem. They are a way too easy solution. I believe the game would be much more interesting if energy actually had a cost, no matter what your game plan is. That way solar might be better in certain circumstances and steam power would be better in others. As it is now there is no alternative because solar is simply too good.

[liq3]

I build them, they provide endless energy for the rest of the game. I build enough, (and I have) and I don't have to use steam engines ever again.

That's the problem. They are a way too easy solution. I believe the game would be much more interesting if energy actually had a cost, no matter what your game plan is. That way solar might be better in certain circumstances and steam power would be better in others. As it is now there is no alternative because solar is simply too good.

I don't think it's a problem though. They're hugely expensive to build initially. An inserter + boiler + belt + steam engine costs about 25 iron, 5 stone and 1.5 copper, while providing 510kW. It's peanuts. A Solar/accumulator pair (you need the accumulator for nighttime power) on the other hand only provides 60kW (actually less, since it doesn't work all the time) (12%~) and costs... 47 iron, 33.5 copper and 10 sulfuric acid. You then gotta scale it up by 8.5x to get it on the same scale as steam... so that's really 400 iron, 276 copper, and 85 sulphuric acid. And that's not even accounting for the fact that solars don't work at night! That means power wise solars are over 16x more expensive than steam. It's really something you can only afford to invest in late middle game or late game in freeplay. By that point, you're usually rolling in so many resources that solars are more a convenience thing than actually being necessary.

[Subzero22]

This type of analysis is really good for figuring out speed run timings.

How would you take into account resource abundance? I ask because i like to play with really weird resource start up amounts to mix things up. In my current game Im bottlenecked on oil, which makes sulfur "expensive".

I'm bottle necked in oil also and I figured you when you use a small pump at the factory when putting oil into barrels even with 6-7 oil fields all at 0.1/s I'm able to get about 8 barrels a factorio day. I'm thinking that the pump forces the oil to come out faster and I'm going to test and see if stacking more than one pump will make it go faster.

So far I haven't even needed to search for more oil fields yet as what I'm getting currently is all I need to keep up with my production.

[Cilya]

which in fact is a bit useless since energy is an infinite resource. thats what we're trying to say.

As Silenus said :

This type of analysis is really good for figuring out speed run timings.

If you want to speed run this game, you will want to know which path is the faster one. Computing return on investment is a good way to do that. Depending on the start locations, resources may be sufficient, and you will just want to increase your production exponentially. Thus, what you want is to know "how fast my factory grow" and this mean "what is my return on investment".

I believe more details are needed though. It's not obvious that the neglected costs can actually be ignored. For instance, you can't start with solar panel are they are not available before the research is done. Removing the thermal electric chain to replace it with solar panel requires time, which may slow the speedrunner.

[Junion]

I think the better question is. How long does it take for you to 'get back' what you spend on solar panels?

Eventually return will happen. All things considered, how long does it take for a single Solar Panel to make back all the resources put into making it, in the form of energy?

Then accumulators are separate..you'll need them in order to operate at night with the solar panels.

Which for speed runners is a big question. How much 'extra' energy must the solar panel produce..energy you are not using at that current moment and instead store, so that you can use it at night? At that point you are now spending resources to make sure you produce all the energy you need for an entire day/night cycle...but only make it during the day. That ups the amount of panels you need for it to be useful.

Sadly I havn't really delved into the game enough to answer such questions on my own, yet.

[Ethribin]

I found that it ends up being quite effective.

The only real downside of solar pannels and accumulators as energie producers is that they need soooooo much space.
Someone made the math about resources, accumulater/pannel ratio and all allready.

I think in the end you just have to decide if you want to use up a lot of space (my factories normally have like 1/4 is production and 2/4 are solar pannels and accumulators ) or if you want to use steam engines on less space, but who need coal and water access and produce pollution.

I think best in the end is and remains a Hybrid XD (works especially well when you have DyTech mod's primary, secondary, terciary energy system ^^)

[Cilya]

The thing is, at some point, if you want to use productivity modules and beacons, the energy consumption is so high that you would need a lot of coal or solid fuel. You would end up spending more time to setup coal mining sites, or oil mining. On the other end, depending on the settings you use, space is not especially a rare thing. When you have built mining sites far, and removed the presence of aliens near them, you have a lot of free space. Furthermore, solar panel farm building can be automated with blueprints.

So, in some way and late game, it's easier to go with solar panels only. For speedrunning, though, the return on investment for modules is too low, so you would have won before using them, and thus the energy consumption will stay reasonable until the end. You will never have to span big solar panel farms, and it would be a lost of time to stop the steam engines. (You may still use some solar panels, but perhaps not accumulators)

[Ethribin]

The thing is, at some point, if you want to use productivity modules and beacons, the energy consumption is so high that you would need a lot of coal or solid fuel. You would end up spending more time to setup coal mining sites, or oil mining. On the other end, depending on the settings you use, space is not especially a rare thing. When you have built mining sites far, and removed the presence of aliens near them, you have a lot of free space. Furthermore, solar panel farm building can be automated with blueprints.

So, in some way and late game, it's easier to go with solar panels only. For speedrunning, though, the return on investment for modules is too low, so you would have won before using them, and thus the energy consumption will stay reasonable until the end. You will never have to span big solar panel farms, and it would be a lost of time to stop the steam engines. (You may still use some solar panels, but perhaps not accumulators)

That's a really good point you're making there :O

Probably best explanation I've seen so far in this discussion.

[MeduSalem]

Solar --> I built it, I'm done, nothing left to do here, ever

That's the reason why Solar farming wins no matter the resource costs. They are "Build & Forget", which is very, very bad gameplay-wise, especial the longer you keep playing, in my humble opinion.

Yes there's a point to discuss the return on investment for speedruns with a fixed length of gameplay, but on the longterm if you are dedicated to a map and keep on going for 100 hours and more then Solar Farming is way too broken. Since space is also infinite (at least if you ticked that option during map generation) you get infinite power without ever running out of resources to keep that power production going. It's a one-time investment that doesn't require any upkeep. On top of that it doesn't attract any Biters because it doesn't generate any pollution, which also keeps the energy/resource-costs low to defend your base. Once you push the Biters out of your pollution radius they never attack anymore. It's just waaayyy too unbalanced.

This "one-time investment" leaves you in the spot that at some point you don't have to expand the borders of your factories any further to get more resources to keep power production going. With Coal & Oil you need to continually expand since Coal runs out completely if you burn all that stuff and Oil wells being too sparse and losing efficiency over time. Both of which will force you to expand your borders to find more coal deposits and more oil wells to keep up with your comsumption and therefore you have to produce even more infrastructure to cover the transport as well. At some point it's getting a ridiculous race against time since the distances are becoming greater and greater.

You never have those problems with Solar farms since Copper and Iron are pretty common anyways and later in the game my storages run full with millions of them, especially when I don't have to expand anymore and build additional infrastructure. Might as well use that stuff in Piercing Magazines since I don't know what else to do with it at some point. Which would be quite ridiculous itself since that would even further lower the need for Laser Turrets and thereby Energy upkeep costs, because Gun Turrets with Piercing Magazines are much stronger anyways once fully upgraded.

Long story short: In fact Solar Farming renders gameplay boring. Plop & Forget, attracts no biters, no resource struggle. Nothing to fear. Boring.

That's why I have started to avoid using solar panels in my current games because they take away too much of the expansion/exploration as well as combat experience.

Even the speculated Nuclear Power stuff will probably have an upkeep eventually, probably attracting biters since they won't like the radiation stuff.

One solution to the "problem": Make solar panels deteriorate, just like the oil-wells. Go from 100% to 20% slowly over 10 hours time starting from 30 minutes after placed or something like that.

Or make them deteriorate at a faster pace but also make them "repairable" meaning you need a division of bots to constantly polish and refurbish them. I think this would be most in line with the other mechanics of the game.

The deterioration would be a possible solution, but only if there's a ridiculously low cap (worse than 20%) and with a repair function so that Bots may autorepair them after a certain threshold. Because if it just stops at 20% then people would just plop 5 times as much solar panels and be done with the problem, not solving anything.

But it would have to be balanced pretty well, otherwise we would end up in a race condition where the bots repairing the solar panels take as much energy as the solar panels are producing, leaving nothing to feed your factories.

Maybe providing a way to use Belts+Inserters to repair the solar panels as well could be an alternative way to repair them so that combination requires less energy than trying to auto repair the massive fields with Bots where most of the energy is wasted by traveling the distance.



My personal recommendation would be that each source of energy production leaves you with a race against time but at different levels... For example:

1) Burning Wood/Coal is the beginner thing... obviously, but the energy gain per resource invested is so low that you'd have to cut down every tree you find and/or waste so much coal that it doesn't pay off beyond 50MW.
2) Burning Solid Fuel is the midgame, with that you can go up to 150-200MW or something before the struggle for more oil wells begins, because of the pipes through no man's land or using barrels and trains.
3) Using Solar panels is late game to endgame, but becomes ridiculous to maintain when the fields become too large, because of Bots repairing the solar panels consuming near all the energy produced.
4) Using Nuclear power is endgame, but attracts ludicrous loooaaads of Biters because of the increased radiation levels, probably even creating mutated biters and other enemies that are much stronger than the regular Big Biters. It really puts your defenses to a test.

It could probably be very well regulated with the dynamic map creation... that once you reach a certain level of research the map creation spawns various resources more sparsely forcing you to adapt.

[Ethribin]

I personally find this an awesome idea to have the solar panels require maintenance XD

I agree that having them be "plot and forget" makes them quite op, especially for more experienced players (maybe the maintenance can be turned on/off in options?)
It's also more realistic as in real life, the two things that prevent the Sahara being covered in solar panels is A) the distance the power would have to be distributed at = great loss of power unless we have superconductors and more importantly B) the maintenance of such a huge field of solar panels is just impossible (especially profit output/input wise)

Having Solar panels require maintenance also adds to the factory and automation gameplay XD
Maybe one would be forced to have a "backup battery" with steam power, in order to support the solar farm's maintenance. (the primary, secondary and tertiary power system from DyTech is perfect for that) That way one would just have to build a steam energy source and stuff enough burning material into it (I have to much solid fuel all the time anyway as I only use it for trains)

The balance will be difficult never the less I agree.

And.. do the devs even consider adding nuclear power?

Anyway XD
I haven't checked it yet, but if there no one has outed the idea in the "Suggestions" section, go and suggest this idea MeduSalem! ^^
If you don't, and nobody has already, I will do so in your name! ;P

[MeduSalem]

I personally find this an awesome idea to have the solar panels require maintenance XD

I agree that having them be "plot and forget" makes them quite op, especially for more experienced players (maybe the maintenance can be turned on/off in options?)
It's also more realistic as in real life, the two things that prevent the Sahara being covered in solar panels is A) the distance the power would have to be distributed at = great loss of power unless we have superconductors and more importantly B) the maintenance of such a huge field of solar panels is just impossible (especially profit output/input wise)

Having Solar panels require maintenance also adds to the factory and automation gameplay XD
Maybe one would be forced to have a "backup battery" with steam power, in order to support the solar farm's maintenance. (the primary, secondary and tertiary power system from DyTech is perfect for that) That way one would just have to build a steam energy source and stuff enough burning material into it (I have to much solid fuel all the time anyway as I only use it for trains)

The balance will be difficult never the less I agree.

Exactly. Factorio is about building and maintaining a factory and to automate those processes... and in that sense Solar Panels are fundementally cheating. They take the maintanence out of the equation. Once you have that stuff there's no real reason to keep on playing. You basically won the game.

And.. do the devs even consider adding nuclear power?

At least I think to remember that there were some talks about adding nuclear stuff to the automation system in a future release... probably to process Uranium to fuel rods for power plant usage as well as other things. Probably atomic bombs and probably even Deuterium and Tritium processing for Hydrogen bombs or fusion reactors. At least I'd like to drop some hydrogen bombs on some of those giant biter nests because otherwise they are quite tedious to remove. xD

I always thought it was quite odd that the portable fusion reactor for the modular armor does only require some Processing Units and alien artifacts and nothing else. That makes them quite cheap to produce actually for the amount of energy they provide to your suit.

Anyway XD
I haven't checked it yet, but if there no one has outed the idea in the "Suggestions" section, go and suggest this idea MeduSalem! ^^
If you don't, and nobody has already, I will do so in your name! ;P

Feel free to go ahead... because I'm probably too busy to create a thread and maintain it.

[ssilk]

You all forget, that you - playing longer and longer - constantly need more power. There is no good way around that fact.

It doesn't make sense - gameplay wise - to add detoriation (or other kind of maintenance), cause you constantly need to extend the energy production. Which is more than enough "maintenance".

[MeduSalem]

You all forget, that you - playing longer and longer - constantly need more power. There is no good way around that fact.

It doesn't make sense - gameplay wise - to add detoriation (or other kind of maintenance), cause you constantly need to extend the energy production. Which is more than enough "maintenance".

That's not completely true... I've never played any map beyond 300-400MW of power consumption - the average being between 150-200MW, depending on how efficient my furnaces/assemblers work and how many idle around... because by then it's only gaining resources just to stockpile them in a storage system and never do anything with them because killing the Biters doesn't consume nearly enough resources. The defense of your base using Laser turrets doesn't consume any resources as well apart from the intial setup costs (which become marginally with a smelter system that's able to keep up 3000+plates/s), which basically means that there's no upkeep in having 5000 turrets idling around doing nothing as well. That's when the game becomes boring because you don't have to expand anymore to keep your power plants running and defense is for free too and that's why I abandoned many of the maps and started over to try something else.

I've at least one chest full of each individual intermediate/end product already, so what do I do with 2000 Processing Units or 2000 speed modules? Most of the infrastructure is already idling and that's why I don't need 1GW of energy production... which basically means energy consumption grow will stop at some point once your chests are full. The factory will stop wasting resources and energy, which would only leave the defense for energy/resource wasting, but oh... that's for free in the Solar Farm+Laser Turret combination, so no point to keep on playing. :s

The combination of one-time resource costs for both energy production AND energy consumption is just too overpowered and unbalanced in the long run and becomes more obvious the longer you play the same map. With no additional maintanence costs there's a predefined end to the gameplay because out of BOREDOM.

That problem is pretty much independent from the Map settings, because the map settings only determine how hard it is in the beginning, but once you have most of the researches done and automation going the resource sparseness around the starting area stops being a massive problem and only determines how far you have to spread out with trains, but eventually one reaches the same point of boredom once stuff starts to stockpile in the central processing area.

The only map I keep on going beyond that point is when I decided to not use solar farms and laser turrets at all, because then there's still a reason to expand to the unknown territory to gain more resources, since eventually I will consume them but even in that map I've got already at least 300000 of each iron plates and copper plates in the storage to rot forever. And that by using Gun Turrets and Steam Plants only, because I pushed the Biters out of my HUGE pollution radius already in my struggle to gain more resources, which means I only have to kill them when they set up a new base every now and then. ^^

That basically shows that it's possible to have high maintanence costs until the very end, but in the end you'll still begin to stockpile stuff despite the high maintainence costs and infrastructure costs. It just takes much longer to reach that point...

But yes, maintanence costs only virtually prolong gameplay but better than nothing as long as there's no "real" endgame content.

[Boogieman14]

You all forget, that you - playing longer and longer - constantly need more power. There is no good way around that fact.

It doesn't make sense - gameplay wise - to add detoriation (or other kind of maintenance), cause you constantly need to extend the energy production. Which is more than enough "maintenance".

That's hardly any maintenance if you ask me. At some (fairly early) point most people will have automated solar panel and accu production and use a standard blueprint to just plop down a bunch more solar panels. Still very much a fire-and-forget thing.

This is all going by the current game though, where the game is pretty much done after rocket defense. Obviously, things will change if/once gameplay is extended past this point (colonists have landed and need constant supplies and protection, perhaps?)

[Ethribin]

I always thought it was quite odd that the portable fusion reactor for the modular armor does only require some Processing Units and alien artifacts and nothing else. That makes them quite cheap to produce actually for the amount of energy they provide to your suit.

That's because that core reactor isnt a nuclear reactor.
At least I think XD
i always imagined it be something like teh arc reactor that iron man uses. This reactor works with cold fusion though (at least that's the most comon and scientific possible theorie)
To explain how cold fusion works (it is in itsself only a theroy as noone has yet managed to actually bring forth cold fusion, but in theorie it should work) would take to long. In short cold fusion is a form of fusion where the atom cores dont fuse by being pressed upon each other but my exchanging protons and electrons until they have new cores. And it uns only on special isotops (forgot all teh materials but silver is one of the included)
So no wonder no uranium is needed XD

Feel free to go ahead... because I'm probably too busy to create a thread and maintain it.

I'll go ahead them^^

You all forget, that you - playing longer and longer - constantly need more power. There is no good way around that fact.

It doesn't make sense - gameplay wise - to add detoriation (or other kind of maintenance), cause you constantly need to extend the energy production. Which is more than enough "maintenance".

True.. but at the same time, as MeduSalem said, for experienced players or late game it's just... well... boring.
That's also why I suggested that one could add the option that the solar panels require maintenance or not. A sort of a "easy game" or "hard game" option XD

Of corse once that is automated too it can get boring again.. true.. but it makes it more complex never the less.

[Ethribin]

We have a thread now about the whole "Solar panel maintenance" now. https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 971#p46971
Please continue any discussion or add any new thoughts about the matter there please

[ssilk]

it's only gaining resources just to stockpile them in a storage system and never do anything with them because killing the Biters doesn't consume nearly enough resources.

Belief me or not, but this will be the target of the game.

The only map I keep on going beyond that point is when I decided to not use solar farms and laser turrets at all, because then there's still a reason to expand to the unknown territory to gain more resources, since eventually I will consume them but even in that map I've got already at least 300000 of each iron plates and copper plates in the storage to rot forever. And that by using Gun Turrets and Steam Plants only, because I pushed the Biters out of my HUGE pollution radius already in my struggle to gain more resources, which means I only have to kill them when they set up a new base every now and then. ^^

Hm. I understand that. But now I tell you, that I came in a >80 hours game to the idea to use modules. Extensively! Productivity and speed and all level 3. This is a huge amount of resources needed. And an extreme amount of energy. I came to more than 1000 MW.

So all I can currently say per sure about this theme is: It will make a bit more sense in the future and it seems clear to me, that the balancing here is not finished. But currently I won't say "this is how it must work". Cause the target of the game is not clear.

[MeduSalem]

Belief me or not, but this will be the target of the game.

It might be the current target of the alpha, but if that's the goal of the finished game then it's surely one hell of a boring goal. ^^ xD

I'd at least expect a little bit more from a real endgame but to store ludicrous amounts of resources I'll never need. If there's at least some freaky guys building a city on the planet - after the rocket defense clearly - always demanding new items to build their ever increasing city then it makes somehow sense to gather those resources, but hoarding them for nobody doesn't feel like an accomplishment. It's... tiresome and boring after a while.

That's why I start over with new maps because I'm quite bored with doing always the same thing over and over, a.k.a. building a new trainstation, mining stuff until everything is exhausted, deconstructing and moving on to the next ore deposit and increasing the storage every once in a while. If there's nothing else left beside copy&pasting the same blueprints over and over I'm basically dying because of boredom. ^^

I can't even rebuild anything from the ground up if I've a brand new idea for a factory, because that would be so much work that it is better to start a new map because it's faster.

Hm. I understand that. But now I tell you, that I came in a >80 hours game to the idea to use modules. Extensively! Productivity and speed and all level 3. This is a huge amount of resources needed. And an extreme amount of energy. I came to more than 1000 MW.

So all I can currently say per sure about this theme is: It will make a bit more sense in the future and it seems clear to me, that the balancing here is not finished. But currently I won't say "this is how it must work". Cause the target of the game is not clear.

Well I've several chests full with Module 2s... and crafted enough module 3s for every machine already... I don't know what giant factory you are maintaining but I topped out at 450MW or something with my map. But well I invested ~116 hours into it already with several reconstructions to incorporate beacons or better designs (which I would never do anymore since it's easier to start a new map) and let the factory do it's job in the background while I went out to explore the neighbourhood. xD

I can only imagine that you're overnuking the entire production circle to create stuff in godly numbers as fast as possible, while I took my sweet time producing bit for bit but all the time without any interruption and store them to chests to have them ready for later. ^^

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, don't know, maybe it's just the fact that I'm using Gun Turrets, which don't require any energy. xD


As for the balancing... there needs something to be done... Because at one point in the game you are done with building the factory and if there's no maintanence to it then there's no real reason to keep on going. Might as well end there. Don't know what kind of endgame the devs have in mind, but if it is resource costly, then I might actually rethink the energy costs, but currently the solar farming/laser turret stuff renders gameplay to become boring quite fast for me. It's surely the way to go because of its benefits, but meh gameplay-wise because they don't add any depth to it rather than the complete opposite: They make things too easy again. ^^