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We can't make the game as complex as real life but I think if we generalized how petroleum is used in real life we can balance everything out nicely.

Light oil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_crude_oil

Produces a higher amount of Gasoline, Diesel, and Lubricants.

This can be where our fuels/lubricants come from for our trains/cars/tanks/etc

Heavy Oil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_crude_oil

"It is "heavy" (dense and viscous) due to the high ratio of aromatics and naphthenes to linear alkanes and high amounts of NSO's (nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen and heavy metals)."

We could get sulfur and other industrial products from this.

Liquefied Petroleum Gas: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=34&t=6

"In the United States, plastics are made from liquid petroleum gases (LPG), natural gas liquids (NGL), and natural gas. LPG are by-products of petroleum refining, and NGL are removed from natural gas before it enters transmission pipelines."

Plastics are made from liquified gas products. We could also use the LPG in flamethrowers or flamethrower turrents.

Isn't the problem more that there isn't enough Petroleum Gas being produced by a refinery to supprt operation of plastics, batteries(!Blue pack!), processors, and explosive, without massive oversupplies of solid fuel?

Lubricant and flamethrower fuel are 'side products', created in limited quantities and not generally produced on as constant a basis.. solid fuel, from light oil, is produced in such quantity to avoid siezing gas production that I, and possibly more players, simply destroy full chests of the stuff to make it go away, or to exploit boiler-steam engine mechanics to 'burn off' the excess portion at the tap. Having a refinery with one light oil - solid fuel factory and a steam engine/boiler set up to destroy the rest perfectly balanced solid fuel production for the most part.. assuming I regularly checked up on the six chests it was dumping into to deposit at the power plants and furnaces.

Multiple refineries are a way of making up for lousy gas production, but the extra light oil is straight up waste in general. I ran three steam power plants and a sizable Steel Furnace facility and still was drenched in solid fuel. I ripped down electric furnaces and disconnected the solar plant just so I could burn more fuel, and it still backed up, constantly seizing plastics and sulfur. Every refinery had its own steam power plant. The heavy oil fuels were not quite enough to run them, but a light oil plant quickly backed up.

Heavy Oil to Sulfur is maybe a way out, although the 'advanced processing' produces just enough for later-game flow of lubricants for logistic/construction drone construction. Doubling up on Heavy Oil's load isn't a solution, just another potential bottleneck to go alongside gas. Light Oil needs more load than just fuel.

Plastic production is too slow. One refinery isn't enough to produce plastics at a constant rate, instead, the factory can only operate once per refinery cycle. The balance is out of whack if I have two refineries, one lubricant, 1-2 solid fuel, One plastic, one sulfur handling (if any) excess gas, and an array of steam engines to vaporize excess light/heavy oil.

Crude itself is 'come fast, go fast' as a resource.. fields tap out at abysmally fast rates, but the real production throttle are refineries. You want to run more on less refineries. The more you have, the more fields you have to keep tapped (as it doesn't take long for production to hit 0.1), the more light/heavy oil or solid fuel that needs to be, in effect, outright destroyed or it will seize production elsewhere.

Do you have any idea how incredibly stupid it is to find out that the reason you have no missiles to fire at biters is because of a heavy oil backup?

Petroleum gas does too much right now and it isn't very realistic =/

Sulfur is typically found in heavy oil not LPG. Sulfur should be made from heavy oil and plastics should be made from LPG. Heavy oil also has fuel in it so outputting a small amount of gasoline/diesel would make sense.

Light oil is used for fuels but it does have sulfur in it, just lower quantities. Light oil could output Gasoline, Diesel, and some sulfur (a fraction of what heavy oil makes). This way producing light oil isn't pointless and it is still realistic as we remove sulfur from diesel in real life.

Fuel will be unbalanced at the moment due to lack of vehicles/tanks/consumers but that is ok this is in alpha after all, we have "diesel trains" that don't run on diesel =/. Gasoline and diesel is used in a huge variety of mechanisms in real life, having a surplus of it will allow for more combustion powered machines to be created in the future. TANKS. We also could use a "sprayer" that will spray the ground with fuel and light it on fire, use a firewall to keep biters out

We could also go the generic route of just saying "Fuel" instead of Gasoline/Diesel.

In the future Coal->Oil plants may be viable as a source of more Oil

Thanks for the inputs. We did try to stay relatively close to the reality with the oil recipes, though it is tricky . The fact that the petroleum gas is the most heavy used ingredient came out sort of naturally. The idea of making sulphur from the heavy oil is intriguing because then the two most costly oil products (bateries and plastics) would be made from different oil fractions. However one thing we were after with the oil recipes was to try different concepts. Originally we planned to provide the garbage disposal facility that could burn the excessive oil. While this is still a plan we will have to wait for the graphics at least till the next feature release. So for now (0.9.1) we have added "cracking recipes" that allo crack heavy oil to light oil and light oil to petroleum gas.

Cracking heavy isn't really necessary, as upgrading to the advanced processing already shifts the weight away from excess heavy oil to 1 per refinery cycle, which doesn't significantly contribute to solid fuel overproduction.

Cracking light to gas is fine, although perhaps a second advanced refining recipe that yields even more pretroleum gas per cycle and less light oil (say, a 1, 4, 7) may be a better option.

The need to 'burn off' is mostly a matter of poor mechanics compared to existing mechanics. When a coal powered plant 'backs up' on coal, the coal miners simply stop and wait. This does not interefere at all with any other process, and is generally a good thing. When there's a back up of solid fuel, the refinery shuts down, and stops a whole mess of production sequences. 'Garbaging' fuel is bad stopgap solution, and shouldn't

At the development phase, you guys, the Refinery production should be VERY specifically tuned to the buildings that consume it. They are currently very arbitrary as a preliminary form where gas is produced at an insufficient rate to support even one gas consuming factory.

Case in point: One plastics factory can support 12 advanced chip factories if it ran full tilt. if there's only one Refinery behind that plastics lab, that number drops to 4 factories (3 gas/sec consumed, 1.1 produced by advanced processing). If there's a sulfur plant too? I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say that it'll only support 2 advanced chip factories.

In the end, the refinery is going to have to get fixed somehow. Having a triple-threat of total mid-level tech gridlock if any one product is overproduced is what's causing the whole snarl.

Wht I was wondering: Normal Oil processing gives needs 10 crude oil and produces 10 oil products (3+3+4). Advanced Processing needs 10 crude oil and produces 11 oil products (1 +4.5 +5.5)

BurnHard wrote:Wht I was wondering: Normal Oil processing gives needs 10 crude oil and produces 10 oil products (3+3+4). Advanced Processing needs 10 crude oil and produces 11 oil products (1 +4.5 +5.5)

Yeah someone got the math wrong

slpwnd wrote:

BurnHard wrote:Wht I was wondering: Normal Oil processing gives needs 10 crude oil and produces 10 oil products (3+3+4). Advanced Processing needs 10 crude oil and produces 11 oil products (1 +4.5 +5.5)

Yeah someone got the math wrong

That's why it's advanced, although I wouldn't mind a 1-3-6 (why screw with fractions of fractions?).. it doesn't solve the underlying problems.