[Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

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Which is better in the late game? Which of theese reasonings do you agree with?

Electric furnaces, because they don't require fuel OR because of efficency modules.
82
41%
Electric furnaces, because of productivity modules.
61
30%
Electric furnaces, because of speed modules.
20
10%
Electric furnaces, because they produce less pollution.
6
3%
Steel furnaces, because they take up less space for the same throughput.
13
6%
I stay with Steel furnaces, because it is simply not worth the trouble replacing them later on.
11
5%
Steel furnaces, because they produce more pollution.
3
1%
Steel furnaces, because electric furnaces consume too much electricity.
6
3%
 
Total votes: 202

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featherwinglove
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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by featherwinglove »

One word: Modules. Stacking productivity starts with the electric furnace, and with efficiency beacons backing that up, they can even get more efficient than steel furnaces if you're sticking with steam power. But if you're going solar/nuclear and have your coal resources cranked down and (like me always) can never spare any oil for solid fuel other than the space program, you switch to them much earlier. I've played no-coal maps where I've switch to them MUCH earlier.

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impetus maximus
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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by impetus maximus »

speed beacons will use less energy/materials/space/entities by letting you use less furnaces.
i just tested this. productivity 3 mods/speed beacons used 30MW to get a full express belt.
with prod 3/efficiency beacons (lvl 3 4 effect per) i got to 30MW and was not up to a compressed express belt yet.

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featherwinglove
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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by featherwinglove »

impetus maximus wrote:speed beacons will use less energy/materials/space/entities by letting you use less furnaces.
i just tested this. productivity 3 mods/speed beacons used 30MW to get a full express belt.
with prod 3/efficiency beacons (lvl 3 4 effect per) i got to 30MW and was not up to a compressed express belt yet.
I stand corrected. (Maybe, I don't have enough to be sure you're right.) But the real question isn't about whether speed beacons beat efficiency beacons, it's whether either can beat steel furnaces on fuel energy/item where the fuel is being fed into a boiler to run a steam engine to run the furnace instead of running a steel furnace directly. I recall that efficiency modules can reduce an electric furnace's electricity consumption to 20%, that boilers are 50% efficient, and that means the moduled up electric furnace is using 40% of the fuel energy per craft as a steel furnace. The wild card I'm not remembering is the power consumption of the beacons themselves. That's probably the wrench in the works.

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impetus maximus
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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by impetus maximus »

steel furnaces will beat the prod/speed setup hands down for power.
steel furnaces use less fuel compared to electric furnaces/steam when both are stock.

if you want to save power use 2 efficiency modules (cheap) in each electric furnace with no beacons.
that will use less than with steel furnaces.

the prod/speed setup is to get more out of the ore you mine, while using less entities when there is uber power available.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by ChoMar »

I use electric because the logistic is simpler. Simple as that.
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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by JimBarracus »

electric > steel

no need to feed them with fuel
modules make them more efficient
with nuclear power electricity becomes dirt cheap

I run my furnaces with 2 tier 1 Efficiency modules which makes the running costs cheaper than steel furnaces.
Decentralized smelting is also way easier.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by Termak »

Couldnt vote since i wanted to choose all pros for the electric ones :D But i change electric when i start to have everything running, though nowdays its blast furnaces from angels.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by Nasabot »

Some people argue "productivity modules start at smelter".

This is incorrect. Productivity modules are best suited and should therefor be prefered in machines, which consume items very fast. Marathon green circuits are the best example for this.

The important value is "item saved per second". Considering this, smelter should have lower priority for productivity modules.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by Zavian »

Well the important item is resources saved/sec (with particular attention to anything that is in short supply/unusually scarce on the map).
So yeah I first put prod modules in things like the rocket silo, but if I'm building to megabase size, then long term I want them in everything.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by Frightning »

Nasabot wrote:Some people argue "productivity modules start at smelter".

This is incorrect. Productivity modules are best suited and should therefor be prefered in machines, which consume items very fast. Marathon green circuits are the best example for this.

The important value is "item saved per second". Considering this, smelter should have lower priority for productivity modules.
There's also the rationale of what proportion of your raw materials go through a process to consider, technically, it's actual items/sec, not theoretical items/sec that really matters.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by featherwinglove »

...I think he's referring to the proportion of materials processed. It takes um... 2.63 electric/steel furnaces to keep one gear making AM2 happy. This is a case where you want to put the first productivity module in the machine. The last entities in which you'll be putting your productivity modules will probably be your science kit machines (especially SK1 machines) since they use materials at a very slow rate. Blue circuit machines usually get productivity modules very early because use LPG (indirectly), which I'm almost always struggling for, and crazy piles of green circuits, this despite how long it takes for them to make one blue circuit.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by BlakeMW »

In 0.15 I've found petroleum to be much less limiting than in previous versions, now I find iron to be the progress-limiting resource so priority goes to iron gears and blue/grey/purple science packs - altough you do get good iron savings out of the circuit line as well because each green circuit does consume 1 iron along with the 1.5 copper.

One thing about productivity is the ROI is also strongly based on the cost of the module: prod1 has a much better ROI than prod2 which is better than prod3 (though speed beacons help remedy that by dramatically improving the throughput of prod3 assemblers). Recipes with a low throughput can still be good places to put prod1 modules for that "free" +8% and it's relatively energy-friendly because there are no beacons involved.

For electric furnaces 2xprod1 can be considered but it does come at a heavy energy cost, each plate produced costs 810kJ instead of only 315kJ so you spend an extra 495kJ to make 0.08 plates or 6.18MJ per "free" plate - if you are burning coal to make the power that is doubled to over 12MJ of coal energy per "free" plate (1.5 coal to make 1 "free" plate!) - that's probably a bad deal because you could just make 1 iron miner instead of 1.5 coal miners! Still it might be worth considering with Nuclear power which scales up so very well (altough by the time you're thinking of making large nuclear plants you should be able to do Prod3+Speed3 Beacons which has a high ROI thanks to synergy).

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by Gergely »

Gergely wrote:Steel furnaces, because they produce more pollution: 2 votes, 1%
Well, that is interesting. 1 out of 100 people thinks pollution (in-game) benefits you. It maybe becase you want to test your defenses or something? You want more biters? What...? :shock:

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impetus maximus
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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by impetus maximus »

Gergely wrote: Well, that is interesting. 1 out of 100 people thinks pollution (in-game) benefits you. It maybe becase you want to test your defenses or something? You want more biters? What...? :shock:
because it can be fun to play 'the bad guy'.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by Ifalna »

Gergely wrote:
Gergely wrote:Steel furnaces, because they produce more pollution: 2 votes, 1%
Well, that is interesting. 1 out of 100 people thinks pollution (in-game) benefits you. It maybe becase you want to test your defenses or something? You want more biters? What...? :shock:
Well, it's not as if them critters pose much of a threat once you reach late to end game. ^^
The backbone of modern industrial society is, and for the foreseeable future will be, the use of electrical Power.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by BlakeMW »

Gergely wrote:
Gergely wrote:Steel furnaces, because they produce more pollution: 2 votes, 1%
Well, that is interesting. 1 out of 100 people thinks pollution (in-game) benefits you. It maybe becase you want to test your defenses or something? You want more biters? What...? :shock:
It's not that the pollution benefits you, rather it's that it's cheaper to blast away the biters than to not pollute: in fact there's even quite a firm pollution to biter exchange rate because spawners use absorbed pollution as a kind of "currency" for buying new units, for example a small biter "costs" 200 pollution - in principle a building producing 3.6 pollution would pay for a new small biter every 55 seconds - but of course a lot of pollution gets absorbed by trees. Also interestingly as the game progresses the enemies spawned by a given amount of pollution get less deadly but more beefy - a Behemoth spitter will output a lot less DPS than it's pollution cost in small spitters but have more total HP - for weapons not effected by armor the biters get easier with increasing evolution.

But anyway from the exchange rate it's possible to calculate how much you would expect to spend on bullets, for example it's about 1 iron/minute to make regular ammo to kill the small biters attracted by 3.6 pollution, since a furnace produces 34 iron/minute this comes to ~3% of the production needed to kill the biters - assuming all the pollution gets absorbed by spawners. The numbers are much less favorable for piercing ammo but you can get by with bullet damage upgrades. However it is largely a moot point as well place flamethrower turrets are a much cheaper way of bulk elimination and laser turrets are always cheaper than gun turrets regardless of how you make your power, and basically have no ongoing cost with nuclear or solar/accu (assuming you use enough dakka that repair & replacement isn't required). And then it's going to be even cheaper to just run around and destroy all the spawners inside your doom cloud so 100% of the pollution gets absorbed by terrain.

The upshot of this is you probably don't spend more than 1% of your factory output dealing with the consequences of polluting - the cost in attention span is higher, and the cost gets a lot higher if you don't stay on top of the biters. But ultimately the cost of being clean will probably be higher than being dirty, in this sense polluting is good and going green is bad.
It gets even more extreme when you consider the advantages of speed+productivity compared with the advantages of efficiency - with efficiency you might realistically reduce your factory expenditure on biter defense from 1-2% to 0%, which is basically nothing compared with +8%-40% productivity bonuses.

Finally to be fair eff1 modules do have a big saving grace: a watt saved by eff1 is usually cheaper than a watt generated by solar/accu (the break even is about 150kW) so the pollution savings are a freebie if using solar/accu. Also some machines have much higher pollution: the mining drill/pumpjack produce 9 pollution, which is a small biter every 22s! If you use regular ammo roughly 10% of the miner output could be consumed fighting off biters. It's probably still cheaper to use defenses (especially fire/laser) but eff1 modules can largely eliminate that 10% overhead along with the maintenance headache. Personally I'm fond of putting eff1 in miners and pumpjacks and everything else takes productivity.

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Re: [Poll] Is it worth switching to electric furnace

Post by featherwinglove »

Gergely wrote:
Gergely wrote:Steel furnaces, because they produce more pollution: 2 votes, 1%
Well, that is interesting. 1 out of 100 people thinks pollution (in-game) benefits you. It maybe becase you want to test your defenses or something? You want more biters? What...? :shock:
One out of 88.5 ppl. (Sharpening titanium axe so we can have last half-person in the group foto.)

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