Accumulators

[Chess]

Do you guys use bob's accumulators? Which type do you use?

I understand the difference but i don't know when you should use one type or another.

[Boogieman14]

I've tried the fast and high cap ones for a while, but for my current solar-powered factory, I settled on using just the basic ones. They seem balanced enough to get me through each night and mixing them up made the overview somewhat confusing to me. If I'd been running a base without solar, I might use fast accumulators over basic to cover the brief periods where large numbers of biters need frying.

[bobingabout]

The different types were basically designed for different purposes...

the fast accumulators are designed to work where you need short high powered bursts, like laser defence, or maybe a solar powered ammo factory for gun defence at an outtpost. they're just as viable as a buffer on a steam powered network too (to set a current limit)

The high capacity ones are aimed at the solar overnight storage.(or just a lower current limiter.) I suppose they might need tweaking, but the idea was that the higher capacity, and lower transfer rate means the output current would be capped, so your factory may slow down at night, but last the whole night, rather than completely running out of power half way through... That was the theory anyway, but it is untested. I should probably go and calculate how much lower the flow needs to be to last the night, and tweak them all to make it actually work like that.

[Chess]

You could change the night/day cycle to be a little random, that could make different accumulators usage interesting.

I want to try it, but i don't know how to change the durations dinamically (don't even know if its possible).

[bobingabout]

You could change the night/day cycle to be a little random, that could make different accumulators usage interesting.

I want to try it, but i don't know how to change the durations dinamically (don't even know if its possible).

can't change the day/night cycle, it's hardcoded to get dark/light at certain points on the daytime scale. it is possible to change the day length though, but I don't think I'd want to do that, especially with a script to make it random.

[RedDagger]

The different types were basically designed for different purposes...

the fast accumulators are designed to work where you need short high powered bursts, like laser defence, or maybe a solar powered ammo factory for gun defence at an outtpost. they're just as viable as a buffer on a steam powered network too (to set a current limit)

The high capacity ones are aimed at the solar overnight storage.(or just a lower current limiter.) I suppose they might need tweaking, but the idea was that the higher capacity, and lower transfer rate means the output current would be capped, so your factory may slow down at night, but last the whole night, rather than completely running out of power half way through... That was the theory anyway, but it is untested. I should probably go and calculate how much lower the flow needs to be to last the night, and tweak them all to make it actually work like that.

Interesting design reasoning, but I don't think it is currently working this way. Maximum input/output of vanilla's accumulator is far, far too high to ever be the bottleneck, and since you probably used it as a baseline, all 8 models added by your mod inherit this problem.

In practice, this means only the energy capacity is the relevant attribute, which means that it's always better to build the high capacity model, since you need fewer of them to satisfy the needs of the factory.

[bobingabout]

The bottleneck isn't that bad actually.

I've just run some tests. Under maximum drain, a standard acumulator lasts about 1/8 of a night. my high capacity accumulator lasts half the night.
the standard accu has 6% power limit vs the capacity, my high capacity is 1.5% Halving that would give 0.75%. I calculated that you probably actually need 0.72% to last the whole night. this calculation assumes a power switch from solar to accu at exactly the midpoint of dusk, and switchs back at exactly the midpoint of dawn. realisticly it would be a slow gradient over the whole period, so the dead middle is a good estimate.

I think if I just halve the output power limit (0.75% vs the actually needed 0.72%, Making it last twice as long) this should ballance it out to be as intended.
Note: Just the output, so it charges twice as fast as it drains, so in a buffer scenario: when provided with power it charges at the same speed as it drains when it has no power.
The other 2 would remain as standard, so if the drain matchs the power limit, it never charges, so when main power shuts down, so does the buffer.
I suppose I could contrast the "Fast" accumulator, so it is capable of discharching twice as fast as it charges, really giving you that power burst mode.

what do you think?

[bobingabout]

Thinking about it again... this change wouldn't change your mind about big vs slow for your main battery, because big is slow, and you'd still pretty much want to use high capacity only.

It would probably be a better idea to add another type of accumulator, the slow accumulator, that lasts the whole night, that either has the same capacity of the normal accumulator, or less.


You would then have the Basic Accumulator, the Fast accumulator, the Slow Accumulator, and the High Capacity Accumulator.

You would then need to decide if you want your main all night storage facillity to be Slow, High capacity, or a combination of both.

I'll probably still reballance the stats, and recipes too. Reballancing the recipe means that instead of speed being the only down side of the high capacity accumulator, it would also be cost too.