RocketManChronicles wrote: ↑Mon Jul 01, 2019 12:28 pm
Now, with bob's 'newer' early game (I have yet to play through), steam powered buildings introduce a whole another way to play. If anything, I am on bob's side here with how his mods now handle the early game (very interested to start over at some point). Having steam powered 'everything' before electricity is a unique start to Factorio, and is more 'Factorio'-like than AAI's approach.
Unfortunately, my ideas are more theory than practice. The For starters, the base of the burner stage (Technology mod) only really adds a burner lab and steam science pack, then shuffles everything around, adding new technologies that require this new science pack to research. Other mods (Power, Assembling machines, and Mining) add the Burner electric generator (Power), Burner and steam powered assembling machine, along with oil powered furnaces (Assembling machines) and a steam powered mining drill (Mining).
The main novelty with the steam powered stuff (even though there's only 2 machines with it right now) is that they scale in speed based on the type of steam you put into them. it actually only really becomes worth considering replacing a steam assembling machine with AM3, as the boiler 2 is easy enough to research, and will provide a faster crafting speed than AM2, but Boiler 3 gives a crafting speed only slightly slower than AM3. Steam powered things are also not effected by modules, so that's another reason to switch to AM3.
I added oil burning furnaces at steel furnace stage (it's actually just a steel furnace with a different power source, the advantage is it has a slightly lower pollution level), considering 2 factors.
1. there's nothing to do with your steel furnaces, so why not offer an upgrade path for them?
2. It's cleaner than fuel items, and it's available earlier than electric furnaces (no other tech remains on burner power as long as furnaces... except boilers of course)
So, if you consider that you need oxygen to make steel in bob's mods, what do you do with the excess hydrogen? Well... why not use it to power the same furnace? and you get only a tenth of the pollution from hydrogen power.
Also you're likely to want to figure out what to do with an excess of light oil once you do start oil processing, you could use that to power the oil powered furnaces.
Something I haven't mentioned yet, also part of this overhaul, is the burner and oil burning heat sources, with yet another tech tree shuffle around nuclear power and heat exchangers. (they're pretty much separated from each other now with heat pipes being the gateway technology)
What can you do with your old oil burning steel furnaces? make an oil-burning heat source, of course. Also you can turn a steel furnace into a burner heat source too.
These only start with 750C as a max temperature, so definitely lower tier than a nuclear power plant, but even with that temperature, they're able to power up to heat exchanger 2. they also only have a 50% neighbour bonus. A general rule is that it takes the power of 2 of them to power a single heat exchanger, but, neighbour bonuses can easily change things to have more HEs than HSs. The T2 goes to 875C with a 75% neighbour bonus and the T3 1000C with 100% bonus. The only difference between the burner and oil burning versions is the fuel source.
Note: when using any heat sources (including nuclear) and neighbour bonuses... the bonus only works with the same entity. So a BHS1 needs to be next to a BHS1 to get a bonus, and NR2/TR would need to be next to another NR2/TR, a NR1 and NR2 would get no bonus for being next to each other, likewise a BHS and OBHS would get no bonus, or a BHS1 and BHS2 would get no bonus.
Anyway, after saying all this... the fact that I consider steam power to be level 2, between burner and electric makes it incompatible with any mod that makes an electric powered offshore pump, as my mod assumes you have steam before electricity.
I'm open to suggestions and ideas for more steam powered, oil powered, and heat powered entities. To note: although oil/steam powered inserters are possible, they look kinda dumb with a pipe base.