Issues with RSO 1.5.6

[TheWesDude]

so far i am enjoying RSO changes except for one thing.

oil. normally the decay rate for oil on default system is pretty good and they decay pretty slowly.

i am now running the RSO and my oil is decaying very rapidly, and its only producing like 2-6 per second on the pump, and they decay down to under 0.5 sec very rapidly.

i did set it to normal frequency, very big, very rich, and i changed the "min_amount=750" from 250 default.

it almost makes me want to go back to the vanillia resource generation.

[BlakeMW]

This is one of my pet peeves with RSO as well, it changes the oil spawning dynamics. But technically if you find a somewhat distance oil patch it should provide an awful lot of oil before running low (oil wells deplete faster the lower they get, a 600% oil well will take a very long time to deplete), in vanilla you tend to spend a lot of time sucking on depleted wells, but a lot of them, while in RSO you'll be getting oil mainly from a small number of non-depleted wells, since the wells outside the starting area generally take a long time to deplete because they contain so much more oil than a vanilla deposit does.

[orzelek]

Oil is one of contested topics - it was to abundant previously due to bug so it was easy mode (wells spawned in 10's per one spawn). After fixing that issue oil wells are as rare as other resources - might be to rare now.

About oil well mechanics - RSO is not changing the default oil thresholds in any way. And people were asking why there are thousands % for wells so they are a bit more normalized now. Even 600% oil well wouldn't last you for long - 100% means that oil well has 7500 units. Even 6 times this would be pumped out quite quickly.

I could try modifying oil prototype and making number 10x or even 100x. That would mean that oil well would last much longer before being depleted.

[BlakeMW]

A little while ago someone posted the correlation between % and quantity (Windfall Oil), it's basically a quadratic relationship:

100% yield=3k windfall oil
200% yield=13k windfall oil
300% yield=31k windfall oil
400% yield=57k windfall oil
500% yield=90k windfall oil
600% yield=130k windfall oil
700% yield=178k windfall oil
800% yield=234k windfall oil
900% yield=297k windfall oil
999% yield=367k windfall oil

A 200% yield well takes 4x longer to deplete than a 100% yield well - not twice as long.

RSO tends to generate 600%+ yield wells, you never find such wells in vanilla. Instead in vanilla as the other resources in an area run out and you move on, you're still sucking from lots and lots of depleted wells. So in vanilla you'll be getting a lot of oil from depleted wells, in RSO most your oil will be "windfall" oil because RSO is super-stingy in the number of oil patches generated but often the individual patches have a huge %age. It's a very different dynamic to vanilla. I modded my personal copy of RSO to change this and make bigger but less rich oil fields.

[orzelek]

So the issue would be that RSO allows the 600% etc oil wells ?

I'm not sure if I understand what the issue really is. If you want more wells per spawn just set size to bigger on map settings screen when generating map.
It might be slightly counter intutive - for oil wells size is responsible for amount of oil wells and richness will make them have more %.

[siggboy]

The oil well generation in RSO is very much in line with how ore patches are generated: make them more rare and richer at the same time. Sure, you find oil fields with 400,000 "windfall" oil in them, but those are already 3,000 tiles away from the starting area (and at those distances you also find ore fields with 3,000,000 ore, easily).

Setting up oil drilling operations is even more tedious than mining operations, due to the pipe-laying involved. I'd like to be rewarded for the effort with juicy oil wells that last a long time.

Now, there's a problem with this, due to the fact that depleted oil wells are better the more you get. By reducing the numbers of oil wells on the map, as in RSO, you nerf this aspect of the game. One could argue that that increased amount of "windfall" oil is insufficient compensation depending on the number of oil wells you're missing out on (and the length of the game).

In my opinion, the yield/number of oil wells should be balanced against the amount of ore on the map by taking the resource cost of a rocket launch into account. A rocket launch costs, very roughly, 200k ore and 40k oil -- so there should be about 5 times as much ore on the map than "windfall" oil. I'm guessing the default values in RSO (if you leave everything at "normal" in the map settings) are a bit too low for Oil right now.

[XBBX]

And best solution would be to make min amount /s higher farrder away from the spawn if possible

[orzelek]

And best solution would be to make min amount /s higher farrder away from the spawn if possible

Sadly min amount is only one for all oil wells and thats very unlikely to change.

[orzelek]

...
In my opinion, the yield/number of oil wells should be balanced against the amount of ore on the map by taking the resource cost of a rocket launch into account. A rocket launch costs, very roughly, 200k ore and 40k oil -- so there should be about 5 times as much ore on the map than "windfall" oil. I'm guessing the default values in RSO (if you leave everything at "normal" in the map settings) are a bit too low for Oil right now.

Tbh I play normal vanilla game so rarely that calculations like this are completely out of my hands.
If you can propose better balance based on such estimates I'll update it.

I did notice on my last playthrough that oil was on low side - it was slightly increased recently and I might add 1-2 more wells in next version. It does force you to expand for oil quite rapidly.

[siggboy]

Tbh I play normal vanilla game so rarely that calculations like this are completely out of my hands.
If you can propose better balance based on such estimates I'll update it.

In my current game I want to make a mega(ish) base; maybe I'll have some suggestions when I'm finished with the map. Right now my impression is that while Oil is plentiful if you expand far enough, you still end up with an "excess" of ore -- assuming that you turn everything into rocket parts. So that suggests that there might not be enough oil, especially because there are far fewer oil wells compared to the vanilla spawner, so you cannot compensate by leeching hundreds of depleted wells.

On the other hand, I'm not sure at all about this. You'd have to ask somebody who actually has created a megabase with default map settings.

Also, rocket parts are not the only point to balance the game around. Some people play with Victory Research, and that probably requires less oil than rocket parts do (in relation to ores).

[NoriSilverrage]

A little while ago someone posted the correlation between % and quantity (Windfall Oil), it's basically a quadratic relationship:

100% yield=3k windfall oil
200% yield=13k windfall oil
300% yield=31k windfall oil
400% yield=57k windfall oil
500% yield=90k windfall oil
600% yield=130k windfall oil
700% yield=178k windfall oil
800% yield=234k windfall oil
900% yield=297k windfall oil
999% yield=367k windfall oil

A 200% yield well takes 4x longer to deplete than a 100% yield well - not twice as long.

RSO tends to generate 600%+ yield wells, you never find such wells in vanilla. Instead in vanilla as the other resources in an area run out and you move on, you're still sucking from lots and lots of depleted wells. So in vanilla you'll be getting a lot of oil from depleted wells, in RSO most your oil will be "windfall" oil because RSO is super-stingy in the number of oil patches generated but often the individual patches have a huge %age. It's a very different dynamic to vanilla. I modded my personal copy of RSO to change this and make bigger but less rich oil fields.

This explains it.. I've been wondering why this set of 8 wells is taking so low to deplete. Two of them are insanely rich (like 2000%) and they are taking forever to deplete.
I actually have too much oil on my map. I think it is because of the RSO settings I did. Small ore patches with high density seems to affect oil tool

[orzelek]

Only what you set for oil specifically will affect it for map settings.

Config is applied to both ore and oil - 2000% might be indeed tons of oil in a patch. It might get to that value far from start with default config.
Maybe this is the way to go - change balancing a bit to make oil well richness go up higher then now so if you go 5k+ tiles you'll get this kind of oil wells.

[BlakeMW]

I actually have too much oil on my map. I think it is because of the RSO settings I did. Small ore patches with high density seems to affect oil tool

Technically almost all maps have too much oil, if you actually bother to go out and extract it. I sometimes wonder* if players who typically suffer oil shortages use trains instead of pipes - pipelines are so cheap and easy to setup that you can easily end up extracting way more oil than you can use, even with vanilla settings. A pumping outpost is just logistically much simpler with pumpjacks and pipelines than an ore extraction operation.


*actually I've seen it in lets play, like where the player sets up a full scale two way railroad and train station to extract oil from like 3 measly oil patches, when a pipe would be 5% the effort and still have a capacity like 20x as much oil as the wells produce.

[Miravlix]

*actually I've seen it in lets play, like where the player sets up a full scale two way railroad and train station to extract oil from like 3 measly oil patches, when a pipe would be 5% the effort and still have a capacity like 20x as much oil as the wells produce.

Not sure what game you're playing, but last I checked, pipes is one of the most painful things to create, because you can't run and place them.

Trying to do it with personal roboport and blueprints is just as painful, because you can't run and place, but have to fiddle to place the next part, not to mention robots can't follow the player while running.

[BlakeMW]

My experience with personal roboports has been entirely positive. I just blueprint between 4 and 20 underground pipe lengths (all perfectly spaced) and place the next segment on top of the last pipe to ground from previous one (this ensures proper alignment) and shift-click to get rid of trees.
0.13 introduces run and place for underground pipes, but the personal roboport will still take care of trees.

[siggboy]

Even with run-and-place, and 20x underground blueprint I'm not going to run a pipeline over 3000 tiles -- which is easily the distance to my refinery that I'll have to cover. Trains are easier.

Also when I said "tedious" I was talking about setting up the entire extraction operation, where you also have to connect everything with pipes, I think it's easier to setup an ore patch.

[orzelek]

I'm updating for next version to make oil wells generate in smaller number of location but bigger amount per one.
In 1.5.6 you can get 2-3 spawns with 1-3 wells each. I'm thinking about 1-2 spawns with 2 to 5 wells each. It should be a bit more on avarage but will give nice chances for one big cluster of oil.

[siggboy]

Sounds great. Spawns with only 3 wells are a bit underwhelming (even if the wells are juicy). It's what the others said above, it's hardly worth making an outpost for only 3 wells.

I have to say, though, that I really like the RSO balance, it's a lot of fun with the default configuration, I personally never saw the need to change anything. So great job there -- and great that you support so many third party mods.

[BlakeMW]

Sounds great. Spawns with only 3 wells are a bit underwhelming (even if the wells are juicy). It's what the others said above, it's hardly worth making an outpost for only 3 wells.

That's kinda flawed logic - it's not the number of wells it's the total yield per second. Okay, they are capped at 10 oil/cycle but even 30 oil/s is far from trifling... that's like what, equivalent to about 50 electric miner drills? And furthermore it's trivial to massively boost the output with productivity modules and speed beacons, in fact the mega-well being speedjacked is one of the few things which actually can max out a pipeline.

[siggboy]

Sounds great. Spawns with only 3 wells are a bit underwhelming (even if the wells are juicy). It's what the others said above, it's hardly worth making an outpost for only 3 wells.

That's kinda flawed logic - it's not the number of wells it's the total yield per second.

Well if I understood him correctly he's going to increase the total yield per spawn (= cluster of oil wells), and so we'll get more yield per outpost and that makes it a bit more rewarding to create the outpost.

Of course you're correct, what ultimately matters is the yield per second, not the number of wells.