Heat Factor - A balacing idea to solar and accumulators

[siggboy]

So steam is worse because it is more complex? It is cheap, compact, reliable at night. Sounds like it has the advantages for expert players who can handle the comlexity.

Solar is also cheap and reliable at night (with accumulators). If you have enough, then it's going to put out all the energy you need throughout the night. The one thing it is not, is compact; but since you don't have to defend it from biters that's not an issue.

Steam does not have advantages for experts from a min-maxing perspective. The advantage it does have is that it's less boring, and it's a lot more satisfying if you can say "I set up 2 GW of sustained steam power" compared to "I blueprinted 2 GW worth of solar panels".

[Qon]

Solar is also cheap and reliable at night (with accumulators).

Cheap? Well solar panels costs about 30 times as much as a steam engine +boiler + miner per kW since each panel delivers so little energy by itself. And then you need accumulators too if you want energy at night. For a big factory it might not be a big problem since you also have a lot of production and resources at your disposal. Depending on how fast you are expanding. Module production will limit your expansion more I guess. The coal cost isn't payed up front so what you really pay for is just the miners and time it takes to set up your mining outpost. The coal itself is not a part of the cost calculation. Solar isn't as cheap as steam but I guess it is still not that expensive.

Reliable? Solar is only really reliable if your consumption is reliable. Your factorys consumption is only stable if you have calculated continous production that is not expanded. So a megafactory producing rockets and nothing else and where no more expansions are made. While it is a thing, it's not that common. Most factories are continously expanded and unless you are buffering your output without limit (or blasting it to outer space) your energy consumption will be unpredictable.

If you expand and accidentally overconsume power with accumulators your laser defence will stop working. Once your factory gets fairly big your factory will consume much more than your lasers. At that point shutting down your factory means your lasers will have maybe 10 times more power available. If your factory production output is then made 100 times bigger you will need 100 times more power, 100 times more space and 10 times longer perimeter and laser turrets. Even if you didn't expand your power system your steam power plant will still be able to defend your factory because it will just redirect all power to lasers when needed. But with solar+accumulators you factory will prevent your accumulators from charging during the day and would drain your accumulators during the night if there is any charge in them, stopping your defence and thus prioritising production over defence.

Now in 0.13 the power switch can be used to power off your factory in case your accumulators aren't charging quickly enough during the day or gets discharged too quickly in the night. So you can get pretty much the same reliability if your combinator fu is strong enough. How many have thought of doing that though? It would require you to have 2 separate grids for your factory and your laser defence everywhere. Might get annoying dragging 2 grids out to your outposts... And your solar and accus have to be separated too. I always do that anyways though because of the flexibility it gives me but I think most people have, at least before the switch, been building them together without thinking of the Qonsequences. But with enough effort maybe you are right then, solar can be reliable.

For worlds that are online 24/7 the "actually endless" nature of solar is actually making it reliable in the sense that it will never run out and you can sleep at night knowing that your base will probably still be there when you wake up. Stopping production when coal runs out to only power lasers will then be a good strategy. And of course for smaller self contained systems that needs very little and constant power solar is very reliable as I mentioned above.

But otherwise, for a growing factory, the main grid powered by steam doesn't fail because you didn't calculate the exact power needs of your expansion beforehand. Different properties makes them good for different applications.

Steam does not have advantages for experts from a min-maxing perspective.

The size requirement becomes a huge waste of time (valuable resource, especially when it is spent doing something boring). Designing my 30-on-a-row steam power was fun. Building 2 GW of steam will be quick. I disagree, but there's not much substance in your claim to disagree with. You didn't put forth any arguments backing up your position so I can't puch holes in your reasoning in case it is flawed.

[siggboy]

Designing my 30-on-a-row steam power was fun. Building 2 GW of steam will be quick.

"Fun" is the key word here. All the rest of this back-and-forth does not matter (and also we're beating a dead horse because we've had the same discussion in another thread already, with similar results ).

[Qon]

Designing my 30-on-a-row steam power was fun. Building 2 GW of steam will be quick.

"Fun" is the key word here. All the rest of this back-and-forth does not matter (and also we're beating a dead horse because we've had the same discussion in another thread already, with similar results ).

Well building a reliable accumulator charge and discharge control circuit with combinator might be fun quite fun though. There's so much stuff you can do with the switch and smart accumulators. They are game changers.

Beating dead horses isn't very productive, but I did present some points for both sides that haven't been mentioned before though.

[siggboy]

I'll stick with Nucular and making nuclear rockets from the reactor waste, so the biters will have something to "chew" on. Hah.

Also I play with eternal daylight, so Solar power is a no-go zone for me anyway (it would be cheating).

[Qon]

Solar is also [...] reliable at night (with accumulators).

Yes, now it is!
Never get a power failure for your laser defence with solar again!

[Grendus]

Honestly, I think Solar just needs a nerf. We don't need to make solar useless to a megabase, even if it takes 2-5x as many panels to power the base it's not a big deal. What we really need are several intermediate layers of energy tech between steam and solar. We kind of have that with being able to burn heavy and light oil for fuel, but since those have much better uses while coal is basically just used for energy and plastics, there's no reason to pump your precious petrol into your boilers.

Ultimately, powering your base with wood/coal/oil/nuclear should be a viable scaling tier strategy. Solar is too good, but coal isn't good enough which is why it's so popular, and that needs to be addressed.

[Qon]

Honestly, I think Solar just needs a nerf. We don't need to make solar useless to a megabase, even if it takes 2-5x as many panels to power the base it's not a big deal.

Ultimately, powering your base with wood/coal/oil/nuclear should be a viable scaling tier strategy. Solar is too good, but coal isn't good enough which is why it's so popular, and that needs to be addressed.

And how many megabases have you made? And did you read the thread? For your very first post my impression of you isn't really 100%. How did you come up with the 2-5 number? Did you calculate how much space that would require? How did you determine that powering a megabase with steam isn't viable? Are you playing 0.13 or 0.12?

I've already argued why steam is better than solar in 0.13. Going beyond megabase the coal patches are a bit too small (coal patch/GW with biggest sized patches, I don't like building a lot of outposts) and terrain segmentation is too high (seems 0.13.11 didn't fix it) but otherwise I disagree, steam isn't as bad as you think and solar taking so much space is really annoying when you need many GW.

[alan2here]

Some solar to run speed beacons clustered around the oil might work, then turning the oil into solid fuel for the steam engines.

Ore seams, presumably including coal now do increase in richness over distance from starting area. It's still more and more of a mining expansion building grind.

I've always used solar/accumulators, but am finding they now take up so much space even packed densly together in huge fields, and seemingly electric oil ground pumps powered by solar and encouraged by electric beacons, still seem to dominate pollution anyway, and biters only get more expensive to deal with the further out from the starting area, so now I'm not so certain about being all electric.

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Simple option, ability to pipe the chimney output to pipes, to store in the usual way with pipes, except that it's released to the air instead of deleted when a pipe/tank/barrel is picked up.

Then it could be filtered into lets say half the existing level of pollution each pass through a filtering building, producing solid waste very gradually, that needed either storing or turning back into poluting gas to release into the air.

The filtering building could even be put together with some pipes into a loop to continuously refine and take in new air, releasing air in the loop when it is fresh enough, if you didn't mind putting some effort as the player to make this process reliable enough.

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Now if there was a very late game level of automation, providing devices like the following:

Moved to own thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=30507

Then (above link) together with circuit networks you'd have another blueprint like but different approach to creatively putting together any number of new sorts of design, including mining expansions, or even a whole self expanding factory, a mind-bending but player specifically viable option.

It would assist the fossal/solar balence while also providing a very interesting and natural extra layer late game.