Oil Richness

[Deadly-Bagel]

Compared to other resources at the same game settings, oil is in far shorter supply and is burned through quickly. I suggest dramatically increasing the richness of oil fields to bring them in line with iron and copper.

I know it is difficult to compare an infinite resource with a finite one but let's focus on the early and mid game, before modules are available. Will a single iron deposit at max settings be enough for a casual game? Yes. Will a single oil field be enough? No. Two might not even be enough.

Every game in 0.13 onwards I've burned through two oil fields and need to build another outpost for a third one before I need any other type of mining outpost. In my last game I had richness max and frequency minimum on all resources, but oil had max size and ores had default. I still frequently had oil problems while I was sitting there trying to get through my starting area iron so I could build over it.

Now I'm not saying they need to go back to their 0.12 values, starting area oil fields at 450% yield was ludicrous. I would just like to see them brought more in line with the other resources, so for example I could set biters to max settings without guaranteeing failure (as oil would run out before I got the tech to get more).

Also the frequency options might be undergeared, try playing a game with oil set to minimum frequency and again compare it with the other resources.

[ssilk]

This is a balancing question, no suggestion. Moved.

[impetus maximus]

first server i set up with low frequency iron, normal size, good richness. oil very low frequency, small, normal.
needing trains for the iron was fun. people who had plans for a MEGA base flipped out when they saw the tiny oil patches.
needless to say i won't be using very low frequency, small patches again. lol

even for me (play in smallish scale in single player) oil needs a bit of a buff.
maybe just extend the richness time before lowering to 0.1 per sec.

[steinio]

I plan for example with very high oil settings but ending oil patches.
So I have good oil but not forever.

Greetings steinio

[Frightning]

I definitely agree on richness issues, very good richness seems to mean starting area oil deposits have about 80% yield to start on average, which is more along the lines of what I would expect from medium richness. I think something like 40-70-100-150-250% yield for very poor to very good richness, current 250% is roughly on par with 500% in terms of windfall oil before the 0.13 changes, which was plenty high and more or less what I would expect from very good richness.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Oops, sorry Ssilk ^^ (thought I did actually =s sleep deprived lol)

IMHO with max size and richness settings you should have a pretty comfortable game on just a single deposit / field of each resource, mostly for the benefit of players who don't want to bother with trains or new players who are trying to get to grips with the base game before moving on to trains.

[impetus maximus]

you know playing with default settings i'm doing ok with oil. note, i don't have a mega uber factory.

[Carl]

Honestly i think the issue runs much deeper than that./ Without bringing in speed or productivity modules 1 refinery using advanced processing and cracking all heavy and light oil down to petroleum and then using that to feed either red chip or battery production produces a ratio of just 1 per 3.33 oil processed. Given the quantities of both your likely to use, (unless you almost completely eschew bots and solar), thats an incredibly bad ratio both in terms of using a lot of a scarce resource, but also, in simple processing time terms. Processing that much oil requires 5 chemical plants and 1 refinery working flat out.

You can improve the oil per item, (especially for batteries), by using processing module 3's. But that slows overall work rate down and requires a fair few more chemical plants to boot.

I have to ask if maybe the issue isn't so much oil richness and oil depletion, (somthing raised in a recent friday facts and a fair point IMO), but oil to final products ratios being absolutely and utterly awful.

[clusterfack]

I refuse to play the base game anymore without increasing at least one of the three standard settings for oil up to the next level. All of the people I play with feel the same, it's far far more precious than any other resource at the standard setting level.

[Deadly-Bagel]

I have to ask if maybe the issue isn't so much oil richness and oil depletion, (somthing raised in a recent friday facts and a fair point IMO), but oil to final products ratios being absolutely and utterly awful.

Don't remember reading that, in FFF 160 they mentioned oil fields were a pain to set up so they're having fewer but richer deposits, that's all I know about.

The ratio to final products is relative to the supply. If you decrease the oil requirement or increase the products of crude oil you're detracting from the huge setups required to maintain large factories. I think oil processing to final products is pretty good right now, my oil processing section isn't huge but it requires some throughput and thought. The only problem is finding enough of it, even on max richness settings I burn through oil fields very quickly especially when trying to make productivity modules to stretch my oil supply! lol

[HurkWurk]

the issue is that there simply is not enough oil in a patch.

when spawning resources, if i want an "infinite" number of a resource, i will set the pool to 90,000. for your average miner, this will set 16 tiles to 90,000 or 1,440,000 resource to be mined.
but when you set oil to 90,000. thats it. and thats considered a 600% pump! (6/s)

rather oil pools should start around 100,000 oil, but only provide 5 oil/s each at that level.
if we step down the point production every 20,000 oil, this gives:
5/s for 66 minutes. 2.5 refineries
4/s for 83 minutes 2 refineries
3/s for 111 minutes 1.5 refineries
2/s for 166 minutes 1 refinery
1/s for 333 minutes half a refinery

total well time 759 minutes, or 12.65 hours.
realistically though, if we did 1 well per refinery, we would get about 3 hours of production before having to find more oil resources.

with a large factory layout, im using about 10 refineries worth of oil. my game is about 50 hours old. during that time i would have to have found new oil fields about 8 times.
that seems to me to be a reasonable amount of effort.

[Frightning]

the issue is that there simply is not enough oil in a patch.

when spawning resources, if i want an "infinite" number of a resource, i will set the pool to 90,000. for your average miner, this will set 16 tiles to 90,000 or 1,440,000 resource to be mined.
but when you set oil to 90,000. thats it. and thats considered a 600% pump! (6/s)

rather oil pools should start around 100,000 oil, but only provide 5 oil/s each at that level.
if we step down the point production every 20,000 oil, this gives:
5/s for 66 minutes. 2.5 refineries
4/s for 83 minutes 2 refineries
3/s for 111 minutes 1.5 refineries
2/s for 166 minutes 1 refinery
1/s for 333 minutes half a refinery

total well time 759 minutes, or 12.65 hours.
realistically though, if we did 1 well per refinery, we would get about 3 hours of production before having to find more oil resources.

with a large factory layout, im using about 10 refineries worth of oil. my game is about 50 hours old. during that time i would have to have found new oil fields about 8 times.
that seems to me to be a reasonable amount of effort.

Oil richness is interesting because it doesn't scale like other resources. It's also an infinite resource (even a single Pumpjack can, given enough time, produce any amount of Crude oil), however, in the current state of things, a Large, rich ore deposit can last almost an entire game (at least until you hit late game anyways), but this generally isn't true of Crude oil, at least from standpoint of Crude oil mining rate (obvious you can force yourself to work w/ your starting oil patch if you insist; I've had to work with a single Pumpjack on my random challenge map for the first 25 hours, still haven't found another Oil field, despite much searching for one). So why is this rate problem an issue for oil, but not for ores? Well, ore's harvest at a relatively constant rate until the patch starts to near depletion, then it will drop off as miners (starting from the edges usually) run out of ore under them. This means that, until most of the ore is mined, you get full rate. With oil, the corresponding graph is very different: The rate starts off pretty high, but as Oil field's get mined their yield drops linearly, which means that the proportional loss in income rate becomes sharper the closer to depletion the oil fields become. This entire process doesn't take long on Very low frequency, Very big size, Very rich richness oil patches, which can easily have dozens of Oil fields (sometimes over 50!) but their yield is usually under 100%, which isn't really a lot of windfall oil (oil income above and beyond the depleted rate, which lasts forever). So with those map settings, which people like because they are naturally suited to train usage, you get large groups of Oil fields with relatively little windwall oil. Curiously, if you set Frequency to Very high instead, although the Oil fields are now scattered all over the place, they will typically have yields upwards of 200% (!), which is a LOT more windfall since amount of windfall oil scales quadratically with yield % (e.g. a 160% yield Oil field has 4 times as much windfall oil as an 80% yield Oil field).

The tl;dr here is that the reason Oil is annoyingly lacking in supply is because of how frequency affects yield and how yield determines windfall oil as well as Pumpjack mining rate. The solution is to adjust mapgen behavior so that at frequency does not have such a pronounced effect on yield values.

[HurkWurk]

i dont know the current oil system. but i guess infinite can work as well. oil well fields can last a damn long time in real life.
pennsylvania still has their first oil pump running after 153 years after all.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Change the oil so the minimum yield is dependent on the starting yield so better fields are also better later on.

While you'll still probably need to set up a second outpost pretty quickly to keep that oil flowing, it will be significantly longer before a third is required. This is better but I still think yield needs to be increased to like 200% on maximum richness.

[Frightning]

Change the oil so the minimum yield is dependent on the starting yield so better fields are also better later on.

While you'll still probably need to set up a second outpost pretty quickly to keep that oil flowing, it will be significantly longer before a third is required. This is better but I still think yield needs to be increased to like 200% on maximum richness.

You can get that level of yield with very high frequency and very good richness. But not if you lower frequency to very low, as many people like to do to facilitate efficient train usage.

[Deadly-Bagel]

Last game I played (admittedly I think it was started in 0.13.x though not aware of any changes since then) I had highest richness and highest size settings for oil deposits but lowest frequency, and the fields around my base were ~60 - 70%. Going further out to about 2,000 tiles from starting area I found ~85% deposits. It was painful =/

Still, why should frequency have ANY effect on richness? That's counter-intuitive.

[HurkWurk]

my understanding is that frequency doesnt. frequency is just how large the fields are, not the content, thats controlled by the richness.

if you set a low frequency, you should get less total fields, but more oil nodes per field. if you set the richness, thats what sets the windfall percent.

[Frightning]

It didn't used to be that way...but since the 0.13 mapgen changes it does, I've tested it, and verified it (not just for Oil, but ores too). I noticed almost immediately, that max richness ore deposits with min frequency had much less variability in ore/tile and a lower minimum (min, used to be ~1500, now about ~700; used to be that interior could range anywhere from 2k-9k, now more like 1.5k-5k). So I set frequency to very high and the ore/tile was now behaving as I remember they did pre-0.13 mapgen changes, but ofc, the ore deposits were highly scattered and on average, smaller in size.

For oil, pre-0.13 mapgen changes, it used to be that max richness -> >500% yield, but back then, yield decay rate was twice as fast as it is now (75 cycles per 1% instead of 150 cycles per 1% as it is now). Now, with min frequency, you get mostly 50-80% yield (but easily 40+ oil fields in larger deposits), switch to max, and ofc, oil fields are scattered, but yields typically range from 150%-250% (note, this is about equivalent to 300-500% yield with the old decay rate in terms of how much windfall oil you will get from the given oil well).

[HurkWurk]

i never played before 14, im a new player.
the current fields are rich in the center, then peter out around the edges.

so for me, i always play with low frequency and high yield, which gives me a huge amount of ore in very large fields, but the edges of those fields are still crappy amounts. same with oil. a small field of say 5 nodes, will have 4 sub 100% and 1 about 120%. but if i get a large pool of say 15-20 then the ~10 around the outside are sub 100%, the next 6 are 100-120% and a few in the middle are better (i think the best i have seen is 160%)

I personally set them to 90,000 resources which comes out to 600% which is 6/s. this has lasted ~20 hours and is still above 4/s

[Frightning]

i never played before 14, im a new player.
the current fields are rich in the center, then peter out around the edges.

so for me, i always play with low frequency and high yield, which gives me a huge amount of ore in very large fields, but the edges of those fields are still crappy amounts. same with oil. a small field of say 5 nodes, will have 4 sub 100% and 1 about 120%. but if i get a large pool of say 15-20 then the ~10 around the outside are sub 100%, the next 6 are 100-120% and a few in the middle are better (i think the best i have seen is 160%)

I personally set them to 90,000 resources which comes out to 600% which is 6/s. this has lasted ~20 hours and is still above 4/s

I got started right about when 0.12's stable release hit, and I've always been on the stable release. Back then, I managed to find a few Oil fields (in sizeable patches) with very low frequency, but very big size and very good richness that actually exceeded 1000% yield (income rate is still capped at 10 crude oil/sec). Since the update, with all very high I don't think I've seen any>300% yield, but ofc, windfall oil for a given % yield is about double what it used to be, thanks to the slower decay rate.