Oil Richness

[Deadly-Bagel]

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

You're thinking Size which affects the number of deposits in an oil field. Frequency (theoretically) controls how close together the fields spawn.

[Carl]

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

sorry for taking a while to get back to you,busy elsewhere on the web. The problem your missing is that you allready require overly massive setups relative to the amount of gods your producing. 4 refineries would need with advanced oil processing and full cracking some 11 chem plants to turn all of that into 144 red chips a minute. Those 144 red chips consume 288 green chips. You need a grand total of 2 assemblers, (well 6 if you include the wire fabs for the green chips), to produce that many green chips. And if your producing batteries, well add another 18 chem plants to the total instead. Unit per minute for unit per minute batteries require the greatest footprint of pretty much anything. And plastics aren't far behind. More than that though what i'm getting at is the raw crude oil per unit point that you just noted. It's effectively 3.33 crude oil per red chip/battery. You can happily churn through tens of thousands of oil worth of them even if your not using the oil for other things. This is kinda why i brought up solid fuel. It has an excellent conversion rate overall, (if you could up crack pet back to LO at the reverse ratio of 2 to 3 it would be even better ofc, but thats strictly by and by), as such only around 30% of the crude oil consumed launching a rocket is used on the fuel, the rest goes on the Plastics and Sulphur. And thats despite the fact we've both acknowledged that unless your using a steam, power based power solution your almost certain to have much greater non-rocket demands for sulphur and plastics than the fuel and that solid fuel is numerically much more than 30% of the total, (41%)...

[Deadly-Bagel]

The early game is designed to be simple, oil is what breaks you into the mid game and eventually end game because of its complexity. Having done several playthroughs the base game is pretty simple already, I wouldn't want to simplify it further.

[HurkWurk]

playing around with the console, 150,000 oil resources is 1000%. as soon as you turn on the pump that drops to 999%, so they are doing an absolute calculation in the back end.
so each 150 oil is 1%.
an average node of resource is 7500, which for oil is 50%. 100% nodes are 15000. each 100% is 1/s extraction. I think this works out to 3/s flow, as 30 should show the pipe as full.

[Frightning]

playing around with the console, 150,000 oil resources is 1000%. as soon as you turn on the pump that drops to 999%, so they are doing an absolute calculation in the back end.
so each 150 oil is 1%.
an average node of resource is 7500, which for oil is 50%. 100% nodes are 15000. each 100% is 1/s extraction. I think this works out to 3/s flow, as 30 should show the pipe as full.

Huh, that's odd, because according to viewtopic.php?f=18&t=24748, you get a LOT more windfall oil than that (note, #s in the OP are out of date, see 8th post for current numbers). I think I know why, that oil amount, 150,000,is the amount of non-windfall oil before the windfall amount has been completely mined (i.e. oil field reaches depleted status) for a 1000% yield oil field (actually 149,900 technically, since depleted is actually 10% yield).

[Frightning]

To the balance question in the thread, here is abstract perspective on why the current interaction of frequency with oil is problematic, relative to ores.

Ore/tile changes by a modest amount (higher w/ higher frequency), proportion of tiles covered in ore seems to go up by a fair bit, this latter changes affects the theoretical average maximum throughput of ore per map area. So you can get more/time (by a modest amount) from higher frequency with ores, the supply will last a tad longer as well.

Oil/field changes by a significant amount with higher frequency (higher w/ higher frequency), proportion of tiles with oil fields on them seems almost constant when only frequency is changed. So the long term depleted rate is the same, but.... since oil production rate is far faster during the windfall period (e.g. 80% yield=8x rate of depleted pumpjack), the yield % strongly affects initial and shorter term rates (which are more important to the feeling, or lack thereof, of abundance). This also means that the windfall oil is much higher per map area with higher frequency, which is a significant departure from the behavior for ores.

The tl;dr here is that oil yield shouldn't vary much with frequency, but number of pumpjacks and how scattered or not they are would make more sense and behave in a manner consistent with the ore situation.

[HurkWurk]

i think the real issue is that since they allowed oil to be infinite, they vastly undervalued the final amount (10%, or 0.1 per second).

I think i would rather see oil wells work differently. IE a small node being a single well head, while a large being ~5. each wellhead being 30-150 oil per second, with minimal depletion.

[Electroid]

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 think that iron, copper, coal and stone richness is way to high given the current values, on just normal you have so much iron and copper you barely even need to leave your initial starting zones.

[Frightning]

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 think that iron, copper, coal and stone richness is way to high given the current values, on just normal you have so much iron and copper you barely even need to leave your initial starting zones.

They implemented a thing where resource richness gets better as you go away from your starting area, but in my experience the effect is FAR to minimal, and also, if you think you always have plenty of resources in your starting area, try lowering frequency, size, and richness to very low....You can absolutely make it so that you have very little resources to work with if that is your goal. Main reason I'd be opposed to decreasing ore availability at high richness settings is that it would make supporting megabases much harder (plenty of people have gotten games to the point where they have to spend most of their time establishing new mines just to feed their giant gigafactory). I wouldn't mind at all if they made the effect of the richness increase due to distance from start area being much stronger at first (e.g. atm, it's a very gradual effect, what if instead it was quite drastic within the first few Radar's scan range of your start, leveling off afterwards?) and making the starting area richness lower than it is now, but ramping up to current levels within about a Radar's scan range of your start. It would encourage expansion sooner which encourages the player to be proactive vrs. the biters. At the moment you can often get to late game by simply walling in your start area and turtling with default resources. Oil, atm, tends to require you to expand, which in it of itself, I'm fine with. The problem is that even at high richness and size, it can be hard to get enough oil without having multiple oil outposts, and yet with ores, you can get away with one until you start building a very large base (my kilobase is the only base I've made big enough to require multiple ore mines of the same type (just 2 of Iron and Copper) with max size (min freq and max richness too), and those mines are on the order of ~100 Electric mining drills each).

[Carl]

The early game is designed to be simple, oil is what breaks you into the mid game and eventually end game because of its complexity. Having done several playthroughs the base game is pretty simple already, I wouldn't want to simplify it further.

I'm not saying it should be simpler, i'm saying it should be so massive for such miserly output. Even without backwards cracking in game a mere 7 chem plants and 1 refinery will happily output 8 solid fuel a cycle. Thats very compact for the amount of product your outputting, (particularly at the rate you'll use said product, even in a steam powered factory). Plastic and Sulfur are far more massive for far more miserly results.

Which doesn't make the efficency not an issue either ofc. And no windfall oil has nothing to do with it, you simply need a lot more oil and a lot more machinery to produce plastic and sulfur than you do solid fuel or lubricant, (not that producing those doesn't create issues for the production of plastic and sulfur by sucking up oils they could use), particularly when you factor in the relative usage ratios. Solid fuel, and without worrying about producing anything else, lubricant have good ratios, you can get a lot for your oil input relative to how much you'll use. But lastic and sulfur are so bad and you use so much of those that they turn production of fuel and lubricant into a potential issues.

Don;t get me wrong the points about windfall oil arnet inaccurate, but they're a long way from the core of the problem, they're just another factor making an allready bad issue worse.