Resource-aware Power Strategy

[Escadin]

3) Steam engines, powered by Solar, before accumulators (thanks mrvn)
- Steam is stored in tanks during the day.
- Pros: Cuts consumption and pollution by about 2/3 compared to pure coal.

Had to read mrvn's post to make any sense of that but thanks for your effort guys.

[zOldBulldog]

It's the thing I just said, more steam engines than the boilers can handle and a steam tank buffer to spread out fuel consumption.
That whole "generate steam from solar" was your interpretation, you might want to re-read their post.

Thanks for the clarification, I removed option 3.

Too bad, it made so much sense and at least in my mind it explained why we unlock the Solar Panels so much earlier than the accumulators. I can't even think of a good use for solar panels that early... since if we relied on them we'd run out of power at night. Meh, maybe we could create factories in isolated electrical grids that only run during daytime and stockpile their outputs? Weird, but possible.

[HurkWurk]

i use a lot of mods, have to ask, why is non-solar causing UPS problems? is it the animations?
if i put a nuclear power plant inside a factorissimo building, does it still count against UPS?

[dog80]

i use a lot of mods, have to ask, why is non-solar causing UPS problems? is it the animations?
if i put a nuclear power plant inside a factorissimo building, does it still count against UPS?

UPS has nothing to do with graphical elements that would be FPS. When it does run and generate energy that gets used ofcourse this has to get calculated so UPS should get used...

[Drasius]

i use a lot of mods, have to ask, why is non-solar causing UPS problems? is it the animations?
if i put a nuclear power plant inside a factorissimo building, does it still count against UPS?

I don't know what a factorissimo building is as I run vanilla, but the basis of why non-solar isn't an option for rediculously large bases in vanilla is all the calculations involved with fluid movement once you get to the sie of base that needs that much power. IIRC, solar, regardless of the size of the farm - 10 panels or 100,000, is just a single number that gets fed into the energy grid while stuff based around steam, nuclear plant or not, has a bunch of fluid to pump around and that eats tonnes of processing. As mentioned in previous posts, once you're into the realm of needing 5-10 GW to power your base, the amount of processing taken up by the base is pretty monstrous and the power plant only adds to the strain, so the only real option is to switch to solar and have kilometre after kilometre of panels and accumulators.

[mrvn]

i use a lot of mods, have to ask, why is non-solar causing UPS problems? is it the animations?
if i put a nuclear power plant inside a factorissimo building, does it still count against UPS?

UPS has nothing to do with graphical elements that would be FPS. When it does run and generate energy that gets used ofcourse this has to get calculated so UPS should get used...

With boilers and steam engines every single entity keeps track of the fuel it consumes, the steam it produces, the steam it gets and the steam it uses up. That means each tick the game has to update every single boiler and steam engine.

With solar apparently the game just counts the number of solar cells connected to a power grid once. Then each tick it adds <number of solar cells> * <power per cell> to the grid. That's a constant cost no matter how many solar cells you have.

[HurkWurk]

i use a lot of mods, have to ask, why is non-solar causing UPS problems? is it the animations?
if i put a nuclear power plant inside a factorissimo building, does it still count against UPS?

UPS has nothing to do with graphical elements that would be FPS. When it does run and generate energy that gets used ofcourse this has to get calculated so UPS should get used...

With boilers and steam engines every single entity keeps track of the fuel it consumes, the steam it produces, the steam it gets and the steam it uses up. That means each tick the game has to update every single boiler and steam engine.

With solar apparently the game just counts the number of solar cells connected to a power grid once. Then each tick it adds <number of solar cells> * <power per cell> to the grid. That's a constant cost no matter how many solar cells you have.

This makes me wonder if factorissimo can still help since you can set how often it updates... to less than once a tick. i think the default is 6 updates per 10 ticks. I know i have had ~30+ GW, however since the mods... not the same number of entities involved. (i think my power plants are ~6x efficiant)

[Hedning1390]

I'm not sure it fits here, but 1 steam turbine will power an outpost of 19 productivity miners, or 324 efficiency miners, and 1 storage tank lasts 7 minutes if the turbine is running at full power. Shipping power with train to an outpost this way is a good alternative to drawing vulnerable power poles. Only nuclear gives you this option as you need the steam and boilers produce much less power per unit of steam.

[Aeternus]

EVOLVING BEST PRACTICES CONSENSUS
0) When you create the map disable Cliffs. They are a royal pain in their current form (thanks for mentioning it Deadlock989).

Not sure what that has to do with power generation, but I agree, cliffs are annoying.

1) Low power alarm.
- As soon as you get the technology.
- Trigger at (tentative value) 30% of accumulators charge.

Only feasable if your consumption doesn't exceed the drain speed of the accumulator. A sudden spike in power requirements that triggers a brownout or blackout (fuel insertion failure, I'm sure we've all been there) can shut down your base before the alarm has a chance to trigger.

2) Steam engines, powered by coal
- Once you have a better option add ability to shut off pumps and only activate when less than (tentative value) 25% of accumulators charge.
- Pros: Available since early game. Can be used later on to consume your excess supply of wood (thanks dood). Can also be used later on with solid fuel if you have a permanent excess supply of oil (most efficient is to do it from Light oil, can also be done with Petroleum gas but only worth it in the rare cases where you overproduce Petroleum).
- Cons: Significant pollution and coal consumption.

Chemical fuel is a very basic form of power generation but you can get greater efficiency even once you can make rocket fuel. Some production modules can turn solid fuel into rocket fuel - which concentrates the fuel value so that a -huge- boiler/steamengine array can be powered from a single belt. 2.4 GW from a single blue belt. With production modules and a speedmod beacon you can squeeze more fuel out of your oil at the cost of a bit more pollution.

3) Daytime Solar.
- I am no expert on this. At least for now, do your own thinking. I'll update as people say more.
- Fairly early game, before getting oil, batteries and accumulators.
- Useful to lower pollution.
- Probably requires an isolated grid, so that assembly lines you run with it are those that are useful even if they shut down at night. My guess is that much of the production mall can be run this way, producing by day and stashing the output in chests.

Daytime solar requires shutting down high energy using parts of your factory at night, or using a buffer elsewhere (doing 3 steamengines per boiler and adding a few tanks to buffer steam for instance). Since solar does not produce any energy by night, you will still need another generation method, so this strategy can only supplement power. It's usually to reduce chemical fuel consumption early on, before you get many accumulators.

4) Nuclear.
- Should buffer steam in storage tanks and only add fuel cells when the steam drops below a certain level. (Thanks Serenity)
- Lots of power in a relatively small footprint.
- Pros: Very fuel efficient once fully setup (thanks to all that mentioned it). No pollution. Small footprint (important while still confined by the enemy). Efficient use of player time for the power it produces (thanks Bauer) Decent option for midgame.
- Cons: Long time to setup. Hampers game performance once it gets big enough (gigawatts or terawatt range).
- Good at least until 5GW.
- Should eventually shift to Solar before reaching the performance issues.

The performance issues with nuclear I've found are mainly visual related. When you got a few hundred turbines with their steam animation showing, things slow down. Zoom in and... UPS returns to normal. I'm running my megabase-in-progress purely on nuclear, at top draw it pulls 20GW - but I'm not done, it's currently doing 1k science per minute, but I'm going to scale it up till 10. Just need to crack how to do the smelting... it's a bottleneck. Nuclear is insanely fuel efficient. I've been running the factory on a tiny uranium field, ~300k, and only after 300 hours played it's still there - about 75% depleted. The next field I've tapped is 20M ore, so I doubt I need to worry about power at all anymore.

5) Solar with accumulators.
- Setup out of the way, uses a lot of space.
- Have automated production of panels, accumulators, substations, roboports, and bots before you start.
- Have a rail branch nearby and stops you move as you progress. You will need them when you must add power generation in a hurry.
- Best long term solution.
- Pros: infinitely expandable without affecting game performance, no fuel, no pollution. N(thanks dood, Bauer).
- Cons: Time consuming. Initially cost in materials or low numbers of bots can slow you down in the early stages.

Add radars to your pattern. Given the amount of terrain you're going to cover, you will want to be able to drop blueprints from the big map and have bots just slowly auto-build it. A rail line delivering a steady supply of buildings makes sense.

Priority of consumption:

1) Solar/Accumulators.
2) Accumulators charge below 35% turn on Nuclear (see Nuclear section for additional fuel handling info).
3) Accumulators charge below 30% activate alarm ( text and one-time sound).
4) Accumulators charge below 25% activate Steam with wood/coal/solid fuel.

I'd kick on Nuclear and/or chemical at 50% power, with a simple latch, disengaging it again once the batteries are at 90%. If you've got nuclear power, there's no real reason to keep chemical power around (aside from a small incinerator to get rid of wood).

Interesting power ideas:
- Powering mining outposts: Ship (nuclear-generated) steam by train to run a steam turbine at the outposts is sufficient to run the miners if you want to avoid rail electric poles that could be chewed by biters. (By Hedning1390)

Feasable for medium distance, not so much for high distance. 25000 steam dissipates surprisingly fast. It worked better when the tanker wagons could still lug 75000 fluid... Another big risk is that if the usually short steam supply train runs into a biter horde crossing the tracks, it'll stall, and subsequently fail to make deliveries. Or a deadlock on the tracks, same result. If you don't notice it in time, your mining outposts black out, and get chewed on by biters. A blacked out mine cannot recover, it has no power for the pumps unloading the steam.
Consider solar power instead. While it makes a mining outpost larger, solar + batteries along with 3x Efficiency 1 module per mine (cheap as hell so why not, also lower pollution so fewer attacks) you'll have mining outpost with low power requirements. You may need to not rely fully on laser turrets though. The advantage is that these mines, once set up, are fully output only. I'm a big fan of "set and forget", once built, I don't want to have to revisit a mine until it's time to deconstruct the whole thing 'cause the ore's used up.

[bobucles]

Shipping power with train to an outpost this way is a good alternative to drawing vulnerable power poles. Only nuclear gives you this option as you need the steam and boilers produce much less power per unit of steam.

There's one tiny flaw in the system. Pumping the steam out of the train requires the tiniest amount of energy. If the system is totally dry, you can't pump steam to restart it. You'll always need some kind of emergency accumulator or solar panel to reboot the system if it runs dry.

[dood]

vulnerable power poles.

Don't run anything through biter territory.

[mrvn]

1) For a steam + solar setup it's ~6 steam engines per boiler because solar works about 2/3 of the day.

2) Run your fuel inserters and (at least some) miners from a dedicated power network. To be doubly sure add some solar cells there. Even just one cell will eventually put some fuel into a boiler and restart the engine.

3) Same deal with unloading steam at remote stations. Add at least one solar cell so it can unload steam and restart from a blackout the next time the sun rises.

[Aeternus]

2) Run your fuel inserters and (at least some) miners from a dedicated power network. To be doubly sure add some solar cells there. Even just one cell will eventually put some fuel into a boiler and restart the engine.

Or just have the last boiler in a row be fed with a burner inserter. That way you can be sure that even during a fuel starvation blackout, your plant will auto-restart as soon as fuel is provided again. I prefer feeding my early chemical plants completely with burner inserters for this reason. Also cuts down on the mess of power poles in the plant area - you just need one row of power lines in between the steam engines (which if you leave some room between them, build the poles, then hook the first to the second row of steam engines with a simple pipe, makes it a very clean looking setup).

3) Same deal with unloading steam at remote stations. Add at least one solar cell so it can unload steam and restart from a blackout the next time the sun rises.

Optionally, you could do a power latch with just a single accumulator - disconnect the pumps + accu from the main grid if the accu falls below a treshold (say A<25). Pumps have no drain, so if there's nothing but the pumps and the battery on that isolated minigrid, the pumps should stay powered for the next steam arrival. Make sure to have another parameter for reconnecting the battery - steamlevel / 1000 = A on any steam tank comes to mind. This setup doesn't require daylight to recover the mine. Accumulators can supply 300Kw, pumps consume 3, so... unless you're powering over 100 pumps, one battery will do.

[Serenity]

I run the first steam engine with burner inserter and run all the other inserters with that. Though yeah, later on you could use solar cells

[Hedning1390]

Don't run anything through biter territory.

Everything is in biter territory. It's just a matter of how well you defend it. Power poles need to be defended, but not naked tracks, which is a good thing to exploit with the more scarce resources of 0.16.

There's one tiny flaw in the system. Pumping the steam out of the train requires the tiniest amount of energy. If the system is totally dry, you can't pump steam to restart it. You'll always need some kind of emergency accumulator or solar panel to reboot the system if it runs dry.

There is no flaw. Just place 1 solar panel.

Feasable for medium distance, not so much for high distance. 25000 steam dissipates surprisingly fast. It worked better when the tanker wagons could still lug 75000 fluid... Another big risk is that if the usually short steam supply train runs into a biter horde crossing the tracks, it'll stall, and subsequently fail to make deliveries. Or a deadlock on the tracks, same result.

-You can power 19 productivity miners, or 324 efficiency miners for 7 minutes using that 1 storage tank. That's not "dissipating surprisingly fast". That's plenty of time.
-If you need more punching power on your supply train you can add more wagons. Since you are running out "surprisingly fast" maybe you should add more wagons anyway. If you just want more mass you could add an artillery wagon.
-If you get a deadlock on the tracks at an outpost you should reconsider your playstyle. Maybe trains isn't for you.

[dood]

Don't run anything through biter territory.

Everything is in biter territory. It's just a matter of how well you defend it. Power poles need to be defended, but not naked tracks, which is a good thing to exploit with the more scarce resources of 0.16.

Nothing has less surface area than a single box and if no biters are in that box, you minimize the amount of enemies calculating around in revealed chunks.
If you have multiple outposts all with their own defenses or super long corridors all surrounded by enemies, that's a lot of real estate of revealed map chunks belonging to the biters and guess what that will do to your UPS over time.

Yes you can run rails through undefended territory but you really shouldn't except maybe very early on if you absolutely have to reach something and can't afford defenses at all.
Trains with nuclear steam don't qualify as "early on" though so what you're doing is no longer a necessity but a bad practice.

[Aeternus]

There's one tiny flaw in the system. Pumping the steam out of the train requires the tiniest amount of energy. If the system is totally dry, you can't pump steam to restart it. You'll always need some kind of emergency accumulator or solar panel to reboot the system if it runs dry.

There is no flaw. Just place 1 solar panel.

And wait for daylight while the steamcarrying train tries to unload with still no power. And have some kind of logic that disconnects the pump from the rest of the outpost. It's a little more complicated then "just toss a panel in there and you're good".

Feasable for medium distance, not so much for high distance. 25000 steam dissipates surprisingly fast. It worked better when the tanker wagons could still lug 75000 fluid... Another big risk is that if the usually short steam supply train runs into a biter horde crossing the tracks, it'll stall, and subsequently fail to make deliveries. Or a deadlock on the tracks, same result.

- You can power 19 productivity miners, or 324 efficiency miners for 7 minutes using that 1 storage tank. That's not "dissipating surprisingly fast". That's plenty of time.
- If you need more punching power on your supply train you can add more wagons. Since you are running out "surprisingly fast" maybe you should add more wagons anyway. If you just want more mass you could add an artillery wagon.
- If you get a deadlock on the tracks at an outpost you should reconsider your playstyle. Maybe trains isn't for you.

The caveat of your design is that you spare no power for defenses. Therefor no laser turrets, which in my experience is problematic at endgame. Sure, you can make some depleted uranium ammo and stock all your mining bases with it - that tends to get expensive though, especially if you're getting hit by Behemoth Biter groups. This means you need to add a supply wagon/train as well, resupplying ammo and replacement turrets (since they're weaker then lasers, they die more often). You also need to have a system in your outpost to automatically restock turrets with ammo. Most designs I've seen use a logistics grid for that - which requires power to recharge the bots.
Relatively frequent deliveries of steam to your mining outpost also increases the traffic on your mining grid, and requires a fast loading station at your nuclear power plant. If not deadlocks, it'll certainly increase congestion on the mining grid on megabases.

Yes you can run rails through undefended territory but you really shouldn't except maybe very early on if you absolutely have to reach something and can't afford defenses at all.
Trains with nuclear steam don't qualify as "early on" though so what you're doing is no longer a necessity but a bad practice.

This suggests to me that you favor clearing out and walling off -any- area you plan to use? Seems impractical to me once you transition towards a 10k sci/min gigabase, considering the sheer amount of raw materials you need, even if you go full production mod.

[dood]

This suggests to me that you favor clearing out and walling off -any- area you plan to use? Seems impractical to me once you transition towards a 10k sci/min gigabase, considering the sheer amount of raw materials you need, even if you go full production mod.

You kidding me right now?
You burn 10k spm constantly but can't afford some laser turrets and walls once?

map

Standard rail world settings.
No excuses.

[Aeternus]

This suggests to me that you favor clearing out and walling off -any- area you plan to use? Seems impractical to me once you transition towards a 10k sci/min gigabase, considering the sheer amount of raw materials you need, even if you go full production mod.

You kidding me right now?
You burn 10k spm constantly but can't afford some laser turrets and walls once?

map

Standard rail world settings.
No excuses.

I meant that at 10k sci, your mines will frequently run dry, forcing you to build new ones further out in the field. Not so much a matter of being able to afford the buildings - but getting them where they need to be and clearing out the biters before walling it all off is the issue. Tends to be a timesink and there's no easy way to automate (well, used to be no easy way - artillery may offer some options).

I suppose it's a choice you make. Viable are:
- Wall off everything and build without needing to worry about biters. Main base power for everything you have. This is your preferred method
Pros: Safest and simplest option. No need to worry about defending anything since nothing's outside your walls.
Cons: Expanding takes a VERY long time since you need to move up your entire wall. (If you have ideas on how to automate or accellerate this I'd like to hear them).

Wall off only your main plant and use independant outposts without main base power. This is my preferred method.
Pros: Makes expansion more rapid, once you've got your production set you only lay rail to a new location, then stamp down a mining base. Rail in is the only requirement
Cons: Outposts will have less severe defenses and independant power grids are slightly UPS unfriendly.

Wall off your main plant and rail net to your outposts. Defend your entire power and rail grid.
Pros: Main base power ran towards all outposts.
Cons: Lower rate of expansion as each rail section needs to be defended by turrets, walls, a logistics grid per column for automatic repairs and rebuilding, supply stations. Effectively you'll have more defensive structures with this then walling off your entire base. Can also make traversing terrain a hassle as you have to pass walls each time you pass a rail section.

[Hedning1390]

Nothing has less surface area than a single box and if no biters are in that box, you minimize the amount of enemies calculating around in revealed chunks.
If you have multiple outposts all with their own defenses or super long corridors all surrounded by enemies, that's a lot of real estate of revealed map chunks belonging to the biters and guess what that will do to your UPS over time.

Yes you can run rails through undefended territory but you really shouldn't except maybe very early on if you absolutely have to reach something and can't afford defenses at all.
Trains with nuclear steam don't qualify as "early on" though so what you're doing is no longer a necessity but a bad practice.

Maybe you haven't played 0.16 map gen yet. The distance to the next resource can be truly massive. Also what's up with your progress description? If nuclear is not considered "early on" then what is the talk about ups? Nuclear is available before the first rocket, <10h into the game, and UPS starts becoming a problem for people at what? 5k science per minute? The lowest I have seen someone struggle to run was a 2.5k base. That's was maybe still 100+ hours of playtime if not built in creative. I think most players never hit any UPS cap, so it's totally irrelevant to them. In any case that's a long time to take advantage of not having to clear all biters. You'll be able to research a lot more artillery range for that automatic clearing. In contrast trying to take every biter out on your way to 5k spm in your square base with the manual firing will take ages and ages. You may think it's much faster clearing things with nukes first, but that's only marginally faster, because in vanilla there are no artillery nukes. "Bad practice" is spending hours and hours on a task that will only be necessary later wile also done much quicker later.

I meant that at 10k sci, your mines will frequently run dry, forcing you to build new ones further out in the field.

When you start getting up there you'll have so much mining productivity that miners start lasting a very long time, and at that point I would go over to dood's side and say it's probably time to just clear it all.

There is no flaw. Just place 1 solar panel.

And wait for daylight while the steamcarrying train tries to unload with still no power. And have some kind of logic that disconnects the pump from the rest of the outpost. It's a little more complicated then "just toss a panel in there and you're good".

First of all running out is a failure that shouldn't happen in the first place, but if you are really concerned about it you can put down 1 accumulator as well and it will work during the night. You don't need any logic. If you get hung up on such small and trivial things I wonder how you deal with the rest of the game.

The caveat of your design is that you spare no power for defenses. Therefor no laser turrets
...
Relatively frequent deliveries of steam to your mining outpost also increases the traffic on your mining grid, and requires a fast loading station at your nuclear power plant. If not deadlocks, it'll certainly increase congestion on the mining grid on megabases.

That was not a caveat. I didn't include them because how you deal with defense is another issue to how many miners you can run. I never said you couldn't bring extra power for laser turrets.
Regardless how you solve defense you can have a single supply train. A single train unloading on a separated supply station will never gridlock anything unless you totally mess up your signals. Again how you do it is up to you, but even if you chose to have multiple trains it is still an outpost and should receive a lot less traffic than some other sections of your base. If you can't deal with traffic at an outpost how does your main base not constantly gridlock?