Friday Facts #305 - The Oil Changes

[Astrella]

My primary concern is that the devs appear to be dumbing down the game to appeal to the lowest common denominator, instead of creating a more intelligent solution (better tutorials, UI hints, etc).

Why change basic oil processing? Why not instead add 3 new specific oil processing recipes that produce heavy/light/petro gas at lower rates?

Eh, redistributing the difficulty curve isn't really "dumbing the game down", you still need advanced oil processing to finish the game. It's just shifting what you have to do when around. (Rocket fuel requires light oil now.)

I'd hope a tutorial is still forecoming, but UI changes / etc... are a different area of development than rebalancing changes, which is probably why it hasn't been touched on rn yet.

A rocket fuel recipe being solid fuel plus *more* light oil - which is the "intended" way of making solid fuel - feels weird. Not actively harmful, but just "why is there light oil in this recipe twice?". I guarantee you that people will start asking why you do not just add the light oil directly to the solid fuel recipe. It also does not make a whole lot of realism sense.

*shrug* I mean, belts require plates and gears which are made from plates. It's not the only recipe that works like that.

[huancz]

I had this prepared for FFF304, but this just as good place for it...

I have no idea how typical my noob game was, but since it was very recent, it might add some value in this thread (about $0.02 I reckon, adjust for for inflation and how blue the moon appears tonight as you see fit). I was putting off buying factorio for a long long time, even though I was sure it would be just my type of game. Got it on Apr 30 this year, my first version was 0.17.34. About 2.5 months later, I already passed 200h mark and during this week I obtained the "there is no spoon" achievement - won in 7:20. So, I still remember my first game, and at the same time I already do know a bit how the game really works. Of course I made some very silly mistakes in my first game. How I dealt with the two topics that so many people find so controversial here?

tl;dr version:
- robots of any kind are concern for advanced players, not newbies
- of the solutions offered so far, I think I'd have appreciated tutorial after researching basic old the most. It's very satisfying to finally get it right, even if I didn't invent it myself - I just looked up how other people do it for my next game. My current refinery design is original enough to be proud of it. So, tutorial focused on piping, and specifically how underground pipes allow you to avoid mixing fluids - both input and output. Maybe have three refineries side by side and goal of the tutorial is to connect all the outputs to three storage tanks - available resources: 18 normal pipes and plenty of underground pipes, leading players to the tripple T output piping. Or more normal pipes if you don't want to force players to the most space efficient piping (maybe put in an optional last step - "try to optimise this with less surface pipes, hint, all you need is X") and let them discover it themselves. What it is important is giving them playground to play with the pipes without pressure. Advice that "you need to empty all refinery outputs to keep things going" could be included in the flavour text. Oh, and have them switch to AOP as one step to teach them that there WILL be AOP, and to explain to them what the "cannot mix fluids" really means when switching single-input recipes to multi-input ones.

Now the main wall of text:
- robots - I knew about them (there is tutorial for them), tried them in practice and then ignored them because... Main reason was that I noticed that there is an achievement for winning the game without active logistics network, and decided "hey, this looks doable". So half of the robots were out by choice. I still don't use them much, I always forget to include space for roboport coverage in my factory and they are so power hungry...

As for construction robots: they only shine when you a) know enough about the game to use blueprints, upgrade planners and ghosts, or want to reorganize your factory with copy/cut/paste - all of that was still a mystery to me at that point, no tileable production, everything was spaghetti, etc... b) researched couple of item/speed upgrades c) have personal fusion reactor to power them. Using just solar panels to power suit batteries to power everything else... I was having trouble feeding my exoskeleton and nightvision and belt immunity gear, and personal roboport seemed much more hungry than all those combined (now I know it's perfectly fine tech with just portable solars, just saying what I thought then). Covering entire base with roboports just for building stuff seemed like huge resource drain: adv circuits were rare (I might have been cooking them in inventory with no automated production at that point). Putting down roboport where I'm building, filling them with robots, putting required materials into passive provider, then tear it all down and move somewhere else, just so that I could place ghosts of machines and have robots deliver them, instead of just placing the machines themselves... I tried that couple of times and got tired of it very quickly. Also, horribly inefficient factory = low polution = no problem with biters, so even the autorepair function didn't provide enough incentive. My point - newbies have load of OTHER problems to deal with, conbots just add more complexity for no gain at that stage of game knowledge. (*)

- oil processing - I didn't rush to setup refinery immediately when I researched BOP, technologies were flying past me too fast and this was just one of many. I started to think about oil when I was running out of green techs to research. I must have taken some time to browse the blue tech tree, because I knew that refinery area will need access to water. Which led me to put it in the same area as boilers, and major problems with both oil and power - I had no room to expand either. At least it allowed me to easily feed boilers with solid fuel, manually restocking their coal chests was becoming too time demanding.

I don't remember struggling with the concept of output blocking at all. I probably already encountered assemblers that stop at blocked output too, extending it to 3 outputs just seemed natural - when I stopped getting more plastics or whatever I needed, it was easy to go back to source and find out the reason. Using the waste fluids for solid fuel to relieve my energy crisis was obvious too, I had one factory reserved just for that and re-piped it to consume whatever was the current blocker, until I added more. What was hard was dealing with those 3 outputs in practice. I struggled a lot with piping all the fluids without mixing them and without trapping myself or making something completely inaccessible, with room for inserters and power poles... Most of that game I was using a tank for each of the outputs, with pump on both the input and output (so I could pressurize or empty them just by rotating the correct pump and I wouldn't loose any of the "precious" fluids during the many reconstructions) and huge mess of pipes in between. In the endgame I ended with something passable (two refineries and several chem factories that could output what was needed at the moment), but it cost me several evenings of building and rebuilding and it was still far from compact design.

What if BOP only produced PG at that time? Chance is I'd learn almost nothing from that step, just struggle with manually restocking fuel chest for a while longer. Everything else that is being said about oil spike... Pumpjacks - trivial, just electric miner in another coat, with storage tank instead of chest as buffer. Transporting crude - setting up train with fluid wagon was very easy. I did learn something about trains at this step, but could have learned it just as well from transporting ore if it ran out sooner. Overload of new products and how do they fit together, in what ratio I'd be consuming them - I just produced some of each as a matter of principle and learned by experimenting, no spike here. Any learning about fluid specifics would be postponed until later, when I had even less space to solve it.

I still don't like the changes to oil at least on the grounds that I'll have to rebuild both my rocket fuel and blue science industries, but I had to accept such possibility when buying game in development. Do whatever you think is best for the game, I'll deal with it somehow. I just think there are way less disruptive ways to try first.




(*) Experience from my last game also added d) you don't have the whole base prepared as blueprint. Because when you do, they will get overloaded with build requests, build random bits of stuff with nothing in working condition and then cause massive blackout - but that is definitely NOT a newbie problem.

[MiniHerc]

There is another alternative that I haven't seen discussed yet: putting the oil changes in a difficulty setting.

When a world is created, have {simplified} and {normal} difficulties for oil processing. The existing oil mechanics would go in {normal}, and the proposed changes in {simplified}. The oil processing 'difficulty' could be changed at any time during gameplay. This would take effect for both oil processing and the controversial tech tree adjustments.

This would allow the Factorio veterans to continue to use the existing mechanics, and newbies have an easier setup to get accustomed to with the existing mechanics as an advanced option.


I do not want to have to research blue science to use construction bots.

[dzaima]

* You have split the "oil wall" into, what? "Handling fluids" and "Handling fluids with multiple outputs"? Is the former even a wall at all, given that the player should already have some grasp of that?

In the "oil wall" I'd include whatever comes out of oil - plastic, sulfur, batteries, advanced circuits, ect. It's not complicated, but it's still a lot to do before getting everything working, and adding on dealing with stuff backing up unless you make solid fuel isn't helpful IMO.

* This new system still "teaches" players the wrong thing, such that they will have to massively refactor their entire oil processing setup once they switch to AOP from BOP. And need I remind you, unlike with items, deconstructing fluid handling systems voids the fluid, meaning if they have built this big mess of pipes with 50k stored PG, they will have to lose all of that in order to rebuild, or sit there and gradually consume it while waiting 12 ingame hours to actually do so. I have done the latter in many cases, in many games; it is not fun.

As far as I remember, breaking fluid containers first tries to push the fluid to nearby machines before voiding it, and either way, 50k is a very very little loss (I'd be more conflicted with 500k or a couple million, but crude oil fields contain literally infinite oil), and it's worth it for the 2x (or 3x with productivity modules) production gain.
And upgrading to AOP shouldn't be that hard either way - even removing and completely redesigning the refinery setup and moving it shouldn't be bad, as all the products from PG could stay unchanged. If changing a small part of your base breaks everything, you're playing factorio wrong.

* There is still no better indications to inexperienced players that fluid is backing up or why than before, and that is arguably the crux of the issue.

It's already mentioned in the tooltips and the GUI, and things backing up is a regular part of non-100%-efficient bases, so anything more intrusive than that would be just incredibly annoying.

[Illiander42]

The Oil Changes:

Too bad you seem locked in to this.

Pushing back construction bots is not a "fun" change.

The suggestion made by the user last week, to have Basic Oil Tech produce Heavy Oil only which must then must be cracked down, was the most elegant solution. You learn about the different outputs, because you are making them when you crack down the heavy oil. It's like the game play becoming the tutorial, which is perfect. Then later when you ramp up to Advanced Oil Tech, the change can be plugged into your existing line. You hook up the Light Oil to the Light you have cracked from the Heavy. Same with the Pet. Gas. You are now working with multiple outputs like a champ! You taught the new player how to play efficiently. You taught them through game play.

Your solution to only produce Pet. Gas at the low levels is weird, and doesn't solve any issues. You pushed back the problem, and taught the new player nothing.

You are saying exactly what I'm thinking.

And the devs have decided to ignore us on this.

They've also made AOP even more of a mandatory rush, when they claim to want to make it less important to rush it.

Yes, Construction bots (ie: Heavy Oil) are that important. When you grok them it's one of the biggest "Whoa! Why don't other games do this?" moments you will ever have.

[RocketManChronicles]

now that you've explained it all, and made changes, it does make a lot more sense.


I'm still going to have to undo a few of these things in my mods though, like I said last week, I make use of light and heavy oil in many things, and just making them unavailable until after SP3 would break the flow of my mods.
But then mods are mods, not vanilla.

The combination of Bob's mods with MSP 30 Science Packs would be totally destroyed with these new changes. Both require Light and Heavy oils well before the Chemical Science Pack. Both mods will need to address this if my modded game has any chance of going beyond 0.17.58.....

[Matthias_Wlkp]

To people saying, that new oil processing forces new players to rebuild oil refinery for AOP. Guess what? A LOT of things in this game forces you to rebuild. Including (or most notably) getting better at the game. Unless you are a veteran and know what you are doing, you will have to rebuild. A LOT. After ~400h into this game, I still end up rebuilding things more often than not. In my last game, where I reached yellow science, I'm about to abandon my current base and start over to the side, because so many things can be built easier, nicer, more efficient and substantially more OCD friendly... I finally got the nuclear power plant working, so I wanted to demolish the old power plant, but since everything is tangled up, it's easier to rebuild...

Among other things, most obvious things that make you rebuild:
- Electric furnaces
- Modules
- Blue belts
- Beacons

Best advice I got, which should be somehow highlighted in the tutorial - if you built something inefficient - just let it be and build new version to the side. That saved me a ton of frustration.

[Matthias_Wlkp]

The Oil Changes:

Too bad you seem locked in to this.

Pushing back construction bots is not a "fun" change.

The suggestion made by the user last week, to have Basic Oil Tech produce Heavy Oil only which must then must be cracked down, was the most elegant solution. You learn about the different outputs, because you are making them when you crack down the heavy oil. It's like the game play becoming the tutorial, which is perfect. Then later when you ramp up to Advanced Oil Tech, the change can be plugged into your existing line. You hook up the Light Oil to the Light you have cracked from the Heavy. Same with the Pet. Gas. You are now working with multiple outputs like a champ! You taught the new player how to play efficiently. You taught them through game play.

Your solution to only produce Pet. Gas at the low levels is weird, and doesn't solve any issues. You pushed back the problem, and taught the new player nothing.

You are saying exactly what I'm thinking.

And the devs have decided to ignore us on this.

They've also made AOP even more of a mandatory rush, when they claim to want to make it less important to rush it.

Yes, Construction bots (ie: Heavy Oil) are that important. When you grok them it's one of the biggest "Whoa! Why don't other games do this?" moments you will ever have.

Listening and disagreeing is not the same as not listening.

[MrGrim]

The GUI updates for modders are fantastic news! I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do with that!

I'm mostly ambivalent re the oil changes. I'm mostly just a little sad that heavy oil has been reduced to a 1 recipe intermediate with the flamethrower ammo change. I do think the flamethrower ammo recipe from raw oil is actually pretty cool giving raw oil another use.

Re heavy oil, tho. Perhaps, if the art department is bored, you'd be open to one more use for it? Asphalt concrete! A new tile to spruce up a base with actual roads. The recipe would be steam, heavy oil, and stone. It would pair _very_ well with coal liquefaction with the steam and heavy oil requirement as well.

I know we're in polishing phase and are not looking to add more features, but a new tile without any major new mechanics to make heavy oil more interesting and with an interesting recipe perhaps would be possible to find time for?

Anyway, thanks for not breaking my base _too_ badly. Retrofitting the rocket fuel and blue science changes shouldn't be too bad.

[argbla]

The Oil Changes:

Too bad you seem locked in to this.

Pushing back construction bots is not a "fun" change.

The suggestion made by the user last week, to have Basic Oil Tech produce Heavy Oil only which must then must be cracked down, was the most elegant solution. You learn about the different outputs, because you are making them when you crack down the heavy oil. It's like the game play becoming the tutorial, which is perfect. Then later when you ramp up to Advanced Oil Tech, the change can be plugged into your existing line. You hook up the Light Oil to the Light you have cracked from the Heavy. Same with the Pet. Gas. You are now working with multiple outputs like a champ! You taught the new player how to play efficiently. You taught them through game play.

Your solution to only produce Pet. Gas at the low levels is weird, and doesn't solve any issues. You pushed back the problem, and taught the new player nothing.

This exactly. I do not understand how this is not recognized as the better solution, unless the devs are simply being stubborn about it not being something they came up with, or if they want an excuse to shake things up more than this simpler change would justify. Have they given their thoughts on it anywhere?

I do hope these changes weren't inspired by a particular recent streamer of factorio with a particular fruit in his name who had issues with oil. That streamer is purposely thick when he streams for entertainment value. He is not at all representative of a normal player.

[Theikkru]

To people saying, that new oil processing forces new players to rebuild oil refinery for AOP. Guess what? A LOT of things in this game forces you to rebuild. Including (or most notably) getting better at the game. Unless you are a veteran and know what you are doing, you will have to rebuild. A LOT.[...]

Not necessarily true; this is a style of play decision. When I was playing for the first time, I did a LOT of thinking ahead to avoid precisely that kind of rebuilding. There is a difference between base redesigns that could have been circumvented with forethought and inefficiencies in base design that are enforced by the game. Furnaces, for example, all behave the same, so it is no great loss if one decides not to upgrade to electric furnaces because it's too much trouble to rebuild everything. The proposed design changes really do force inefficiencies, however, because without prior knowledge, it's near impossible to avoid building something incompatible with advanced processing, and both basic and advanced processing are mandatory for progression.

[Unknow0059]

I'm a fan of the changes, not as worried as I was last time (by proxy because of what people were saying). I'm also excited to see what mods do with the new GUI thingamabob.

Note that I'm not a veteran player. I want you guys to sit on the changes more before deciding for sure where to go, there are still lots of valid criticisms from what it seems like.

[BlueTemplar]

We made slight changes to the numbers in the recipes - specifically, Basic oil processing results in a bit more Petroleum gas (45 instead of 40), and Advanced oil processing results in more Heavy oil (25 instead of 10) than before. This is because it was common to use Basic oil processing over Advanced oil processing when you needed a lot of lubricant for Express transport belts.

For the avoidance of doubt, please can you confirm what the exact inputs and outputs of the proposed new Basic Oil Processing recipe is?

Is it 100 crude in, 100 petroleum out?
Is it 100 crude in, 40 petroleum out?

100 crude in 45 out, or at least that's what it says on the post.

then from the same 100 crude plus water in the advanced recipe, you get 25 heavy oil, 45 light oil and 55 PG.

Honestly, it looks like when you get advanced, it makes basic completely pointless.
I would suggest upping the number to about... 75ish, so that the amount of PG you get from basic is somewhere between what you get directly from Advanced, and what you'd get from advanced if you cracked everything down (I believe 25 heavy becomes 12.5 PG, and 45 light gives you 30, so full cracking gives you somewhere around 97.5PG)

Actually, that's my only suggested change for vanilla right now, buff the basic processing to give more PG.

To make it a bit more realistic, shouldn't the advanced oil processing consume more energy and time to produce than the basic?

The basic (takes 5s):
100 crude -> 45 PG

The advanced (takes 5s):
100 crude + 50 water -> 55 PG + 45 LO + 25 HO

Apart from the "free" resource which is water, you get straight up more PG from advanced processing that from basic processing. It takes the same amount of time and therefore energy.

To me, it feels that the advanced should be more complicated for the machine and therefore should take longer. At least as long to make the same amount of PG in the same amount of time:
(55/45) * 5 seconds = 6 + 1/9 seconds
adding another (at least) 8/9 of a second would make sense to let the machine separate the liquids or something.

TLDR; I propose it would be better if advanced oil processing would take at least 11/9 of time the basic processing takes. Which would make it basic in 5s and advanced in 7s.

For the avoidance of doubt, please can you confirm what the exact inputs and outputs of the proposed new Basic Oil Processing recipe is?

Is it 100 crude in, 100 petroleum out?
Is it 100 crude in, 40 petroleum out?

That's in the FFF- 100 crude in, 45 petro out:

Thanks, I did look for it but couldn't see it for some reason.
My previous objections were based on the assumption that Basic Oil Processing would produce 100 petroleum per craft. If it's only 45, I feel a lot better about the balance in ultra late game. Since this is the case, I don't see it being UPS-efficient to use Basic Oil Processing in a megabase scenario, and that was the main sticking point for me previously.

Others have suggested that the number be increased from 45. I do not think it should be increased, because if it gets any higher it will start to be competitive vs Advanced Oil Processing in a megabase that is optimizing UPS. That would lead to a systemic decrease in the complexity of efficient megabases which I feel would be a negative thing.

[...]

As already discussed in the previous thread, finding the right balance for the new Oil Processing recipes is going to be pretty hard...

But I still don't understand the concerns about blue belts :
First, they are pretty optional (EDIT : except for underground length),
and second, hey, what is it that you can see right next to them on the tech tree ?

coal_liquefaction_&_logistics_3.png (1.28 MiB) Viewed 9000 times

And I'm not even sure that it even needs to be buffed to give even more Heavy Oil ( 90-25 = 65 per 10 coal right now), after all, it only gave 35-25 = 10 Heavy Oil per 10 coal in 0.16 !

[rhynex]

To people saying, that new oil processing forces new players to rebuild oil refinery for AOP. Guess what? A LOT of things in this game forces you to rebuild.

I think there is a point in a game where you would gladly rebuild. if it is at the start you would do that, no big deal. blue science might be a good time to do that. if it is at the end (yellow science) then it would be seriously annoying.

another point of rebuilding is who is rebuilding. me as a veteran player, would not blink an eye to rebuild stuff, no problem for me. I know what I would gain. a player who is enthusiastic about factorio would also do that. they are not the target audience of the change I believe.

but a new player might be seriously pissed off after spending hours on a game and realize they need to start from beginning (yes they restart the map or forget about factorio since it really takes time). they might be forced to rebuild a huge oil setup elsewhere. maybe space does not allow because they need cracking due to three-output system. they would need to learn the "new" three-output concept where they have never seen it in another recipe. if oil is difficult then they would avoid it, they would delay the problem. if they understand how oil works then they would be annoyed. they need to spend a few hours for something they have never faced and game did not even taught about anything.

summary: requiring rebuilding a setup might backfire on new players. they might leave factorio instead of continuing.

side note: electric furnaces are not a must besides the science input. modules as well. they are nice to have but not necessary. blue belts are not necessary. many players avoid that and think it is unnecessary for winning the game. similar to solar and nuclear, you can win game without them. you can completely ignore uranium.

[Hiladdar]

First off regarding oil processing, my opinion this new set of recommendations is has a one good recommendation, and a few small improvements, as far as the rest, it is mostly like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, does nothing to address the real problem, the iceberg which in this case is the hurdle for chemical science.

What I really like, is the short mod V453000 did with the proposed changes! Thanks for that it lets us know exactly what the proposed changes are and test them on our existing bases.

The good idea is the use of only steel + crude to make flamethrower ammo. That is good, since this will greatly simplify base defense were we no longer need any oil processing to for base defense, just pumping crude directly from oil patch into a tank then into the turret.

In chemical science, replacing solid fuel with surfer is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It replaces one item that needs oil processing with another. In the end the complexity for chemical science remains the same. For this reason, I recommend keeping chemical science the same. As it is right now, there is a large increase on the requirement of petroleum for the production of sulfuric acid using sulfur for now for chemical science will only exacerbate this problem.

I fully agree with Ambaire's comment of:

My primary concern is that the devs appear to be dumbing down the game to appeal to the lowest common denominator, instead of creating a more intelligent solution (better tutorials, UI hints, etc).

I believe that tutorials and UI hints / warnings similar to when your stuff is attacked by biters, would be a much more elegant solution.

I would be OK with a change of this magnate if we were migrating from version 0.16.51 to 0.17.0 or from 0.17.xx to 0.18.0.

But if you intending to go with the proposed changes, I would recommend basic oil processing to produce 60 petrol per 100 crude, and the advanced to produce 25 heavy and 60 light oil per 100 crude. Finally on the coal liquefaction recipe consider having the recipe of 15 coal, 25 heavy oil, and 75 steam, produce 105 heavy, 30 light, and 15 petrol.

I am ok with all the technology changes. They move things around but in the end, do not really affect base design. I am also ok with the changes to lasers and robots.

Hiladdar

[Hanse00]

Something else that I've not really seen anyone mention...

you're making all these changes so that people can more easily get into oil, to get chem science packs.

what happens when they do eventually research advanced oil processing, then realise they're going to have to completely redesign their base, because they didn't consider that you'd eventually have to add something to those 2 additional outputs on the refinery?

What happens when people realise 1 belt split between coal and iron isn't enough? That electric furnaces are larger than coal ones? That you actually need a lot more science production than you walled yourself into fitting?

I would argue all these situations are at the core of the gameplay of Factorio. Build once use forever is a fool's errand.

[Asterix]

My two cents: If the basic oil only returns methane, it should at least provide a polymerization process to convert methane into heavy oil for lubrication.

This unlocks the robots and smooths things out for veteran players.

The lack of light oil isn't as big a deal, IMO, it can probably wait for advanced oil processing.

All things considered, however, I'd much rather have the old recipe and a "dump as waste" recipe for all liquids.

[rizmage]

The whole reason for these changes is to make the game easier for "new players". There have been more than 1.5 to 2 million copies of Factorio sold, and the majority of those players managed to process oil. It took me a few attempts to get it right and I learned and enjoyed the experience, that is the point of playing a game like this.

I understand there will be people waiting for full version 1 release before purchasing, but I should think that this number would be less than the current player base. People who want to play this excellent game are already playing it, (and processing oil).

Do we need such a major change for "new players" who in my opinion will be a minority. Railways, combinators etc. are more complicated than oil processing, will they be dumbed down to make these easier too?

[Asterix]

The whole reason for these changes is to make the game easier for "new players". There have been more than 1.5 to 2 million copies of Factorio sold, and the majority of those players managed to process oil. It took me a few attempts to get it right and I learned and enjoyed the experience, that is the point of playing a game like this.

I understand there will be people waiting for full version 1 release before purchasing, but I should think that this number would be less than the current player base. People who want to play this excellent game are already playing it, (and processing oil).

Do we need such a major change for "new players" who in my opinion will be a minority. Railways, combinators etc. are more complicated than oil processing, will they be dumbed down to make these easier too?

The game isn't really being dumbed down, you still need to eventually understand everything you understand now. However, I do agree that this change is a bit of a head-scratcher, mostly because it's weirdly unrealistic: you refine crude oil and all you get from it is methane? Really?

If having to manage muliple outputs is an issue for new players (which it is), provide them with a waste disposal pump that simply kills any liquid pumped into it. Problem solved.

Removing the main source of heavy oil from the game doesn't seem like a solution.

[BlueTemplar]

The good idea is the use of only steel + crude to make flamethrower ammo. That is good, since this will greatly simplify base defense were we no longer need any oil processing to for base defense, just pumping crude directly from oil patch into a tank then into the turret.

You're confusing hand/tank flamethrower ammo with what the flame turret can use. It doesn't accept flamethrower ammo, and has accepted crude oil for a while :
viewtopic.php?p=370154#p370154

Hm I don't know about the flamethrower ammo, just using crude oil doesn't feel right.
Crude oil is very viscose and actually hard to ignite (don't get it burning so), it just doesn't fit as ammo.

I'd have it rather if you would need a recipe change to require:
1x crude oil barrel
2x petroleum barrels
for 3x barrels of flamethrower oil

The the added complexity of setting this up is IMO worth the benefit.
Also this way barrels have a actual use case where they are consumables and need some production.
They almost lost their merits with the fluid wagons.
As for turrets they should deal 120% dmg if you feed them with flamethrower oil.
Or rather flamethrower oil should be 100% and other fluids should deal less dmg.

You should check out this thread :
Remove flamethrower ammo from the game (and replace them by oil barrels as ammo).

However, I like your idea -
(I think that you mean hand/tank flamethrower ammo as output, rather than barrels of flame turret oil, right ?)
- it would be a nice alternative if AlienRaven's suggestion is unfeasible :
forcing new players to learn barrelling, while having an outlet for unused barrels for experienced players,
though perhaps just 2-5 barrels of crude oil per flamethrower ammo ?
2 kinds of fluids would be too complicated for new players in an early game recipe...