Friday Facts #304 - Small bugs; Big changes

[Koub]

I guess if we moved sulfur to be made from HO, though, it makes slightly more sense than making it out of PG.

Don't you know, this is a perfectly balanced equation :

30 C2H4 + 30 H2O => 2 S

Screw physics chemistry.

[bhaktivedanta]

Holy carp! Last time I checked this was about the new oil recipe, now it is about turning the whole game upside down... time for FF305...

[Amarula]

Let's just make sure I am not promoting something I did not want to: my idea was that we make sulfur from heavy oil, or we make lubricants from heavy oil, not sulfur and lubricants at the same time

Indeed I thought your post was quite clear, and I take complete blame responsibility for the idea of producing sulfur and lube at the same time.

And thank you for posting the images, that is exactly my mental picture (with the addition of my little player character half buried underneath) when I read your description of a mountain of sulfur!

[Theikkru]

The more I think about it, the more I feel that rebalancing the chemical science pack to use more solid fuel should be part of the solution. Doing that alone would provide a persistent sink for any oil products in excess at the perfect time in tech development. The 3 recipes to make solid fuel become available alongside pumpjacks themselves, and so are immediately available alongside basic oil processing. If chemical science packs used enough solid fuel, (say, 3~5 per recipe,) then players would be able to balance oil product consumption by simply prioritizing the chemplants producing solid fuel, eliminating the need for wasteful voiding of tanks. This can even be done without circuits, by putting priorities on splitters merging the solid fuel belts. This would solve the oil refining balance problem cleanly and temporarily, without repercussions for the rest of the tech tree (unlike moving cracking forward in the tech tree).
Conversely, as the factory grows and moves on technologically, this solution would seamlessly provide pressure to switch to advanced processing and cracking; consumption of chemical science remains linear with respect to other production, while petroleum products (i.e. plastic and sulfur) are far more heavily utilized in the production of advanced chips, processing units, and recipes that use them later on.

[BlueTemplar]

Ok, new players might find a use for it, but hoping people make something potentially useless & easily dismissable just because they're forced to spend a resource isn't good game design. I usually have enough coal to last me until I get solars & electric furnaces (& nuclear fuel for trains further on) for me to not need to bother, and many might feel the same, forgetting the recipe even exists. And replacing coal usage with solid fuel (without breaking things that need just coal) is another bump in the oil setup process that one would need to do before being able to actually get anything out of it.

Solid fuel is very useful. Coal should be saved for products you need later, like plastic and explosives. Notice solid fuel has, what, about 4 times as much energy as coal does, right? Whereas you need the coal to make bulk products. So I'll tell you what I tell any of the new players on my network: you're being a bit silly if you're still burning that coal for power.

[...] it is much more efficient to burn solid fuel instead of coal for power. Plus the fact that solid fuel is technically infinite, since oil is infinite.
[...]

It's not that simple - you have to compare the costs for 1 unit of coal and 1 unit of solid fuel - required buildings, logistics, energy and pollution... and the impact from pollution on biter attacks also heavily depends on the respective locations of pollution emitters (and absorbers) !

(this is not to say I completely agree with the change (well, I mostly do), and I may be biased because I've never used coal liquefaction and don't really care about getting solid fuel until it's strictly required, and always struggled with my base dying when light & heavy oil backed up since it has exactly 0 use to me before blue science)

As a random aside, the only time I've used coal liquifaction is when I had a coal patch near a uranium patch and I decided I didn't want to ship sulfuric acid to the uranium patch. So I set up a tiny oil chain that just produce sulfuric acid and nothing else (except, of course, for siphoning off just enough heavy oil to keep the process moving).

Whether you're bottlenecked on oil or coal will depend a lot on what game settings you picked, and also on random chance.
For instance, in the two vanilla(-ish) games where I got to or near coal liquefaction, I'm using it (or about to).
(Though, one of them is 0.16 RSO with low resources, where I specifically disabled oil in the starting area.)

[...]
the fact that solid fuel is technically infinite, since oil is infinite.
[...]

You might not have access to a sufficient flow of it though... it might be much farther than coal, or be blocked by an annoying/prohibitive amount of biter nests...

I'm by no means a fast player. But I was always fine with doing maybe 80-160 steam engines running on coal. That's 72-144MW. And then putting done some solar. I keep using steel furnaces for a long time. So I don't have excessive power needs from electric smelters.

Maybe it's still residual PTSD from my first game where using solid fuel sucked down all my oil. But that was before the oil rebalance. Now it's a lot more plentiful.
Maybe not having much coal would be different, but I don't play with super low resources. I rather have substantial patches far apart

What kind of game settings do you use ?!?
I don't think that I ever used more than a dozen boilers !

Now that I think of it, I don't think the game mentions anywhere that crude oil is infinite though? I wouldn't be surprised if many assumed oil might deplete faster than ores, whereas it's quite the opposite. Lots of communication issues around oil (ha ha ha..)

Well, regular ores clearly show the amount, and individual tiles getting depleted...
I don't know what the general new player assumptions about oil fields are ? I'd guess that it involves being aware that they tend to deplete ?
It would be nice though, if the depletion rule of final amount being 20% of initial OR at least 20% was shown somewhere - currently, we don't even have to way to know what the final flow will be, unless painstakingly noting what the initial output was ! (Is there a mod that specifically does that ? Maybe as an extension of Resource Labels ?)

[BlueTemplar]

Construction Drones,
[...]
I would make them locked to a personal robo(drono?)port of maybe just 10 (15, 20?), and not include any building ports or provider/requester chests, so you can't automate building unless you are directly supervising it.

That's unworkable, as modular armor is way later...
Why not a regular dronoport though, like in the animation I posted ?

You could also rework so these early drones match the building of con bots (Robotic frame + 2 EC) as the first progression after robotics, and then beef up con bots with Robot Frame + Advanced Circuits + Green Wire and Log bots with RF + 2 AC + Red Wire.

This is unworkable too, as long as robot frames need sulfur and lubricant. (Remember how defender robots were almost useless, arriving way too late ?)

[Monara]

I just want to say thank you for adding the obstacle avoidance back to the rail planner.
Straight up removing features in order to streamline the UI never sat well with me, and for me this took away the entire point of the rail planner. If I want to create straight lines that ignore the environment I just use blueprints that include power poles and signals. I'm really happy the defining feature making the rail planner useful is back.

As for doing something about the oil processing obstacle for new players is probably a good thing, but I don't agree with the chosen solution. It essentially gives the player complete cracking down of oil without even requiring water before even unlocking the actual cracking recipes.

[vampiricdust]

In all honestly, you should get rid of light and heavy oil, it serves no purpose other than to make things complicated for the sake of being complicated.

Just have everything made from petroleum and be done with it, let advance oil processing just make more petroleum per crude oil. Why complicate this so much?

while we're at it, remove copper and make everything from iron
copper only serves to make things complicated for the sake of being complicated

the point of oil processing having multiple outputs is to match real-world chemical processes, in addition to providing a logistical challenge to the player. I personally feel like this suggestion aims to remove logistics from a game involving logistics as a core component.

You totally missed my point. I was arguing that there is no major resource sink for light & heavy oil. You need tons and tons of copper. Also, not using copper doesn't stop your ability to make more iron.

Having nearly useless products that have only solid fuel and lubricant, which are not used to the same degree as PG is used. There needs to be a more reasonable way for those products to be consumed.

[Zavian]

Having nearly useless products that have only solid fuel and lubricant, which are not used to the same degree as PG is used. There needs to be a more reasonable way for those products to be consumed.

There is. You crack the excess to petroleum. (Now how to better communicate that to new players is another matter).