Modules balancing?

[wyp020610]

IIRC eff modules 2 and 3 have been useless for a long time. In vanilla I just can't find a use for them.
Eff1 is actually rather powerful. I play relatively green and I always rush it. Miners are a main pollution source and green modules cut it down a lot. It also saves a lot of energy in other machines, reduces pollution in the boiler plant.
Eff2 are not worth the cost IMO. For electric furnaces and pumpjacks, they are an additional -20% saving to eff1, but eff2 are expensive so not worth it in general.
Eff3 are just ridiculous. When I can afford them, I no longer care about the resource they save.
Prod modules are fine.
Prod 1 is useful as soon as I unlock it. Plug it in assemblers and it will work. No beacon needed.
Prod 2 slow down machines a lot, and are best used with beacons. They are also a good stepping stone to prod3.
Prod 3 is powerful and expensive. Typical for endgame things.
Speed modules... I use Speed2 and 3 in beacons together with prod modules, but I never find speed1 worth using. If I need more speed, then I could just build more machines instead. Cheaper, and energy cost is still a thing at this stage.

Some observations on module balance in mods:
Exotic industries: Speed 1 is +10% energy cost and +30% speed. Very worth using when unlocked. Also cheaper than those modded machines.
While high level eff modules are still useless in EI, mixing eff and speed makes good sense. There are machines with huge energy costs (IIRC quantum supercomputer is 100MW), even with nuclear there is still good reason to put some green modules in the beacon.
Space Exploration: High level eff modules are super powerful. Eff1 is -40%, Eff9 is -1000%. 25x as powerful as eff1. I haven't reached it yet, but I think it will pair well with those 250MW machines.
Bobangels: High level modules are super cheap. However, there are no buildings with high base power draw, so I'm still not sure whether I should build more power generators or insert eff in beacons.

Now look back to vanilla, with SA:
1. High level eff modules certainly need buff. This depends on how many power hogs SA will add. Single large machines with huge power draw can make good use of eff modules. But even with a single machine base draw 1GW, the current eff3 won't be much better over eff2.
With SE module balancing, eff module power grows a little slower than sqrt to cost. So with eff1 -30% unchanged, eff2 should be -60%, and eff3 -120%. These number look large, but modules are expensive & power generation is cheap.
I don't know how quality will affect this module balancing. I think quality eff modules should be more powerful than the +30% per quality tier, since power saving become less and less relevant as the player progress. Maybe +30% per tier but compounding will work?
2. For speed1, I think it should be +20% speed and +30% energy cost. Maybe +20% energy cost. Energy matters in this stage, and module slots are constrained for beacons so speed2 are still better in beacons.

[Hares]

Space Exploration actually handles this issue very well.
The changes are:

1. Speed modules generate extra pollution (same as prod modules) and require extra power
2. Prod modules are slightly weaker
3. Green modules are stronger on all levels with a non-linear scale (-40%/-60%/-100% for t1/t2/t3 respectively, and up to -1000% for t9).
4. Green modules also reduce pollution (10% base, 5% for each next tier)

[Panzerknacker]

Agree that Eff1 are a bit too powerful. They reduce energy consumption and polution of the total factory by an huge amount. There is a no other research around that tier with such a huge impact, even more so considering the low cost of the research.

[Stargateur]

All my game are with https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SchallModules that buff efficiency module