[0.11.x] Electricity (More Accumulators&SolarPanels) by XyLe

[V453000]

Very valid points, all of them. I like it. Especially the steam/boiler recipes, that's amazing.

[Qon]

The mod isn't called "electric producers or transmitters" though. It's about extended electricity.

So you have comitted to not mod burner insterters, non-electric furnaces, belts and gun turrets? I'm just saying that for "Electricity" to mean something to the people who read the name it kind of has to be limited to the parts that are most associated with electricity and not everything that uses electricity. It's fine if you want to mod other items, just giving you my interpretation and expactation of the current name. In a game where almost everything requires electricity it just seems a bit odd to me personally to specify "this mod is about electricity and nothing else" and have that mean "This factorio mod is about factorio stuff". But it's your mod.

Just checked what a single assembler with 4 productivity 3 modules and 12 beacons with 2 speed 3 modules in each draws. 2.6 MW for the assembler and 5.7 MW for the beacons. That's the very worst ratio you can get if your assemblers are working full time, right? Also if you place the assemblers in a grid when going for 12 beacons on each assembler you will use less energy. With only 4 assemblers and 36 beacons (12 in reach of each assembler) I was already using less than twice as much power for beacons comapared to assemblers.

It's called theorycraft and i don't like it. If you're ready to share a replay of you building a real thing in a normal game i'll check it out. If you're gonna throw a bunch of numbers at me - i'm not interested, i can do that myself.

It's called theorycrafting? I like it! Nice name, descriptive and fun to engage in.

I'm sorry but I can't show replays and you (should) know at least some of the reasons. You aren't requesting this seriously, right? Replays are disabled in a save when you change mods. We are discussing this in the modding forum where we both know we have modded the games in the recent past and that it's reasonable to assume none of us has replays. Heavy beacon setups are for the end game so I can't jump into a new game and show you my burner beacon setup either.

Also my playstyle would not work with a replay anyways.

And why a replay and not a screenshot of a setup? I don't rush to the end with only the perfect setups. I have a save I tinker with and try maknig new blueprints and try new mods on. I don't see what a replay has to do with any of this.

So you are doing something very wrong or you are doing something very good I don't know about. You should probably fix your factory so that your assemblers are working all the time.

Let's agree on something here: i'm very bad and i'm doing everything very wrong. Ok? That's fine by me and i'm not gonna argue with anybody to prove otherwise.

I didn't mean to insult you or your factory. Sorry if that sounded like a critisicm of your person. What I meant was that the fact that your factory uses more electricity than optimal isn't an argument for beacons being energy hungry. It's fine to do suboptimal setups, both temporary and permanent. I do a lot of suboptimal stuff too. But I wouldn't use my factory stats as proof that something is this or that way without considering if I'm doing things the optimal way. While you don't necessarily do the optimal thing, you always balance for the optimal path. Because players will theorycraft and it shouln't break the game. And anything can be used in the "wrong" way and that is no reason to buff (or in this case claim something uses a lot of energy and balance other parts in relation to it) it until it works in the "worst" configuration.

So I'm not saying you are bad, just that your argument that beacons are using 10 times more energy than everything else is not sound since it only applies to your factory and not a property of the game. K? You said that it applies to all productivity factories:

Did you know that productivity oriented factories actually spend 10 times more power on beacons than they spend on any other power consumers?

As it was a fact applicable to all productivity factories. All I meant was to point out that it isn't a property of productivity factories. Instead it's only limited amount of data gathered from your factory, about your factory. Is this sorted out now? Or do I have to show the most embarassing parts of my own factory?

This discussion actually made me a bit interested in making a productivity focused factory. I'm rebuilding everything anyways now. So thank you for that.

I don't like it. I prefer just balancing the recipes. And I have 40 MK6 solar panels that give 61 MW each. Regular solar panels would give 3 times as much power but I feel it's worth it because it's fun and convenient to have a portable powerplant. I think the price is reasonable.

If you went with 6 panels for 4 times the power then you would need almost 8k solar panels for a single MK6 panel that gives the power of 1024 as much power as a regular one. You would then only get 13% the power of regular solar panels you put in when you "upgrade". And on top of that it's all the other items you have to pay for also. Isn't that a bit too much?

I went with 6 panels for mk2-mk4, i never said anything about mk6 and i don't even know which recipe it would use and what kind of power generation it should offer. That's what we're trying to decide right now. So i don't know where you're getting your information.

My information comes from my branch of the mod where MK6 panels continue the pattern with 5 of the previous tier for 4 times the power q:
Your version has up to MK5 though with that pattern and it's pretty much the same there. It's about 2.5 times more electricity from the basic panels used up in the recipe to create the MK5 panels. And that seems fair to me. Of course your next version doesn't have to be like that, but I enjoyed your v1 when it was like that.

So basically my opinion is that

• A consistent pattern is good and beautiful. It would seem weird to me if the pattern wasn't kept consistent between tiers even if it's otherwise balanced. So I would try to balance it without breaking the pattern. This point is about consistency between tiers and not versions of the mod.
• However I also think the 4:5 setup works well (40% efficiency at mk5). Seems fair to me.

It's a bit tricky to get a constistency between tiers and make it just require slightly more resources than it does now.
Both 3:4 (23% at 243 times the power, mk6 needed for that) and 4:6 is (20% efficiency for power of 256 MK1 panels) about half as good as the current version. It's a big nerf to require 100% more materials, don't you agree? It wouldn't be completely unusable though. Maybe it would work. I'm not qonvinced yet but I'll think about it. The lower tiers aren't hit as hard which is the good thing about the exponential in this case. 4:6 seems better than 3:4 for the nice 4^x power curve which has nice and even numbers.
2:3 is just not worth it at all (4% efficiency at 256 times more powerful panels, needs mk9!).
Something like 6:9 could also work, with 29% efficiency at 216 times the power (mk4). It would mean less tiers though and you don't simply need one quarter of the previous amount to get the same amount of energy which was nice when you had squares of solar panels. Having a consistent ratio makes it harder to balance since we can't have rational numbers of items in our recipes unless we allow using productivity modules to boost the panel crafting...

And no, it is not a bit too much. I honestly appreciate your opinion and i'm grateful for your time and effort, finally having such a long discussion is exactly what i always wanted, i understand that you want this mod to be better, i'm glad you like it. I promise to consider your point, it's good and you clearly have your personal taste but you're also capable of adjusting the mod however you see fit. That's why in the end i'll have the balance which i like and my personal taste will be the highest priority here, i hope you can understand that and still enjoy the mod, even if it's not gonna be done the way you've suggested.

Cheers)

Of course. It's your mod. I'm glad if I can help!
And yes I will likely mod it to suit me. Which is why I can claim I don't want it balanced in a certain way purely for my own gains I want it to be as good as possible for all who wants a compact electricity mod like this. I only know my own preferences and intimately though.

Cheers!

[Qon]

Steam boiler mk2 uses more pipes and a steel furnace.
Steam engine mk2 uses engines. I kinda like the recipes. It's 4 times the power compared to basic versions.

So is the boilers mk2 still 50% efficient But scaled up to use and produce 4 times as much power? The limits on how much water you can pump through, consume and how much you can heat water seem to be a bit tricky to balance. It will be interesting to see what you come up with. Can it compete with solar when those are as space efficient as they are now? Is the fuel burning path might be much cheaper to set up or something in it's favor?

[gendalf]

Why do the panels and accumulators scale so badly? like 1 mk3 pannel is wasting 540kw since it takes 25 panels to make.
The only thing vanila panels require is space, which in free mode is unlimited. I'd like to have a more correctly scaled version of the mod.

[XyLe]

Why do the panels and accumulators scale so badly? like 1 mk3 pannel is wasting 540kw since it takes 25 panels to make.
The only thing vanila panels require is space, which in free mode is unlimited. I'd like to have a more correctly scaled version of the mod.

It's in the config file now. You can even make it cheaper if you want, i don't care. There's just a number of solar panels which is used to make a better solar panel.

Originally the idea was to have a price for space effeciency. So you get more compact panels but you have to invest more resources. I don't intend it to be that way anymore, again - it's in the config now, i've redone all the code and i'm currently testing ver 2.0 to find syntax errors and forgotten things. As soon as i'm done with testing i'll make an overview of the new version and upload everything to the forums. cheers!

[XyLe]

Steam boiler mk2 uses more pipes and a steel furnace.
Steam engine mk2 uses engines. I kinda like the recipes. It's 4 times the power compared to basic versions.

So is the boilers mk2 still 50% efficient But scaled up to use and produce 4 times as much power? The limits on how much water you can pump through, consume and how much you can heat water seem to be a bit tricky to balance. It will be interesting to see what you come up with. Can it compete with solar when those are as space efficient as they are now? Is the fuel burning path might be much cheaper to set up or something in it's favor?

Ima tell you this - i haven't yet read all of the above, it was a huge post of yours. I've glanced through and i haven't seen any revelations there or anything i really needed to know to make the mod right now because the config solves the most if not all of your issues.

I'm not gonna argue with you about factorio stuff anyways. There's just no benefit, only a waste of time. If i'll have time to kill some other day i'll read your post, i promise)) but now i'm gonna focus on testing the mod, there's probably still something wrong with it. And the graphics could be better, i may wanna put some more effort in color-coding the stuff... So it's probably gonna be out tomorrow if things go well.

It took me to write almost everything from scratch but you'll be pleased to know that i made the code as short and as pretty as i could, it's much more beautiful and tweaks-friendly now, of course the implementation of the config file does help a ton with adjustments too. I can't be sure about the recipes yet but we'll figure it out and maybe then i'll make 2.1 or something to tweak the graphics and the recipes.

Regarding steam engines mk2, just wait a little bit to see, they have gold-ish tint and they make 4 times as much power but they consume that much more water. So basically you can only have 1 regular pump per 5 engines mk2. Although boilers mk2 are more fuel effecient. So they eat significantly less wood/coal/whatever. Cheers!

[Qon]

Why do the panels and accumulators scale so badly? like 1 mk3 pannel is wasting 540kw since it takes 25 panels to make.
The only thing vanila panels require is space, which in free mode is unlimited. I'd like to have a more correctly scaled version of the mod.

While XyLe's next version will have the cost easily configurable, a fan of this mod made his own version that uses 4 to get 4 times the power (and has other stuff also) viewtopic.php?f=93&t=24127
I haven't tested it so can't say if it's good or bad yet though. Otherwise just wait for XyLe's version 2, it will probably be fantastic q:

[PlatinumEragong]

Why do the panels and accumulators scale so badly? like 1 mk3 pannel is wasting 540kw since it takes 25 panels to make.
The only thing vanila panels require is space, which in free mode is unlimited. I'd like to have a more correctly scaled version of the mod.

While XyLe's next version will have the cost easily configurable, a fan of this mod made his own version that uses 4 to get 4 times the power (and has other stuff also) viewtopic.php?f=93&t=24127
I haven't tested it so can't say if it's good or bad yet though. Otherwise just wait for XyLe's version 2, it will probably be fantastic q:

hey they scale so badly because there desined to be more balanced... for a item that use the same space its kinda better to make it cost more for the same space but tones more energy.

[PlatinumEragong]

Any chance on getting a 0.12 version?

ive recreated the mode you can see it in here viewtopic.php?f=93&t=32371

[PlatinumEragong]

MK3 Solar Panel don't charge any accumulator in isolated network, but simply solar panel do.

Screens

1.PNG

2.PNG

Have you read this?

Any chance on getting a 0.12 version?

In the zip file if you replace /prototype/entity-solar-panels with
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zred2ls7cs61s ... s.lua?dl=0

it will work for 0.12

Have you tried the MK 2,4 and 5 if they work?
Mark 3 works for me.

ive recreated the mode you can see it in here viewtopic.php?f=93&t=32371