Factorio Forums

Not sure if it has to be in the bug section but here it is:

-advanced material processing2 (electric furnace) can be researched before oil, however you need oil to make plastics for the advanced circuits needed to build the electric furnace.

The problem is that Advanced electronics is a huge bottleneck in the tech tree.

The simple fix is to make Advanced electronics require Plastics, because both of its recipes do. However, this adds an extra required tech to everything else. Laser, Electric engine, and Solar energy normally don't require Plastics. (I am in favor of doing it anyway!)

Making Advanced material processing 2 require Plastics would be better than nothing, I guess.

There's a discussion about it here: Research requirements should include needed items [Balancing]

In my opinion the technology doesn't only research the two items (advanced circuits and processing units), but also gives the ability to research lasers and solar panels, it makes sense to research it to be able to research later technologies.
One could argue that it would be better if they wouldn't require Advanced electronics technology at all as they actually don't use it, but I think that would make solar available too soon and only require Optics and Steel, and buildable with steel, copper plates and green circuits only.

My personal take:

Anything that requires AE but doesn't use AE items should fall back to Electronics.
AE should require everything to make the AE boards, including plastics.
Processing unit should move to AE2
anything that requires processing units elevate to AE2
anything that requires AE2 that doesn't use processing units should go back down to AE.

I've thought it strange that as soon as you can research Advanced Materials Processing, you can immediately follow that up with Advanced Materials Processing 2 and provided you have Oil Processing done, skip ever using Steel Furnaces and go straight to Electric Furnaces. Easy fix might be to make AMP2 require Blue Science (since that requires red circuits to make anyways, just like the actual electric furnace. It would also separate Steel and Electric Furnaces more so that there would be reasons to actually build Steel Furnaces besides not wanting to rework your Furnace layout due to Electric being 3x3 instead of 2x2.

Frightning wrote:skip ever using Steel Furnaces and go straight to Electric Furnaces.

That is actually a bad idea, it costs 2x as much coal to run electric furnaces through boilers. Electric furnaces are only useful in combination with modules or solar panels.

DaveMcW wrote:

Frightning wrote:skip ever using Steel Furnaces and go straight to Electric Furnaces.

That is actually a bad idea, it costs 2x as much coal to run electric furnaces through boilers. Electric furnaces are only useful in combination with modules or solar panels.

I usually have at least one of those (usually solar) started by the time I am researching more advanced Furnace tech.

It makes sense that you can't research a plastic item without first researching plastics. Tweaks like this help keep the tech tree intuitive, which means a better learning experience for players. Yes, I do think Blue Processors are unlocked far too early, given how much more they require to build.

If for example solar power suddenly becomes easy to research, those issues can be dealt with on a case by case basis.