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I wanted to dicscuss one issue I have with the technologie of Coal Liquification:
While I'm certain that it is a nice addition to the game, there is one issue which bothers me for this technologiy and that is: You need oil to research it and get it started!
From my point of view it is not only meant to supplement your oil supply with possibly abundant coal, but also to give a way out, if you don't have any reasonably exploitable oil patch at all. And since oil doesn't run out, in the long run you always will have an ever increasing supply from it (you can add more and more minimum production oil wells). And even if it does not neccessarily sattisfy the demand, adding the first oil patch can get quite hard depending on your map. Even for standard Map settings Oil can be quite elusive! If the only oil patch is sitting in a giant enemy base, this can be quite frustrating, since you only realize it after already building for a certain time (unless oil is in your starting area which is not neccessarylily any more desirable from a builders point of view).
I my opinion the technology should loose the Tech level 3 requrement and heavy oil input for production (which for fluids does not really add to the building challenge in my opinion anyway).
What do other people think?
Stm

Or, as an alternative, provide a way to make either oil, or one of its products, without requiring oil or its products.

Even modders don't seem to do this. I've tried several mods which can make crude oil from other materials, but they've all required either crude oil or something made from it in their production.

It seems actual alternatives to the almighty pumpjack are rare as hen's teeth.

I find it kinda hard to believe that someone can have no oil on standard settings, because I always play with frequency of all resources lowered, and I've never seen complete absence of oil.

When I saw the coal liquification I thought about playing a map with no oil, instead only relying on a coal supply. Unfortunately that is not currently possible

eX_ploit wrote:I find it kinda hard to believe that someone can have no oil on standard settings, because I always play with frequency of all resources lowered, and I've never seen complete absence of oil.

I've had to abandon at least one game because I couldn't find any oil without hard early battles vs biters. That was 0.14 so map gen rules may have changed, but coal liquefaction doesn't help get past the "I have no good way of clearing biter bases" stage if you can't find any oil.