Fluid balancing
Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2018 10:51 pm
A delicate issue.
The reason I believe fluids need balancing is due to Crude oil behaving differently to every other raw resource in the game. Once crude oil has been processed it takes up more space in storage than the raw product. All the other resources gain a storage bonus (minimum double) from processing allowing you to store more in chests or on trains encouraging site processing. Oil even before productivity modules eats 100 crude and spits out 110 liquid in oil products, throw in productivity modules and this gets far worse. (I know water is involved as well but rare is the player who transports that in trains) This is further compounded by requiring separate storage tanks for each each of the three oil products. Barrels did need to be nerfed so barrel cargo wagons could not beat the liquid wagon this made logical sense but a side effect was they made using barrels for anything but the smallest jobs pointless. Also considering the cost of barreling, un-barreling and infrastructure they are now effectively extinct.
To balance this I would recommend a couple of possible balance changes.
1) Half the amount of oil products produced while you also half the amount of resources the recipes that require them use.
2) Double the amount of crude oil required for oil processing, double the output of all oil derricks output and double the capacity of liquid wagons and barrels.
These are just rough suggestions the general point is to make barrels viable for use with processed oil products while still leaving it unattractive for crude oil transport. The only way I see to do that is have processed oil take up less space in storage than the crude that made it.
Alternative suggestions welcome.
The reason I believe fluids need balancing is due to Crude oil behaving differently to every other raw resource in the game. Once crude oil has been processed it takes up more space in storage than the raw product. All the other resources gain a storage bonus (minimum double) from processing allowing you to store more in chests or on trains encouraging site processing. Oil even before productivity modules eats 100 crude and spits out 110 liquid in oil products, throw in productivity modules and this gets far worse. (I know water is involved as well but rare is the player who transports that in trains) This is further compounded by requiring separate storage tanks for each each of the three oil products. Barrels did need to be nerfed so barrel cargo wagons could not beat the liquid wagon this made logical sense but a side effect was they made using barrels for anything but the smallest jobs pointless. Also considering the cost of barreling, un-barreling and infrastructure they are now effectively extinct.
To balance this I would recommend a couple of possible balance changes.
1) Half the amount of oil products produced while you also half the amount of resources the recipes that require them use.
2) Double the amount of crude oil required for oil processing, double the output of all oil derricks output and double the capacity of liquid wagons and barrels.
These are just rough suggestions the general point is to make barrels viable for use with processed oil products while still leaving it unattractive for crude oil transport. The only way I see to do that is have processed oil take up less space in storage than the crude that made it.
Alternative suggestions welcome.