Factorio Forums

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.

Productivity modules also can put more resources out than were put in.

I've never had a real problem using a single storage tank each for heavy, light and petroleum outputs. Storing output isn't a challenge, but getting enough petroleum is.

Transporting petroleum and lube only is already viable.
I don't know about you but having a giant, centralized refinery with those kinds of pipe physics is misery and then you have to transport the petroleum and lubricant someplace else anyway.
It's much more economic to refine oil on-site.

Pumping a viable amount of petroleum fluids across a thousand tiles is quite frankly a pretty trivial task. Fluids move very far and pipes have excellent(if impossible to comprehend) throughput in Factorio. They even surpass blue belts in an apples to apple juice comparison. The only time pipe throughput is truly stressed is when dealing with boiler water, and that's because boilers demand an absolute absurd amount of water. It takes 130 units of water alone to satisfy a single piece of burned coal!

There's very little point in using fluid trains even once on your way to the rocket. Pipes will take care of most of your needs.

to make barrels viable for use with processed oil products

Bots already carry up to 200 fluid in a single trip, and it used to be 1000 before the barrel nerf. 200 fluid translates to 20 "items" and very few recipes have extreme liquid demands that demand too many bots. Moving lubricant and sulfuric acid by bot is completely viable for a large base, and other output products are fairly reasonable to move by bot. But why bother? Bot transfer isn't necessarily bad, but rather pipes are very good.

bobucles wrote:Productivity modules also can put more resources out than were put in.

True but its the transportation that's the issue at hand, you can transport 2000 iron ore in a cargo wagon. If you smelt it first even with productivity modules you get 2200 iron plate that you can cram into a cargo wagon and still have room for another 1800 iron plate. This is one of the reasons decentralized processing is so attractive.
Take 25k crude oil and turn it and it's by products all into Petroleum with productivity modules and you have a little over 33k Petroleum that's going to be more difficult to transport than the crude you brought in. Meaning it's more attractive to just transport the crude and process it where it's needed. (We are assuming water is not an issue)

dood wrote:It's much more economic to refine oil on-site.

That is the balance I'm talking about, oil is the only product where it takes less transport space to more the raw than it does to move the processed forms. If the heavy, Light and Petroleum took up less space after processing it would make alternatives viable and possibly put barrels back in play. Currently oil only has one efficient solution and implementation across all game types.

I really miss my sushi train designs that are now no longer viable because barrels take up 50 times more space. I have to pipe things everywhere and it's killing my UPS.

Here some numbers
One wagon plastic bars contains 40k peotroleum plus 2k coal.

One tanker sulfuric acid contains 37.5k units Petroleum and 500 iron.

One wagon rocket fuel contains 40k light oil (or 80k heavy oil or petroleum)

I think these are the main oil products that you need to ship.

For most througput:
-ship plastic bars
-ship sulfuric acid
-ship rocket fuel

If you include productivity modules then it gets less rosy.
2000 Sulfur (Full wagon) takes ->
17327 Crude
25000 Sulfuric acid (Full wagon) takes ->
16661 Crude and 385 Iron plate
400 Rocket fuel (Full wagon) takes ->
20555 Crude
4000 Plastic (Full wagon) takes ->
23103 Crude and 1539 coal

Plastic is the only one that comes out ahead all the rest it's more efficient to ship it in raw.
8000 Green chips (Full wagon) takes ->
5102 copper ore and 4761 Iron ore
That means it's 490% more efficient to move green chips that the raw resources.
It's 166% more efficient to move Iron plate than the raw resources.

Fluids are nearly always more efficient to move raw that to transport the processed form.