Koub wrote:I'm OK for that the exact day you can do all that recycling thing with exactly 0 pollution.
What you are doing right now is triple punishing people who use solar, roboports, and laser turrets.
1st, heavy pollution when you create tour first setup of solar, accus, build your laser turrets, build your building bots.
Let the infernal loop start
Then, for every accumulator, laser and bot, you'll need more electricity to power the infrastructure to recycle the batteries, which inturn need you to :
- add more solar+accus
- more robots (to go and get the used shells bring them to recycling facility or whatever
Building these will make you produce sh*tload of pollution. So you'll get attacked by more by biters. So you will :
- Add more turrets
- add more solar + accus to power these turrets.
Loop is complete, go back to the beginning, and watch your doom.
You've started a loop that is solely targeted at upkeeping your upkeep. Just tell me now, what is the advantage of green solar energy now ? Only cons. Might as well take it out from the game, or make it game over every time you plop one.
It should be clear that if a battery lasts like 30 recharge cycles or something that an accumulator would drop out a deteriorated battery every 30 game-days. (with random spikes it might differ)
That means a single accumulator, Laser Turret or Robot doesn't cause you to recycle batteries nonstop. Instead it would only become more noticeable the moreAccumulators, Laser Turrets and Robots you have.
Let's do some rule-of-thumb math for accumulators:
Currently a battery takes 5 seconds to craft. Let's say it would also take a Chemical Plant 5 seconds to process the deteriorated battery into its components, etc
A gameday lasts 416.6 seconds.
A Chemical Plant has a speed of 1.25 and requires 210kW power.
Let's say a battery lasts 30 full recharges. (might be too many recharges actually)
A single Chem Plant can reprocess 1.25 * 416.6s / 5s = 104.15 batteries a game day.
That alone means that every day 104 accumulators can dump a deteriorated battery that has to be reprocessed. But since they last 30 days you can basically recycle 3120 batteries with a single chem plant and have as many as 3120 accumulators before it becomes a bottleneck. That doesn't include a handfull of batteries that will be "in-flight" due to transport distance etc
It would take 3 machines in a simple setup to recycle a deteriorated battery: Dismantling into components, reprocessing Sulfur into Sulfuric Acid, assemble the components to new battery. If done in Chem plants then this requires 630kW of constant power. It's already negligible in comparison to how much energy the 3120 accumulators can store. With EM2's it would take 126kW.
In comparison Solid Fuel+Steam Power is far worse when it comes to how much it takes to power its own Refining/cracking process and Solid Fuel Plant.
So you see It really depends on the balancing... how much a "recharge" deteriorates a battery in each turn. If it would just take one recharge to deteriorate the battery then you are obviously screwed... but that's not what I had in mind. If they stand something like 30 cycles before finally succumbing then the overhead is most certainly manageable in my opinion, though I made no calculations for Laser Turrets and Robots, but I eventually they should work in a similar matter.
My goal would be that the first few hundred Laser Turrets, Accumulators or Robots shouldn't be to hard to accomplish with a simple battery recycling setup. I want it to be a fair approach that doesn't "triple punish" the player like you said.
But beyond that, like if you plan on using 10000 robots, 10000 laser turrets and 10000 accumulators then you are probably going to have a huge backend obviously. But you would also have to compare how much effort would go into creating a factory with the same capabilities only using Belts, Gun Turrets, Solid Fuel+Steam power instead. And that's why it becomes quite obvious that Solar Power (or any renewable energy in that matter), Laser Turrets and Robots need some balance because otherwise there is not even remotely something like an "option" or "choice".
With the deteriorating batteries you at least may think twice about going to solve a problem with a certain approach.
korda wrote:I believe that batteries needing replacement would mean that if you have power problems because you run out of batteries and you are not producing them fast enough... then... you are dead or have to destroy half of power poles to get it working again.
With steam you only need to supply coal to boilers to get stuff running again, with accus and panels you need whole industry working to get those batteries and probably robots to supply them to accu farms.
If you look at the approximated math above you see that if we are using reasonable amounts of recharge cycles for a battery then the throughput limit would mostly only target endgame players, which by that point should have enough knowledge of the game to circumvent the problem.
The average player probably will never go beyond a certain number of Accumulators, Laser Turrets or Robots so they probably won't have to invest a lot on the recycle process. And if they do go beyond the threshold of not being able to sustain as many entities they would at least learn an imporant thing from their mistake. Just because Solar Power/Laser Turrets/Robots are later in the tech tree shouldn't mean that they are no-brainers. On the contrary... more sophisticated technology should also require reasonable responsibilities in your actions and to think stuff through.
Besides that the same problem could happen to your Boiler/Steam Engine plants too if you don't plan the Refining/Solid Fuel production well. So priority management of who gets batteries first would be part of the deal the same way you have to manage Light Oil/Petroleum Priority.
And as for burning coal... that is the most inefficient way of power production in the game, by far. With a halfway decent Steam Engine setup (>400-500 engines or more) you would eat through your coal reserves in no time.
Lallante wrote:I also really like this idea.
Not only that, but the game-design concept of "recycling" products that feed back in to their own production chain's materials is a fantastic one and would really increase the options and depth of the system. Having more than one option to source raw materials would also be great.
Yeah, I think the "recycling" process of products could be extended to some other production cycles as well. It is an interesting approach on "fixing" overpowered gameplay features with a more "factorio-like" approach instead of trying to balance something just scaling up One-Time Investments or make something "worse" on purpose.
The recycling processes effectively turn the balancing/boredom problems into layout problems which can be automated and have to be scaled in order to take advantage of them.
Also it gives the player a bit more to play around with, which is mostly also a good thing.
Crafting recipes should be more modular in general... especially for the purpose of reprocessing/recycling stuff.
For example I can imagine Small Shells to be an item that has to be crafted before turning it into Regular/Piercing Rounds magazines or Regular/Piercing Shotgun magazines. So it adds 1 intermediate step, BUT... now imagine that with an upgrade to Gun Turrets the gun turrets may recover the empty ammunition Shells! That would at least get you back some of the investments you put into the ammunition and all you would have to do is recollect the empty shells and turn them into Piercing Rounds again. The fun part being that the shells are effectively one-time investments and first you use them for regular magazines and as you advance through the tech tree you can reuse them for Piercing rounds. Of course you can continue to dump the empty shells, but it would be more resource efficient to recycle them.
Stuff like that would open an entire new topic of factory optimization.
Hexicube wrote:Battery swapping will just swap the problem to solar panels being far too complicated in comparison to steam. You end up with accumulators being considered a pointless resource drain (just use hot water storage instead), laser turrets being replaced with gun turrets instead of a mixture (because ammo is so much easier to automate), and at best a hybrid power system (which temporary degradation on accumulators would achieve without the other issues).
It isn't too complicated in my opinion.
Solid Fuel production also requires to be tricky to make it reliable, which can be quite complex for the beginner to comprehent. Especially with the stalling of refineries and that Light Oil is more efficient for Solid Fuel than Petreolum Gas. So it takes quite some effort to establish that as well.
And with the Battery Reprocessing you would basically lift the Solar/Accumulator Power to a somewhat equal level of effort that has to go into it. And if they are at least somewhat equal then people would have a REAL choice other than simply "Solar Power > Steam Power".
Also in my opinion Hot Water in tanks shouldn't stay hot forever. Filling a tank with Hot Water in reallife wouldn't stay hot forever either. They should consider including simulating that in the pipe mechanics.