TlDr
Make coal-liquefaction easier to get so when you have little/no oil you can use it to produce oil.
Detailed explanation
I play a lot of PvP, oil fields, their size and location become very important, the same can be said for non-pvp scenarios I would argue. Coal-liquefaction provides a viable alternative to generating oil however the tech is currently quite expensive (when you are oil poor in pvp), requiring production science packs, blue science packs and advanced oil processing.
What I propose is to remove the dependency on advanced oil processing and remove the need for production science packs to research the tech. An even more radical change would to make it a red/green tech but then reduce the effectiveness (amount of product per unit coal) obtained. Implementing these changes will make coal-liquefaction a more viable alternative for generating oil.
Thank you for reading and I welcome any comments
Kind regards
EvilxFish
Cheaper coal-liquefaction tech
Re: Cheaper coal-liquefaction tech
Yeah I think coal liquefaction should be about the same cost and prerequisites as advanced oil processing (or included in it if we bump up the cost of AOP). Maybe make Advanced Oil Processing cost 100 instead of 75, but it includes Coal Liquefaction. Especially if we're moving oil patches farther out from the starting area we're going to want something to do with the large coal patches that might lay between your first oil patch and the next one you expand to.