Maintainance for Solar Pannels

[Ethribin]

In the "solar panels, return on investments" thread ( https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=5&t=4356 ) MeduSalem (https://forums.factorio.com/forum/mem ... ile&u=2492) made an interesting suggestion.

The discussion in that thread is about how useful solar panels are compared to steam engines by comparing the cost needed to build them and the energy they give back.

All discussions normally end with solar panels winning as they simply are to be plotted down and they produce energy for free forever (with accumulator combos even throughout the night.) So the cost of building them drops to zero over time.

Now MeduSalem made an interesting suggestion as I said before, which is to have solar panels require maintenance XD

I'll just quote his post as he does a good job explaining his idea.

Solar --> I built it, I'm done, nothing left to do here, ever

That's the reason why Solar farming wins no matter the resource costs. They are "Build & Forget", which is very, very bad gameplay-wise, especial the longer you keep playing, in my humble opinion.

Yes there's a point to discuss the return on investment for speedruns with a fixed length of gameplay, but on the longterm if you are dedicated to a map and keep on going for 100 hours and more then Solar Farming is way too broken. Since space is also infinite (at least if you ticked that option during map generation) you get infinite power without ever running out of resources to keep that power production going. It's a one-time investment that doesn't require any upkeep. On top of that it doesn't attract any Biters because it doesn't generate any pollution, which also keeps the energy/resource-costs low to defend your base. Once you push the Biters out of your pollution radius they never attack anymore. It's just waaayyy too unbalanced.

This "one-time investment" leaves you in the spot that at some point you don't have to expand the borders of your factories any further to get more resources to keep power production going. With Coal & Oil you need to continually expand since Coal runs out completely if you burn all that stuff and Oil wells being too sparse and losing efficiency over time. Both of which will force you to expand your borders to find more coal deposits and more oil wells to keep up with your comsumption and therefore you have to produce even more infrastructure to cover the transport as well. At some point it's getting a ridiculous race against time since the distances are becoming greater and greater.

You never have those problems with Solar farms since Copper and Iron are pretty common anyways and later in the game my storages run full with millions of them, especially when I don't have to expand anymore and build additional infrastructure. Might as well use that stuff in Piercing Magazines since I don't know what else to do with it at some point. Which would be quite ridiculous itself since that would even further lower the need for Laser Turrets and thereby Energy upkeep costs, because Gun Turrets with Piercing Magazines are much stronger anyways once fully upgraded.

Long story short: In fact Solar Farming renders gameplay boring. Plop & Forget, attracts no biters, no resource struggle. Nothing to fear. Boring.

That's why I have started to avoid using solar panels in my current games because they take away too much of the expansion/exploration as well as combat experience.

Even the speculated Nuclear Power stuff will probably have an upkeep eventually, probably attracting biters since they won't like the radiation stuff.

One solution to the "problem": Make solar panels deteriorate, just like the oil-wells. Go from 100% to 20% slowly over 10 hours time starting from 30 minutes after placed or something like that.

Or make them deteriorate at a faster pace but also make them "repairable" meaning you need a division of bots to constantly polish and refurbish them. I think this would be most in line with the other mechanics of the game.

The deterioration would be a possible solution, but only if there's a ridiculously low cap (worse than 20%) and with a repair function so that Bots may autorepair them after a certain threshold. Because if it just stops at 20% then people would just plop 5 times as much solar panels and be done with the problem, not solving anything.

But it would have to be balanced pretty well, otherwise we would end up in a race condition where the bots repairing the solar panels take as much energy as the solar panels are producing, leaving nothing to feed your factories.

Maybe providing a way to use Belts+Inserters to repair the solar panels as well could be an alternative way to repair them so that combination requires less energy than trying to auto repair the massive fields with Bots where most of the energy is wasted by traveling the distance.



My personal recommendation would be that each source of energy production leaves you with a race against time but at different levels... For example:

1) Burning Wood/Coal is the beginner thing... obviously, but the energy gain per resource invested is so low that you'd have to cut down every tree you find and/or waste so much coal that it doesn't pay off beyond 50MW.
2) Burning Solid Fuel is the midgame, with that you can go up to 150-200MW or something before the struggle for more oil wells begins, because of the pipes through no man's land or using barrels and trains.
3) Using Solar panels is late game to endgame, but becomes ridiculous to maintain when the fields become too large, because of Bots repairing the solar panels consuming near all the energy produced.
4) Using Nuclear power is endgame, but attracts ludicrous loooaaads of Biters because of the increased radiation levels, probably even creating mutated biters and other enemies that are much stronger than the regular Big Biters. It really puts your defenses to a test.

It could probably be very well regulated with the dynamic map creation... that once you reach a certain level of research the map creation spawns various resources more sparsely forcing you to adapt.

I liked this idea so much and found it so interesting to be put to thought, I looked through the forums if someone already had added the idea to "Ideas and Suggestions"
Not having found any I am now adding it here now!^^

I'm going to post the comments that followed MeduSalem's first post so the discussion can take up from there.^^
So don't be surprised at the many quotes that will follow.

Join us and add your ideas and pros/cons to having solar panels that require maintenance.

[Ethribin]

I personally find this an awesome idea to have the solar panels require maintenance XD

I agree that having them be "plot and forget" makes them quite op, especially for more experienced players (maybe the maintenance can be turned on/off in options?)
It's also more realistic as in real life, the two things that prevent the Sahara being covered in solar panels is A) the distance the power would have to be distributed at = great loss of power unless we have superconductors and more importantly B) the maintenance of such a huge field of solar panels is just impossible (especially profit output/input wise)

Having Solar panels require maintenance also adds to the factory and automation gameplay XD
Maybe one would be forced to have a "backup battery" with steam power, in order to support the solar farm's maintenance. (the primary, secondary and tertiary power system from DyTech is perfect for that) That way one would just have to build a steam energy source and stuff enough burning material into it (I have to much solid fuel all the time anyway as I only use it for trains)

The balance will be difficult never the less I agree.

And.. do the devs even consider adding nuclear power?

[Ethribin]

I personally find this an awesome idea to have the solar panels require maintenance XD

I agree that having them be "plot and forget" makes them quite op, especially for more experienced players (maybe the maintenance can be turned on/off in options?)
It's also more realistic as in real life, the two things that prevent the Sahara being covered in solar panels is A) the distance the power would have to be distributed at = great loss of power unless we have superconductors and more importantly B) the maintenance of such a huge field of solar panels is just impossible (especially profit output/input wise)

Having Solar panels require maintenance also adds to the factory and automation gameplay XD
Maybe one would be forced to have a "backup battery" with steam power, in order to support the solar farm's maintenance. (the primary, secondary and tertiary power system from DyTech is perfect for that) That way one would just have to build a steam energy source and stuff enough burning material into it (I have to much solid fuel all the time anyway as I only use it for trains)

The balance will be difficult never the less I agree.

Exactly. Factorio is about building and maintaining a factory and to automate those processes... and in that sense Solar Panels are fundementally cheating. They take the maintanence out of the equation. Once you have that stuff there's no real reason to keep on playing. You basically won the game.

And.. do the devs even consider adding nuclear power?

At least I think to remember that there were some talks about adding nuclear stuff to the automation system in a future release... probably to process Uranium to fuel rods for power plant usage as well as other things. Probably atomic bombs and probably even Deuterium and Tritium processing for Hydrogen bombs or fusion reactors. At least I'd like to drop some hydrogen bombs on some of those giant biter nests because otherwise they are quite tedious to remove. xD

I always thought it was quite odd that the portable fusion reactor for the modular armor does only require some Processing Units and alien artifacts and nothing else. That makes them quite cheap to produce actually for the amount of energy they provide to your suit.

Anyway XD
I haven't checked it yet, but if there no one has outed the idea in the "Suggestions" section, go and suggest this idea MeduSalem! ^^
If you don't, and nobody has already, I will do so in your name! ;P

Feel free to go ahead... because I'm probably too busy to create a thread and maintain it.

[Ethribin]

You all forget, that you - playing longer and longer - constantly need more power. There is no good way around that fact.

It doesn't make sense - gameplay wise - to add detoriation (or other kind of maintenance), cause you constantly need to extend the energy production. Which is more than enough "maintenance".

[Ethribin]

You all forget, that you - playing longer and longer - constantly need more power. There is no good way around that fact.

It doesn't make sense - gameplay wise - to add detoriation (or other kind of maintenance), cause you constantly need to extend the energy production. Which is more than enough "maintenance".

That's not completely true... I've never played any map beyond 300-400MW of power consumption - the average being between 150-200MW, depending on how efficient my furnaces/assemblers work and how many idle around... because by then it's only gaining resources just to stockpile them in a storage system and never do anything with them because killing the Biters doesn't consume nearly enough resources. The defense of your base using Laser turrets doesn't consume any resources as well apart from the intial setup costs (which become marginally with a smelter system that's able to keep up 3000+plates/s), which basically means that there's no upkeep in having 5000 turrets idling around doing nothing as well. That's when the game becomes boring because you don't have to expand anymore to keep your power plants running and defense is for free too and that's why I abandoned many of the maps and started over to try something else.

I've at least one chest full of each individual intermediate/end product already, so what do I do with 2000 Processing Units or 2000 speed modules? Most of the infrastructure is already idling and that's why I don't need 1GW of energy production... which basically means energy consumption grow will stop at some point once your chests are full. The factory will stop wasting resources and energy, which would only leave the defense for energy/resource wasting, but oh... that's for free in the Solar Farm+Laser Turret combination, so no point to keep on playing. :s

The combination of one-time resource costs for both energy production AND energy consumption is just too overpowered and unbalanced in the long run and becomes more obvious the longer you play the same map. With no additional maintanence costs there's a predefined end to the gameplay because out of BOREDOM.

That problem is pretty much independent from the Map settings, because the map settings only determine how hard it is in the beginning, but once you have most of the researches done and automation going the resource sparseness around the starting area stops being a massive problem and only determines how far you have to spread out with trains, but eventually one reaches the same point of boredom once stuff starts to stockpile in the central processing area.

The only map I keep on going beyond that point is when I decided to not use solar farms and laser turrets at all, because then there's still a reason to expand to the unknown territory to gain more resources, since eventually I will consume them but even in that map I've got already at least 300000 of each iron plates and copper plates in the storage to rot forever. And that by using Gun Turrets and Steam Plants only, because I pushed the Biters out of my HUGE pollution radius already in my struggle to gain more resources, which means I only have to kill them when they set up a new base every now and then. ^^

That basically shows that it's possible to have high maintanence costs until the very end, but in the end you'll still begin to stockpile stuff despite the high maintainence costs and infrastructure costs. It just takes much longer to reach that point...

But yes, maintanence costs only virtually prolong gameplay but better than nothing as long as there's no "real" endgame content.

[Ethribin]

You all forget, that you - playing longer and longer - constantly need more power. There is no good way around that fact.

It doesn't make sense - gameplay wise - to add detoriation (or other kind of maintenance), cause you constantly need to extend the energy production. Which is more than enough "maintenance".

That's hardly any maintenance if you ask me. At some (fairly early) point most people will have automated solar panel and accu production and use a standard blueprint to just plop down a bunch more solar panels. Still very much a fire-and-forget thing.

This is all going by the current game though, where the game is pretty much done after rocket defense. Obviously, things will change if/once gameplay is extended past this point (colonists have landed and need constant supplies and protection, perhaps?)

[Ethribin]

I always thought it was quite odd that the portable fusion reactor for the modular armor does only require some Processing Units and alien artifacts and nothing else. That makes them quite cheap to produce actually for the amount of energy they provide to your suit.

That's because that core reactor isnt a nuclear reactor.
At least I think XD
i always imagined it be something like teh arc reactor that iron man uses. This reactor works with cold fusion though (at least that's the most comon and scientific possible theorie)
To explain how cold fusion works (it is in itsself only a theroy as noone has yet managed to actually bring forth cold fusion, but in theorie it should work) would take to long. In short cold fusion is a form of fusion where the atom cores dont fuse by being pressed upon each other but my exchanging protons and electrons until they have new cores. And it uns only on special isotops (forgot all teh materials but silver is one of the included)
So no wonder no uranium is needed XD

Feel free to go ahead... because I'm probably too busy to create a thread and maintain it.

I'll go ahead them^^

You all forget, that you - playing longer and longer - constantly need more power. There is no good way around that fact.

It doesn't make sense - gameplay wise - to add detoriation (or other kind of maintenance), cause you constantly need to extend the energy production. Which is more than enough "maintenance".

True.. but at the same time, as MeduSalem said, for experienced players or late game it's just... well... boring.
That's also why I suggested that one could add the option that the solar panels require maintenance or not. A sort of a "easy game" or "hard game" option XD

Of corse once that is automated too it can get boring again.. true.. but it makes it more complex never the less.

[Ethribin]

Lets get this thread and it's following discussions rolling!

[BurnHard]

I don't see any logic in looking at solar panels or accumulators as something special. If you want to have any sort of "maintainance-mechanic" for your base, you would have to include everything, things that move especially (belts, assemblers, furnaces ...)

All those things would need - due to their nature and construction - a lot more of maintainace than solar panels. But I don't think that would add any value to the game and would distract me too much from building and expanding.

[Ethribin]

well.. it's meant as a late game mechanic, where you've already expanded to a point where your need for expansion drops.
It's meant to slow your expansion at that point as well as increase the need to expand

[MeduSalem]

All discussions normally end with solar panels winning as they simply are to be plotted down and they produce energy for free forever (with accumulator combos even throughout the night.) So the cost of building them drops to zero over time.

[...]

Now MeduSalem made an interesting suggestion as I said before, which is to have solar panels require maintenance XD

It's not really zero but an asymptote... it's never reaching zero, but becomes QUITE marginally over time. At least there's a point where Solar Panels outperform steam engines by magnitudes because steam engines have a "maintenance" aka upkeep by burning wood/coal/solid fuel.

I guess the main idea is from Echmech, who first mentioned the deterioration thing, but I only addressed some of the problems that might happen when they only slowly degrade down to his suggested lower cap of 20%. xD

I don't see any logic in looking at solar panels or accumulators as something special. If you want to have any sort of "maintainance-mechanic" for your base, you would have to include everything, things that move especially (belts, assemblers, furnaces ...)

All those things would need - due to their nature and construction - a lot more of maintainace than solar panels. But I don't think that would add any value to the game and would distract me too much from building and expanding.

I don't think that the solar panels are something special and never pointed out to have any "maintainence" for assemblers/furnaces etc., I merely expanded upon the thought of Echmech about how to have some sort of upkeep for solar panels.

The problem about solar panels/accumulators is that they provide energy for free, without any upkeep as opposed to Steam Engines and that breaks the gameplay in late/endgame because there are gradually less resource consumers in late game. There's lesser and lesser to do but hoard all the incoming ores/coal/oil in chests since the overall resource consumption will slowly degrade near to zero over time and eventually stop altogether once the chests are all full.

That's when the factory becomes boring as you realize that you don't need the 8000 modules and processing units and whatever else you overproduced. You won the game the second you took the upkeep for energy production out of the equation, because not even defending your base will force you to further expand to the borders of the map because it's free as well thanks to laser turrets only requiring energy, which in return is for free of course thanks to solar farms.

Expand just to expand for no other reason than to hoard more ore may be interesting for some people but at that point I don't feel challenged anymore and start over with a new map. I don't blame the developers, because they did a greeeaaat job on the existing game and I fully understand that there's not enough time to implement every idea (including endgame) all at once and are only able to develop bit for bit.

Obivously I could use mods to make things interesting again since there's no endgame content for the vanilla game yet, but I can't help but feel that the "plop & forget"-aspect of Solar Farming paired together with the same "plop & forget" aspect of Laser Turrets is basically against the nature of the game, even the Vanilla-one without mods.

Basically you throw the gameplay of building and maintaining a factory out of the window the second you start plopping that stuff. There's no real downside to solar farming and loads of laser turrets (which is always the indication of a very, very unbalanced game aspect), because they are one-time investments that don't require any further treatment. And once you overproduced all the other products you realize that there's no reason to expand & explore any further. You basically killed your own experience by making things too easy.

If someone else comes up with a better idea on how to implement an upkeep to solar farms then I'd gladly welcome it as well, but momentarely I could live with Echmech's idea of deterioration, since it is probably one of the eaisest ways to solve the problem for the meantime as long as there's no endgame yet.



Update:

I already thought about suggesting that Solar Panels don't deteroriate BUT Accumulators and Laser Turrets do, because of the built-in batteries becoming less effective because of loading/unloading all the time, which basically means you'd have to replace them with new batteries every once in a while - so batteries are their "fuel". Hence removing the major downside of not having any downsides attached to Solar Farms/Laser Turrets, maybe even rendering them to become evenly matched options to Steam Engines/Gun Turrets.

So basically you either have Steam Engines bundled with Gun Turrets or you have a Solar Farm bundled with Laser Turrets, both equally wasting Iron/Copper/Oil in their upkeep. Maybe the Steam Engines could be a little bit more efficient, since they also generate pollution, while the Solar Farm itself doesn't (only Battery production, but that's the same as Solid Fuel production). Would look pretty good to me.

How you'd load the Accumulators/Laser Turrets with the new batteries is once again up to you, f.e. Requester Chests or Belts in acompany with Inserters. (Has the nice side effect of people finally stopping to argue what's the perfect layout for a solar farm xD). Eventually the solar farm needs to be tweaked in power output to accomodate the increased infrastructure so the size doesn't explode as much.

In fact that would be the easiest to implement because it wouldn't work any differently from how Boilers or Gun Turrets work. Just have a progress bar when the next battery is "consumed" and be done with it.

I'd only enable that for new maps, because rebuilding existing solar farms would be quite tedious, but it is really necessary to implement an upkeep for solar farms because they are broken as hell and that's a fact I've no doubts about.

well.. it's meant as a late game mechanic, where you've already expanded to a point where your need for expansion drops.
It's meant to slow your expansion at that point as well as increase the need to expand

Exactly. ^^

[Albrat]

Personally for me... Solar panel maintainance would be a pain in the rear. When I have built solar panels in game I have to build such a large field of them just to provide power on a basic level its silly. Then i have to over build for my factory to store enough power for overnight usage as well in accumulators. Add in maintainance for them and it could become tedious to be constantly repairing them. Plus a bot system to repair them just pushes me back to my origional plan... Build more steam engines.


I used to make a bee-line for solar power as soon as I could and produce power that way... But I have recently just setup a factory producing steam engines and boilers. Lots of pump jacks and chemical plants turning the oil into solid fuel. 1500 steam engines vs 12,750 solar panels and 4250 accumulators. Just the number of panels scares me. (accumulators may be too low as well.) But just imagine trying to maintain 13,000 solar panels. It would take my entire logistics system to just keep up on the maintainance.

I will say this. It is a great idea for a Mod. But for vanilla Factorio, I think its one to give a miss. Or at least make it a game option at creation. Building maintainance checkbox. To add extra difficulty and maybe make a bunch of new achievements attached to it.

I do however like the idea of accumulators "wearing out" over time. your average battery will recharge 1000 time (260,000 hours) before it stops charging completely. So accumulators should wear over time, giving reduced returns by usage. (would have to be a decay rate * number of discharges.)

[Deadly-Bagel]

Necro much?

You didn't even +1 it, you suggested something else that has already been suggested in another topic.

[ssilk]

Thanks for pointing that out Deadly-Bagel, and as in this linked post I recommend to make a mod out of this, cause this is also suggested several times in balancing.

I won't read the whole thread through now, but I guess in this one: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=18613&hilit=repair Solar panels less of a no-brainer