[0.12.x][v0.12.8] Bob's Power mod

[bobingabout]

Okay, new version of the mod is up!

This is a small update, it doesn't have everything I intend to add, but I promiced an update, and I don't want it to end up like MCI, where people were waiting for months for it, so here it is.

A rather important note:
to make it "compatable" with DyTech Power, so I'm not overiding his technologies, I renamed my technologies, the issue here though is that if you load an old game where you used this mod, you'll need to research my power techs again, a minor problem in my opinion.


New feature: Boilers.

The Energy Efficiency of the boilers are designed to consume fuel (wood, coal, fuel blocks etc) at the same rate of the original boiler for the new power output.

bobmods.config.power.boiler1 = {burner = {effectivity = 0.5}, energy_consumption = "390kW"}
bobmods.config.power.boiler2 = {burner = {effectivity = 0.6}, energy_consumption = "520kW"}
bobmods.config.power.boiler3 = {burner = {effectivity = 0.7}, energy_consumption = "700kW"}
bobmods.config.power.boiler4 = {burner = {effectivity = 0.8}, energy_consumption = "1.1MW"}

bobmods.config.power.steamengine1 = {effectivity = 1, fluid_usage_per_tick = 0.1}
bobmods.config.power.steamengine2 = {effectivity = 1.1, fluid_usage_per_tick = 0.15}
bobmods.config.power.steamengine3 = {effectivity = 1.2, fluid_usage_per_tick = 0.2}

Maximum water energy capacity/power of boiler = recomended number of boilers per pump. (round up)
5100/390 = 13.07 (14) mk1
5100/520 = 9.81 (10) mk2
5100/700 = 7.29 (8) mk3
5100/1100 = 4.64 (5) mk4

total water throughput of offshore pump/water consumption per second = maximum number of steam engines per pump. (round down)
mk1 = 6 water/s, 60/6 = 10 mk1 engines
mk2 = 9 w/s, 60/9 = 6.66 (6)mk2 engines
mk3 = 12 w/s, 60/12 = 5 mk3 engines.

[Boogieman14]

Adds Tech 2 Steam Engine (reduces water consumption to 75% of default, able to be powered from a single boiler per engine, and doubles efficiency, resulting in a +50% overall power output)

I'm getting the impression water consumption actually isn't reduced on the Mk2's. I have 1 pump, 15 boilers (mk1s) and it's working fine for 10 engines but as soon as demand kicks up to require over 10 engines, water level over the entire chain drops to 1.5ish. This happens with both 0.1.5 and 0.1.6. With 20 mk3 engines it seems to work better, although water level is 7.5 at least power output for the 20 units is 20MW.

[bobingabout]

fluid_usage_per_tick = 0.075,
I just checked, it's defined correctly, you should easily be able to power 13 from a single water source. I've not had any issues with it personally.

[Boogieman14]

Hmm.. for some reason I thought it was max 15 mk2 engines to one pump So that's my setup. I reduced it to 14, that didn't make a difference (of course it didn't), then skipped down to 10...

Oh well, it was about time I started upgrading to mk3 anyway (100 and counting )

[bobingabout]

Yeah, the effects are an exponential curve, not linier, so it goes 10, 13.3, 20 rather than 10, 15, 20. I can't remember how I worked that out but I think it's a combination between consumption and efficiency. In theory it should be 15 because I'm reducing consumption from from 100%, to 75% then 50%...

[bobingabout]

V0.1.7 released
* Adds Tier 3 Accumulators that require Lithium Ion Batteries
* Fix Multiplayer Compatability in the Migration scripts.

[bobingabout]

V0.1.8
* Adds T2 to T4 Medium and Big Power poles
* Adds T2 to T4 Substations
* Adds German translation for all v0.1.7 content.

[tux_mark_5]

Small question: is crafting time for solar panels and accumulators supposed to be 0.5 seconds or is it a bug? Because the original factorio's solar panels and accumulators take 10 seconds to craft.

[bobingabout]

Right... it was supposed to be 0.5 seconds, because when I made the mod, the original solar panels and accumulators took 0.5 seconds. I havn't updated it with newer times.

[taw]

Any plans to make different levels of boiler/steam engines/miners/etc. look different, even by just applying some color coding to them? It looks just confusing right now.

[bobingabout]

at some point, yeah.

[SHiRKiT]

Right... it was supposed to be 0.5 seconds, because when I made the mod, the original solar panels and accumulators took 0.5 seconds. I havn't updated it with newer times.

Aawwhh and I was here thinking that you got realized that 10 seconds for a Solar Panel was too much =\

[bobingabout]

Right... it was supposed to be 0.5 seconds, because when I made the mod, the original solar panels and accumulators took 0.5 seconds. I havn't updated it with newer times.

Aawwhh and I was here thinking that you got realized that 10 seconds for a Solar Panel was too much =\

Well, it probably is, but 0.5 is too fast too. I'm thinking a 2x2 should take 2 seconds, a 3x3 about 4.5 seconds and a 4x4 about 8 seconds.

[orzelek]

I think that your steam engines might be a tad to efficient.
Effectivity set to 4 would mean it produces 4 times energy it consumes if I understand how stuff works.

It seems like slightly to efficient - might get those to a lower value and increase total power capacity. It will be a challenge then to actually heat up lots of water to make engine work at full capacity.

DyTech power has it solved in different way - with upgrades effectivity actually decreases which I also found strange. Better and more costly hardware gets worse on energy conversion rates there.

[bobingabout]

who's to say how much power is actually in a peice of coal? 150% efficiency in the boiler and 4x efficiency in the steam engine sounds silly, but perhaps the original designs were only operating at 30% and 20% efficiency, so this 150% (original is rated 2/3, or 66.6% in code, making 150% 225% of the original) is actually only 67.5%, and 400% is actually only 80%, the original machines were just crap, and my versions fix the flaws. at least that's how I look at it. I reduce the ammount of steam used in each engine so that you can fit more engines on a single pump as you upgrade them, this effect alone causes a decreased output in power, not an increase, the 2x and 4x efficiency scaling are to counter this drop, to actually give you an advantage.

think about steam engines (trains). Sure, more powerful steam engines usually had a bigger boiler, but they also changed the designs of the actual mechanics too to make steam usage more efficient. A later design of a similar sized engine could easilly produce double... tripple, or more pulling power from the same fuel. This effect can easilly be seen in the flying scottsman, the previous owner <butchered> the preserved engine to "upgrade" it, making the A3 gresley more powerful than any of the A4s in existance (the next model) simply by changing a few design features.

Why can't my steam engines do the same? think of it less of a 400% fuel efficiency, and more of 4x the efficiency as the original.

[gixbit]

who's to say how much power is actually in a peice of coal? 150% efficiency in the boiler and 4x efficiency in the steam engine sounds silly, but perhaps the original designs were only operating at 30% and 20% efficiency, so this 150% (original is rated 2/3, or 66.6% in code, making 150% 225% of the original) is actually only 67.5%, and 400% is actually only 80%, the original machines were just crap, and my versions fix the flaws. at least that's how I look at it. I reduce the ammount of steam used in each engine so that you can fit more engines on a single pump as you upgrade them, this effect alone causes a decreased output in power, not an increase, the 2x and 4x efficiency scaling are to counter this drop, to actually give you an advantage.

think about steam engines (trains). Sure, more powerful steam engines usually had a bigger boiler, but they also changed the designs of the actual mechanics too to make steam usage more efficient. A later design of a similar sized engine could easilly produce double... tripple, or more pulling power from the same fuel. This effect can easilly be seen in the flying scottsman, the previous owner <butchered> the preserved engine to "upgrade" it, making the A3 gresley more powerful than any of the A4s in existance (the next model) simply by changing a few design features.

Why can't my steam engines do the same? think of it less of a 400% fuel efficiency, and more of 4x the efficiency as the original.

Because there has to be a drawback to this to keep it's value in gameplay rather than being the end all power source and completely overpowered. We're talking about a game, not real life. In real scenarios, we have a lot of technology to make a lot of things more efficient, In real life these things are welcomed without hesitation. However, this is a game, and the concept of making something that easily satisfies power requirements goes against the fun of the game. Thats why it needs to have a major drawback, that makes it harder to use so that it scales with endgame better, not just something you can slap down in blueprints and spam it. I can't say what you need to do personally, but, you've played the game yourself, You can sure add more power and machines until you run out of map (never usually). However, the issue is usually with space management. On the one hand you build solar panels and they take up an asston of room but, they're flexible on where you place them. However steam engines make a lot of pollution and require a constant source of fuel or they drop in power.

Those are drawbacks in the original game, If you want to make a mod that introduces a new steam engine, it makes far more sense to add equipment that consumes more fuel, generates more pollution and creates more power. I mean based on the game mechanics. Rather than introduce boilers that use less and less fuel, and steam engines that generate more and more power allowing you to put down like 20 steam engines on a line rather than 6-8. And space management is hardly a draw back with numbers like 400% and 150%. That's an extreme example of course.

If you're trying to balance your mod against the game it's one thing, but if you're trying to incorporate real life logic into a game where a lone dude can create an entire factory compound from a pickaxe and a dream, You're probably using the wrong mindset for this. What you really need is to evaluate how to incorporate machines such as these into the game without ruining the endgame experience for players who like a challenge. There needs to be a particular aspect of these machines that makes them harder to use so that their value in the endgame and the like creates fun vs. output. That's my suggestion to you, You can completely ignore it on your own merit.

[faldazar]

I honestly think that the balance with the engines+boilers is fine. They need to be this efficient, because they have a huge competition in solar panels+accumulators that use no fuel at all and create no pollution at all for a slightly higher initial cost.
In the vanilla game every player will at some point change their power set up to solar panels, but with this better engines it is actually viable to be the mean guy that doesnt care for this alien planet at all, instead of being forced to build clean energy.

imo the "the end all power source" will still be solar panels, so everything is fine with this mod.

[bobingabout]

Indeed. I have a setup of MK4 boilers and MK3 engines, disconnected from the power grid in favor of the field of MK2 and MK3 solar panels, and high capacity accumulators.

at least I think it's MK4 boilers. it's definitely MK3 engines.

[Degraine]

My recent games have all been completely solar agnostic, just for the hell of it. I'm interested in seeing how far I can drive the pollution of a base down by using the extended modules available. I'm also using Klonan's oil burner because dammit I want to use oil firing already. I lose the efficiency of your boilers, but it produces a different fluid that has greater energy content - it boosts the output of steam engines a little, which is nice.

[F-W]

Well, it seems to me, that high tier boilers and steam engines are completely-100%-overpowered. Why?

Boilers in original factorio has there energy conversion efficiency = 50% (it is very good number!). It means, you gain 4MJ of electric energy from 8 MJ of heat energy from fuel (efficiency of steam engines =100%, so they convert all energy of boiled water into electric).

T2 boilers in this mod have efficiency = 75%. Well, for me it is a huge jump! But it is not the worst.

T2 steam engine in mod has effectivity = 2. It not only allowed you to fit more engines on single pipe, but it also doubled the amount of energy, that produced by boilers. So that numbers are multiply together. I made a simple experiment to illustrate this.

Put boiler and steam engine on the separate network, with no fuel and some empty accumulators. And than put a single piece of coal (8MJ) into the boiler, and look how mush energy will stored in accumulators when coal burned out. This is a result:

Mk1 boiler with Mk1 steam engine produces 4 MJ of energy - as expected.
Mk2 boiler with Mk1 steam engine produced 6 MJ of electric energy.
Mk2 boiler with Mk2 steam engine produced 12 MJ. What about law of conservation of energy?
Mk3 boiler with Mk3 steam engine can produce 32 MJ of energy! And, finally,
Mk4 boiler with Mk3 steam engine produced 48 MJ. It is a 600% more than coal creates heat, and 1200% boost compared to original boilers!...

Well, if you speak about realism, in real life energy conversion efficiency can't be much than 100%. Best turbine have this parameter to 60%, and conventional combustion engines all less than 50% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_co ... efficiency). Ok, I don't know, how much power is in a piece of coal, maybe MC^2, but this is a boiler - not reactor which annihilated coal with antimatter)) So, I think, it will be good to consider, that piece of coal provides 8 MJ of heat energy, as it mentioned in tooltip. And total energy output must be not greater than 100%)).

I think, that you can balance this by changing boiler and steam engine parameters. Boilers could rise there efficiency from 50 to, maybe 80-85%. It looks little, but it is an example of "power of little numbers". Efficiency=75% means, that you need 1,5 times less fuel to provide same amount of energy. It is a huge economy of fuel. As for steam engines, i think, it's better keep there effectivity parameter =1, and make them to use more water. Or, maybe, for more realism and difficulty, make first engine effectivity less than 1, rising to 1 with tier (somehow first one works without bearings after all )...

And if you want to make steam power more usefull compared to solar energy - I think you must make solar more expensive. Because in your mod with cheap steel and cheap basic circuits, it is twice - three times easier to switch to solar. (and accumulators with twice capacity and same cost too!) So, as you added a lot of new resources, you could make solar to need some rare materials to craft (as in real life).


And what will happens, when you are breaking the law of conservation of energy? Infinite source of energy! Here, this setup can generate more energy, than it consumes:

To Bob.jpg (213.17 KiB) Viewed 25278 times

Mk4 boiler and mk3 engine. And no module at all!

How much more it produses? Well, with one single piece of solid fuel it produses 50 pieces. So, why we need solar, coal or oil? We will produse enegy from nothing!