Shenpen wrote:undarl wrote:
Meaning that you find petrochem easier than refining? That's terrifying.
Petrochem is only difficult because the chemistry is scary because the names are hard to remember and hard to understand. Very few people feel comfy with chemistry at all. But the actual implementation of the production systems needed is a lot more straightforward than what is needed in the refining mod.
In refining there are actual difficulties: Setting up a complete ore refining system with three tiers of refining (sorting, flotation and leaching) is a very complex task. The differentiation between different products are vague because the items are fictional and arbitrary. In both mods you need catalyzing as part of many processes, but the petrochem catalyzers are fairly simple as soon as you have the ores from the refining mod.
Petrochem might have a bad rep because people started using it after getting used to the refining mod to some degree. Or they listen to Arumba who likes to sound worried.
Apart from being complex, refining mod also have the issue of changing things early in the "food-chain". You dont get a chance to setup something familiar and build on that. You need to deal with different ores, crushing and new ways of smelting form the get-go. That makes for a very steep learning curve! Also you need technology to deal with the waste products from ore crushing which is not available when you need it. Now the learning curve is not steep, its leaning back the wrong way. Unless you know by heart how to make 14 splitters and a fistfull of underground belts act like a makeshift sorting station, you need to do things manually and to build and rebuild later. The refining mod was meant to be hard, frustrating and annoying. And it is.
Can't say I agree here.
First, a small disclaimer: Angel's + Bob's is evolving all the time and what I say is based on their status when I was playing. Things might not apply for the latest version.
I think Refining is well designed and easy to set up. It is incredibly straightforward. You need to set up multiple tiers like you say and manage sorting, but setting up the tiers is not that hard. Is is simply dropping off larger specialized blocks, adding them to the chain and there is only a handful of byproducts, some of which are very easy to process.
Refining fists so well into the vanilla scheme and you keep upgrading it every time you want a new ore. One small fault it has is that the upgrade path is not that smooth: it often doesn't fell like upgrading you infrastructure, but slightly redesigning it.
But it is incredibly flexible, allowing you to focus on what you need. There are multiple viable builds and you can skip it all for the first 4-6 hours of the game and still get up to blue science.
It also follows this simple principle: be output focused. You want a new ore, you focus on that, get the new ore and most of your work is about getting that new ore. If I am working 2 hours on a Alum build, that is 2 hours of focusing on Alum.
Petrochemical is nothing like this, neither do I think it is that well designed to be fun. It "was meant to be hard, frustrating and annoying". It is a challenge though, so that can be fun.
Let me give you an example: plastic! You want plastic? You need to create a large and complex setup that manages both oil and gas and takes care of 100% of the byproduct, because you can't have it lock up at this stage. This stage is the equivalent of dropping down a refinery. After that start a large and complicated chain where each level adds a new byproduct. Managing some of the byproducts is locked behind tech you need plastic to unlock. Some is locked behind even harder to reach tech.
You end up with a 20-30 buildings build, several byproducts you do not want or need at that time, maybe ever, and at the end of the chain is 1 or 2 chemical plants spitting out a measly amount of plastic. If you want high throughput, the chains are so complicated (there are about 8 links in the chain) that Mathing it all out is complicated. In Refining you often worry about 3-4 link chains. Plus, managing throughput though belts is easier.
And to it the need to manage water treatment byproducts and other stuff and you have huge build in which you are not focusing on your goal.
You are simply not playing the game! I am not building plastic! I am managing byproducts, none of which I want or need and they are all frustrating. If I work 2 hours on a plastic build, most of that time is not spent on plastic, but about 20% on the initial oil + gas stage and the rest is byproducts management.
And if you don't or can't manage the byproducts, by the time you are done with Blue Science, you have so many byproducts that you filled up like 2-10 pressure tanks of each. You can literally have so many byproducts that it take s over 10 hours to get rid of them with normal build. Or you go over the top, add a 20x build, and then have to tear it down.
TLDR: Smelting is flexible and allows you to play the game, go in add a new ore, come up with your own designs.
Petrochem is super rigid, with all the fluids needing to be manged you spend 95% of the time building massive infrastructure to handle byproducts and 5% of the time spent on the actual thing you wanted. Petrochem is very fragile, with long links and any backup can kill you final product with ease.
Their design philosophies are completely different.
If Petrochem was more like Refining and also designed to be not frustrating, you would be able to make plastic simply, but inefficiently. Then you would unlock some tech with a new requirement. The new requirement could be made with a complex new chain (the hard solution) or by changing the plastic recipe (the easy; but byproduct rich solution), to a new one, where it has byproducts that you need for your new requirement. You would be motivated by the new needs of the byproduct to build big and you original inefficiency would be resolved. It would be an interesting logistical challenge to process all the byproducts you want with the ones you don't and at the same time keep plastic in check, not too low, not too high.
PS: I know you can make plastic in several ways and you can ignore oil + gas. It was just an example. But eventually you need to go into oil + gas, so at best you end up postponing the problem.
