Gas grill costs way out of line?

[psusi]

What the heck is going on with the operating cost of the gas grill?  First off, why does it need 240 watts of power?  IT'S A GAS GRILL!  It shouldn't take power.  And it burns slightly more gas than a NG power plant does!  So effectively it costs 1040 watts plus some water to run the thing.  Are you kidding me?

 

[Junksteel]

It's a high tier building. I can agree with you that it's pretty expensive but nerfing its costs wouldn't make the game any better IMO. Highest morale should have some costs. All high tier equipments are insanely power hungry. Arcades cost 1200 watts, same for Vertical Wind Tunnel or even tube transporting is pretty expensive.

In the other hand, I do agree with your other thread about refrigerator. It's pretty expensive to have a constant 120 watts expense pretty early.  But we need to consider it can be fun to discover the workaround for this using chlorine or CO2. So Idk for sure.

[CannedSmeef]

16 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

It's a high tier building. I can agree with you that it's pretty expensive but nerfing its costs wouldn't make the game any better IMO. Highest morale should have some costs. All high tier equipments are insanely power hungry. Arcades cost 1200 watts, same for Vertical Wind Tunnel or even tube transporting is pretty expensive.

In the other hand, I do agree with your other thread about refrigerator. It's pretty expensive to have a constant 120 watts expense pretty early.  But we need to consider it can be fun to discover the workaround for this using chlorine or CO2. So Idk for sure.

The fridge power cost is not worth it at all.  Just dig a hole at the bottom of your base and let CO2 collect in there, it's free and is actually even better than the fridge because the decay rate is basically null.

Now, if the fridge only cost 60w and had a much larger storage (200kg sounds good), maybe I'd use it.  Actually no, I'd still just stick them in the CO2 lol.

[SharraShimada]

The fridge costs power, yes. But it frees dupe-work time, which is far more valueable than power. Why? Because the powered fridge can tell the food-makers to stop at a certain point. Otherwise they will produce food forever without any sense.

[psusi]

I guess part of the problem is that you used to be guaranteed to find one or two NG vents on a map.  Is that no longer the case?  So far I have found a polluted oxygen, hydrogen, cool steam, two salt water and one polluted water vents, but no NG.  Running the gas grill off of just the NG from making fertilizer doesn't seem like it is going to work too well.  That and it's really weird that a gas grill also takes a beefy amount of electricity.

 

58 minutes ago, SharraShimada said:

The fridge costs power, yes. But it frees dupe-work time, which is far more valueable than power. Why? Because the powered fridge can tell the food-makers to stop at a certain point. Otherwise they will produce food forever without any sense.

No it doesn't save time.  I didn't realize it had an automation signal, but even if you use it to stop the electric grill when full, you are only delaying the cook time until later.  Eventually it still takes the same amount of time to cook.  It's easy enough to notice when your calorie count is getting high and uproot a one or two plants for a dozen or two cycles until it comes back down.

The only reason I would consider using a fridge is that it would save a few seconds of time being located in the mess hall instead of dupes having to run down to the CO2 cellar to get food, but that is NOT worth 120 watts of continuous power, which is about what you get out of a hydrogen or NG vent on average.  I can't imagine dedicating a vent just to running the fridge.

[Khullag]

what's the problem with gas grill? it runs from time to time, so it's not eating that much of natural gas. and as you can see in the research tree - it's a high-tier building, so it should have bigger costs than regular grill. i'm cooking Frost Burgers for my 12 dupes and I do not even notice this "loss" of natural gas (even pre crude oil boiling, after you have a boiler it's just peanuts).

[OxCD]

1 hour ago, SharraShimada said:

The fridge costs power, yes. But it frees dupe-work time, which is far more valueable than power. Why? Because the powered fridge can tell the food-makers to stop at a certain point. Otherwise they will produce food forever without any sense.

Just uses pressure plates into chlorine, and you can weight all meals you have to automate the food making. It's not early game solution, indeed (keep the fridge until then), but it could be easily built in mid-game.

[psusi]

40 minutes ago, Khullag said:

and as you can see in the research tree - it's a high-tier building, so it should have bigger costs than regular grill.

More, yes... 17+ times more though?

[6Havok9]

Fridges, being automation capable, are awesome right beside an espresso machine for storing pincha peppernuts. Also for the juicer, I suppose.

While I cannot "justify" disproportionately large costs for some buildings, I'm fine with them. Gives you that luxury progression feeling. What else are you gonna do with all that power coming from your boiler?

[Gurgel]

I really do not find the grill problematic. It does not have that high an uptime. Mine runs comfortably besides an always-on nat-gas generator from the same nat-gas vent and that is with 16 dupes on mushroom-wrap.

[SharraShimada]

5 hours ago, psusi said:

no it doesn't save time.  I didn't realize it had an automation signal, but even if you use it to stop the electric grill when full, you are only delaying the cook time until later.  Eventually it still takes the same amount of time to cook. 

I disagree. You only need so much food. Everything above that is just wasted dupe work time. Lets say, you have 20 dupes, which need 1000 calories a day. Thats 20k cal.  Given you provide a 3 day storage to prevent shortages = 60k cal.. In my setup the fridge is set to this amount (calculated cal/food type produced), and then the dupes just stop producing any more food. 

In your setup, they produce and procude and.... Whats the use for this millions an millions of calories in your storage. They never get eaten. Its just a big waste of work time, when you produce way more than dupes will every eat in 1000 cycles.

[psusi]

53 minutes ago, SharraShimada said:

You only need so much food. Everything above that is just wasted dupe work time

Yea, and it does not matter whether you cook the food today, or tomorrow, you spend the same amount of time cooking the food. 

55 minutes ago, SharraShimada said:

In your setup, they produce and procude and.... Whats the use for this millions an millions of calories in your storage.

You don't have enough storage to hold THAT much food.  It isn't like you will keep overproducing forever.  Like I said before, when you notice you have too much food, you just go uproot one or two crops so production slows down a bit and your stockpile starts going down slowly.  Then 20-30 cycles later when you start getting low, you plant those crops again.  You don't need automation to micromange cooking on and off every cycle.  And even if you do that for cooking, you will just fill up on crops.

[nakomaru]

Why would I need to turn off my farms? They consume no resources. And 450 million kcals are stored in one cell.

(It is clear everyone has different ways they like to play.)

[SharraShimada]

6 hours ago, psusi said:

Yea, and it does not matter whether you cook the food today, or tomorrow, you spend the same amount of time cooking the food. 

You don't have enough storage to hold THAT much food.  It isn't like you will keep overproducing forever.  Like I said before, when you notice you have too much food, you just go uproot one or two crops so production slows down a bit and your stockpile starts going down slowly.  Then 20-30 cycles later when you start getting low, you plant those crops again.  You don't need automation to micromange cooking on and off every cycle.  And even if you do that for cooking, you will just fill up on crops.

Why dont you automate your farm too? 

I think we disagree on this topic, which is fine. I say its a waste of time, if you produce food for 10.000 cycles you will never play. You say it does not matter to you. Thats okay. 

[psusi]

7 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Why dont you automate your farm too? 

For one, you can't really do that.  What are you going to do, lock the door so the farmer can't tend the crops?  Then they will sit there wasting whatever fertilizer they have until it's gone.

7 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

I think we disagree on this topic, which is fine. I say its a waste of time, if you produce food for 10.000 cycles you will never play

No; you're still not getting it: you can't overproduce food for 10,000 cycles.  You overproduce for 20-30 cycles, then under-produce for 20-30, etc.  Then it all averages out and there's no waste.  It's like flying a plane: it's impossible to keep your altitude exactly level, so you just adjust your trim up or down every now and then when you notice you are getting a little too high or too low.  On average you maintain the target altitude even though there are some minor fluctuations.

With your automation, you are also overproducing food at times, and under-producing at others.  The difference is how fast and in what way you make corrections.  There isn't really any advantage to keeping the correction period down to 1 cycle instead of 20-30, and automating the grill without automating the crops ( which you can't really do ) does not buy you anything.

[Chintam]

53 minutes ago, psusi said:

For one, you can't really do that.  What are you going to do, lock the door so the farmer can't tend the crops?  Then they will sit there wasting whatever fertilizer they have until it's gone.

Crops will drop their produce after a certain amount of time if they're not harvested. I believe it's 8 cycles but I can't remember. So you can fully automate crops but it results in a lower production rate. 

 

The cost for using the grill doesn't really matter. The grill is a late game item and the amount of gas/power it uses is really nothing. 240w is the same as a pump is which considered a low power item in the late game. Further, the grill is not on very often, my grill has about 10% usage across 5 cycles and I overproduce food (currently 1 million kCal). That means it uses about 100w using your figure in the original post.

 

[psusi]

8 minutes ago, Chintam said:

The cost for using the grill doesn't really matter. The grill is a late game item and the amount of gas/power it uses is really nothing. 240w is the same as a pump is which considered a low power item in the late game. Further, the grill is not on very often, my grill has about 10% usage across 5 cycles and I overproduce food (currently 1 million kCal). That means it uses about 100w using your figure in the original post.

Wow, 10% for enough food for how many dupes?  I seem to remember my grill being rather busy with over a dozen dupes from when I used to play leading up to the rocketry update.

[Chintam]

12 minutes ago, psusi said:

Wow, 10% for enough food for how many dupes?  I seem to remember my grill being rather busy with over a dozen dupes from when I used to play leading up to the rocketry update.

I have 19 dupes, I do use barbeque as a supplementary food source.  Gas range didn't exist in the rocketry update, it was introduced at launch.

[bobucles]

23 hours ago, SharraShimada said:

Because the powered fridge can tell the food-makers to stop at a certain point.

Can't a weight sensor under the food pile do the same thing? It's far cheaper too.

[psusi]

32 minutes ago, Chintam said:

I have 19 dupes, I do use barbeque as a supplementary food source.  Gas range didn't exist in the rocketry update, it was introduced at launch.

Yea, but you used to be able to make some of the same stuff that now takes the gas range on the electric one.  Maybe you just don't need to use the gas range much because only the highest trained dupes need the high quality food, and it also packs a lot of calories into each one.  Most of my electric grill time before was probably spent making fried mushrooms, which still will be done on the electric grill instead of the gas one.

[Chintam]

20 minutes ago, psusi said:

Yea, but you used to be able to make some of the same stuff that now takes the gas range on the electric one.  Maybe you just don't need to use the gas range much because only the highest trained dupes need the high quality food, and it also packs a lot of calories into each one.  Most of my electric grill time before was probably spent making fried mushrooms, which still will be done on the electric grill instead of the gas one.

it's possible cooking time has also been adjusted from when you last played. Dupe cooking skill also probably plays a large factor. My colony had the same dupe since cycle 1.