Game rebalance after Space out DLC

[KonfigSys]

After discussing with players an idea emerged.

1. Oil behavior is changed - it does not produce sour gas anymore when it is overheated but produces natural gas instead.

2. Oil wells start producing sour gas (oil production left unchanged) instead of natural gas and in much higher quantities. 

3. Sour gas transforms into natural gas and Sulphur at temperature of -60C.

4. Oil refinery produces not only refined oil and natural gas but also ligroin (or bitumen which is already in the game?).

5. Ligroin replaces petroleum (refined oil) in visco-gel and super coolant production at molecular forge.

6. Using Ligroin (wax) together with lead in the nuclear industry to make the protective suits.

First of all, it much better assembles real processes. Second, it pushes using oil refineries at least at the end game stage (a lot of players are using volcano or rocket boiling for oil refining currently) to produce hi-end products (visco-gel and super coolant), it also allows newbie players to boil/refine oil at volcanos, rockets as it will simplify the process just to get refined oil (no dealing with overheating and sour gas) and also generates natural gas for gas ovens and NG generators relatively easy. Sour gas at wells can be collected at first but then transformed into Sulphur which became an important resource with the DLC. -60C is much less a problem to achieve than -160C currently to get Sulphur and much simpler set-up (you need to make serious thermo exchangers with -160C if you want to be somewhat energy efficient). Moreover, -60C is the real temperature of H2S to go to liquid and hence segregating sour gas into clean natural gas and liquid H2S occurs at -60C. 

To be clear - I do not advocate to remove Sulphur volcano. In fact it ties well with sour gas production by wells at the same asteroid. All comes together logically.

Also it becomes easier to make gas cooked food on every asteroid; just bring some oil and have heat sources to transform it into NG (or create a heat source - I can see thermium thermo aquatuner enclosed in a thermo isolated room adjacent to every hi-end kitchen and another adjacent cool room for food storage chilled by super coolant going through the thermo aqua tuner  - here is the end game usage of hi-end materials).

 

[KonfigSys]

the more I think about it, the more I like it. Just a small note - this change will not badly affect players of vanilla version.

It will have all these nice benefits to them also. The only point is that they do not need Sulphur and can vent to the space the sour gas produced from the wells. More savvy players will actually like converting sour gas to natural at higher temperature (-60 vs -150)

 

[Sasza22]

I like the idea of ligorin/wax/bitumen as a byproduct of the refinery. Maybe it could be used as a construction material (maybe mixed with rock in the rock crusher). What i don`t like is changing oli straight into nat gas. It was changed to sour gas beacause it was too strong. It was insane amounts of power for little effort (i think you could do that with just a simple aqua tuner setup). Maybe it should produce a mixture of both so it`s harder to go straight into nat gas generators.

[KonfigSys]

1 hour ago, Sasza22 said:

I like the idea of ligorin/wax/bitumen as a byproduct of the refinery. Maybe it could be used as a construction material (maybe mixed with rock in the rock crusher). What i don`t like is changing oli straight into nat gas. It was changed to sour gas beacause it was too strong. It was insane amounts of power for little effort (i think you could do that with just a simple aqua tuner setup). Maybe it should produce a mixture of both so it`s harder to go straight into nat gas generators.

I thought about overproduction of natural gas from oil. But now there are much less natural gas geysers (normally you had two or three at the vanilla map vs one on the 3rd planet). Also oil extraction requires manual dup work and oil pools are very small compared to vanilla game. When oil rockets start, oil will be consumed by rockets also and will be more valuable. 

I do not know if devs can change conversion rates so you do not get 1 to 1. So the coefficient can be any justifiable (10 to 1, for example). You can get not much natural gas from oil - I am fine with it. If they put requirements for a lot of ligroin for super coolant production (or even add to the insulation materials), one may use only refineries to generate more wax at the late game.

Currently -

experienced players do not use refineries at all (manual work, halved production)

gas cooking is not widely used (complicated to set up, not much benefits)

ligroin is in the game but not used

sour gas set up is too cumbersome (especially without super coolant)

energy is not a major issue anymore but Sulphur is more required