A problem H2 and petroleum engine have

[NeoDeusMachina]

38 minutes ago, AndreyKl said:

1. Because having something a rocket outclasses others with adds more options to player's arsenal.
2. Because when technology gets built it gets built for a purpose, it's both reasonable and realistic for each engine to have some unique advantages and downsides
3. Because game progression is supposed to open more options and capabilities

Petroleum engine technically has an advantage - ability to add additional tanks to extend range while being easier to set up than Hydrogen one, but from my point of view it gets counteracted by other issues.

Maybe we just have to accept we have a different view on what is a purpose and what gives options.

1. To me, if each engine outclasses the others in doing a task, it doesn't add more options to my arsenal it removes options. I feel like I -have- to use each engine for "what they are the best at" and if I want to do something, I have to setup the infrastructure to use the best engine for it. I can already use all engines and I am fine with the redundancy, this gives me options because I can do the same thing with different engines and I accept all options have pros and cons.

2. Again, the "purpose" thing that confuses me. @sakura_sk made pretty good tables showing advantages and disadvantages of each engine in terms of specs. Then they also have side advantages and disadvantages in how you set them up, what resources they use, etc. At the end of the day, they all have the same "purpose" and they can all fulfill that purpose - space exploration/mining/colonization.

3. Isn't it already this way? We start out with CO2 and sucrose, those are pretty easy to set up early, fuel is readily accessible via dupes exhaling and sucrose can be mined. Fertilizer can also be mined or produced rather easily. Then you progress to steam (requires more tech and more advanced materials), radbolts and petroleum. They each have their own infrastructure and challenges. The "final" engine, hydrogen, is probably the most advanced and difficult to set up, and it gives the longest range of all engines, among other things. If you decide to be creative and extend the range of early techs, that is one thing. But can you send CO2 rockets from the starting planet to all other planetoid for colonization in a single trip? Can you send a steam engine or even a radbolt engine from the starting planetoid to mine a POI that lies at the very edge of the map? In my opinion, the answer is no and I can see that more advanced tech do open up more options and capabilities. Rock hopping is a choice, a playstyle, not an engine feature.

 

38 minutes ago, AndreyKl said:

 

1 hour ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

It has the same range as the large petroleum engine (1 fuel tank) but requires way less fuel to operate, which makes it much more efficient.

Small Petroleum engine costs 450kg of petroleum, plus 225kg oxidizer, plus ~300kg of oxygen for pilot. 450kg of petroleum can be turned into 168kg of pwater plus 112kg of CO2. I think that's a bit expensive in comparison to earlier engines.

What would the cost be if you sent the same pilot over with the large petroleum engine instead of the small one? If you can show me that it would cost less using a large petroleum engine, I will be convinced. I am not comparing it to early engines, those use different resources and have different height limitations (module capacities) which might not suit everyone's playstyle or needs.

But yeah, I don't know if we will get anywhere with this, maybe we should just drop it and hear other opinions XD

[AndreyKl]

7 minutes ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

Can you send a steam engine or even a radbolt engine from the starting planetoid to mine a POI that lies at the very edge of the map?

Sending from staring planetoid to any POI that far away is hardly efficient time and resource-wise, even if I could I wouldn't.

Also the end goal is to reach a time-tear via one way tip, yet it's within 11 tiles from starter planetoid, so it's reachable by radbolt from starting planetoid and by steam one with a refuel (because chances of it being within 11 tiles of every planetoid are near zero). In my personal case it reachable even by a CO2 rocket. I think it's supposed to be a challenge.

16 minutes ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

Isn't it already this way? We start out with CO2 and sucrose, those are pretty easy to set up early, fuel is readily accessible via dupes exhaling and sucrose can be mined. Fertilizer can also be mined or produced rather easily. Then you progress to steam (requires more tech and more advanced materials), radbolts and petroleum.

I mean that small petroleum engine doesn't bring much to the table, thus no progression, it's not really an improvement over other engines.

Also game description says that small petroleum is supposed to be a mid-range exploration rocket, it's far from efficient choice for exploration. And by the time I built my first petroleum rocket my steam one explored most of the map, long range included.

24 minutes ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

If you can show me that it would cost less using a large petroleum engine, I will be convinced. I am not comparing it to early engines, those use different resources and have different height limitations

As you said "they give our colony access to space and other planetoids" - all 'fuel' types are comparable and translatable to distance on top of being used to produce each other and almost every other fuel type is cheaper resource/tile and effort wise.

As for the height limitation - there is even less point to compare large petroleum engine to a small one due to even bigger difference than between steam and small petroleum.

[NeoDeusMachina]

@AndreyKl I was gonna write a more elaborate answer to your lastest post, but I changed my mind. The short version would be that I respect that you prefer playing in a certain way and doing things that might be "time efficient" and "resource efficient", but not everyone plays the game the same way. I would personally prefer if game mechanics were not balanced around a single playstyle, which also means that they should not be balanced around my personal playstyle.

In my opinion, having multiple ways of completing a task is important, otherwise the game becomes repetitive and the progression becomes linear. For example, in the base game, I went through the tear once. It was gated by an extremely linear space tech progression and I could not be bothered doing the same thing over and over again. In the DLC, there are many ways of doing that and I am perfectly fine with it. 

Let's just agree to disagree!

[JaxckLl]

10 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

Let's just agree to disagree!

Why put in so much effort to be contrarian when you're just going to abandon your position? There's nothing wrong with reading a forum post & disagreeing without posting.

One thing of note is that AndreyK's experience seems to be more normal, in particular qer point about Steam being used to access the whole map. The infrastructure needed to support Petrol & Hydrogen is so complex, in my experience most players give up rather than spend hours working on a single problem. The Radbolt engine is the real silver bullet, which is why I'm not surprised it's been nerfed in the most recent balance changes. Steam, CO2, & Sugar need to be viable early game options for exploring & accessing the map, while radbolt needs to be good to justify its inclusion as a DLC feature (radbolts still don't have enough uses compared to how quickly they are generated). At the same time as needing to be good for various reasons, those rockets are also all fairly simple to use. Just add the required resource & go. Setting up infrastructure on new asteroids is quick and easy for all those save maybe Steam.

This puts Petrol & Hydrogen in an awkward middle space, in particular being substantially more complex. That time I need to spend setting up additional Petrol factories I could instead spend tapping into the unique resource of each asteroid, or diving into new engineering problems involving radbolts, or just letting my base run without focusing too hard. I would rather spend that complexity on other problems, maybe wrapping back around to Petrol/Hydrogen much later once I have sustainability. This paradigm I see reflected in other players, in particular streamers. I would love to use the Petrol engine (especially if it were allowed to use Ethanol!), but steam/radbolt is easier for largely the same effect so why bother?

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There's this thing in RTSs about the relationship between units. If a unit is too good compared to another unit, you'll see lots of the powerful unit and relatively little of the weaker one. This is especially true if the powerful unit is designed to counter the weaker one, such as in the case of Age of Empire II's Knights/Crossbowmen vs Longswords. Longswords, while they absolutely have a purpose and can be a great unit in many circumstances, are dominated by Knight/Crossbowmen builds. This has the negative side effect of suppressing use of the equivalent unit in the prior & later ages, with both the ManatArms & Champion (upgrading into/upgrading from respectively) seeing less play than their stats would suggest. The dominated content is seen dramatically less by default, requiring special circumstances to be only conditionally better than the default, dominant strategy.

The dominant/dominated relationship is much less strong with rockets, but a similar decision space certainly exists. I find it's useful to think of content in that way, since it best described how players will actually use the content provided. Players are going to use what they feel is best given their game knowledge, and given how much time they are willing to spend to acquire that option.

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@NeoDeusMachina: I feel you've kind of missed the point of AnredyK's posts. Qe's not asking for less options. Qe's asking for content that qe feels is dominated to be less dominated. 

[NeoDeusMachina]

11 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

Why put in so much effort to be contrarian when you're just going to abandon your position? There's nothing wrong with reading a forum post & disagreeing without posting.

I don't feel the need to convince everyone that my position is the right one at every turn. I shared my opinion, acknowledged theirs, and I am fine with it. We exchanged a few posts and it did not seem we had the same experience or preferences and it also did not seem like we would reach an agreement any time soon, so I prefer to leave it at that.

11 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

One thing of note is that AndreyK's experience seems to be more normal, in particular qer point about Steam being used to access the whole map. The infrastructure needed to support Petrol & Hydrogen is so complex, in my experience most players give up rather than spend hours working on a single problem. The Radbolt engine is the real silver bullet, which is why I'm not surprised it's been nerfed in the most recent balance changes. Steam, CO2, & Sugar need to be viable early game options for exploring & accessing the map, while radbolt needs to be good to justify its inclusion as a DLC feature (radbolts still don't have enough uses compared to how quickly they are generated). At the same time as needing to be good for various reasons, those rockets are also all fairly simple to use. Just add the required resource & go. Setting up infrastructure on new asteroids is quick and easy for all those save maybe Steam.

This puts Petrol & Hydrogen in an awkward middle space, in particular being substantially more complex. That time I need to spend setting up additional Petrol factories I could instead spend tapping into the unique resource of each asteroid, or diving into new engineering problems involving radbolts, or just letting my base run without focusing too hard. I would rather spend that complexity on other problems, maybe wrapping back around to Petrol/Hydrogen much later once I have sustainability. This paradigm I see reflected in other players, in particular streamers. I would love to use the Petrol engine (especially if it were allowed to use Ethanol!), but steam/radbolt is easier for largely the same effect so why bother?

I agree with you that petroleum and especially hydrogen rockets require quite an elaborate infrastructure compared to other fuel types. Petroleum can be done rather simply and less efficiently by using two buildings (the well and the refinery), a few (very long) pipes, ladders for the rocket platform and that's it. But it can also be done with a very high level of complexity and efficiency, require an additional boiler, might as well go for a volcano because it's renewable, etc. It seems like a lot of players lose the ability to enjoy simple less efficient solutions. It sometimes feels like ONI is their semester project and they need that perfect grade or it's their engineering job, but it's not, it's a game. Personally, it is not that it is complicated or elaborate that makes me steer towards other options, but because I have done it already multiple times and I do appreciate something new to fiddle with, like the new engines. To be honest, I haven't used the steam engine in SO yet, but I might give it a try in future playthroughs for that reason, because I haven't done so already and also because it is such a short part of the base game rocketry that it is probably the engine I have used the least overall.

We might need to consider that, in addition to the "complexity/time consuming aspect" discussed above, maybe the new things also get more attention right now because they are new. Petroleum has been done countless times in the base game, it might not be as exciting to do again, on stream or video, if you're looking to put out some new and exciting content about the DLC. But there are streamers out there using petroleum engines and building petroleum boilers, copy-pasting good ol' blueprints from the base game, etc.

11 hours ago, JaxckLl said:

 

@NeoDeusMachina: I feel you've kind of missed the point of AnredyK's posts. Qe's not asking for less options. Qe's asking for content that qe feels is dominated to be less dominated. 

I don't know about that, it feels like what they wish for was that each engine dominates other engines in some particular area in order to make each engine relevant at some phase of the game. To give each engine "purpose", My concern with that is that, depending on how it's done, it could translate into having to setup infrastructure for every engine type, a little bit like what we had to do in the base game to reach the tear: every time, setup steam engine, grind close planets, set up boosters and oxyite, set up petroleum, launch more rockets, hope to find fullerene, set up hydrogen, reach tear. It was linear and repetitive, and we were forced to do all of it every single time if we wanted to mine planets that were far away.

I would be very satisfied if we ended up with engines balanced in a way that we can explore/mine the starmap and colonize other planets without having to go through all stages of grief and set up the infrastructure for every engine type every playthrough at one point or another, because they all excel at doing something that the others do not, or because they open up some area of the starmap that only those engines can reach. Ofc I also wish all engines to be relevant in their own way or at different phases of the game, but I think they are already. Could it be better? Probably. Are they all "optimal" and "the most efficient" at something? I don't know, but does everything have to be?