I hope polymer gets more uses (that are useful)

[chemie]

I do not like the current polymer production chain in therms of benefits.

First, crude refiner takes dup labor to run.  So using this for petroluem generator seems to be worst choice over straight nat gas gens.  Plus it has waste nat gas which I would probably put in my fertilizer room, but then, I have enough nat gas anyway so....

Then you make the polymer in a second production chain.  Both refinery and polymer machine have "non-piped" waste (nat gas and steam) which require additional placement/engineering/power to manage.

So lots of power usage and complexity.  I love a complex production chain, when it gives you something in return.  What do you get for your efforts?

Cozy bed: A cot with a portrait seems just as good

Ladders - By the time you could replace existing ladders, your dups are likely 20+ level so zipping up and down regular ladders just fine. 

Polymer tiles?  Disinfectant property would be nice early game but you won't need late game since your exo-suits allow you to fully ignore slimelung.

Traps?  I would like to use on hatches but you will have already dealt with those by the time you have polymer up and running.  So this is a niche usage for those who want to exotic animal farm (puffs, orbs etc).  Nice but not really core to game.

 

(As an aside, I am intrigued by prospect of a slickster farm for low energy CO2 disposal.  They seem fairly OP right now for this roll so you could make an argument for petroleum-->pet gen-->CO2 to slickster as infinite power loop.  However, this does not address polymer usage/need). Edit: Seems you need 60 slickers for a single pet gen so never mind about power loop.  Just use for low energy CO2 disposal.)

[brummbar7]

I would guess that down the road there will be tons and tons of compelling uses for plastic.

[Risu]

Think of it as a step in the door to the next tier up. The petrol generator is a good example of this.
It's the only (currently enabled) generator to require plastic and it generates far more power than every other generator.
 

[chemie]

16 minutes ago, Risu said:

Think of it as a step in the door to the next tier up. The petrol generator is a good example of this.
It's the only (currently enabled) generator to require plastic and it generates far more power than every other generator.
 

But how is more power per generator useful vs just building more of a coal or nat gas generators?  There is an efficiency arguement but you are spending dup labor to run the thing.

[Risu]

1 hour ago, chemie said:

But how is more power per generator useful vs just building more of a coal or nat gas generators?  There is an efficiency arguement but you are spending dup labor to run the thing.

Why build coal or nat gas generators when you can just build more manual generators?
Saying that the next available building isn't worth using because you could build more of what you have isn't good for game development.
You need to try everything for anything to get balanced.
 

[chemie]

27 minutes ago, Risu said:

Why build coal or nat gas generators when you can just build more manual generators?
Saying that the next available building isn't worth using because you could build more of what you have isn't good for game development.
You need to try everything for anything to get balanced.
 

Manual generators take dup time.  I was focused on the dup labor needed for petroleum refining.

[CfSapper]

Been playing around with it a bunch and honestly not sure its worth it at current balance the petro genny burns through your crude oil faster then you can pump out of one gyser.

[NurdRage]

Yeah there needs to be something so awesome that it's worth putting a dupe on the oil refinery to pay for it. Plastic, or power or something else.

I agree with all the points raised so far. The uses of plastic so far just seem like luxuries, but nothing so awesome that i would go out of my way to get it. The animal traps are nice, but come so late in the game that i've already worked around my strategies to not need them.

Instead of making a huge powerful generator, i think i would love the petroleum generator a lot more if it had intelligence. What i mean by that is if it only generated power when there was a deficit. Like if the batteries ran down the petroleum generator kicked in and ONLY consumed fuel in that particular case. An intelligent generator would be worth the cost, pollution and excessive waste to build and use it.

In real life, solar, nuclear and wind power are awesome, but natural gas generator plants are still used a lot. The primary reason is that they can be spun up or spun down to match the changing load of the grid while the renewable sources cannot. The best thing we got in the game for that is the manual generators but those use dupe power. The petroleum generator would be a good fit for the same function but that doesn't use dupe power.

As it is, the petroleum generator seems like a net negative. A generator that for the total amount of effort and cost produces more waste and pollution and less power. 

 

Overall, i think the plastic tech-tree would benefit if the tree had more intelligence or new functions rather than just bigger/stronger/faster versions of existing things. The animal traps are the right idea, but way too late in the tree. The generator would arrive at the perfect time... if it had more intelligence. I honestly thought the exo-suits would be plastic based, now THAT would have been something worth killing for... but they're made without plastic.

 

I'm sure Klei will rebalance it properly. I like the new research tree actually. not perfect, but better and more challenging than the old one. 

 

 

[chemie]

someone on reddit reported that after spending the 5kg/s water on a well, they were able to generate a whopping 200 kw from the resulting petroleum.  So the idea of a 2KW generator is kind of off so....

 

EDIT: 200 watts net

[NurdRage]

200kw?

Seriously... 200 000 watts?

You'd need 10 heavy wires to channel that. If the generator was really putting out that much power it'd be totally unusable without more electrical ports to parallel more wires. How was the redditor measuring that much power?

 

 

[Risu]

1 hour ago, NurdRage said:

200kw?

Seriously... 200 000 watts?

You'd need 10 heavy wires to channel that. If the generator was really putting out that much power it'd be totally unusable without more electrical ports to parallel more wires. How was the redditor measuring that much power?


 

It costs 4032W to generate 2000W including the liquid pumps, well cap, and refinery.
Assuming the water pump and oil pump are pumping 10 kg per second.

If you used slicksters instead you'd need, ohhhhh, 40 of them for a constant input.
This drops it down to 432W to generate 2000W, ignoring any costs to generate the CO2.

And I got curious about hydrogen generator. If the electrolyzer wasn't garbage it'd cost 128.57W to generate 800W.

Natural gas generator needs 28.8W to generate 800W.
 

[NurdRage]

That's 2kw or 2000 watts

I'm wondering where the 200kw (200 000 watts) figure came from.

 

[trukogre]

it's an obvious typo nurdrage; the reddit post referenced had the correct math, 200 watts

 

"This brought me down to ~200 W and some extra CO2 to deal with." 

is the quote in question from the ONI subreddit

 

 

 

[chemie]

yes guys, a typo. 200 watts

[NurdRage]

damn, i was hoping it really was so powerful.

The natural gas/fertillzer/carbon skimmer power plant we all use is great... But is hard on CPU speed since it's so complicated. A single high energy power plant, even if it was extremely hard to make, would be worth it if only just to get back CPU cycles. At least for me anyway on my slow computer. 

[CfSapper]

I Managed to get a fairly balanced system going with it using the natural gas output from it and the petro refinery, it needs a tonne more refinement and is a total mess or wires and pipes and 100% of the petrol goes to generating power. And burn through the crude oil, Still not sure its worth it. The crude oil gyser may actually be broken at this point, as they shouldn'tthey act like the other gysers in game?

[Risu]

4 minutes ago, CfSapper said:

The crude oil gyser may actually be broken at this point, as they shouldn'tthey act like the other gysers in game?

It's not a geyser. It requires a well cap to pressurize it to get oil out of it.
 

[CfSapper]

Just now, Risu said:

It's not a geyser. It requires a well cap to pressurize it to get oil out of it.
 

I know that put its output is 1000g/s and the description of the well cap says uses water to reenable extraction of a depleated well. Seem like a stage is missing currently. Its 10kgs/s of oil for the refinery to convert into 5kg of petro so you need a minimum  of 6 wells to run one generator constantly,  as it requires 3000g/s  even by oni thats a pain in the butt for its output. Seems to me that the well cap should be used after the well is depleated. That part just isn't in yet.

[chemie]

9 hours ago, CfSapper said:

I know that put its output is 1000g/s and the description of the well cap says uses water to reenable extraction of a depleated well. Seem like a stage is missing currently. Its 10kgs/s of oil for the refinery to convert into 5kg of petro so you need a minimum  of 6 wells to run one generator constantly,  as it requires 3000g/s  even by oni thats a pain in the butt for its output. Seems to me that the well cap should be used after the well is depleated. That part just isn't in yet.

Unless they plan to add back a lot of water geysers, no way you can feed those 6 wells.

[CfSapper]

5 hours ago, chemie said:

Unless they plan to add back a lot of water geysers, no way you can feed those 6 wells.

I had two geysers in debug feeding my 6 dupe base with full bathrooms and 4 electrolizers and a well cap and it just bearly kept up. Now keep in mind there is not water reprocessing going on at this point and I have a huge waste water tank right now but yup no way to keep up with water demand with the two geysers alone.

[Michi01]

If they add a third research station, it could require plastic to prevent players from unlocking late game research too easily. Also, as said before, many structures in general could require plastic. Another idea that I brought up in another thread is aerogel, which would be a very good insulator. It used to be in debug mode so the devs have definitely thought about adding it. I think abyssalite tiles could use a nerf (while natural abyssalite could stay as good at insulating as it is) because of how easy it is to obtain them in the early game and because of how they makes insulated tiles useless. Aerogel could instead take its role of being the best insulator, but be locked behind oil.
Also perhaps the current exosuits or an even stronger version could require plastic, while the ones without plastic would be much weaker (less temperature resistance, more slowing, less oxygen storage), but still good enough to be useful before getting the stronger ones and good enough to allow players to access oil.

[Michi01]

Also, while I want plastic to have lots of uses, I think animal traps shouldn't require it.

[chemie]

27 minutes ago, Michi01 said:

Also, while I want plastic to have lots of uses, I think animal traps shouldn't require it.

I agree.  It is way too late for hatches at that point.

[YiinHikari]

Plastic tables where they eat faster? hmmm animal cages or similar so you can feed them directly to get the coal? Idk, jetpacks?

 

Edit: I mean so you can set to store food for them or something like that

[Lifegrow]

On 23/09/2017 at 10:16 PM, chemie said:

Manual generators take dup time.  I was focused on the dup labor needed for petroleum refining.

Coal generators need fuelling, cooling, and processing of CO2. A refinery generates 5kg/s of petroleum, generators consume 3kg/s - solution, split off the surplus into a reserve tank. One dupe running the machine for a little portion of every cycle for 2kw of power seems like nothing to me, if said dupe would be spinning their tiny legs off along with 4 friends on manual generators anyway  

On 24/09/2017 at 1:08 AM, CfSapper said:

Been playing around with it a bunch and honestly not sure its worth it at current balance the petro genny burns through your crude oil faster then you can pump out of one gyser.

The idea of being able to just slap down a pump and painlessly power something that generates 2kw is laughable to me. The whole point of this tech (in my eyes) is that by the time you're ready to use it, you'll have progressed through other means of power. The coal gens you used would have created co2 (along with dupes breath) that you'll have dumped/stored/liquified/solidified somewhere - that can be fed to slicksters for supplementary oil. Let's face it, unless you're at a late game "done everything and now just bored" stage of the game, you're not going to want to build much out of plastic other than traps (if you failed to trap your hatches propperly) and beds (if you care).

Currently plastic is a worthless resource, and once you've made a couple of hundred kilos (which doesn't take all that long - let's face it) can be pretty much ignored.

There is plenty of oil in high pressure pockets on the map, plus numerous (normally) wells that CAN be tapped if you have surplus water. I really don't think there's a problem here. If you can't handle the gasses output by the refinery/press and generator - don't build them. Seriously. Dealing with a spot of co2/nat gas and steam is nowhere near as hard as balancing the infrastructure to use the generator efficiently  

3 hours ago, chemie said:

I agree.  It is way too late for hatches at that point.

Depends on whether your initially trapped hatches are close to where you eventually built your power station   How many times have you trapped your hatches on one side of your base at the start of the game, then when you finally come to want them they're in an inconvenient place  I think the plastic cost should be lower tbh - 25kg per trap or something.