Geyser balance is terrible, randomly ruins worlds

[Coolthulhu]

The idea to have random geysers is not inherently bad, but the implementation - picking random geysers with no regard for how they add up - certainly is bad. This is made even worse by the random average output per activity/dormancy period.

One of my worlds got 3 gold volcanos and one iron volcano. The only truly useless geyser was the CO2 one.

The one right after it got only one metal volcano and it was copper (the worst one). From what I can tell, it's entirely possible to end up with a world with no metal volcanoes at all. Not a huge chance, but still - a world without a metal volcano will be really boring, because any major electric installations require tons of metal, meaning getting from midgame to lategame will be a slog.

It would be easy to fix the disappointment of uncovering a crap geyser by balancing the spawns according to tiers. That is, metal volcano, water geyser, energy vent, crap vent. The more dangerous the vent, the MORE it should produce - you can easily seal any vent, so it should be balanced by how useful it is unsealed. Hot is bad, steam turbines can't be powered by volcanoes.

[Gwido]

5 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

The one right after it got only one metal volcano and it was copper (the worst one).

Ha ? I love this volcano, becaus I'm a stubborn player that want to make all his wires into copper.

 

5 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

The more dangerous the vent, the MORE it should produce - you can easily seal any vent, so it should be balanced by how useful it is unsealed.

As far I see, Even if the values are randomly generated, a natural gaz geyser is set to provide enough gaz to power continuously as least 1 generator (often with some more gaz, so that you can provide partial supply to a second one)

The hydrogen geyser do not produce enough for a generator, but we also produce hydrogen with eletrolizers, so ..

And if I'm not wrong, a cold steam geyser can continuously produce at least 1 kg of water per seconds

 

In my opinion, these values are well balanced.

At least for human sized bases.

 

I think wath you lack is more of a complete custom generation of the world, like in Don't Starve.

[Coolthulhu]

20 minutes ago, Gwido said:

And if I'm not wrong, a cold steam geyser can continuously produce at least 1 kg of water per seconds

In my opinion, these values are well balanced.

You mean cold steam geyser values or values of all the useless geysers like polluted oxygen and CO2?

Polluted oxygen geyser produces 1/10 of what cold steam does. Not exaggerating here - cold steam is 10 times as good at oxygen production as dedicated oxygen geyser, assuming you electrolyze all the water.

[Yukiya]

14 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

The only truly useless geyser was the CO2 one.

I have one in my base. And you know what? I fed it to slickster. Those valuable crude oil (or petroleum if you have molten one) is crucial for my base, having extra CO2 when my base were run by just 20 dupe is more than I can wish for.

14 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

From what I can tell, it's entirely possible to end up with a world with no metal volcanoes at all. Not a huge chance, but still - a world without a metal volcano will be really boring, because any major electric installations require tons of metal, meaning getting from midgame to lategame will be a slog.

I have currently running a space program and I still haven't found any metal vocalno. Still, I have 5 tonnes of iron from space alone, and producing more of gold and copper from metal refinery. Yes, it can drag your speed down but 200 cycles in and I already pass mid game pretty easily.

9 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

You mean cold steam geyser values or values of all the useless geysers like polluted oxygen and CO2?

Polluted oxygen geyser produces 1/10 of what cold steam does. Not exaggerating here - cold steam is 10 times as good at oxygen production as dedicated oxygen geyser, assuming you electrolyze all the water.

Yes, Pollute oxygen vent produce oxygen less than cold steam geyser. and infectious one can be hazardous, it use no power. While with cold steam geyser, you have to pump(240W) it to electrolyser(each cost 120W) and have a vent(240W) to disperse oxygen and hydrogen, maybe even filtering hydrogen(120W). While in the long run it could be better, beginner can tame Polluted oxygen vent much easier. Also, temperature different isn't as high so, that is another pros.

While yes, a little tweak can be a good thing. I think a lot of geyser already have its balance.

[yoakenashi]

On 9/6/2018 at 1:56 PM, Bigfoot said:

[W]e want to make sure that ... the situations a colony encounters have enough variety that each playthrough feels fresh.

I think the wide variety of geyser possibilities leads to this. You would play differently if you had 3 metal volcanos vs 6 chlorine vents.

I like this randomness, but I also understand why people may not want that. I always felt that could be configurable when starting a new game, since geysers are as much a game changer as stress and immune systems.

Simply being able to define geyser type (including none and random) would be sufficient. No need to break into all of the details of emission rates and cycle durations.

I would enjoy playing a map one day with no geysers.

[Coolthulhu]

3 hours ago, Yukiya said:

I have one in my base. And you know what? I fed it to slickster. Those valuable crude oil (or petroleum if you have molten one) is crucial for my base, having extra CO2 when my base were run by just 20 dupe is more than I can wish for.

Yes, Pollute oxygen vent produce oxygen less than cold steam geyser. and infectious one can be hazardous, it use no power. While with cold steam geyser, you have to pump(240W) it to electrolyser(each cost 120W) and have a vent(240W) to disperse oxygen and hydrogen, maybe even filtering hydrogen(120W). While in the long run it could be better, beginner can tame Polluted oxygen vent much easier. Also, temperature different isn't as high so, that is another pros.

A CO2 geyser running full time produces less CO2 than a single petroleum generator. You think it is helping you, but you simply haven't done the math and have no idea how little does it matter. You'd get FAR more CO2 if you had a steam geyser and piped the water to oil wells.

No energy costs excuse the 10 times difference in output. Especially considering that a properly built electrolyzer+filter block produces excess energy. It's not that "it can be better", it's "it can't ever not be better in the long run". The temperature difference is much higher if you get the 500C vent. Don't even think about suggesting steam turbines, because trying to run them off a vent is entirely futile.

Anyone who defends those terrible numbers certainly hasn't done the math on them.

[Zarquan]

I like the idea of having tiers of geysers.  Some mechanism that guarantees that we get something useful and that no map is too bad.  Or, we could have one of each geyser.  Personally, I'm always sad when I don't have exactly one chlorine vent because it is the only reasonable way to get chlorine for bleach stone or gassy moos.  But if there is more than one, then I'm sad because I don't need that much chlorine and that geyser could have been something else.

2 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

I would enjoy playing a map one day with no geysers.

You could debug away any geysers you find while playing the game.  That would do it.  But then if you don't have any oil wells either, you can't sustainably support anything without massive morb farms. 

[DraconicSiege]

Maybe they could make it so once you get a geyser of a specific type, say a metal volcano, you are less likely to have your other geysers be metal volcanoes. They could weight the percentage spawn chances during the world building based on what it already has spawned. That way you are more likely to get a larger variety, but not guaranteed it.

[Daxterr]

I said this too a while ago. Some geysers are useless. Since then chlorine geysers got a use, but CO2 geysers are still useless. Slickers in general are actually pretty useless I find. I don't really mind them cause they're cute though. What I do mind is this steam vent that gives 100 grams of steam at 500 degrees celcius. The one right beside that is 9,000 grams a second and only 100 degrees. Why is one geyser more than one hundred times better than another one?

[Tekky]

In Factorio, the randomness of a map never poses a serious problem, because, even if the resources that you find are of the wrong type, all you have to do is explore more, until you find the resource you need. That is the advantage of having a map of unlimited size (the more you explore, the more of the map is randomly generated).

Maybe having such an unlimited map size would also work in ONI?

Unfortunately, having a larger map also means that more tiles will have to be simulated, which is bad for performance (CPU and memory bandwidth).

Factorio manages to deal with this by not simulating tiles that are very far away, where nothing is happening. Due to this, a larger map does not decrease performance significantly, it only increases savegame size.

Unfortunately, this can't be done so easily for ONI, because, at the very least, thermal transfer between tiles has to be simulated for all tiles, even if the tiles are far away from all player activity.

However, what if tiles that are very far away were only simulated at a significantly reduced rate? For example, instead of simulating thermal transfer between tiles several times per second, why not just simulate them once per minute? For tiles that are far away from all buildings and dupe activity, I doubt that anyone would notice or care.

[Sasza22]

2 hours ago, Daxterr said:

Slickers in general are actually pretty useless I find.

Well slicksters allow you to recycle the CO2 you produce through the petroleum generator. Effectively you are getting something like 50% of your fuel back. Not to mention meat and eggshells.

They CO2 geyser seems to produce very little CO2 when considering feeding slicksters. Generally you can only get a serious amount of those tamed after you start burning petroleum. Polluted oxygen geysers aren`t enough to farm pufts. Hot steam vent produces minimal amounts of steam. It could use some balance.

[D.L.S.]

In one map i had cold pouted water  vent, it produced 7.9kg/s of PW at -10C, as for me this is one of the best vent: it gives you cold, dirt(so can grow some food which require dirt, at least partially), clean water, and if you electrolyze this water you will have electric power and oxygen, not bad as for 1 single vent. Definitely better then CO2 or magma volcano...

As for magma volcano, few weeks ago was suggested that magma volcano should give also some coal, maybe not bad idea for boost, better then nothing.

[Oozinator]

3 hours ago, Tekky said:

Maybe having such an unlimited map size would also work in ONI?

Not 100% sure ^^

[babba]

Spawned resource sources take relative low cpu load, that works really well in the game. So if one wants to play a bit in debug and add some more resource givers, they dont take too much load. I hope that Klei implements more options into the world generation menu. Resource spawns don't lead to game crashes and take little cpu load.

16x map size can take 10 minutes to generate and starts with a few FPS. 64x can take an hour to generate, starting with 0.1 frames per minute. Anything bigger and one is not sure if the pc is actually still working on it after checking the next day, dont know...never done it. Perhaps it would run at 0.1 frames  per hour haha.

512 Y: 2048 = 1048576 tiles ( x10.66 ) - That a good choice of size and speed compromise, at least for me
256 Y: 384 = 98304 tiles ( Default )

Below some fun - Generated gravitas room from a 12x size map. 12x is well playable on a fast system ( using lots of Neutronium ).

[Gwido]

11 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

A CO2 geyser running full time produces less CO2 than a single petroleum generator. 

QED !

Because we have already many ways to produce CO2, and because duplicants already produce some for free, the CO2 geyser don't need to give a lot amount of this gas.

 

It's quite the same for polluted oxygen, there's many material that produce some. So no need for a high pressure geyser. And morbs also produce a lot for free.

 

So in a way, your right, these 2 geysers are quite worthless, and it's some sort of malus for a map.

[babba]

I do love the debug editor Yeah I know, its not the same...I loved the lottery and struggle feeling playing without debug, but nowadays the default provisioning is just not enough to make my build plans become reality.

[babba]

I figured that there is a diagonal pattern running across the entire map, where all resource values are all exactly the same. It seems to depend on which tile of the pattern the player gets his Volcano, Geysir etc. placed on at @ world generation. Kg,Eruption Period,Active P, Dormancy - All values exactly the same as I have placed and synchronized my Volcanos placements on to the diagonal pattern system of the game. At least that's how it is with my map. I play on my own configured map size, so the spacing may be different on the games default or other custom map sizes. It may not even be a diagonal system on the default map size, my custom map size with a different aspect ratio perhaps made the system obvious. I did not know about this system and how this works.

Bottom right Volcano

Diagonal up,left

Further diagonal up,left

Further diagonal up , left

----------------------------

Choosing the next diagonal synchro pattern, this time bottom middle - Following diagonally up to the left.

Next one up diagonally to the left

Next one up diagonally to the left

[D.L.S.]

21 hours ago, babba said:

I figured that there is a diagonal pattern running across the entire map

It seems there is some amount of predefined settings, and certain set of settings chosen based on coordinates of volcano, and it seems used sum of coordinates. So when you, for example, have x=19, y=369 sum would be 388, moving diagonally one of coordinate will decrease by 1 and other increase by 1, so x will become 18  and y 370, but sum will be again 388, so it will choose same settings again.

Interesting, so you have found secondary diagonale, and moving along another(primary) diagonal you can find out how many different settings this volcano have...

[babba]

Yeah, I find these things interesting too. Always something new to find out about this game