Generators Rebalanced : What do you think of these tweaks?

    I made the following changes to power generation on my server, through decompiling the server jar and tweaking a few constants :


    Solar produces HALF the energy output it did before. Solar NEEDs a nerf...it's stupid how OP it is.
    Wind is halved as well, since with the nerf it's still twice as good as solar and it is renewable energy that requires no maintenance.
    This makes Water Generators just as good as solar (they were half what solar was before). I made them work ONLY if there are flow blocks adjacent, still blocks no longer count. That nerfs them a little.


    And finally, to compensate for the fact that nuclear reactors always sucked and were a waste of materials compared to tons of solar, and now you can no longer massfab for uranium so they are not even a renewable energy source, I made nuclear fuel last 4 times as long.


    Opinions?


    Also, I made recycling take 10 times as much energy. Recycling was the most OP and broken thing in all of industrialcraft 2.

    ehm why you halved solar eu output? They arent exactly op i mean 0.5 output only..and they cost more than generators which output 10x that. Dont tell me its hard to make charcoal i made like 20 stacks in 30 mins with plain old stone furnaces.


    You dont fix the underpowered watergen by nerfing it all

    What Rick said.


    Any idea that relies on nerfing windmills, of all things, is insane. People already don't use them due to their unreliability. Solars are fine - the expense to make compared to the output sees to that, as well as the space and wiring to make an efficient solar grid.


    The wing on my roof was originally enough to power my first modest workshop, but it has since been relegated to a supplemental role.


    I'm not even sure why we have someone calling for nerfs in Minecraft, of all things. It doesn't matter how other people play, and in SMP, everyone is on an equal footing. The problem isn't that "solar is OP", the problem is that windmills are fickle and water mills are useless. The key lies in changing how machines interact with bodies of liquid - and the proper fix is one that would make water mills work better in larger bodies and/or moving water as well as making pumps work more effectively.

    Or, you could just buff Water Mills... sounds like a better option overall...

    Would anyone like to try a Slowpoke Tail?! Only 1 Million Yen!


    Quote

    this isn't about arrogance or ego, I have a block that I put a lot of freaking work into


    Every Mod Author, in existence. And yet, you STILL say otherwise.

    It's a matter of scale. Sure, a generator gives 5x more energy, 8x if you include the night.


    But have you ever tried to keep an array of 20 generators fueled? At a certain point, you end up spending most of your playtime just getting more generator fuel.


    Hence, at a small scale, renewable energy is weak but at a large scale solar dominates because there is only a limit number "Steves".


    The same applies to lava generators. On my server, I have a friend who has a bank of about 40 lava generator mark IIs. He's making over 600 EU/tick, and i have no problem with that. However, at that rate of consumption he's actually draining entire, 15 block deep and 100 block wide, lakes of lava. He has to extend a pipeline to a new lake of lava every few days. It balances things.


    A 600 EU/tick solar array would run forever without maintainence.


    By nerfing it to half, it still means solar is quite good on a large scale, but it makes using nonrenewables a much more viable option til you can come up with the iron you need for enough solar. Whenever I've played, or seen others play, I notice that going to a solar array to run everything is the first thing people do after making a generator.


    Rick, you already admitted that wind was better than your small, early nuclear reactor and you cannot get enough fuel for your big nuclear reactor without cheating. There's no way to legitly come up with 28 fresh uranium every 2 hours 40 minutes. Now, that same reactor gives a lot more energy for the same amount of fuel over time, and requires less babying.

    This really only sounds like an excuse to "encourage" players into making CASUC nuclear reactors. CASUC reactors are attractive enough as it is, those who want to build one will build one.

    /all/ of these issues are also meaningless with Buildcraft or Redpower2 added to the equation since you can automate feeding anything simple with relative ease. Theoretically you can even automate reloading nukes, but the chunk/ejection issues come in to play.


    The real solution is to offer more of these 'magic numbers' as configuration file tweaks; let the admins adjust the balance on their server to fit their issues. Maybe they want to make nukes impotent due to some kind of scifi field which prevents atomic reactions (Re: Gundam 00), or possibly solar and wind are dead because it's forever still-air night.

    To make a solar array that outputs 500 eu/tick is more than 10 times more expensive than making generators that generate 500 eu/tick. Thats why solars dont require any maintenance and generators do.


    For powering my mass fab i use nuclear power because of these reasons:
    -much less lag
    -cheaper
    -doesnt ruin the landscape like solars/windgens do


    Also with a breeder you can get 28 uranium ore before cycle end. Even without using quarries.


    Dont get me wrong solars and windgens can be used to power your mass fab but if you want it going at high speed you need to use multiple reactors or suffer extreme investment cost and lag with renewables. Applies to just IC2 alone and especialy with redpower/bc.

    I saw the OP calling to swing the nerfbat and wondered if I'd accidentally stumbled into the WoW forums.


    Are we talking about shamans vs. paladins here, or can we accept and admit that everyone is on a level playing field in this game and "nerfing" something doesn't improve the game for anyone (else)?


    Maybe people wouldn't have to rely so heavily on solar power if other forms of generation were more dependable. Improve water mills, make windmills less fickle, and if solar is still better than nuclear, then it's the reactor that needs the buff. I haven't noticed my 39-panel solar wing outstripping my humble 2-chmaber, 3-cell reactor yet... and fuel hasn't been an issue for me, even playing several hours a day. Maybe it's because I'm not running vast, automated setups - if I'm not logged in, my machines aren't using any power anyways.

    While there is plenty of room for improvement in the power generation options balance, in my opinion your power generation changes go too far and doesn't really fix much. It sounds like you personally don't like renewable energy but then complain that nuclear isn't renewable now. I think that is more a philosophical issue than game balance. Some people enjoy spending their game time maintaining their machines while others enjoy doing other things. There is almost no resource in the game that isn't available in infinite (for practical purposes) quantity except for the player's time. That means many people will perceive gaining resources without player time input as "unfair". This conflicts with the "industrial" aspect of IC since in the real world we build machines to save us time. Don't forget that this is a game so is supposed to be fun and not work.


    In the end the most important thing is whether your players enjoy the changes you've made on your server, but you asked for opinion so there you go.

    Actually, the ideal way to do water mills would be to have them generate energy for each block of water that moved past them. So, you put it next to a river or waterfall, and it would accumulate a small amount of EU per tick. This would make output comparable to solar, and the size of an array would be limited by terrain or the user's hydro-engineering skills.

    Real hydro uses damns and either builds up a high gravity, low flow, reservoir or simply backfloods a massive area to establish a small potential energy across a -lot- of area. Sticking out a paddle and hoping to get work from it is about as effective as water-milling (actually it's exactly that effective; OK for slow grinding, suck for actual power production).


    Given the physics are over-simplified (and yet still lag-inducing enough) geological engineering to maximize hydro or wind power is already a lost cause. Making these generators more powerful probably isn't realistic anyway.


    Solar, there's a finite quantity of energy per given square meter for any earth-like planet.


    "Deserts, with very dry air and little cloud cover, receive the most sun—more than six kilowatt-hours per day per square meter. Northern climates, such as Boston, get closer to 3.6 kilowatt-hours. Sunlight varies by season as well, with some areas receiving very little sunshine in the winter. Seattle in December, for example, gets only about 0.7 kilowatt-hours per day. It should also be noted that these figures represent the maximum available solar energy that can be captured and used, but solar collectors capture only a portion of this, depending on their efficiency. For example, a one square meter solar electric panel with an efficiency of 15 percent would produce about one kilowatt-hour of electricity per day in Arizona. "


    http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_en…w-solar-energy-works.html



    I'm not sure how an eU relates to a kilowatt, but lets compare some effects. Macerators cost 2eU/t to run. It is effectively a giant industrial grinder/blender. Such a thing is probably 20 amps at 120v; but more often would be run with a 3 phase motor and higher voltages.


    But wait, when I try to convert that I get watts/t; how does that relate to watts/hour? Minecraft has 20000 logic (10000 redstone) ticks per day. I get a ratio of each 'tick' being equal to 4.32 simulated seconds. 833 + 1/3 ticks equal an hour. 1.666KeU/'H' sounds close enough to my guesstimate. However this means that eU/t is really 'watts/second' instead of 'watts/hour'.


    The ratio for watts/second to watts/hour is thus 3600:1


    Let's see if that makes sense:


    Coal: 5eU/t = 18KW/H
    Nuke: 35eU/t = 126KW/H
    Solar: 1eU/t (while active) = 3.6KW/H


    Actually, yes, that's supposed to be the output per day, not per instant. Dividing the solar rate by about 10, 5 for the most effective panels, would match reality.


    However the upper end of the scale is also distorted; without resorting to CARUC (AKA CASUC) methods using renewable coolants automatically applied IC2 reactors can't even begin to approach Gen I nukes.



    The most efficient basic stable design produces at 35 eU/t; 7million eU over the 3 fuel cell lifetime. This should be roughly comparable to an early-mid Gen-I nuke from RL. The very first commercial fission reactors ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Reactor ) seem to all be in the neighborhood of producing 50-200 MW/H. Our reactors produce about 1/1000th that.



    Even the crazy CARUC reactors can only come within spitting distance at 2.3MW/H (for a 640eU/t).




    If solar's nerfed, nuke should be boosted further. If it's just about game mechanics, then change the way reactors behave.


    Also, it would be far more realistic if generators (the burning/lava ones) and nukes produced heat that must be exchanged via chain attached windmill like turbines (possibly water wheel like). Also if nukes needed to be hooked up to an external heat sink. The chambers could be fold-ins to modify damage value and change which cells were processed. (the remaining cells would not be processed and could be filled in with random junk that would not be ejected).

    Wow, finally, someone who thinks I am on the right track. I think of the nuclear generators in IC2 as being extremely small reactors more like the early test reactors used in the 1940s, which is why you don't get much power from them. I know solar is still too good, but it needs to have some utility. The CASUC designs don't use an external heat sink : they just bring in fresh water all the time that turns to steam and vents to the atmosphere. This would be VERY dirty and would probably kill Steve in hours from radiation exposure...but it does work.

    Some ppl take minecraft too serious its a game not a reality simulator. If it was like reality 1 nuclear reactor would power thousands of macerators....


    Remember its a game and its balanced like a game its not a reality simulator where its balanced to match reality. Through you do want 'some' reality in minecraft but nerfing solars by that much would break solars and nobody would ever use them again and all would switch to nuclear reactors only.

    Quote from MJEvans

    The most efficient basic stable design produces at 35 eU/t; 7million eU over the 3 fuel cell lifetime. This should be roughly comparable to an early-mid Gen-I nuke from RL. The very first commercial fission reactors ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Reactor ) seem to all be in the neighborhood of producing 50-200 MW/H. Our reactors produce about 1/1000th that.



    Even the crazy CARUC reactors can only come within spitting distance at 2.3MW/H (for a 640eU/t).

    My only thought on that would be that IC reactors are physically very small compared to their real world counterparts. If you factor in their output per m^3 it would probably be closer. But there are a ton of variables to work with to figure that one out.

    cWelll...considering all of this, on your server, how 'bout you limit what certain powersources can be applied to, i can just imagine on servers someone just hooking up solar panels to a energy-o-mat and just making profit off the coins like crazy.