Suggestion: Electricity physics revamp and more!

Hello IC² fans!

First of all I'd like to apologize for this text as english is not my primary tongue and is thus likely to be a bit shady althought hopefully fully readable.

I am a long time IC/IC² admirer and have been following development for some time now. I have long yearned for development steering towards the direction I will come to tell about. But before I do I'd like to thank Alblaka and his crew for an awesome mod and make aware the time they spend doing this project in their spare time as it surely gets prioritized over more important matters at times I'm sure.

As a student of Electrical Engineering and a fan of the electrical physics in general, there is something I have for long felt was something that I missed in this mod. That, my friends, is how "electricity" is implemented in this game. Although the current method of storable EU/t is a great idea it eventually brings out inevitable conclusions about the gameplay.

1 solar panel in theory will be all that it takes to produce the EU required to do anything in the game. Althought this is a bold statement it isn't practically doable in a sane matter. One Nuclear powerplant setup is however. And one of those fill an MFS in fairly short time. The same goes with N amount of nuclear plants filling N amount of MFS's. This will eventually just lead to new content which requires more and more and more EU (Mass Fabricator, Teleporter).

Instead, what if electricity worked a lot more like it does in real life. You have a continuous source of EU from an active generator that for demonstration produces 50 EU. With this generator active you could power machines which totals effect's add up to 50 EU, just like real physics. I can see an alternative gameplay form take place:

• ELECTRICITY/ENERGY --- Certain generators produce more EU than others and focus could be towards maintaining the generators (fuel, other form of repairs like tearing due to old age). This way you can't build 50 MFS:s and just run your Nuclear plants to the max and just store it all up. If you have a certain amount of machines that require 40 EU when all are running you can power down that 500 EU Nuclear Plant and run them off your 75 EU Wind farm. Otherwise the 460 EU will be excessive and not put to use.
• INFRASTRUCTURE --- I can very much picture this on SMP servers where you can have a whole strategic picture to a fun infrastructure which can be turned into an economy by using Energymeters in people's homes or their toolsheds or whatever you want to call it. To keep people from building too many generators at once to provice infitine energy (equal to storing energy in infinite MFS's) there could be maintenance of such a magnitude that results in the aforementioned being impossible to accomplish, atleast by one person or a small group alone.
• SCALING --- Like I mentioned earlier, picture a Nuclear Powerplant that provides 500 EU. To prevent overproduction of Energy (where a player needs 20 EU but keeps producing 500 EU), make fuel expensive and push the player to not want overproduction. Entice the player to make use of lesser productivity such as Wind and Water. Perhaps overuse of oil and coal generators could have environmental effects such as polluted air which makes crops and trees die or just grow slow or not at all.
• TECHNOLOGY/RESEARCH/ITEMS --- Allow for science where perhaps you can research improved transformers increasing their efficiency. Generators could have empty slots where you place COIL, STATOR, BEARINGS and whatnot. Spontaniously I feel that using Volts and Amps would be better than a uniform EU as they represent different terms of the whole product. But I understand if this is too much and perhaps EU could be adapted to work better.

I could go on and on with this list so I'll to try to end it here with just saying that this would allow for what I believe to be a more fun gameplay. Face it, as it is now we just sit there with the nuclear plants running and we change the fuel in them like once every 5 irl hours. It's not a challenge. The difficulty should remain constant and the progress should allow for more rewards for the time you spend maintaining your infrastructure.

Perhaps overkill but you could implement things such as Direct Current, Alternating Currect (with 3-phase and other phasing), Diodes/Rectifiers.

I'm sure many appreciate the mod the way it has been developed towards and I too have enjoyed it quite a lot.
These are just things I would like to see that I feel would change the entire gameplay into something that doesn't turn stale towards the "end-game" and allows for more fun SMP.

As I mentioned there is only so much I could write in the list. I could go on for even longer with things to implement or revamp.
I'll answer any questions the best I can!

I have wanted to write this so many times and I finally pulled myself together and did it. I just hope I can make people see the picture I want to portrait!

Thanks

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I like some of the ideas there but...they seem like they would take a long time to implement, not to mention a complete rework of the system.
Also, EU alone is simple and easy to use for someone who doesn't know exactly how real electricity works.

On the topic of the smp economy, that would suck for anyone trying to play vanilla or in singleplayer.

The setup could be scalable ... as one person shouldn't run 10 nuclear plants one wouldn't need to either. An SMP server could however.
Let's say it's end-game and one needs to produce 100.000 EU to run the late-game machinery. You fire up the nuclear plant and all the other heavy generators. You need to spend A LOT of time to keep the generators up. Then when the late-game machinery have done their work you shut off the heavy generators and keep smaller ones going that doesn't need as much attention as you perhaps only need a few light machines going while you go build a new house or something.

So by scalable I mean that the same setup could work for both Singleplayer AND SMP with the same attributes/mechanics.

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Its fine and all talking about bringing real life physics to a game, but its a completely different thing coding it.

To properly implement things like this you would need to rework from the energy net, to the generators all the way to the machines. Not to mention that you would have to rework from something simple to something a whole lot complex (Because real life physics are a clusterfuck to understand and to properly do something similar you actually have to understand it).

You're overcomplicating it, I didn't mean it to be like that. The main idea I wanted to shed light upon was changing the whole thing with storing up energy for later use which in theory allows for indefinitely running 1 solar panel to run an infinite amount of machines. The main foundamental idea is flawed by it's very own setup. That's why I proposed for mechanics where you don't store energy but rather make use of energy being produced immediately and thus need to pay attention to supply/demand of energy. It doesn't need to be 3-phase, it doesn't need to have Phase shifting nor values in the imaginary plane, not inductance, not inductance nor capacitance.

Don't overcomplicate it!

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If you take away the energy storage, then you take almost 70% of what industrial craft is.

Electrical tools, Quamtum/Nano Armor not to mention that machines like terraformers/Teleporters/Mass Fabricators needs a lot of energy.

Sorry but your idea its not exactly good enough since you kill most features that are within Industrial Craft with it.

Once again its nice talking about real life physics in minecraft, but in theory its a terrible game concept specially so late into this mod. (Its not so terrible, but right now it serves nothing changing it when IC its already so established like it is now)

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Batteries/Crystals can still exist to the degree of powering tools. No arguments there.

Tools, The Armors, Terraformers, Teleporters, Mass Fabricators can all still exist. I just want to change the way they recieve energy and the way that energy is produced.

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It's basically the same type of set-up as BC, that you're suggesting.

While it does work- it's not something you change in the middle (assuming Al isn't out of idea's yet) of such a well developed mod.

I would honestly drop IC2 if it was changed to work more like BC power. Just isn't right for this type of mod, this far along.

(Me and FenixR are agreeing on something. o.o)

(Also heard someone was trying to make a type of energy storage thing for BC. I think it's the same guy who made the BC Reactor that can power 20+ refineries at once.)

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I agree with you that changing something of this magnitude in the middle isn't the best of ideas. This could be something for IC3 perhaps.
It feels that the second you finish building that Nuclear Reactor there is nothing more to do, Nuclear Reactors run so long on their fuel and you only need to be wasting energy on the Mass Fabricator until you get enough iridium. After that the game is ended, there is nothing more to do. The part I like is laying the cables, double checking the High/Medium/Low EU before I turn on my machines, everything infrastructure related to this mod is the part I enjoy the most. And all of that ends with the Nuclear Plant and the MFS