Base power rebalance, and Base Power Storage.
stevinn
Join Date: 2017-01-25 Member: 227249Members
Join Date: 2017-01-25 Member: 227249Members
I'll keep it simple:
- Solar panels are too OP. They should be bigger, provide less power, and be more expensive. Currently I gather 4 titanium and 2 glass and boom. All the power I need. Too easy! They should be weak and inconvenient, so that I really WANT to switch to bio or nuclear. Not to mention that I can fit 30 of them on a single foundation and have THOUSANDS of power forever.
- Bases should require power storage units (AKA batteries). Why does a solar panel store 50 power?
- The life pod should have way less power. I should really, really want to get out of there and make a base.
- Bases should require power before providing ANY oxygen. At the moment, I can actually get down to the bottom of the map with just some titanium and glass in my inventory. That makes no sense! I just float down, build a single base corridor and hatch, and I suddenly have oxygen at 700 meters. Move down further and repeat.
In short, I want building a stable base to be a CHALLENGE to be conquered. I love this game but my biggest disappointment is that creating a stable base takes almost zero effort.
- Solar panels are too OP. They should be bigger, provide less power, and be more expensive. Currently I gather 4 titanium and 2 glass and boom. All the power I need. Too easy! They should be weak and inconvenient, so that I really WANT to switch to bio or nuclear. Not to mention that I can fit 30 of them on a single foundation and have THOUSANDS of power forever.
- Bases should require power storage units (AKA batteries). Why does a solar panel store 50 power?
- The life pod should have way less power. I should really, really want to get out of there and make a base.
- Bases should require power before providing ANY oxygen. At the moment, I can actually get down to the bottom of the map with just some titanium and glass in my inventory. That makes no sense! I just float down, build a single base corridor and hatch, and I suddenly have oxygen at 700 meters. Move down further and repeat.
In short, I want building a stable base to be a CHALLENGE to be conquered. I love this game but my biggest disappointment is that creating a stable base takes almost zero effort.
Comments
Solar panels don't provide 50 power each, they provide 25, you need 2 titanium and 2 quartz crystals. Realistically the recipe should be changed to 2 titanium, 2 glass and silver. Real solar panels use silver.
Are you advocating for a buff or a nerf to base power... from your post I really can't tell.
Bases requiring power storage would be a straight up buff to power generation as it stands right now each "generator" cannot charge more than its internal battery can hold and power is drained one generator at a time...
Because of this solar panels are actually incredibly weak as far as base power generation is concerned and i'll give you an example of why this is the case.
Lets assume that you have a solar panel that generates 1 power / tick the entire time it is "light out" (this is not the case there is actually a formula involved that determines how much "sun" your solar panel is getting at any particular time of the day and for a given depth your solar panel is only generating at true efficiency for depth for about 1 in game hour) your solar panel can hold 25 power (there is a visual glitch which shows that your solar panel is giving 50 power storage to a base but the number is just inflated the actually battery only has 25 power and all power usage is doubled while pulling from the inflated 50#) and your base can hold 50 power meaning you have a power storage of 75 in total. Now assume that you have 1 spotlight and lets just say for convience sake that it takes .5 energy per tick which means that while ur solar panel is charging you have +.5 energy per tick.
Now in this example lets say there are 200 power on ticks and 100 power off ticks indicating that 2/3s of the game day is "lighted" and 1/3 of the game day is "unlighted/night". In this case from 0 power it would take 150 ticks to fully charge your base and solar generator's internal power storage and while you aren't generating power it would take 150 ticks for your internal storage to be depleted during the night ( .5 energy drain per tick x 150 ticks = 75 power stored) which means that your base has a surplus of 25 energy storage for a 1 day cycle. Seems ok right?
Lets do another example.
According to the previous formula one solar panel can run a spotlight with a power surplus so 2 solar panels should be able to run 2 spotlights with enough power left over for almost a third right? Well lets do the math, but before we do that power generation needs to be explained in a little more depth.
Power like i said before is taken from one generator at a time which means there is a "que" of generators so to speak before generator 2 can have any power used generator 1 needs to be completely drained first and generator 2 also cannot charge or contribute to generator 1's internal battery at all.
With that out of the way lets look at these numbers.
2 generators, generator 1 produces 1 energy per tick generator 2 produces 1 energy per tick 2 spotlights drain 1 energy per tick which means that you effectively have 1 backup generator producing 1 energy per tick and 1 generator whose battery never gets charged because it is being constantly drained by the 2 spotlights during the light hours in this scenario your base will have a constant 75/100 total power stored seems fine but lets look at night time.
we have 100 ticks of night and each tick you are draining 1 energy per second since you only have 75 energy banked your lights will only run for 3/4ths of the night thats not good that means that for a quarter of the night you won't be able to produce o2 not good so how do we fix it well i guess we just have to add a 3rd solar panel for extra energy storage no big deal.
However what if we want to use the fabricator during the night? well thats a problem the bases already incredibly small initial energy storage is tied up in our 2 lights lets say that you wanna be able to run the fabricator 10 times i mean a mans gotta eat and drink right plus u might at some point need to make some glass or convert some metal scrap to titanium so we need another 2 solar panels to give us an extra 50 energy storage which will give us 10 runs of the fabricator per night @ max.
now god forbid you wanna add a water purifier lets say that takes another 1e/tick which means that in order to run this through the night you need another 1 solar panel just to compensate for that fact that you will now have another "dead generator" and 4 more solar panels just to have the energy to run the thing through the night.
Ofcourse these numbers are all made up the energy generation for solar panels isn't nearly this good because of the light system. I believe the last base i made at about 60 depth needed 24 solar panels to be able to run 2 spotlights and 2 water purifiers through the night. Ofc In the future there is talk about internal lights for the base also taking power battery chargers and power cell chargers take power as well.
Unless you are advocating for a fix to the current power generation usage method there is no way that a increase to solar panel cost or a decrease in solar panel generation can be justified.
Edited for typos
solar = 25 when place on ground 50 when placed on a base building (I learned something there it seems.)
bioreactor = 100
thermal plant = 50 (+ or - the temp of the water, higher temp means higher energy rate/amount.)
nuclear = 500
Solar is always 25 there is a bug where it displays as 50 if you build it on a base structure but it still only has 25 energy... if you are drawing from the solar panel the energy draw is doubled according to the ui because its pulling from the actual battery 25 but displaying draw from the bugged display of 50
All the more reason for there to be batteries. Need more power storage? Build more batteries. Then there could be some more sensible programming done where your generators aren't waiting in line to do anything.
Your grand breakdown of how many spotlights you can run misses the point. I get that if you have spotlights and a water purifier you're gonna need more than two generators. But each solar panel currently costs 2 titanium and 2 quartz. In about 5 minutes I could get enough to make 30 solar panels without ever leaving the shallows. It's just too easy. If I'm going to build a mega-base, I should have to invest some serious time, thought, and space to how I'm going to keep it powered.
Interior lights should drain power. O2 generation should drain power. Fabricating high tech devices from raw materials should take a TON of power.
Even on my first play through, realizing how little power generation I needed made me literally go "wait, that's it?"
And my point is that you are indeed missing the point.
Solar panels work between above water and (256m depth?) with diminishing returns based on how far down you are going... the power needs right now because of the broken system are extreme when you build a real base because of the broken bases system. I'm all for increasing the cost of power generation if they fix the system so power generation actually works like you would expect it too. however in its current state any increase in cost or decrease in effectiveness will basically break the game.
Like i said before solar energy also has the most drawbacks of any power generation yes its "unlimited" but it only works for half your gameplay time and only if you are literally building in the surface biomes. if for instance you choose to build a "real base" 200 meters down you would need like 90 solar generators just to run like 6 things that "consume" power.
As to your point about "building" this base resources in this game don't and to the best of my knowledge won't regenerate they aren't supposed to so yes you might be able to build all the solar panels with the quartz from the safe shallows and surrounding biomes assuming you literally pick them clean but it def will take more than "5 minutes" o2 generation is suppoed to take power, interior lights are planned to take power (i'm pretty sure this was confirmed) and as far as the fabricator goes its consumes x power for each action not really sure what else you want for that usually higher tech objects take more actions to make so there is that....
And please, make solar panels rotate, following the sun. Let this be one big solar panel, instead of a dozen smaller ones.
totally agre, we need this
"As to your point about "building" this base resources in this game don't and to the best of my knowledge won't regenerate they aren't supposed to so yes you might be able to build all the solar panels with the quartz from the safe shallows and surrounding biomes assuming you literally pick them clean but it def will take more than "5 minutes""
Ok resources do re-spawn, i remember the days when it was very ease to remove every chunk and piece of titanium from the game. Then they tried to increase starting resources in the map but that just meant that you never had to look for them. Anyway time to stop reminiscing.
Wait, your trying to use solar panels and 200m.
Anyhow yes people, including myself think that solar panels need to be nerfed and some thing need to be more energy expensive.
I come to this conclusion because i have never built more than eight and i usually have everything, (this goes as far as two moonpools to have the seamoth and PRAWN suit docked at the same time). They are comparatively quite strong generating wise and are 'dirt cheap'.