Cracking Unit should have dedicated ports for each involved fluid item.
This would be a departure from how all other buildings in the game currently work, but I think it is warranted given the unique role of the Cracking Unit: Diesel, Fuel Gas, and Naptha are never consumed in the exact ratio coming from Distillation and it's supposed to convert excess to fill shortages.
I would argue that during the average playthrough, the consumption ratio of the 3 fluids fluctuates too much for the game to reasonably expect players to catch up to it by simply building more Cracking Units for each recipe. It's a lot of workers & space for something that's going to have gauranteed downtime.
There are 4 recipes to convert between 3 fluids so you need 4 buildings just to get 1 building worth of throughput for each recipe, but having anything run means you have no shortage of one thing, which means something else will not need to run. So you are putting down many buildings worth of workers & space knowing that even in theory half of them won't run at any given time.
Comments: 3
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05 Apr
FireflyIf the building had dedicated ports for every input & output, each building we add could represent production capacity for not one recipe, but more than one recipe. Wiring the array of pipes, storages, and balancers supporting the building will still be a challenge - especially if you want to run all recipes at once - since there is the question of what you want to convert into what first and the need to ensure there are no infinite loops that just waste ingredients.
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05 Apr
FireflyHowever, it will be nothing compared to this: https://hub.coigame.com/Blueprint/Detail/560
This is a blueprint by Kayser, and it does what I think Cracking Units should do, but without the need for fluid-specific ports. However, it is only possible through awkward exploits like multi-fluid pipes whose contents are regulated by balancers, and throughput boosted by alternating L1 & L2 pipes & connectors. I do not believe players should have be incentivised to do such things and I'm slightly bothered by the fact that the only way to get what I think is a reasonable amount of uptime for my Cracking Units is by doing things that would completely un-immerse me from the game by doing things that are quite unrealistic (multi-fluid pipes) and clearly an exploit (alternating connectors & different levels of pipe to increase throughput). -
05 Apr
FireflyKayser's creation is incredibly impressive and very interesting to explore & study, but I don't think the game should have aan incentive for something like this.
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I think it would be much better if the Cracking Unit had item-specifc ports, but perhaps a higher power draw/worker count/maint. requirement/etc.