Linear over/underclocking power usage

[Wood_[OBC]]

Anyone else looking forward to adding tons of power plants to accommodate extra power requirements of hundreds of machines you have currently underclocked? (once linear underclocking comes online)

[bun E]

Publicado originalmente por umop-apisdn:

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

Idk, it might increase power usage a bit, but personally (and I imagine its the same for most of you) only a few machines are underclocked in my factories already, purely for the sake of making 100% of whats needed and not for power, and my power usage will go down a decent bit from all the miners I have set to 250%.

I routinely underclock everything to 12.5% when I build it, these days... mostly as futureproofing, at this point. Running everything off a central trunk means I only have to replace the miner, the input and output belts, and then run through pressing "E, Ctrl-V, E" on each machines to crank 'em up a notch and double (or quadruple, or octuple) the production levels when I get a new miner and/or belts.

Try it, you might like how it can "upgrade" your factory in minutes, instead of hours.

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

It doesn't seem like it would be much of a problem unless you're actively running 4x 25% factories instead of 100% to reduce power usage (which is kinda stupid because it increases save time and fps loss)...

As far as file transfer time, picking plant matter to make biomass wastes the largest portion of it... each destroyed plant is recorded in the save file so it doesn't "respawn" when you load the game. As I understand it, "Destroyed Vegetation" is the majority of the save file, at least until late game. This is one of the reasons I use solely fauna-based biomass in my playthroughs.

You should only be in biomass burner stage for a few hours at most if you're advanced enough to take advantage of the underclocking power usage thing, even then you still have the option (and a good option at that) to kill mobs and transform the carapaces (which are honestly useless for anything else) into biomass/biofuel. Linear scaling would only be worse in this case if you plan on doing some weird sort of biomass pacifist challenge, in which case I don't really care that much, its better for the health of the game overall and for the vast majority of people.

[bun E]

Publicado originalmente por umop-apisdn:

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

I don't see a problem with it being completely linear

The problem with it being completely linear is that there is then no immediate benefit to underclocking; you're effectively penalizing the habitual underclockers like myself; "Efficiency" is measured in more ways than one.

I'm getting really tired of being told the "correct" way to play. It's a sandbox; you play your game, and I'll play mine. Stop trying to tell me how to have fun.

The game currently encourages underclocking and severely discourages overclocking in multiple ways, this leads to encouragement of bigger factories and worse performance. I don't care if it ruins your underclock power stuff, you can add more power or mod it back or something, this will be better for the performance and health of the game and needs to happen in some way, you can have fun in underclockville all you want but it shouldn't be optimal or encouraged.

[umop-apisdn]

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

You should only be in biomass burner stage for a few hours at most

Can you get coal power running in less than 3 hours, without crippling your future progression? Show me.
Download OBS Studio[obsproject.com], make a YouTube video and show us all.

In my most recent playthroughs, using 2 dozen Biomass Burners and critter-based Solid Biofuel allowed me to skip coal... with a side benefit that I can now kill any critter on the map with the starting Xeno-Zapper.

Show us your skills, Bunni. I'm calling you out.

[bun E]

Publicado originalmente por umop-apisdn:

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

You should only be in biomass burner stage for a few hours at most

Can you get coal power running in less than 3 hours, without crippling your future progression? Show me.

How do you cripple your future progression with coal power?

I just got to coal on my side/solo world with a little under 5 hours clocked, and that was taking my time, getting every single milestone before se1 shipment setting up foundation grid and proper factories for reinforced iron plates, modular frames, and all the basic stuff including an early sink point farm with quartz. I can't imagine players on here whom have much more hours than I can't do it as fast or faster, even casually without trying to.

But yeah it doesn't take very long or that much biomass if you're already that advanced that you abuse underclocking or do biomass challenges. The person made the claim that making underclock powersaving less worth it will do more damage to your save file from biomass burning stages than will having over double factory sizes, which cant be true as biomass stage is pretty short and factory sizes are relevant for the entirety of your playing. You'll probably damage your save more blowing up rocks and trees in the way of your factory space than cutting down trees for biomass.

[umop-apisdn]

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

Publicado originalmente por umop-apisdn:

Can you get coal power running in less than 3 hours, without crippling your future progression? Show me.

How do you cripple your future progression with coal power?

Sorry, what I meant by "crippling your future progression" was "unlocking the 'Parts Assembly' Milestones, handcrafting 50 rotors, then stuffing those and 50 reinforced iron plates collected from crash sites into an assembler to feed to the Space Elevator, thus leaving yourself with no automation to progress with... thus technically unlocking the ability to unlock the 'Coal Power' milestone, but not being able to actually take advantage of it because you still need to build all of your infrastructure".

[Wolfgang]

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

Publicado originalmente por Wolfgang:

Or you make the power consumption case sensitive. That way you can keep the benefit of underclocking while having no drawback to slight overclocking while also making bigger overclocking having a more exponential power consumption.

There shouldn't be a benefit to underclocking though, if the most optimal thing to do in a game about being the most efficient is to build 100 factories at 1%, then its encouraging boring, space wasting, save bloating, and performance deteriorating stategies. Removing and unhealthy meta might be jarring if you're used to it, but its important for the game devs to recognize when they're encouraging stuff that shouldn't be encouraged.

I don't see a problem with it being completely linear, it won't encourage a boring meta and most people I know sit around with stacks of power shards in their storage, only using them on miners, so doing something to encourage people to use these limited items will hopefully mean they collect less dust and are more meaningful rather than just the occasional mistake in planning fixers and obligatory miner output increasers.

Encouraging halving your factory sizes, and reducing belting/splitters and such would be amazing and great for the performance of the game overall, and so would be discouraging underclock factory spamming so I dont see a problem with it, you can still do your 1% factory challenges, just without it being optimal, rewarded or encouraged hopefully.

tl;dr game discourages overclocking encourages underclocking leading to an optimal playstyle that is objectively worse for performance which should be changed to encourage playstyle that is healthier for save size and performance

So you don't see a problem in literally everyone overclocking everything to 250% because power shards are infinite (lizzard doggo) which turns overclocking to be very much OP since there is no drawback to it anymore? And power generation is not an issue. Just overclock these things too. Problem solved.
Honestly, that is for me just slightly below green energy (solar power, wind turbines) in this game (which won't come) going by how powerfull something is.

[umop-apisdn]

Publicado originalmente por Wolfgang:

So you don't see a problem in literally everyone overclocking everything to 250% because power shards are infinite (lizzard doggo) which turns overclocking to be very much OP since there is no drawback to it anymore? And power generation is not an issue. Just overclock these things too. Problem solved.

This, 100%.

If the clockspeed:power ratio is linear, then it turns our enjoyable "build some factories" game into "how quickly can you set up a lizard doggo farm" game... might as well play Slime Rancher. https://store.steampowered.com/app/433340/Slime_Rancher/

[Bookslayer10]

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

There shouldn't be a benefit to underclocking though, if the most optimal thing to do in a game about being the most efficient is to build 100 factories at 1%, then its encouraging boring, space wasting, save bloating, and performance deteriorating stategies. Removing and unhealthy meta might be jarring if you're used to it, but its important for the game devs to recognize when they're encouraging stuff that shouldn't be encouraged.

I don't see a problem with it being completely linear, it won't encourage a boring meta and most people I know sit around with stacks of power shards in their storage, only using them on miners, so doing something to encourage people to use these limited items will hopefully mean they collect less dust and are more meaningful rather than just the occasional mistake in planning fixers and obligatory miner output increasers.

Encouraging halving your factory sizes, and reducing belting/splitters and such would be amazing and great for the performance of the game overall, and so would be discouraging underclock factory spamming so I dont see a problem with it, you can still do your 1% factory challenges, just without it being optimal, rewarded or encouraged hopefully.

tl;dr game discourages overclocking encourages underclocking leading to an optimal playstyle that is objectively worse for performance which should be changed to encourage playstyle that is healthier for save size and performance

That's the conclusion I came to, until I realised that it's just going to be easier to build and fuel more power plants than to build 100 times more factory buildings - underclocking is usually discouraged. It's only encouraged if you are in a position where it's easier to build a massive megafactory than to set up new ways of gaining power, which I don't think is very common. Technically underclocking everything (except T3 miners) means that you'll be able to extract the most resources per minute out of the world with every node tapped, but your PC would probably crash before you could do that anyway.

The decision to underclock is one that the player is allowed to make, trading off between two challenges. If things like blueprints or faster building are added then underclocking gets better; if the devs do something like nerf the power savings from underclocking a bit, power production gets better. I think power production is the more challenging and fun problem, so it should be typically encouraged - maybe it's not encouraged enough right now. Just don't completely remove the benefits of underclocking, that just takes away player choice and strategy.

Why don't we buff overclocking by making you able to overclock everything without shards, using the exponential power function. Then, if you use shards the power consumption is converted from exponential to linear. (Sure, you could set up a doggo farm to get loads of power shards, so why don't we remove doggo farms?) Problem solved for overclocking, no need to ruin underclocking.

[Mitrovarr]

It feels like most of the people who are using immense underclocked factories are either past the "end of the game" anyway (they've completed all the space elevator deliveries) or they are ignoring that objective. I don't really think game balance should be based around post-ending messing about.

[umop-apisdn]

Publicado originalmente por Mitrovarr:

It feels like most of the people who are using immense underclocked factories are either past the "end of the game" anyway (they've completed all the space elevator deliveries) or they are ignoring that objective. I don't really think game balance should be based around post-ending messing about.

Neither is true in my case, although I will freely admit that I haven't played my "main" save in a few weeks.

I have yet to get around to making a nuclear power plant, nor have I really begun to work on phase 4.

I'm kind of in a holding pattern waiting for Update 6, exploring the ideas I have for doing "odd things" just to see what happens, and generally exploring both the maps and the mechanics. Perhaps I'm procrastinating because if I "beat the game" then it's over.

I guess I'm just a "filthy casual" with 1100 hours in-game.

[Wood_[OBC]]

Publicado originalmente por Mitrovarr:

Rats. I was looking forward to power shards being useful for, well, anything.

imo, power shards are extremely useful for overclocking miners to increase resource extraction... and that's about it (other than the occasional, temporary production boost)

[Wood_[OBC]]

Publicado originalmente por umop-apisdn:

Publicado originalmente por Bunni:

You should only be in biomass burner stage for a few hours at most

Can you get coal power running in less than 3 hours, without crippling your future progression? Show me.
Download OBS Studio[obsproject.com], make a YouTube video and show us all.

In my most recent playthroughs, using 2 dozen Biomass Burners and critter-based Solid Biofuel allowed me to skip coal... with a side benefit that I can now kill any critter on the map with the starting Xeno-Zapper.

Show us your skills, Bunni. I'm calling you out.

"calling you out", over something that speedrunners reach in 29 minutes, is not a great idea imho.

I routinely get my 1st coal plant (8/4) in less than 3 hours - not even rushing, primarily because until that point, EVERYTHING I accomplish in the game is wiped out, and I start building "fresh" with accumulated resources. I don't waste a ton of time, placing/powering/belting 30 smelters right away like you boast about (because the resources to do so, at that point, are better utilised elsewhere).

For a person exclaiming,

Publicado originalmente por umop-apisdn:

I'm getting really tired of being told the "correct" way to play. It's a sandbox; you play your game, and I'll play mine. Stop trying to tell me how to have fun.

maybe just take a breath, and let everyone have "their way" of playing? We are all on the same side, aren't we? Bunni has some valid points (for their playstyle) as do you (again, for YOUR playstyle).

The following may help a bit
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2686103223

[Wood_[OBC]]

Develop a game that appeals to the biggest audience possible, while maintaining a small enough package that it doesn't cripple the majority of that audiences computers. After that, spend years catering to the nuances of folks who think that a seemingly insignificant/tiny change doesn't affect vast lines of code and simultaneously introduce a handful of bugs - and the "fix" for those bugs created more bugs in already existing code that was originally working fine... oh yeah - AND do it all in a timely manner...

Are you even listening to me Coffee Stain? LOL!