Power options (a.k.a. did we really need to buff wind further in GP?)

[Foefaller]

I think it's less quality of machine parts than quantity. If you could get stirling generators for 4 polymer and some concrete, they would (also) rule pretty hard (comparing open stirling with 20 wind power).
Solar panels cost no advanced ressources at all, of course, but since they eat 4 (!) times the metal per power compared to poly bladed wind (or elevated, or wind with atmo), they are kind of suicidal in the long run. At this point, I honestly believe wind cost should just be at least doubled, at least the machine parts, and then things would be pretty balanced.

And as for fusion, I actually had my own little epiphany when looking at the advanced production plants and farms: I feel like the current game balance generally underestimates how high the effective cost of manpower is, and how low the cost of power is, though the latter is mostly thanks to wind. I believe poly, machine and electronics factory requirements are supposed to be different but roughly equivalent -- yet in practice, electronics is hardest by far thanks to manpower. Same with the farms, if you calculate food/water, it's not as one-sided, but in practice, food/botanist is much more important, since you can always plug down a few more generators/vaporators, but for a single high-manpower building you will need a complete new dome, MOXIE, vaporator, storage, food, service buildings, health care, child care, elderly care, education, power for all of that and and and. The effective cost of sustaining manpower is insanely high.

I've noticed more and more that the resource balance for the first 40-50 sols or so seems to be based on the idea that you don't order factory prefabs at all (at least until you have the tech to build them yourself), and stop ordering Vaporators past the first 2 or 3.

You stick to that, and most of the balance choices start to make more sense. Solar does becomes the early game "cheap" option, because instead of having to compete with wind for surface metal, wind is competing with Stirlings for funding, as well as with everything else that uses machine parts or electronics (and for a brief while, polymer), particularly extractors. Speaking of, water deposits become immediately more valuable because they are now absolutely essential for expansion (rather than just buying and upgrading another 2 or 3 Vaporators,) and things that conserve water -like fungal farms and water reclamation spires- become much more appealing. And since getting factories now relies on having the right technology rather than just exporting enough rare metal to buy the prefab, securing a dedicated research dome becomes that much more important.

As for electronics and manpower, I do think the devs consider electronics to be the most valuable of the advanced resources, but I also think they expect you to be thrilled to use it on things that reduce or remove your dependency on metal and machine parts (though there is still a bit of smart homes being too expensive.) With scrubbers this is absolutely the case. With Fuison... not so much, even though it also effectively reduces the demand for machine parts. It is so apparent, to me at least, that I wonder if there was a pre-release build where you didn't have factories at all, or electronics really were as plentiful as machine parts. And manpower, specifically engineers, I suspect are seen as being the cheapest option in terms of sustainability, because in the end, they just need food, oxygen, and water, three things that can potentially be had with the upkeep of just a little bit of metal, a little bit of polymer, some concrete, and electricity.

TL: DR game's economy seems to be balanced around three ideas that are objectively not true: that players aren't buying factory prefabs until they are close to researching the abilty to make them themselves, that they are not using prefab Vaporators to expand their colony, and that metal/machine parts at mid-game are scarcer compared to electronics and colonists than they actually are.

 

[Xeorm]

I just had a bit of an epiphany about all this. You know what the real crux of the issue with wind being so much better than every non-breakthrough power option and most of the breakthrough ones?

Machine Parts.

Mainly, that machine parts are so cheap and easy to produce in quantities to support massive wind farms. You never consider solar as the cheap option (even though it is presented in the tutorial as such) because you can call supply ships of parts, order the machine shop as a prefab, and use the surface metal for parts and have turbines instead and support a larger base longer before having to build an extractor than you ever would sticking with solar. You never think of using colonists to produce power via a fusion reactor, because you use them to get the machine parts to generate even more power from turbines, and by the time fusion shows up, even if you haven't gotten scrubbers you've at least have a secure supply line of metal to make parts so you never have to worry about becoming scarce before you build the Mohole and end the possibility of a metal shortage forever.

Other than completely reworking the economy and resource scarcity in the game, I think you could go a long way into making early solar more competitive with wind if there were no factory prefabs, and you had to rely entirely on Earth for machine parts until you could build a machine factory yourself, and/or increasing the maintenance cost for wind (or reducing it for solar) if we did change power generation, I would for the most part simply make it variable, so you that you still need power collectors to keep a base running 24/7 even with 100% wind. I'm ok if wind still wins out over solar in the end once you can make parts and polymer blades are researched, as long as the tech is swapped in the tree with the solar self-maintenance upgrade.

With Fuison it's a bit harder to balance just on resources without nerfing scrubbers (though I know some believe scrubbers should be nerfed...) I think making upgraded non-breakthrough fusion at least equivalent to unscrubbed turbines in the number of engineers needed to maintain would be a start.

Now, when you add in Green Planet and terraforming, I've always been of the opinion that terraforming should be more dangerous than it currently is, and that can play into this. Supercharged wind turbines are nice and all, but if they, for example, are sometimes disabled because rather than the normal dust storms, the thicker atmosphere means you are now getting some new type of severe weather with winds that would have shredded the turbines otherwise, you would at least need backup fusion or Stirling generators in case of that disaster. Also, would the science of scrubbers still make them as effective at removing organic matter like pollen as they are with dust? Because if not, I could see vegetation reducing their effectiveness so they no longer practically end the need for maintenance altogether.

Disagree. Machine parts feel like a proper resource sink with other costs and are generally needed in high quantities elsewhere. Even when I start I'll consider solar panels as the "cheap" option because they are solid items for daylight. It's the additional cost of batteries for night time that screws with the calculations and the massive raw cost in upkeep. It doesn't take too long in any game before maintenance is something to worry about and an entire metal is a bit much for 5 power. Combine all the improvements as the game goes on and wind power ends up being really, really good. Solar not so much.

I don't think prefabs enter much into it either. I don't find myself grabbing prefab factories in general at this point. The research for machine lab is machine parts is early and quick and I don't have the colony capacity for electronics until later. By then I've got the electronic research done as well. Instead I'd peg the reasoning more on polymers being the "easy" advanced resource. It's very early in the tech tree and also gives the fuel refinery. It's outside so you don't have to worry about space with your first dome and it's used as an integral part of the solar economy. Skipping that and going straight for machine parts as the first engineering building works out so well though.

Instead of using solar I'll use wind power the entire time because it's cheap, easy to use, highly competitive when dealing with the disasters, and simplifies life.

 

[Foefaller]

Disagree. Machine parts feel like a proper resource sink with other costs and are generally needed in high quantities elsewhere. Even when I start I'll consider solar panels as the "cheap" option because they are solid items for daylight. It's the additional cost of batteries for night time that screws with the calculations and the massive raw cost in upkeep. It doesn't take too long in any game before maintenance is something to worry about and an entire metal is a bit much for 5 power. Combine all the improvements as the game goes on and wind power ends up being really, really good. Solar not so much.

I don't think prefabs enter much into it either. I don't find myself grabbing prefab factories in general at this point. The research for machine lab is machine parts is early and quick and I don't have the colony capacity for electronics until later. By then I've got the electronic research done as well. Instead I'd peg the reasoning more on polymers being the "easy" advanced resource. It's very early in the tech tree and also gives the fuel refinery. It's outside so you don't have to worry about space with your first dome and it's used as an integral part of the solar economy. Skipping that and going straight for machine parts as the first engineering building works out so well though.

Instead of using solar I'll use wind power the entire time because it's cheap, easy to use, highly competitive when dealing with the disasters, and simplifies life.

The only time I've ever struggled with machine parts to the point I had things shut down due to lack of maintenance is when I had the freak combination of a greater dust storm, an event that effectively doubled my colony's population before I was ready to expand, and the lack of funding (and forsight) to get a factory prefab.

I have had 0 issues with machine parts otherwise. Water and Oxygen have been more of a struggle (due mostly to dropping several Moxies or a couple water extractors and thinking that it somehow solved my problems forever until I expand well past the point where it doesn't), and with polymer I have at least had occasion to build an art store to fulfill luxury demands in domes where I can't fit a casino.

The amount of parts you get from a fully manned machine factory will far outstrip you demand for quite a while. The fact it is an interior building is actually a plus: it means you can run it 24/7 without Martian Resilience and be able to deal with the sanity issue with just a med station. The power cost is enormous, but you will make more than enough parts per shift to pay for the maintenance of the turbines powering it, and then practically an order of magnitude beyond that. When I decide to go for the workshop milestone, a full half of them are bio robotics, because in every one of my colonies machine parts are by far the easiest and least in demand resource to make.

As I said, nearly all the current design choices balancing wind with other power options would make a lot more sense if machine parts had a higher demand and/or were more difficult/costly to make than they are now.

 

[Xeorm]

The only time I've ever struggled with machine parts to the point I had things shut down due to lack of maintenance is when I had the freak combination of a greater dust storm, an event that effectively doubled my colony's population before I was ready to expand, and the lack of funding (and forsight) to get a factory prefab.

I have had 0 issues with machine parts otherwise. Water and Oxygen have been more of a struggle (due mostly to dropping several Moxies or a couple water extractors and thinking that it somehow solved my problems forever until I expand well past the point where it doesn't), and with polymer I have at least had occasion to build an art store to fulfill luxury demands in domes where I can't fit a casino.

The amount of parts you get from a fully manned machine factory will far outstrip you demand for quite a while. The fact it is an interior building is actually a plus: it means you can run it 24/7 without Martian Resilience and be able to deal with the sanity issue with just a med station. The power cost is enormous, but you will make more than enough parts per shift to pay for the maintenance of the turbines powering it, and then practically an order of magnitude beyond that. When I decide to go for the workshop milestone, a full half of them are bio robotics, because in every one of my colonies machine parts are by far the easiest and least in demand resource to make.

As I said, nearly all the current design choices balancing wind with other power options would make a lot more sense if machine parts had a higher demand and/or were more difficult/costly to make than they are now.

I mean, it's a management game. If you have too much of one resource you should have decreased your production of that resource or found some other way to use it. Which is what I'll tend to find with machine parts. Build the first factory and it's populated by enough people to make what I need. Then adding from there more and more production. I don't generally feel like I'm going to run into problems, but I do always feel that I need more of everything. Though I'll admit to metal and concrete being stockpiled early and then that being changed later as their usage massively speeds up.