Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0
Friday Facts #416 - Fluids 2.0
Hello, Grab your best lube, because it's time to talk about fluids!
Since pipes are now treated as contiguous segments, and flow technically increases (??) with pipe segment length, I wonder how this affects the economics of long distance pipelining.
An emergent gameplay effect of the old fluids system losing flowrate was that pipelines were inefficient and basically pointless for oil products midgame without a ridiculous number of expensive pumps and tanks- and even after all that, would never perform as well as a single railcar for oil. This would force players to develop their rail network to deliver oil in any serious volume. Forcing players to develop rail is a good thing because many would skip it otherwise.
Pipe to ground uses 15 iron to cover 10 tiles end to end (1.5 iron per tile).
A straight rail segment covers 2 tiles of distance but costs (5.5iron/2tracks)/2tiles = ~1.4 iron per tile. However, 3/4 of that is tied up in time and energy intensive steel plates, and this also doesn't count the additional expenses of all the signaling, switching, load/unload stations, etc that you have to build and spend player time on.This leaves the largest benefit of trains being capable of surviving hostile terrain in Biter Land... since pipes can be chewed thru they're not great to leave exposed. But in most other cases pipes actually seem like the more efficient option now.
Feels so strange. I think this is going to be a positive change overall but it's going to result in some general playstyle changes.Probably the biggest single change now is that building bazonkers-sized nuclear reactors just became infinitely easier....
I have seen this argument, that people are gonna use long pipe lines instead of trains. And I think that might be true to some degree in the start of the game. But, you're already going to expand your rail network anyway, because you need it for ores. And when you already have it, you might aswell put all liquid stuff on the train aswell. So I don't think it's going to be a "problem".
And your last point, in a biter world I don't think long pipelines are going to become a thing at all. Because losing a pipe is just annoying if it's out of your roboport reach. Maybe peaceful it'll be usefull, who knows.
But iam sure somebody is going to make a mod that reverts it to the old system, long live mods haha
Seems like all possible fluid weirdnesses are fixed with this. A bit sad that the fluid became less realistic. But I think now we can make use of the predictable logic of the fluid system in our designs, and can actually reason about why some designs work, and some others don't.
I see it as the other way around, the simulation might run on a less realistic model. But the results are more inline with real life behavior of pipes. They eliminated a lot of weird glitches and strange behaviors that just weren't real at all. Thus, for me it seems like a more realistic implementation.
Yeah, stuff like where the direction of flow depends on the order you've built the pipes isn't realistic at all.
I'm looking forward to try the new mechanics and I don't think the new system will make trains obsolete. Using tons of pipes will create large buffers, which will have low throughput until the pipes are filled sufficiently. You might still need to build pumps regularly to prevent backflow into large buffers, e.g. to not cause huge backflow into the entry pipes when connecting another new oil pumping outpost.
They could also add other mechanics for balance, for example if a pipe gets destroyed that could empty out the whole associated buffer (as the fluid would've leaked out), again making huge pipe networks dangerous.