/tg/Station 13

Feedback thread of Rebalanced power consumption
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Cannot articulate how eager I am to finally have a mechanical incentive for my lovely CO2 setups

I think we really need to stick to some kind of grace period though Telecomms is literally shutting down in a few minutes, there should really be enough power supply to give everyone time to get set up.

As it is I've literally seen a good supermatter set up not cover even a quarter of the station and every department had to resort to chains of a dozen PACMANs, and this is on 50 pop.

The tuning is fucked please fix. I get the goal and concept, but I'm concerned you aren't taking the feedback. Someone already told you that there literally isn't enough SMES power from three SMESs to supply the station from minute one and you acted like that was a feature. The goal should be attrition and forward planning, not "every round starts with a power crisis even if the supermatter is set up correctly".

Stickymayhem wrote: ↑Sun Apr 10, 2022 2:29 pm I think we really need to stick to some kind of grace period though Telecomms is literally shutting down in a few minutes, there should really be enough power supply to give everyone time to get set up.

Someone already told you that there literally isn't enough SMES power from three SMESs to supply the station from minute one and you acted like that was a feature. The goal should be attrition and forward planning, not "every round starts with a power crisis even if the supermatter is set up correctly".

I believe theeeese two things can be unfucked by changing the starting stats of the SMES units.

1) Telecomms, on all current maps, has its own dedicated SMES, either shared with the AI satellite or in its own room. Raising its permitted output should fix any instant telecomms shutdowns, in theory.

2) The immediate power loss on most stations should be fixable by having the standard 3 SMES units start with much more power in them and a higher initial permitted output. If tuned properly, this would restore the initial grace period while leaving Engineering in need of matching upgrades to cope with significantly upgraded machines' power needs.

Tonight on Sybil (182124)

MetaStation is set up with only solars
Arrivals loses power
Clown Traitor "Honk Honker" arrives
Goes into airlock to get to the station
Shuttle leaves
Result:


Shortly thereafter, attempts to set up the supermatter causes a delamination.

This achieves the clown's objectives, apparently, resulting in a greentext.

Review: 10/10, game of the year. Clowns deserve to die.

Power running out isnt fun, It's a barrier to the fun, It stops the fun, But it isn't fun. So the simple question is why is the hard-pressed desire to make the SM so solely important?

The simple fact that the alternatives are gutted and hard-pressed to obtain means that the SM destruction - in short of a prompt replacement, Is now as devastating as round-ending nuclear destruction. But there's no dramatic climax. Everyone is just out of power and it's time to go home because it's very annoying.

This is messed up. Add Pac-Mans to maint. Or something to mitigate this. Even medbay's wounds rework has bootleg systems you can use to get around permanent shift impairment without a doctor.

Edit: Also. It's telling how what is once a highly useful traitor item to draw everyone's attention away from their current task and allow themselves easier access everywhere is now a common occurrence. Isn't that just silly?

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Sun Apr 10, 2022 1:52 pm Cannot articulate how eager I am to finally have a mechanical incentive for my lovely CO2 setups

I cannot articulate how eager I am to lynch engineers for destroying the only viable source of power on the station and, causing anomalies to spawn and the shuttle to be called after pacmans are nerfed.

Let me list out a combination of changes I would want to implement if I wanted to make the average round shorter by forcing every round to end/be unplayable to such an extent that shuttle is called when engineers fuck up.


1> Increase power consumption of every machine on the station and encourage more dangerous setups/experimentation with the sm to meet those demands. (More delams)
2> Directly increase the effect that the SM has on a round when it delams aside from just no longer producing power, like spawning dangerous anomalies throughout the entire station, now antags dont even have to guard the sm and force a singuloose/tesloose to cause catastrophic damage to more than one department.

If you are gonna make anything consume more power to function, it should be the SM, it consumes a very small fraction of its own power output (emitters) to produce infinite power, this would encourage making more powerful SM setups to make more power with the input it gets from emitters without nerfing other forms of power generation in the process (increasing the power consumption of everything else). The SM is an experimental powersource that nanotrasen is testing alongside pacmans (if it uses plasma its generally experimental)


I think we are gonna need an addition of generators that consume chemical fuel so botany can do something like make plants into bio fuel since it would easily be a more pre-existing and refined form of power generation that anyone should be able to get their hands on, especially thru cargo.

You can typically power the station with default setup + solars through some pretty heavy upgrading unless you're at ultra-high-pop, because machines still have pretty low idle use levels, and if you're REALLY resistant to injecting small amounts of CO2 into the supermatter to amp up production, you can always expand the solars.

MooCow12 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 27, 2022 10:56 pm I think we are gonna need an addition of generators that consume chemical fuel so botany can do something like make plants into bio fuel since it would easily be a more pre-existing and refined form of power generation that anyone should be able to get their hands on, especially thru cargo.

Technically you can already make high-value potato batteries, but expansion of the plants to do this properly would actually be pretty cool. Maybe make a trait that turns plants PACMAN-compatible, so that it's part of some sort of fucky wucky Nanotrasen plasma research thing, idk.

Shadowflame909 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 27, 2022 10:38 pm Power running out isnt fun, It's a barrier to the fun, It stops the fun, But it isn't fun. So the simple question is why is the hard-pressed desire to make the SM so solely important?

Since the decision to make the SM the sole engine for the station we started giving it more importance in the round by fixing its issues, adding features and in general making the engine much easier to use but with a big margin for improvement for advanced level players. This was lacking purpose, what's the reason to upgrade the engine power generation if the station never needed more power? For me bragging rights was not enough anymore so I started changing power consumption (and generation as well) to fit more the view of not having just an ON/OFF engine to play with (we already had that version with tesla and singulo), so the power consumption at roundstart was upped, with some machine properly consuming, and I implemented a need to generate more power as the round goes on (and is still too low consumption for my liking)

Shadowflame909 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 27, 2022 10:38 pm The simple fact that the alternatives are gutted and hard-pressed to obtain means that the SM destruction - in short of a prompt replacement, Is now as devastating as round-ending nuclear destruction. But there's no dramatic climax. Everyone is just out of power and it's time to go home because it's very annoying.

This is messed up. Add Pac-Mans to maint. Or something to mitigate this. Even medbay's wounds rework has bootleg systems you can use to get around permanent shift impairment without a doctor.

Alternatives are getting nerfed because they are not there to support the SM, but to replace it entirely and is a thing I don't want.
Solars are still good at supporting, pacmans needs a nerf (460 kW from a single super pacman is really too much). Also is a slow process that requires time to polish and adjust, there will be issues and broken things but with time they can be fixed.
Also don't pull in medical bootleg surgery without saying that cargo can just buy a shard and make their own engine

Cargo cannot just buy a new shard if they don't have any power to do so!!!!

Listen, I understand wanting the SM to be important and the main power provider. But it's gotten to a point where this issue is detracting from the game and not adding to it. The SM pretends to be a power-sink every round. Everyone becomes unable to do their jobs, and the SM is now highly important but also highly targetted. This quite literally doesn't make any sense, even telecomms allows you to bypass it with hand-held radios. Even other important things have backups with drawbacks

This is bad design that should maybe be a rare gimmick like a "power failure station trait" or something. It being a new core addition to the game is irredeemable.

Try not to make the station /require/ an advanced engineer to be able to do anything.

I don't much like the approach of making basic necessities of literally the whole game be too complicated, I prefer the route where you find something new and useful to channel the excess energy in.

Long ago I posted some ideas about a "energy to matter" converter to generate materials to help when mining is shortfalling, put it on a curve so more and more excess power gives diminishing returns (tending towards a finite limit). This way you have bragging rights, something productive, and dont screw the station over when there's no engineers and someone reluctantly sets up the untouched basic pump SM.

Add, don't restrict. IMO.

(Also no idea how much a station would or does struggle, more a general perspective ATM)

Did you do any of the math with this thing or did you just random values? Not to mention that the total power production in low power mode (supposedly more efficient) is actually 20% less than in high power mode.

Pre-nerf stock values for PACMAN:
260 time per sheet and 5000 powergen (which is then doubled to 10000 powergen with stock parts due to being prefabbed from Backup Generators)
10 kW/s for 43 minutes with 10 sheets, old bin could fit 50 sheets though

Post-nerf stock values (unupgradable, so any other values dont matter anyway):

Low power mode is 50 time per sheet with 2500 powergen or in other words 2.5kW/s for 8.3 minutes with 10 sheets which is new max
High power mode is 20 time per sheet with 15000 powergen or 15kW for 1.6 minutes with 5 sheets which is max in HP mode

This is a 50x nerf and puts plasma per cc as worse fuel than just burning wood. For the same amount of sheets of plasma that you got 40 minutes of power with (and usually struggled), you now get a bit over 3 minutes.
For that matter, 15kW with 85 time per sheet for SuperPac makes new high power mode basically a stock SuperPac except 4 times worse with less capacity.
I don't know about you but it's kinda tough when parts upgrades increase power consumption exponentially elsewhere. With the new base power consumption of 1kW/activation by machines, a stock grinder will take 2kW per grind (because it has a coeff of x2 in the code) which is pretty high. Biogen eats 5kW per melon processed. Every chemmaster click is 1kW. There's a pretty high chance of power drought every round even with a well-setup SM.

This PR ended up being less of an issue than I originally thought.

Thanks to previous changes to the ORM (removal of upgrades) and RnD, which have made upgrading the station harder and unrewarding, the issue of upgrades draining too much power has pretty much never come up for me.

As long as round times are generally 1:30:00 the round ends before upgrades are researched and rolled out (with the exception of science being upgraded of course).

I suggest increasing the power consumption of science machines by a lot, as this would actually mean engineering would have to upgrade the SM.

There is one very funny thing about this, which is on some stations (Delta?), Atmospherics immediately dumps its APC's charge within like 5 minutes

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 2:23 am There is one very funny thing about this, which is on some stations (Delta?), Atmospherics immediately dumps its APC's charge within like 5 minutes

Dont think this is anything new unfortunately

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Mon Apr 25, 2022 11:29 am Tonight on Sybil (182124)

MetaStation is set up with only solars
Arrivals loses power
Clown Traitor "Honk Honker" arrives
Goes into airlock to get to the station
Shuttle leaves
Result:


Shortly thereafter, attempts to set up the supermatter causes a delamination.

This achieves the clown's objectives, apparently, resulting in a greentext.

Review: 10/10, game of the year. Clowns deserve to die.

FYI these doors are supposed to open even when unpowered for this reason

oranges wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 5:32 am

Pandarsenic wrote: ↑Mon Apr 25, 2022 11:29 am Tonight on Sybil (182124)

MetaStation is set up with only solars
Arrivals loses power
Clown Traitor "Honk Honker" arrives
Goes into airlock to get to the station
Shuttle leaves
Result:


Shortly thereafter, attempts to set up the supermatter causes a delamination.

This achieves the clown's objectives, apparently, resulting in a greentext.

Review: 10/10, game of the year. Clowns deserve to die.

FYI these doors are supposed to open even when unpowered for this reason

It takes about 15-30 seconds of uninterrupted contact for the airlocks to open when unpowered.

Once the shuttle leaves the pressure difference keeps dragging you away from the airlock.

This causes the player to die of exposure.

chocolate_bickie wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 6:58 amThis causes the player to die of exposure.

no I mean I legitimately asked that they open as normal powered or not and that was implemented at one point I swear on it

oranges wrote: ↑Thu May 19, 2022 8:11 pm no I mean I legitimately asked that they open as normal powered or not and that was implemented at one point I swear on it

Bug reported https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/issues/67140