What happened to advanced solars cost?

[Hoff]

Considering solar flowers constantly outperform nuclear power without config adjustment and only GregTech's fusion power tops it eventually, if you're the least bit interested in balance solar power is grossly overpowered for what it does and always will be so long as it doesn't require moderately expensive maintenance.

Solar panels having a finite lifespan before either breaking totally or needing repair would clear up the problems with them very quickly, as has been mentioned in the thread.

What makes this a problem is that as it stands, with solar power being as good as it is, you might as well remove all the alternative methods of power generation from the mod as it's wasting RAM.

MANY players do NOT value balance at all which is the problem with this change. Rather than adding in a middle tier to ASP for the current normal recipes and moving the old ones to an easy setting proves how worthless the developer is IMO. IF you force your idea of balance in your mod it's a terrible mod, plain and simple.

 

[Velotican]

It's a very slippery slope if you don't value balance, as ephemeral a concept as it is, because as soon as you aren't enforcing a sense of progression everything becomes arbitrary. Yes, Minecraft is actually very good at letting people ignore parts of the game they don't like and can handle arbitrary everything just fine. The simple fact is if you don't like a mod you don't have to use it, and on top of that Advanced Solar Panels have an alternative that's balanced around default IC2 that you can use!

Though with all the whining around this change maybe he should consider adding an easy mode option for the basic panel and readjusting those recipes to actually make sense. Funny how many people are so hostile to cohesive design in their sandbox. :|

As it stands with that change which whacks solar power up to the end-game where free power should be, you've got a much better design behind the mod with a simple tweak. What it actually looks like a lot of people are saying is that they don't like having to actually think about where they're getting their electrical power from, which is interesting in of itself.

 

[Hoff]

It's a very slippery slope if you don't value balance, as ephemeral a concept as it is, because as soon as you aren't enforcing a sense of progression everything becomes arbitrary. Yes, Minecraft is actually very good at letting people ignore parts of the game they don't like and can handle arbitrary everything just fine. The simple fact is if you don't like a mod you don't have to use it, and on top of that Advanced Solar Panels have an alternative that's balanced around default IC2 that you can use!

Though with all the whining around this change maybe he should consider adding an easy mode option for the basic panel and readjusting those recipes to actually make sense. Funny how many people are so hostile to cohesive design in their sandbox. :|

As it stands with that change which whacks solar power up to the end-game where free power should be, you've got a much better design behind the mod with a simple tweak. What it actually looks like a lot of people are saying is that they don't like having to actually think about where they're getting their electrical power from, which is interesting in of itself.

That shouldn't be interesting at all really. Not everyone plays for the same reason or wants the same things out of the mods. Hell geo power is always more efficient in terms of materials. That's just base IC2. Nuclear power has never really been the best in terms of power it's just a way to generate it that can be fun for some people. If you want nuclear power to be the most efficient so that it's an actual end goal for you; make it so in the configs. As I see it there should be no lock on what one person or even a group of people call balance because it's arbitrary. There is no universal balance and when you try to enforce such you may oblige some but you will always turn others away.

It's really simple: Not everyone plays for logic, balance, efficiency, or any other possible reason you can think of to unchangably nerf something. Hell vanilla minecraft outta have configs; it would improve vanilla 10x just having a way to customize the base game to your liking.

Also saying "Where free power should be" is quite simply an opinion and has no place being enforced on other players.

 

[clippjam]

I think that a config file option would be all thats needed here. At the moment, the hard/easy setting makes no difference, just a bit of glowstone and uranium, neither of which are needed in large amounts. If the setting was between old/new recipie, however, it would allow players looking for a challange to have just that, but people who like things easy can have things easy. I have to admit, I like cheap stuff. If I can get unlimited power at a low cost, I will take that opportunity and enjoy every moment of it, and I'm pretty sure many other people would too. Really hoping that he lets us change the cost back, or else I suspect that a lot of people will move over to compact solars instead. While its recipies are dull and quite tedious to make, at least it is achivable early on. Not saying that adv. solars is a bad mod, just a bit unfair with the update.

 

[Exasperation]

Considering solar flowers constantly outperform nuclear power without config adjustment and only GregTech's fusion power tops it eventually, if you're the least bit interested in balance solar power is grossly overpowered for what it does and always will be so long as it doesn't require moderately expensive maintenance.

And yet, advanced solar panels aren't quite as powerful as an automated tree farm + basic generators (2 ASPs are almost as good on average as 1 basic generator with a constant supply of fuel, which is not hard to automate in large quantities). I think the base point for your balance comparison is off, here; the problem isn't that solar panels are overpowered or underpriced, it's that other mid-tier options (i.e. nuclear) are underpowered and/or overpriced.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Personally, if I'm wanting "free" power, I really don't see why I'd go beyond a hell pump with some geo-gens. 20 EU/t, which can be easily supported by cheap copper cables, multiplied by however many geo-gens you can build and/or pack into your power room. Get a stack of them, and you've got 1,280 EU/t, and the only real show-stopper there, in terms of cost, is iron which, with a few pulverizers and some elbow grease, stops being a problem pretty quickly. I'm kinda torn about solars. On one hand, making them more expensive does make them a bit larger a goal, but on the other, requiring UU-Matter seems a bit arbitrary.

Honestly, instead of mucking the solars, IC2 et al should be buffing the other mid/high-tier options to make them more attractive. I, for example, would probably never bother with a fusion reactor. I've never needed that much power, and not only is the creation cost high, but simply getting the thing running requires an asston of power to the point where only one or two fuel types give you any net gain, and even then, if NEI is to be believed, its not all that great when compared to cheaper, simpler forms of power production. Make the other options cooler and more attractive!

 

[Exasperation]

Honestly, instead of mucking the solars, IC2 et al should be buffing the other mid/high-tier options to make them more attractive. I, for example, would probably never bother with a fusion reactor. I've never needed that much power, and not only is the creation cost high, but simply getting the thing running requires an asston of power to the point where only one or two fuel types give you any net gain, and even then, if NEI is to be believed, its not all that great when compared to cheaper, simpler forms of power production. Make the other options cooler and more attractive!

The fusion reactor is like the railcraft boilers: as long as you can keep it supplied with fuel, you only have to pay the heat up cost once. So feeding it 1 tritium and 1 deuterium may lose you ~6.5 million EU, but feeding it a stack of each at once nets you over 2 billion EU.

 

[meuqsaco]

Like others have said, I only play around with other energy sources for the fun of it, because in terms of performance, the 5 ultimate panels I have are grossly overpowered and quite easy to make, tbh.

 

[Hoff]

Like others have said, I only play around with other energy sources for the fun of it, because in terms of performance, the 5 ultimate panels I have are grossly overpowered and quite easy to make, tbh.

I didn't know 64 iridium + 2 UU per panel was easy. Especially for a casual player. Not to mention on hardmode it's an additional 96 UU matter.Also not to mention all other resources that went into it.

E: With GT added the normal recipe costs 7499999700 EU in Iridium and UU alone and the hard 96 additional UU is another 1599999936 EU.

So please what's so easy about it?

 

[Velotican]

Y'know I always forget about it but so long as you have GregTech you could always just use the Lightning Rod.

 

[Icarus White]

Speaking of lightning rods, though, any news on their lagginess? I've heard that the whole "bedrock to sky" setup is impossible because of that.
Of course the lightning rod requires iridium too, but not nearly as much as, say, an ultimate hybrid solar panel.

On the funnier side, I've heard that the reactor sensor mod allows for some rather unusual reactor builds, that could possibly outperform the 'safe' builds - for instance, one proposal I've heard involves stuffing one reactor full of fuel rods and coolant cells, then shutting down the reactor and sending the coolant cells to a 'cooling reactor'.

Fusion reactors, of course, are sort of a silly suggestion - in order to gain access to those you need ludicrous amounts of chrome and iridium. In fact, I think I worked out once that a reactor set to transmute 4 iridium ore in default mode took about a minute. It's certainly a valid choice, but not until endgame.

 

[Exasperation]

Fusion reactors, of course, are sort of a silly suggestion - in order to gain access to those you need ludicrous amounts of chrome and iridium. In fact, I think I worked out once that a reactor set to transmute 4 iridium ore in default mode took about a minute. It's certainly a valid choice, but not until endgame.

It's not a silly suggestion - with the new ASP recipe, you have to have a matter fab and enough energy production to power it before you can even consider making one, at which point going for a fusion reactor is entirely reasonable; you are already in the endgame. Especially considering that ASPs with equivalent output to a fusion reactor would now cost ~7280 iridium and ~14560 uum (and probably kill your server), HSPs with equivalent output will cost you ~8190 iridium and ~7280 uum, and equivalent UHSPs will cost you ~7500 iridium and ~7050 uum.

 

[Hoff]

To put into perspective how long it takes to generate 9.1 billion EU for your first hard mode Ultimate panel; 64 geothermal generators(1280 EU/t) would create that much EU in 247 real life days given you ALWAYS get 20 tps and never turn your game off. This is all for an item that increase your EU/t by about 1/5th of the Geo's, really a little bit lower than that. So now, happy day, it only takes you ~200 real life days to get the next one! Multiply days need by ~.8 to get the normal mode equivalent. Solar power is overpowered in the same way anything else in minecraft is; it's not.

Just for giggles I also did the non-GT version(This is a much more "realistic" goal for a hardcore gamer): Normal mode 450 million EU, 12.2 days of non-stop 1280 EU/t. Hard mode 546 million EU, 15 days of non-stop 1280 EU/t. Both real life days of course. These all are absolutely insane amounts of resources for something that will not pay it back for more than a month without GT and maybe in about 4 years on GT. But yeah, totally "balanced"


E: Ignore my rl time lengths. I fail at math sometimes.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Tis one of the reasons I've not really gotten into the more advanced IC2 power options, like advanced solars and nuclear/fusion reactors. It takes too damned long to get built and running, especially the fusion reactor. Even if you make ludicrous amounts of EU with said fusion reactor once it gets going, the entry cost is still stupidly high and, if I remember correctly, requires a fair bit of infrastructure to automate.

My advanced machines mostly consist of normal things like rotary macerators and induction furnaces, with a few GT machines thrown into the mix. The most advanced thing I really build is a pair of IDSUs so I can decentralize my EU generation and put it somewhere where I can easily expand it as my needs require, such as a Void age. I'd say that my primary focus isn't on power generation, but on power storage. I'm one of those players that obsesses over having fallback options: secondary entrances/exits to my house, overflow material storage, and what most would likely deem excessive power storage. That way, if any of my power generation facilities, for some reason, cease to function, I'll have plenty of breathing room in which to diagnose and correct any problems.

All this said, I've actually been moving away from IC2 in general for a while now. Mostly because, for most of my modded Minecraft life, I've always defaulted to it for my entry into machinery, and I want to work with different things...like Thermal Expansion or ThaumCraft or RedPower. Well...that, and IC2's been lagging the hell outta me for some time now.

 

[esotericist]

Mostly because, for most of my modded Minecraft life, I've always defaulted to it for my entry into machinery, and I want to work with different things...like Thermal Expansion or ThaumCraft or RedPower. Well...that, and IC2's been lagging the hell outta me for some time now.

Be advised: A lot of redpower stuff is a heck of a lot laggier in a lot of circumstances than IC2/GT. Be careful, mileage may vary, etc.

 

[Exasperation]

You know, the Advanced Solar Panels maintainer has inspired me with their sense of balance, and I've come around to their way of thinking. So now, out of the goodness of my heart and in the same spirit of fair play as the new and improved Advanced Solar Panel recipe, I'm going to make the following offer*, which should appeal to everyone who likes the new recipe:

If you send me $1,000, I will send you $2 a year every year for the rest of my life. That's free, guaranteed income, that you don't have to work for at all! In fact, I'm such a nice guy that I'll let you take advantage of this marvelous offer as many times as you like! Send me $10,000 and I'll send you $20 a year! You could potentially earn unlimited** amounts of money from this deal! Hey, wait! Where are you going? Don't you want all this free money?

* Not a real offer.
** Provided scientists discover how to make me immortal.

 

[Golrith]

They have to stop nerfing solars by increasing their cost. They NEED to figure out another way to balance them.

A suggestion I always see flying around is to have them accumulate dust and become less effective over time and need to be cleaned, so they are still free energy but need to be maintained. It's the set and forget nature of solars that make EU production trivial not the cost.

Another option is that the panels require a replaceable component to function, which takes damage over time. Sure you can automate a system to replace this worn out component, but it all adds to the cost, and makes the builds less compact.

 

[Hoff]

Another option is that the panels require a replaceable component to function, which takes damage over time. Sure you can automate a system to replace this worn out component, but it all adds to the cost, and makes the builds less compact.

Isn't the whole point of the solar panel mods to make them more compact than a solar flower of 512 solar panels?

 

[Velotican]

Actually they exist because the basic solar panels are lag-producing monsters in the mass quantities required to get a decent output out of them. They don't exist in default IC2 because the devs consider them overpowered.

 

[Golrith]

Indeed, if they didn't produce all that lag, we would all still be using the basic solar panel and large fields. Solar panels were not designed for compact builds.

I'm sure there's some way of turning a field of solar panels into a multiblock structure, which then only sends out one packet based on the total panels in the field.