

For power storage accumulators still aren't that great, but they're certainly less expensive than they used to be. I did use to be a fan of night-steam (used to have a link in my sig) but the game changed: the biggest change being the greatly increased abundance of oil, making accumulators relatively cheap, actually per iron being cheaper per watt than steam engines, so in the long run you pretty much want to use accumulators for spike accommodation with extra steam being most useful before accumulators can be mass produced. Given that each boiler contains 5 fuel and a bunch of water and steam they make pretty decent buffers for the cost.
FACTORIO BOILER TO STEAM ENGINE RATIO UPGRADE
for laser turrets) because just the steam in the engines and boiler will last long enough to provide extra power during a biter attack wave, but still, I find it better to just build a larger 1:2 setup and then later I can always upgrade the fuel supply to turn it into full baseline power, or change it into an emergency power. Furthermore unless you go with 1:3 or 1:4 it results in messed up layouts. With boilers being so cheap that's pointless, the steam engines are in excess of 80% of the cost of a 1:2 setup so you don't save much at all by not building additional boilers to go with the steam engines. Why would you build additional engines, but not additional boilers? What is the point building steam tanks instead of extra boilers? The only theoretical reason is limited water supply, but in practice it's irrelevant. You need engines to meet maximum power demand anyway. Try "overbuilding" steam engines, with steam storage tanks - storage tanks are more expensive than boilers, but having the steam already in/near the steam engine should make for a better response time for spiky demand changes like laser turrets firing. In practice I find it fine to "overdraw" the fuel/water supply by 10-20% or even more if using laser turrets. Factory power demand tends to fluctuate, the fuel and water entering the poweplant has to meet the average demand, but the generation wattage has to meet the peak demand unless you want the factory to stutter. In fact I tend to use an excess of power generation relative to fuel anyway. Practically it is not hard decision in Factorio, because entities does not cost significantly, but in real life such decisions may affect much to company's profits and solving them are for what they pay for engineers. Is it better to build one more boiler or steam generator. Non-trivial ratio forces player to decide what kind of compromise he does. Just build 2 steam generators for every boilers. If everything is trivial, player do note have to decide anything.

Or even worse ratio in which you could build straight parallel rows of panels and accumulators and put substation at optimal distances. No, but 21:25 is more interesting than 1:1 would be. 0.837), would the game be more interesting ? I don't think so. The game would just force people to add one additional machine for the rounding error.Įxample : 21:25 (0.84) perfect ratio for solar can be rounded to 5:6 (0.833.) close enough ratio, and even 1:1 not-so-close-but-I-don-t-care-the-waste ratio. There is no added value to keep voluntarily an irrational ratio just to prevent people from achieving the perfect ratio build. To consume a red belt of coal requires more water than a single pump can handle, so you're probably best off braiding undergrounds between the coal inserters and starting a second row of boilers after the first fed by its own pump. IOW, a very easy setup is 30 miners feeding a yellow belt going to two rows of 16 or 17 boilers each fed by one pump. Water production per offshore pump: 1200/s
FACTORIO BOILER TO STEAM ENGINE RATIO FREE
Of course, feel free to correct if there are mistakes 17 made a number of changes that affect power ratios, and I didn't see a post on the effects on power plants (miners/boiler etc) so I figured it would be good to summarize what I think are the correct ratios in.
