Goonhub
11-26-2020, 10:25 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-26-2020, 10:29 PM by nefarious6th. Edited 1 time in total.)
I've run into a lot of issues with doing basic charburns too; once I got a weird char-pipeburn setup to roll okay, but that was a few weeks ago and a "let's throw whatever at it and see what happens" build with no actual intention or thought behind it.
Training new players has been frustrating if not pointless. I was intrigued by the circulators stuff but still see a lot of cold loop bricking on charburn setups, even though it sounds like that was maybe the intent of it to fix? I've also seen what Retrino talks about, with the zero input hotloop. I have only gotten usable burns on Cog1 and Cog2, and my Cog2 burn ran away on what should've been a pretty mild charburn setup.
I'll have to come back to this post, since I forgot something and I'm not sure I hit it on the head in the next part, but there's three things that have really bothered me out of this entire process.
One is that I can't reasonably teach anyone a useful engine setup, which really is sad because engineering is one of my favorite departments.
The second, and perhaps most profound effect, is that currently hellburns are the only really viable engine setup for consistent power; which leads to people using hellburns. And unfortunately, I have seen so, so many of these on RP1 in the past few weeks, and every single time the engine has blown up, and all but once we've had to evacuate on Cog1 because it destroyed cargo (and robotics, and made the escape hallway unusable). It's just frustrating that people think hellburns are the only worthwhile option now, because on RP rounds, keeping that kind of burn stable just isn't going to happen, and that usually means we sacrifice 30 or more minutes that we could've had at the end of the round because things just get too hot to feasibly recover from, so we leave early.
I think my other problem I was trying to remember was that I've had to sit on my engines the entire round when I do them. I get that engineering is a team/collaborative thing, but I think part of the problem is the nature of engineering seems so spread-out to me (construction, mining, cargo, actual engine), that it's difficult to get more than one or two people to sit on an engine all round when there's other things (breaches, cargo, nanites, motives) that need taking care of. The only rounds where sitting with the engine has been okay for me were when I was an engineering borg and planned to not do anything remotely useful beyond getting the engine running. No motives to check in on, no further obligations, none of it. And that was fine, because in my experience with these changes, it is a matter of just a few BYOND ticks between having a decent 1mW charburn going on a setup I was familiar with, and one that jumps to 10mW and destroys inner engineering or bricks a loop completely.
I have one other question, that I unfortunately didn't get to test myself because when I did go in to do some engineering practice at 60 minutes on a Cog1 shift, the thing already melted down: I assume the lubricants are just added into the circulators from beakers or whatever. I don't really have a problem with this conceptually on a majority of the maps, departmental interactions aside, because on a map like Cog1, an extra beaker of cryo spawns in in Medbay, so I figure it's easy enough to swipe that (although not every map has spares of these, and I would definitely look into spawning at least 1 spare beaker somewhere on the map for engineering).
But if beaker/container into the circulator is the case, this is a HUGE disadvantage for any engineering cyborgs since they don't spawn with reagent containers. And, unfortunately, with the way things have been so far, I really can't see engineering not having a cyborg on it for TEG setups, because so few people can set up the engine/will want to join as engineers with constant experimental builds, and once an engine goes haywire, it can become impossible for any non-silicon players to get back in and fix it without dying.
I can try to poke around at more TEG setups and get more solid numbers or whatever; this is mostly my thoughts from the past few weeks, though if I think of anything else, I might come back and add some other ideas/results. I just feel lost on all this.
Training new players has been frustrating if not pointless. I was intrigued by the circulators stuff but still see a lot of cold loop bricking on charburn setups, even though it sounds like that was maybe the intent of it to fix? I've also seen what Retrino talks about, with the zero input hotloop. I have only gotten usable burns on Cog1 and Cog2, and my Cog2 burn ran away on what should've been a pretty mild charburn setup.
I'll have to come back to this post, since I forgot something and I'm not sure I hit it on the head in the next part, but there's three things that have really bothered me out of this entire process.
One is that I can't reasonably teach anyone a useful engine setup, which really is sad because engineering is one of my favorite departments.
The second, and perhaps most profound effect, is that currently hellburns are the only really viable engine setup for consistent power; which leads to people using hellburns. And unfortunately, I have seen so, so many of these on RP1 in the past few weeks, and every single time the engine has blown up, and all but once we've had to evacuate on Cog1 because it destroyed cargo (and robotics, and made the escape hallway unusable). It's just frustrating that people think hellburns are the only worthwhile option now, because on RP rounds, keeping that kind of burn stable just isn't going to happen, and that usually means we sacrifice 30 or more minutes that we could've had at the end of the round because things just get too hot to feasibly recover from, so we leave early.
I think my other problem I was trying to remember was that I've had to sit on my engines the entire round when I do them. I get that engineering is a team/collaborative thing, but I think part of the problem is the nature of engineering seems so spread-out to me (construction, mining, cargo, actual engine), that it's difficult to get more than one or two people to sit on an engine all round when there's other things (breaches, cargo, nanites, motives) that need taking care of. The only rounds where sitting with the engine has been okay for me were when I was an engineering borg and planned to not do anything remotely useful beyond getting the engine running. No motives to check in on, no further obligations, none of it. And that was fine, because in my experience with these changes, it is a matter of just a few BYOND ticks between having a decent 1mW charburn going on a setup I was familiar with, and one that jumps to 10mW and destroys inner engineering or bricks a loop completely.
I have one other question, that I unfortunately didn't get to test myself because when I did go in to do some engineering practice at 60 minutes on a Cog1 shift, the thing already melted down: I assume the lubricants are just added into the circulators from beakers or whatever. I don't really have a problem with this conceptually on a majority of the maps, departmental interactions aside, because on a map like Cog1, an extra beaker of cryo spawns in in Medbay, so I figure it's easy enough to swipe that (although not every map has spares of these, and I would definitely look into spawning at least 1 spare beaker somewhere on the map for engineering).
But if beaker/container into the circulator is the case, this is a HUGE disadvantage for any engineering cyborgs since they don't spawn with reagent containers. And, unfortunately, with the way things have been so far, I really can't see engineering not having a cyborg on it for TEG setups, because so few people can set up the engine/will want to join as engineers with constant experimental builds, and once an engine goes haywire, it can become impossible for any non-silicon players to get back in and fix it without dying.
I can try to poke around at more TEG setups and get more solid numbers or whatever; this is mostly my thoughts from the past few weeks, though if I think of anything else, I might come back and add some other ideas/results. I just feel lost on all this.