Goonhub
10-19-2022, 07:57 AM
Maybe a hot take, but I'm very much against constructable atmos. It would kill the last bit of complexity that engineering has left. For example, it would change the solution to the problem of "pressure is too high" from managing mol count in the pipes more effectively to "build a billion pressure tanks."
Atmos works on the ideal gas law: Pressure * Volume = Mol Count * Temperature * Ideal Gas Constant. As it currently stands, volume is mostly constant and mol count is somewhat static too after the initial setup (not considering pipeburns for a moment). This makes temperature your independent variable and pressure your dependent variable, with your goal being to maximize temperature within a fixed pressure limit.
This PR would make volume no longer constant, presenting two solutions to the problem: Either control your gas expansion or volume to keep pressure in check. Controlling expansion involves managing the amount of gas in the pipes, temperature, blower settings, etc.. Point is, it has some depth. Controlling volume involves just making more pipes. Its a very simple solution to an originally complex problem.
And it would also bring back pipeburns being the "optimal meta" option, which is not something that I particularly want to see, and given the nerfs I believe the devs are inclined to agree. Unless you've changed how pipes work under the hood, it would be trivial to just replace the pipes with T-junctions or radiators or passive gates or whatever that can't break and then just ignore pressure entirely. Even if you have changed that and all pipes can break, people would still just rebuild the engine every round in order to give it as few pipes as possible so that the work of a one-man pipeburn becomes reasonable again. Pipeburns should ideally be something that takes a coordinated engineering team to pull off effectively, and a big part of how that balance works is that the engine pipe network too large on most maps for one person to find it worth the effort to patch all the pipes by themself.
Atmos works on the ideal gas law: Pressure * Volume = Mol Count * Temperature * Ideal Gas Constant. As it currently stands, volume is mostly constant and mol count is somewhat static too after the initial setup (not considering pipeburns for a moment). This makes temperature your independent variable and pressure your dependent variable, with your goal being to maximize temperature within a fixed pressure limit.
This PR would make volume no longer constant, presenting two solutions to the problem: Either control your gas expansion or volume to keep pressure in check. Controlling expansion involves managing the amount of gas in the pipes, temperature, blower settings, etc.. Point is, it has some depth. Controlling volume involves just making more pipes. Its a very simple solution to an originally complex problem.
And it would also bring back pipeburns being the "optimal meta" option, which is not something that I particularly want to see, and given the nerfs I believe the devs are inclined to agree. Unless you've changed how pipes work under the hood, it would be trivial to just replace the pipes with T-junctions or radiators or passive gates or whatever that can't break and then just ignore pressure entirely. Even if you have changed that and all pipes can break, people would still just rebuild the engine every round in order to give it as few pipes as possible so that the work of a one-man pipeburn becomes reasonable again. Pipeburns should ideally be something that takes a coordinated engineering team to pull off effectively, and a big part of how that balance works is that the engine pipe network too large on most maps for one person to find it worth the effort to patch all the pipes by themself.