Vanilla Power Generation and consumption changes

[Stormfox]

Aaaand a third post about numbers balance. I promise I am done for today after this.

Power generation and consumption in Rimworld seems all over the place. Like is typical for an alpha, some workable numbers got slapped on stuff and never changed, because the net result was halfway decent. I can understand that, but I think we can make it much better with just a few tweaks:

1) Simple lighting and a few other things take too much energy. 75w for a light bulb is too high in comparison to the amounts of power a plant gives or what workstations take. Most lighting mods already take that into account by adding cheaper to run lights. Reduce the basic lamp to at most 25w for starters, and ideally incorporate some of the really, really cool alternate light sources like wall, floor or ceiling lamps.

2) Workstations are always on and on max power drain. Since freezers and coolers are using power depending on their use state, why not extend that to every workstation? If its not in use, it drains only 20% of the usual power amount.

3) Power plants have too few options and give too few energy per piece / size. A typical lategame colony needs dozens of wind/solar plants in addition to grabbing every geothermal vent you can. That is unrealistic, tedious and does not look very good. The actual ressource costs for "teching up" and expanding are good, though.

I suggest roughly doubling cost and output of the two basic power plants (and while we are at it, make the wind turbine 4x2 and its canal 4 behind and 8 in front so they play more nicely together - or the other way round with the solar 5x5 and the wind canal 5x5 and 10x5, respectively). Since this might make the very beginning of the map more difficult, consider adding another 100 steel or so to the starting drop pods to compensate. I suggest upping the non-uranium costs of the asrg quite a bit and at least doubling, if not tripling its output. This gives the plant and uranium an actual use. Lastly, slightly adjust the geothermals upwards, but not by quite as much. Perhaps 4000 power instead of the current 3600, with a corresponding cost increase to 450 steel and an extra component or two. Possibly do not quite double the output for the solar plant for reasons outlined below.

The idea behind that is to a) rebalance the steam vents to be something that is nice to have but not crucial and b) to not have to plaster half the map with power plants after a year or two to keep up with power demands. The actual ressource costs for expanding are similar to what they are now, from a steel/components per power generated point of view.

4) Workstations and some other facilities take more energy than right now - either always or when in use.



All the above changes together make it so your industrial basis is the thing that forces you to expand your energy grid, not so much that you added a few colored lights to make your base pretty. Basic functions are affordable tech, but high end stuff like vitals monitors need to be accounted for. Your workstations put quite a drain on your grid when many of them are used at the same time, making batteries much more important to have [small intersection here: something similar to the fuses mods would be really fair to have then].
Solar plants would play nicely with the extra power needs during the day through active workstations, which is why I suggested making them relatively a tad weaker. Wind and the constant power sources are useful to fulfull your "baseline" around the clock needs.

If these changes lead to power generation being to high in general (since we just reduced power needs of all those lamps across the board, for example), tweak all power gen numbers down again accordingly (I guess about 20 percent should suffice).

[eadras]

Back in A14, Community Core Library mods used to take care of #2.  I miss that functionality, and agree that it should be added to the base game.

[Sirportalez]

#2 pawns should just turn them off after work is done.

[Cacaudomal]

More efficiente solar pannels etc could be result of more late game research.It would make more sense .