Energy Shortage For Players and A.I

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K2Q2
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Energy Shortage For Players and A.I

Post by K2Q2 »

Follow up from the galactic-ruler channel in Discord. Energy is a difficult resource to produce and even the A.I factions seem to have trouble with it. Ticket 31043.
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Balthagor
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Re: Energy Shortage For Players and A.I

Post by Balthagor »

Further on this topic, concern was expressed that Energy Extractors on gas giants/lava moons may not be providing enough energy to make them worth exploiting. We're investigating that as well.
Ticket 31071
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Re: Energy Shortage For Players and A.I

Post by arquebus_x »

The random gen also sometimes makes starting systems with no lava or gas worlds, making energy production even harder in the early game.
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Re: Energy Shortage For Players and A.I

Post by Balthagor »

Capturing some of the discussions from Discord
arquebus_x wrote: — 11/09/2022
It feels like the energy production/stock issue is a runaway condition of sorts. Even with the Merchant AI providing energy in trades, I'll often hit zero stock before I can even research energy collectors. And even then, collectors don't produce enough energy to make up the difference. And that's assuming I even have lava/gas worlds in my starting system, which seems to occur only about 1/3 of the time.
That said, I wonder if I'm just playing too sub-optimally. I've run into this problem so consistently that I can't be the only player who gets hit by it - so presumably there's a workaround or some strategic solution to be able to get past the very early energy problem?
Toupzy=21458 wrote: I got bad energy issue too
So bad i wanna mod a fix to energy somehow
But its cheaty eh
arquebus_x wrote: My feeling is it’s an issue with population energy consumption. The “solution” is severe rationing but that would probably tank your approval. If my second recorded run results in the same thing I’m going to start again with the approval effects set low and then try to set the rationing to like 10% and see what happens.
If you watch the resource flow window you can see that virtually all of the consumption is population. So turning off things like research doesn’t help at all.
arquebus_x wrote: Wow! With both mods on, the change is quite dramatic. I actually am thinking that I might only want to have one on at a time! The planet energy mod would give me room to add facilities but still force me to be careful about energy usage, and the pop energy mod would make the early game more relaxed but later on pop growth would probably start to outstrip energy availability on planets (forcing me to expand). Thanks so much for making these!

The vanilla game does force you to find energy sources immediately but the drain is too fast and you can’t get those resources in time. But having the same push with a less aggressive “countdown clock” would be ideal.
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Re: Energy Shortage For Players and A.I

Post by Balthagor »

Balthagor wrote: In most of my play throughs, I could use Merchant AI to keep my economy going until I found some gas giants to exploit, but often my games only when 2-4hours in, then I had to restart due to engine and content changes. Some of the testing team we had made specific tests of "lose the game" and "win the game".
arquebus_x wrote: Merchant AI definitely keeps things alive, but the problem I run into is that I can't import enough energy to keep the "engine" running consistently. I drop to zero stock within seconds of a Merchant AI drop-off, and then all production (research, facilities, etc.) halts, which slows things down. I feel like the drain on energy stocks is too aggressive; I worry that being stuck in a severe energy deficit for the first couple hours of gameplay will put players off.

I've played with energy rationing at 25% and that hasn't stopped the aggressive drain/non-stock. I'm going to try out halting or severely limiting my finished goods production, to see if that slows the drain, and maybe using the merchant AI for finished goods as well as energy will keep things a bit better balanced in my economy.
Also, because lava/gas worlds spawn randomly, I've done some early game tests where there isn't one in my starting system or any adjacent systems. Which makes getting energy in the early game from energy collectors a non-starter.
And while I don't know the underlying mechanics of the election cycle and approval ratings, it feels like my energy crisis was pushing my domestic approval down enough to result in a lost election at the first election. I could continue at that point, of course, but it's a jarring result regardless.
arquebus_x wrote: Okay! I just did a quick test @Dylan @Toupzy on an idea I had for handling energy drain without modding.

I started a fresh game and turned off half of my finished goods factories (20 out of 40). I set my agriculture to aggressive export and energy to 100 years and finished goods to 300 days (the important thing being the agri export). I then started building the spaceport to get access to Merchant AI.

My finished goods product dropped to just above the demand, and my energy only dropped about 3M per tick. Once the Merchant AI kicked in I started gaining energy.

This might give the early game some room to breathe. Once you have new sources of energy you can start to turn your finished goods factories back on. You'll have to nurse it a bit because you'll need finished goods to make things but it actually makes things more interesting to have to carefully manage this.
Toupzy wrote: Very smart approach i didn't know we can turn off factories..... Good idea to balance out demand and supply tbh ill have to start over and do this. How do i turn off a factory mechanic wise please?
arquebus_x wrote: Go to your planet and then in the lower right interface there's a little orange factory. That brings up a panel with all of your installations. One of them is the Finished Goods list, and when you go through that list each factory has a button to Deactivate.

Later you can filter for Deactivated factories so you can just look at those and turn them back on as needed.

I really hope this is a good solution! It's a satisfying gameplay loop (at least for me) to have to manage production to avoid an energy crisis. To the point where I almost feel like it should be part of the onboarding tutorials.
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Re: Energy Shortage For Players and A.I

Post by Balthagor »

arquebus_x wrote: Go to your planet and then in the lower right interface there's a little orange factory. That brings up a panel with all of your installations. One of them is the Finished Goods list, and when you go through that list each factory has a button to Deactivate.
To this specific suggestion, setting the industry to produce to 100% of demand should have the same impact as deactivating surplus facilities. If it doesn't, please let us know.

Ticket 31767 started for ongoing energy balance issues. We'll keep tracking the feedback.
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Re: Energy Shortage For Players and A.I

Post by arquebus_x »

Balthagor wrote: Nov 12 2022To this specific suggestion, setting the industry to produce to 100% of demand should have the same impact as deactivating surplus facilities. If it doesn't, please let us know.
I realized that shortly after and it's a much easier way to control production. I found that by setting finished goods to 0% I can last a lot longer. There's enough finished goods in stock to last a while and the Merchant AI is able to bring in both energy and finished goods enough to keep the drain semi-manageable.

I do think that's a suboptimal solution, though. I would like to see some amount of energy drain in the early game but not at the level it currently is. Starting planet energy is somewhere around 10% of requirements, which is incredibly low both from a gameplay perspective and from a storytelling perspective (i.e., how did your homeworld manage to accumulate a large stock of energy when it can't produce more than 10% of its requirements at the start of the game?). If your starting planet could make say 75% of your requirements and the starting stock were maybe cut in half, then you'd be able to manage the early game without energy stress and at the same time you'd feel an internal pressure to expand because you know you're going to run out eventually - just not immediately.

Then, bringing in a feature suggestion from another thread, if you could tell your colonies to automatically ship energy (or any good) back to the homeworld, then you wouldn't have to micromanage that aspect of your energy supply. In particular it would be nice if you could give your civilian transports a "fill shortages" command that would have them automate transporting goods around your empire according to each world's needs (like in X4 Foundations).
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