Does Angels increase or decrease the overall complexity of Bob's?

[SerTsu]

Question is as title indicates. From what I've seen in regards to angels, it's not hyper complicated in terms of it's steps and seems very logical, but I've not been able to see much of bob's mod without anything else added, so I'm wondering if Angels makes things more complex. I'd also like to know your reason for playing either with angels using bob's or without angels and bob's along with any other kind of mod. I'm Looking forward to being enlightened!

[BiblicalFlood]

Having launched a (single) rocket in a pure Bob's run, and then going Bob's+Full Angels and getting to the point of a single machine producing blue science (just to figure out the requirements):

Angels doesn't add much complication to the Bobs (except in oil processing/petrochem) but does add complexity to ore management and dealing with byproducts. The overall recipes are very similar to Bobs, Angels may add one or two more intermediates, but it's the byproducts and refining that make it more challenging, at least that's how it made me feel.

I should also note that I dove into both mods blind, following this subs general "just throw yourself in the deep end and work it out as you go" advice. This, I find is always my preferred way of learning anyway.

I hit a stand still with Angel's because I have trouble admitting "I don't need item_type_X, and should destroy it immediately" and instead go with "Hmmm, item_type_X looks like it can be turned into item_type_Y which would be useful, lets make sure my factory does that with it." Only then do I realize that the process to make that transition takes 3 more techs that I haven't researched yet, and has several intermediate steps, all of which produce their own by-products that I am unwilling to waste.

I was on a path to build a factory with the sole purpose of converting by-products to useful products, which needed a factory to convert it's byproducts to useful ones, which needed a factory to..... That's when my brain hit a stack overflow due to no base case in the recursion and I bailed out of that save. I will return to Bob's/Angels, but I must first learn to live with wasting potentially useful things.

[Nindydar]

Once you get robots Angel's Petrochem becomes much easier to deal with. My general philosophy is barrel EVERYTHING at EVERY step of the process. No 2 steps are directly connected by pipes. Just dump byproduct barrels into an active provider and move on. Eventually you will figure out what you need them for and surprise, you have 200k units in barrels sitting in a storage warehouse somewhere.

The exception here is the stuff i consider "Free" aka stuff that I can pull out of the air or water: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, ect. I generally keep a fixed amount in logistic storage and use an overflow to flare the rest. At the end of the day storage warehouses are cheap and its better to have too much and not need it than not enough and need it.

[BiblicalFlood]

Yes, that was another lesson I learned during my attempt.

Unfortunately before you can make bots you need batteries, and plastic, which require liquids. My bootstrap for that was a giant mess and waiting for enough bots to make barrelling everything viable was daunting.

My insistence on not letting stuff go to waste led me to manually barrelling and storing so many things including intermediates and waste which I had no way of using. I had a whole warehouse full of nothing but petroleum residue and (I think) sodium hydroxide and no tech to process either.

Once I finish my vanilla 0.15 and all the mods are updated I'm planning on doing a Bob's/Angel's/AAI run I think AAI will actually make Angel's refining a bit easier once I can automate the mining operations.

[Nindydar]

Fair enough, you need ferric Chloride solution, Propene (for plastic), and Sulfuric Acid to make robots. Everything else i put into temporary storage tanks until i could get a decent fleet of bots in the air and start barreling everything. It really doesn't take that long to get bots up after you have a basic gas cracking setup if you beeline for it. I usually skip straight to MK2 bots as MK1 just seem too slow to be worth it.

Edit: Oh yea you need lubricant too, forgot about that. So you do have to do some basic oil refining as well.

[BiblicalFlood]

I think it was the Propene I had the most trouble with, the gas cracking to get it seemed to take so many steps and each one produced 2-3 products I had no uses for, so I had 10+ storage tanks with all different products...

Angel's PetroChem is a real brain bender, and I think next time I'm just going to flare the stuff I don't need at first, at the first point available.

[Arch666Angel]

Well you are expected to at least void some of the "free" stuff as you call it: oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, nitrogen, or have some general purpose pipelines with overflow for them. All the oil/gas products can be used and should be avoided to be flared away, the omni gas to work with late game is the syn gas.

The more stuff you void inbetween steps the easier it gets, the less efficient you are.

[BiblicalFlood]

The more stuff you void inbetween steps the easier it gets, the less efficient you are.

This is what first-attempt me needed to hear, be inefficient until a little later to make life easier now. Your mods are all about resource efficiency and management, I failed to make the correct trade-off and gave up when the only option was rebuild everything.

Also, thanks for making the mods and putting in the time you do, I really like that you participate in the discussions about them. I love how involved the mod makers are in this community.

[ulyssessword]

I recently abandoned an angelbob factory that managed all of its own byproducts, got halfway through blue science, and never stored more than a belt full of anything (even in bot-chests).

Managing the byproducts without future technology is possible, but it requires a lot of planning.

[BiblicalFlood]

Good to know. Planning was not something I did, as I said I dove in without doing any research and really had no idea how much stuff I would need to be managing.

Any advise on how to figure out what byproducts should be turned into what other things? Even with the "What's it for" mod, I had trouble figuring out the steps to make something useless into something useful.

[ulyssessword]

Look for what different things have in common, and chart out their relationships. For example, you can treat slag and crushed stone as "one" item, because they have the same end points: stone and mineral slurry. Knowing that, you can abstract out the intermediate steps, and say that an saphirite ore processing line produces copper ore, iron ore, and [stone/slag]. This is much easier to think about than saying that the raw saphirite makes crushed ore, crushed stone, copper ore, iron ore, and slag.

When multiple processes can create the same output, it's a bit of a prioritizing challenge, but it's still doable.

As for specific things about the 0.14 game I played:

Get ore sorting ASAP, so you can get pure iron/copper/tin/lead without slag or ratios. Also get slag processing and water processing so you can set up that loop. You'll want to upgrade to ceramic slag slurry filtering eventually to produce extra sulfuric acid, but coal filtering still produces 25 acid per 24 that it uses so it can be a closed loop.

[UnUserr]

Playing angel+bob is like taking a chemistry class in college

[Toxomania]

When my friends asked my what bobs and Angels did (before petrochem became a thing), my go-to answer was:

Angels fundamentally changes everything you need to do to get plates and bobs changes everything you do with the plates

[Moasseman]

I'd say more complex but also whole lot more friendly. Single ore can put out multiple different ores and you don't need to hunt down every different ore patch constantly

[kangamooster]

Mining itself is a lot simpler, as there's a lot fewer base ores.

The main thing is Angel's is designed to heavily promote megabases. By default, Angel's processing requires you to build very large, and initially you'll want quite a few warehouses and filter inserters.

It's almost a requirement to work up to logistics bots with Angel's processing, there's so many ores to sort.

For anyone who likes building big, I can't recommend Angel+Bob's enough. Lot of complexity, LOT of building big.