WC2:ToD based question: Oil spills and refineries?

Ever played WarCraft 2: Tides of Darkness? No? There was a fine idea with oil spills. In Planetary Annihilation oil refineries could produce energy.

Whatcha say about it?
puga1999

Anything that looks like it came from a war-ravaged planet should be used as decor on a war-ravaged planet. The odd splodge of dirty water won't detract from the game.

As for having uses for them, like as the third/fourth resource in ToD? I'm not so sure. I makes sense for water-planets (seeing as we will need some sort of power-producing structure), however PA is set in the future and burning fossil-fuels seems a little dumb.

Burning oil is incredibly stupid, especially when petrol products (plastics, polymers, etc.) can be used in everything ever.

Most of our modern industrial energy actually comes from coal. Consumers are only familiar with gasoline because it's a *cough*waste product*cough* not good for anything else.

Isnt the technology of PA more on a "fusion-powerplants for EVERYTHING" level?
Since they are all robots they don't even need to contain radiation.

Radiation is incredibly destructive in large enough doses. Atomic change will destroy the purity of materials, causing the material to weaken or become brittle. One of the big Chernobyl fears is that radiation will degrade and destroy the sarcophagus.

An exploding fusion plant can still shower the field with all types of radiation, reducing the integrity of everything around it. The only permanent fix is to pull out the bad material and replace it with new material (I.E. you repair it).

You could have oil deposits which you could place fairly cheap oil pumps/refineries on and it would give you a good boost in energy for a temporary time, if it gets destroyed it releases an oil spill if it's in water or if it's on land will release an oil fire. Neither would do anything as the robots most likely would be able to withstand the heat from it but it would be more of a cool effect.

This is actually extremely dependant upon the material in question. I'm currently finishing up my PhD in nuclear materials, and I can say that even now, there are a lot of materials that display remarkable resistance to radiation damage effects. They have to, if we are attempting to build fusion reactors now.

On topic, every effect added to the game institutes a time and cost to develop it. Are oil refineries worth it, if they are just a small effect that may only be seen rarely on some worlds? It seems particularly incongruous to have some oil refineries lying around given that combustion technology would likely be completely superseded.

I am not an expert on this, but the robots in PA are made to wage war in space, on lava-planets, on water-planets and other possibly rather dangerous places. I would expect them to use a material that can deal with radiation to a certain degree. They are not build for eternity either, so it doesn't matter if the radiation degrades the material within years. They will be blown apart by enemy-fire long before that.

I would think that a mechanic like this would work like a geothermal plant. In some way the ground would be marked to signify oil, and you would smack a generator on top of it.

Though I think this mechanic would be very redundant as we already have a geothermal generator...

I realy want theese, because then there are objectives to fight for.