the split pipe ac allows you to put coolers anywhere, without needing an outside wall, this is a massive advantage over vanilla wall based ac, also they are scalable so that a single outdoor unit can provide capacity for multiple indoor units, each indoor unit also has a built in thermostat so if you find one part of the base stays hotter than another you can build a couple of outdoor units for each zone to increase the change that it will power off, and generally the system is most useful for building large freezers anywhere rather than being forced to have them on an outside wall

Indoor AC units only really seems useful in mountain bases, though; anywhere else, you can make a 1xN roofless room to vent vanilla A/C into, in a worst case where your freezer isn't directly next to your crops on an outside wall (and in cold climates, you can just have the units pump heat into the rest of the base)

But I wasn't trying to complain that it's not useful, if nothing else I like them for aesthetics, I was just saying it'd be nice if they could scale in some way with room size, because a 1x1 room shouldn't require the same amount of cooling capacity as a 12x12. If they scaled their cooling unit requirement based on temperature difference vs target, that alone would account for it, since the room size would affect how quickly it reaches target. This wouldn't even be an advantage over vanilla, since power usage in vanilla already depends on that temperature difference - it would just be removing one of the disadvantages

It would also make it more interesting to manage as the requirements change over the seasons, and may make the blue bars on the UI more interesting, giving you an easy to understand indication of which rooms might be struggling and which ones can handle a lot more heat, rather than seeing a dozen blue bars that are all constant and identical to eachother (if on the same AC network). In current implementation, it would make more sense to show just one bar at the outdoor unit, instead of the same bar at every vent



I suppose your point is that it'd be too powerful, and I agree - but only because of the very reduced component cost, both from having few central units, and from having vents require none (and thus don't require components to fix breakdowns). But that's kindof a separate suggestion, that vents should probably require at least one component and be susceptible to breakdown repairs, so it doesn't destroy the challenge of getting to component creation before your map is out of components (and, removing one of the main benefits of central AC, opens up room to make it more efficient and still be balanced)