Making the game more fluid - The adjacency bonuses problem.

[Kekouse]

For me adjency bonuses are a BIG mistake. The last RTS I played was Starcraft2 (before coming back in FA). You can love it, you can hate it but it has one good point: everything is useful. You build a barrack and then put the Reactor addon? It's ok. You put the Tech Lab instead? It's ok too.
There are no "Dead-ends", you can do bad choices on one game but it's your fault because everything is useful in a certain way.

In FA there are many "Dead-ends".
For example adjency bonuses. How many times did you saw noobs putting pgens around mexes? I saw it many times. In fact it's a common mistake, and I'm sure I did it too in my first game. Is it the fault of the player? For me it's more the fault to the game saying "do it it's possible" and giving the possibility to make a bad choice.
It serves nothing...why giving options to do it?

After fixing everything else in FA, adjency need to be completely reworked. We doesn't need to balance it competitively. But at least make it more noob-friendly.
For example mex+pgen could work as a little massfab, less efficient as mex+storage but at least not as useless as now...

[Frozen_byte]

Well I like the Idea and I think the adjacency bonus is an awesome (unique?) feature

raise Pgen->Radar bonuses
raise Mex->Factory bonuses
lower Storage->Mex bonuses ...A BIT!
raise Pgen->Arty bonuses
raise Pgen->Shield bonuses
(may) add EnergyStorage->increases Shield capacity?

AND we should think about to increase the bonuses of T2/T3 Pgens drastically, nobody recovers 4 T1 Pgens next to his Fab to replace it with a T3 Pgen.

[Kekouse]

It's more difficult than that. If you give a better bonus to the combo Factory + mex, it will be mandatory and change the early game as we know.
Some bonuses are ok. shield + pgen, radar + pgen. Factory + pgen (or Hydro).
Other are utterly useless: Factory + mex, pgen + mex.

-For the factory+mex combo, the bonus should apply at the T2 stage and not before. We could give a fair decrease of mass consumption as the Factory loses the bonuses with assist and losing one square of Mass storage.
-For the arty+pgen bonus we should buff it too. Right now T2 arty is nearly useless. If someone is turtling like mad, you'll surely upgrade your Factory to T3 and pump mobile artillery and not build a T2 Artillery. It shows that there is somewhere a problem. (I think for myself that T2 arty is useless, either decrease the cost and leave the damage-reload time-not precise shot or leave the cost but with less damage and PRECISE shots...)
-Massfabs are...well its the pandoras box. Make it too efficient and welcome back to Vanilla Supcom with the Eco-spam, leave it like now and it's not really useful (at least not on small maps)
-Pgens + mexes...like the factory combo it should give nothing with T1 mexes and in T2-T3 stages give a mass bonus but less efficient than the storage+mex combo.

My 2 cents

[Treble]

Pgen+Shield, that is a good adjacency option. You have a choice, save a significant amount of energy but sacrifice the ability to overlap the shield with another shield. That is a resource advantage vs military advantage, and easier to balance.

Factory+Mex vs Storage+Mex is two different resource advantages and is difficult to balance and not intuitive to the player, especially if there are no numbers or hints in game.

Maybe if try to look at the other types of resources in the game we can find better adjacency options.

Mass, Energy, Build Power and Unit Cap are the ones I can think of.

[pip]

The annoying part of adjacency bonuses is the necessity to build mass storage near a mex at the proper time. Changing that is tricky because the whole eco of the game is centered to the total value of mexes + storage bonus.

I have a simple idea about that : why not replace the necessity of mass storage with a bonus over time that would mimick the storage mechanic without needing it? What I mean is that after one minute, each mex would automatically gain the bonus they get with a linked storage without actually needing to care about when you should build it. It would take 4 minutes to get the mex to their full production output (as if you had added a storage to each side).

[Lu_Xun_17]

omg please don't change anything here! energy bonus is interesting, but not a "must do"

And concerning the mex storages, lol i doubt maths can take in consideration all the parameters of ingame conditions. Putting mex storages is something really strategic i think cause it's pretty expensive and won't be profitable really shortly.

[Kekouse]

Yes it's true but

-If we give the possibility to upgrade the mex with a simple button...is it bad? Say...the mex can build the storage by itself with a tiny rate of 5 or 10 Buildrate. So we can do it the old way with engies (its better) or do it the new way (take more time but it's easy for noobs)

-We can also give a buff for mex surrounded by Pgens. A tiny buff at T2 and T3. Like T2 mex + pgen = 7mass/sec and T3 mex + pgen = 20 mass/sec.
Noobs will still have a tiny buff and not the "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG" thing. And in some games it will add more diversity.
Mex easily defended? go storages. It takes time to get the money back but it give a massive buff.
Mex on the front? go pgens. At least it gives a tiny something.


All those are ideas thrown without doing maths or thinking about balance and so...but imho doing nothing is worse than tweaking the Adjency bonus.
Now the only thing that it does is confusing new players.

[Veta]

Ton of great ideas in here, I'd echo what other posters said and endorse buffing the other adjacency bonuses VERSUS the mex/storage bonus. Maybe a slight nerf to the mex/storage bonus but either way you should work it out so the math gives you more than one favorable outcome and so that there isn't a best build, but rather it depends on whether you're going to want energy, production or mass.

I think mex/factory bonuses should probably be better though and I know this has been mentioned a lot, especially back on GPG, but I'd love to see a popular mod with Mexes that can be built anywhere and collect according to the area they cover, with tactical locations being provided by high yield mass locations.

Maybe something like this: http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=46367

Or with something closer to the Diamond balance.

[HighFlyer15]

I see a lot of interesting ideas, but I plead to people responsable for adding changes to the game in the end, please don't change the mex+storage as is.
Some of us enjoy the game fully as it is now. Why change what isn't broken?
Buff other stuff as the adjacency mex+factory, pgen+shields, but don't chance what isn't broken.
And newbies wouldn't keep doing pgen+mex, if he constantly loses to other newbies.

Maybe what we really need is a "basics tutorial", which is a little better than the initial one, because how eco works in FA isn't rocket science. I understand it and know that T2 mexes need storage. I knew that after the first time I found out about it and have never stopped doing it since. Don't cater to the people who refuse to learn, but improve on the rest.

Hench only try to improve on other adjacency bonuses, which right now are pretty useless.. I don't even place shields next to pgens for the most part, since the bonus isn't really worth it (note, I don't play a lot of 1v1s)

btw Veta, the guy talks about fewer units, but adding upgrades.. I sense SupCom2 all over again and I don't like it. I wouldn't be able to tell units apart and that would suck, when I try to come up with an idea on how to defeat my opponent. Bad idea imo.

tl;dr
Keep the mex+storage as is, it's not broken, doesn't need fixing.
Buff current adjacency bonuses somehow

[Varaxis]

I only care about the mass storage boost being abnormally large. 50% bonus when surrounded is crazy. Should lower the bonus so it's not as efficient as upgrading to t3. Having knowledge of the most efficient build sequence, from observed math, puts the inexperienced at a major disadvantage.

Off-topic: is it just me, or do noobs love playing with volatile stuff as if it were setting up dominos? Do they love making simcities to let others blow it up and revel in the glorious explosion/chain reaction of their own base?