Do you ever wish eco balance was less sensitive?

[Bennis-]

Heresy heresy Stop it at once this discussion is forbidden be gone

[Gruffman]

If you build the power you need before you build the structure that will need it, then at some point add some energy storage then you barely have to think about power.
With mass, upgrade one mex at a time.
After that, I think you only get stalls when you assign a bunch of engineers or drones/tents to assist and it crashes your economy quickly. I still do that after 3 years of playing, sigh.

[Sovietpride]

Perhaps some remedial training is in order.

[armacham01]

If you made eco balance less sensitive, it would be harder to accomplish something by attacking your opponent's economy. It would make for fewer tactical/strategic choices.

In theory, you could mod the game so that when you power stalled, it would automatically convert some mass into power. And when you mass stalled, it could convert some power into mass. The conversion rates would have to be sufficiently unfavorable that you would be encouraged to seek out a proper eco balance, but sufficiently favorable that it would actually be useful.

Would that improve the game though? Probably not. Managing the economy is an essential part of the game. And it would take away your ability to do things like "power snipe" your opponent. It would make hydrocarbons not so different from mexes. So there would be less incentive to specifically target them (or to specifically build them).

[Steel_Panther]

I wouldn't mind if there was an option for t2 or t3 mass and energy storage. Especially energy, since you often have plenty of mass storage after you cap mexes. Of course you can just build a bunch of t1, but I don't see why there isn't a higher tier option for these so you can build just one or two more efficient storages.

[Bennis-]

Seldomly a game of faf would've been decided by a potential higher tier storage option. Maybe the odd paragon power stall while tanking mavor but dude

[MrTBSC]

the primary thing i would like for supcom is that Maxxes do not require powermaintainance, the loss of a t2 or even t3 Pgen impacts metalgeneration just way too hard than should be ...

unlike others however i would be for some level of automation were apm on reclaiming is reduced, and that is were all TA-likes have that problem, both patroling and A-moving with fabricators, engineers and contructers (well TA is old so one may forgive it for that) is simply inprecize ... Amoving ignores how full your storage is and reclaims indescrimanately ..
you can´t put a patrolroute close to your base otherwise your workerunits may start assisting construction or unitproduction or repair units when you don´t want them to ... behaviors on patroling or inclousion of arealorders would solve this easily ...
there also needs to be a way weither i want to reclaim metal or just trees for power than needing to click a piece of tree or rock individualy AND there needs to be a way to chose between ignoring the storage as well as to consider it ...
maybe idle fabs with a set behavoir can be set to autoreclaim in their area or just to repair units ..


tryhards may call this a way for the SUPERIOR microplayers to be seperated from the plebian mortals for a nonstarcraftesque largescale RTS game but to every avarage player it´s just a bad and clunky system that puts buyswork apm on economy that rather should be spendable on your armycontrol or baseplanning ...

the other problem many TA-likes (not just Supcom) have is putting a powercost on unit- and structureproduction allong with a fix shouldbuildtime ... that makes understanding the eco/production confusing ..
Planetary Annihilation did away with this and units and structures only have a metal/mass cost to them, that´s it ..
your workers have a powercost to metalratio (f.e. worker uses 800 power to convert 15 metal per second) into your building or unit) and power is generaly just used for maintainance, THAT is their way to determine buildpower, your unit/stucture has this ammount of metal/mass thus the factory or worker will finish it with its metal to power in that ammount of time ..

the problem with the usual TA-like economy (and that is not about the continueous spendingcapability compared to the upfront paymentstyle of Supcom 2 other RTSs) is that imho it is needlesy complex .. and that does not make the game intresting it makes it clunky ..
there are may be too many factors the system needs to consider that may be the reason it might be sensitive both from a ballanceperspective as well as the average player understanding it ..


as for storageoptions? .. i think base t1 silos give plenty storage

[Steel_Panther]

Seldomly a game of faf would've been decided by a potential higher tier storage option. Maybe the odd paragon power stall while tanking mavor but dude

Thank goodness the frequency with which games are decided based on a feature or balance issue is not how we decide whether a feature or balance issue could be beneficial to the game or not. I would say that practically zero games have been decided based on the notification feature telling allies when you start and complete an acu upgrade. It's still something that is nice to have. There are definitely games where I'd like to have a few e storages to avoid power stalling, even purely for the mass efficiency from avoiding an e stall, not to mention avoiding shields turning off during a t3 arty war. Why do you think it is BAD to have a t2 energy storage option, instead of just t1? Why are some changes BAD, simply because they do not frequently decide games?

[Bennis-]

Because it's a needless option. It would be nice to have a t2 air staging building that can host 8 planes at once but it's not needed, you can just make twice the amount of T1. It's a non issue in the game.


I do fully agree with mrtbsc btw. Much like target priorities are a useful functionality in the game, an order for engineers that more smartly picks up reclaim such as give engineers factory attack moves by default would make reclaiming easier and shift APM to unit movement. Really good idea I'm going to open a balance thread about it.

[Steel_Panther]

Because it's a needless option. It would be nice to have a t2 air staging building that can host 8 planes at once but it's not needed, you can just make twice the amount of T1. It's a non issue in the game.

By that logic, engimod shouldn't even have been implemented. It was "needless." rofl!