Automatic overflow sharing can still waste resources.

[JeeVeS]

I noticed this while testing the new lazyshare mod.

It appears that in some circumstances power shared between team members is not conserved. Specifically, when a player is using a portion of energy excess from a teammate, the amount of that energy that they don't use is not recycled back into the team, simple lost.

For example: In a 3 player match, player 1 has just completed RAS and is excessing 3000 power. Player 2 has a full bar and his power is perfectly balanced, so he isn't utilizing any excess power from player 1 or excessing any himself. Player 3 starts RAS on very little power and his bar rapidly depletes. In this instance, player 3 will receive the entire excess of 3000 from player 1 immediately. If, however, player 2 begins using even the slightest bit of player 1's excess, he will actually be allotted 1500 power (3000 P1 excess/2 teammates). Unfortunately, the 1400+ power that player 2 doesn't use from his allotment is lost forever; it isn't sent back to player 3 as one would assume.

This allows a team to collectively lose large amounts of power in situations where one player is excessing a lot and some teammates are using a small amount of that excess.

Consider a setons match where one person is excessing 4000 power as they have just done double RAS when another player just begins RAS. If one or both of the other two teammates is using energy slightly beyond their own means, the excess going to the player RASing will be cut to 2000 or 1333, respectively.

Put another way: If you are using someone else's power excess, you are taking up the entire portion assigned to you (amount of excess/number of teammates being excessed to) whether you actually use it or not. This means when doing RAS sequentially in a team, the players that haven't begun RAS yet must be very cognizant to not use any borrowed power, or they will likely cost the team thousands per second that could have been immediately utilized. This calculation can get fairly complex in a larger team with multiple people excessing significant amounts of power.

I haven't tested this with mass excess though I fear the same problem.

I would imagine the automatic sharing mods could get around this, though I haven't tested those either.

[Epson]

Summary for lazy readers: Energy overflow not used by team is lost.

[Myxir]

Summary for lazy readers: Energy overflow not used by team is lost.

that's not what he means


situation 1:

P1 overflows 900 e
P2 overlflows 100 e
P3 overflows nothing, needs 800 e, gets 1k e from his team, the other 200 e are lost



situation 2:

P1 overflows 1k e
P2 overflows nothing, needs 100 e
P3 overflows nothing, needs 700 e

the overflow by P1 is divided equally, so both get 500 e overflow
P2 will get 400 too much, this energy is lost
P3 gets 200 e less than he could use, and still stalls



in both situations there is an overflow of 1k and a need of 800 by 1-2 players, but the result is completely different

[Sheeo]

This ought to be in the tech support forum.

I can take a look at what's happening if someone makes a replay reproducing what Iridium is describing.

[Gorton]

I think this is also a problem with the standard game, not just lazyshare.
I don't have time right now, but it seems it would be easy to replicate iridium's example with t2 pgens and t2 mass fabricators.

[JeeVeS]

I didn't mean to insinuate that this was due to lazyshare. Epson = wrong. Myxir = right.

As far as replicating it, just have 3 people in a sandbox game and do the following: Give P1 a t2 pgen. Have P2 start a factory and P3 start RAS. P3 expects 400+ energy and gets 260.

[E8400-CV]

Ahaa. That explains a lot. I play some Ozone 3v3 games where one (navy)player often completely relies on my power export, often being ~15K/s But sometimes I get the complaint that he doesn't get enough, while nothing in my or his input/output scenario has changed. With this tread I know that that must be the 3rd player getting "short" on power ... and 7500/s is wasted

I still find it a minus point in SC; you can't see how much power is from your own, and how much the import is.

Of course this problem needs fixing.

And this problem is of course exacerbated by those that have too much mass farms to power themselves in combination with massfabmanager.

[Mr-Smith]

Isn't this exactly the point why crotalus mad his eco manager mod