Hello I am new -- sort of.

[fox]

Thought I would drop in and say hi.
I am fox from the defunct GPG forums. I have not played SupCom/FA in a long while. Thinking to do it in the near future so I registered an account.
It is especially good for me to see this community still going. It reminds me of a happy period of my life that can be no more. So I say "thank you", even if you can not understand why. Just accept it :' )

[Col_Walter_Kurtz]

Hello fox, I don't remember you from GPG forums but whatever, join the FAF club. Get playing! I would say the game and platform supporting it have improved a great deal.

[ZLO_RD]

Welcome, you should know that since GPG times there were TONS of patches and small changes
but also some big balance changes, like t2 land rebablance, land t4 cost increase, engymod, t3 air power cost increase, wrecks no longer dissaper in water, but instead they just give 50% less mass, and also very awesome to use OP support commanders that were rebalanced to be more cheaper, maybe little less powerfull as before, and more easy to get early (pre-upgraided support commanders), also a fire beetle buff
Even a new unit added - t3 mobile aa for every faction, it might sound like huge change, but see how i almost forgot about it
t3 mobile aa is not much better than t2 flack, it is just designed to be able to hit fast t3 planes

not only there are ton of changes... FAF was also based not on 3599 but on 3605 or so good luck undertanding what was changed

[fox]

Hello and thanks.
I could use an up-to-date FAF changelog. Any link for a good read?

[speed2]

Hello and thanks.
I could use an up-to-date FAF changelog. Any link for a good read?

something like this? http://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?tit ... hange_Logs

[fox]

I have read all patches' change logs. (thanks for the link)

Today like years ago I'm going to say pretty much the same thing: I like all changes introduced by the patch, minus the one that makes the Energy Storage buildings what they are now. Their storage capacity has been more than doubled, and their death triggers too powerful an explosion.
Today like years ago this results in making little use of Energy Storage buildings and when you build them you put them out of the way.

These ES buildings aren't what they were meant to be in the first place. And since you build them out of the way there's no adjacency bonus to take advantage of. Adjacency was one of the neat features introduced by SupCom but that was never exploited properly. Instead of developing adjacency, you favor its falling in disuse.
Why not mod the ES buildings out of the game entirely at this point? They're bombs in wait of detonation within your base, why force players to even build one? :-/

Not want to start anything. Just trying to understand the motives.

[Zock]

The reason was (iirc) following:

1. No one actually made e storage in high level play, because every building and engies gave small amount of e storages already, and you simply didn't need the extra.
2. OC was too strong and there needed to be some solution to it. The solution chosen was to increase OC price to 5000 energy and remove all e storage from buildings/engies, so you had to make a storage before you could OC.
3. Making the storage vulnerable makes it a decent sniping target to deny OC
4. Choice is always good - when adjacency becomes a no brainer (like mass storage now), what's the point of it? Now you have the choice between higher efficiency with some risk, or lower efficiency without risk. It is not true that there is no point making them next to pgs. If you don't build too many, they won't kill your pg either, only damage it, even if they die. Or you could shield them, most times for free since you want to shield your pgs anyway.
Maybe it's discussable if the energy bonus the storage gives is worth the risk, or if it should be tweaked, but that's an entirely different argumentation. Things being explosive doesn't mean using the adjacency is bad - see massfabs in vanilla for example. (image vanilla had templates)

Even without adjacency, removing it would be very strange, because their main purpose is not giving more power with adjacency but increase your e storage to survive power fluctuation or power shortage over longer durations.

It's true that adjacency was never used very much in supcom from the beginning, but having adjacency for the sake of it is not an improvement imo.

Nice that you found your way here. Hi!

[Vee]

E storage next to t3 pgens is quite efficient! More efficient to place storages in between 2 pgens than making another t3 pgen afaik.

[fox]

Hi,

I welcome the removal of the added storage from engys and buildings, because it makes the ES structs more useful.
But was it necessary to elevate the ES capacity to 5000E from 2000E?

ES wasn't used much before. Now that it's so capacious it's used even less: build a few and they provide plenty of buffer until you draw tons of energy in seconds... which only happens in late game.

Until 'late game' comes you've had plenty of E buffer at a cheap initial cost for the whole game. That's what I find out of balance.

The ES structure is transversal to all factions, and one of the building blocks every base is made of. Yet it's among the least used across the board.
From the patch logs it's evident how FAF strives to give everything a place in the cosmic order of SupCom/FA.
From the same logs it's also apparent how the ES capacity wasn't touched again after the beta GPG patch (3603) increased the storage to 5000E years ago. FAF only lowered the death explosion damage from 2000 to 1000 (before patch 3603 it was 500).

After 6-7 years maybe it's time to rethink the capacity of the ES so it finds a decent purpose.
My suggestion is to nerf the Energy Storage building to store only 3000E or even 2500E.
Commanders would need 2 ES to use OC, and many more buildings if they want a comfortable E buffer.
The change doesn't sound like much, but when you're rushing to build your infrastructure (early on), having to devote Mass and an engy to build some extra ES is going to have an impact.

And later on, if you want a good E buffer, a logistic problem might arise: structures want space. One thing is to build 2 clusters of 6 structures and forget about it for the rest of the game. One other is to build 4 or 5 such clusters half of which later in the game when your initial building space has been taken for the most part. Planning what-goes-where is part of the strategy as well.

All I'm trying to say is: give your players an excuse to make more use of the Energy Storage.

Thanks for reading

[Col_Walter_Kurtz]

If you reduce the amount of storage, you would have to build more of them to OC. That would be quite painful in early game.

Also I don;t agree with your point that they provide a huge amount of storage to begin with. You can drain a good number of storage instantly with heavy ASF production in the mid (not even late) game.