Can someone help my theory crafting

Next Next dumb question:
How many mex and p gens to power a fabber or a factory.

Like 1 mex and 1 pgen powers 2 facts?

Like 1 mex and 1 pgen powers 2 fabbers?

Something like that.

Can anybody answer above question?

First off, there is storage. Metal that is produced goes to your storage (if it is not full, otherwise it is thrown away). Metal that is spent is taken out of your storage. Think of it as your bank account.
In the start of the game, it is full. That means you can spend that amount of Metal, even if you have no income. You can see that in the top of the screen: it's the bar that gets depleted. (Same for Energy.)

Secondly, a T1 Mex outputs 7 M/s. A T1 Pgen outputs 600 E/s. A T1 Factory uses 15 M/s and 675 E/s. It thus has an efficiency of 22 M/kE, larger than both the Commander and T1 Fabbers.

But just start a sandbox game and go explore for yourself! You will learn more that way, instead of asking questions here!

http://pa-db.com/

How does using 2 fabbers save 50 metal?

Because 2 fabbers build the mex quicker than two separate fabbers building different mex ( they finish building the mex quicker so give you more income earlier).

How much does built rates slow when negative on metal?

Basically, your metal is distributed evenly to all your fabbers (relative to their build power that is). So if you have 30 metal income, and you have your commander and two fabbers running, that means you are trying to use 50 metal per second.

income / active build power = efficiency ratio

30 / 50 = .6

So in our little situation, each fabber unit will only be able to use 60% of their available build power to construct.
Commander: 18 metal per second
Fabber 1: 6 metal per second
Fabber 2: 6 metal per second

This is of course ignoring power constraints.

There's a difference in helping as apposed to you being just lazy.

This is what i've learnt so far.

First question about fabbers assisting each other
If purely and simply trying to maximise metal spent, it is always better to get each fabricator to build each thing independently so that the overall travel time is reduced. You will see this effect pretty easily by comparing 2 fabbers expanding metal together as opposed to expanding metal alone.

However in real situation you have to consider resource constraints and timings. You will not always want to maximise the full efficiency of your build power because of this. For example if you go 3 fabber build, at the start you will generally want your two fabbers to expand metal together for a bit to reduce their combined build power and thus energy footprint. In this case it is favourable because then you won't run into the unavoidable energy bottleneck (leading to knock on lower build speed of pgens) at the start if you expand them in different directions. In the end, i don't think the difference is large enough to decide games, but it is an advantage that can be used if you want to micro your fabbers.

The only other situations you want to get fabbers to assist each other is if you are only planning to build 1 unit or you want to rush out certain units quickly.

Second question about mex and pgens to power factories and fabbers
Powering fabbers is obvious. They build 10/1000, so they require that amount of metal/energy exactly. You control their uptime, so there is no point trying to analyse this any further.

Factories is slightly different because there is fixed roll off and unit build time. Now let's list the numbers we need to make the simple calculation.
Dox: 45
Tank: 150
Factory build power: 15
Bot factory roll off: 2 seconds
Vehicle factory roll off: 3 seconds

dox = 3 second and tanks = 10. Now add rolloff time and you will get a factory uptime % of
dox = 0.60
tank = 0.77

Long run factory consumption then follows as bot factory 9/405, and vehicle factory 11.5/520, which will give you how much mex and energy you need to support these things. 2 pgens per 3 bot factories exactly, and 2 pgens per 2.3 vehicle factories. Build different units and those numbers will change ofcourse

Also a difference between being lazy and maximizing theory crafting time at work during work breaks while at a 15 hour shift lol.

Thusly improving my play while being anything but lazy.

When's the last time you worked a 15 hour shift clopse? I work a minimum of 4 15s a week.

This does not include school either.

So I don't think lazy is fair here.

Well... It's not only lazy, but also faster. Instead of waiting for someone to answer, you can just go to the website and have a nice overview!

This is assuming you understand how it works of course. For this these kind of questions can be useful. But also:

Just because you do something lazy doesnt make you lazy. I do a lot of stupid stuff and I'm arguably not stupid. I consider myself lazy, I work 8 hour days, do a full time degree course in the evenings and Wind down in the gym and playing video games. But I would never ask someone to do something that I can. It's just a different kind of lazy.

Ok, I concede to your point,but enjoy becoming semi competitive in my leisurely past time without having to research that which is already completed thusly allowing me to try out new builds without wasting time figuring out the already known aspects of the game.

Which I imagine are going to change with balance updates.

After slowly becoming accustomed to this economy in now regretting my previous rants to change it back.

I'm slowly picturing more viable builds especially with larger planets in the hopeful future.

The thing I enjoy about rts is idle time when unable to play can be spent theorizing new original builds.

One simply needs the parameters of the game.

That's all I was seeking and greatly appreciate responses provided by all.

Now my imagination can run rampant.

Good luck! I look forward to hearing about your breakthroughs!

The build time is the units metal value divided by the builders build power (how much metal per second it can put into the target) + rolloff time for factories/movement times for builders.
The energy cost is based on the unit that is doing the building/repairing/reclaiming.
There is no "energy cost" as there used to be in SupCom. Basically a "active fabber" or "active factory" takes X energy from your supplies, wheter it actually has the metal to work with or not. But it only does building based on the metal it has avalible.

Generally factories have better energy/metal ratio then fabbers. T2 has a better energy/metal ratio then T1 (but since it is also building a lot faster, that still means more consumption).
Combat Fabbers are special in that they do not use Energy to reclaim or repair (not sure about building).

You need at least one fabber assigned to the building for it to not decay (you can have this fabber put on no power to not actually use up metal/energy however).

The goal is to have very good metal efficiency, so little metal is wasted.
In turn you always want to have excess energy.
Metal is something you can run out ocassionally (have some metal storages to buffer stuff like roll-off and movement time vs full use).
You never should run out of energy. Always try to have excess power.

Well, you always want to have enough of both Metal and Energy... It doesn't really matter if you have too little Metal or too little Energy, in both cases global building speed goes down. It's really very symmetrical between the two.

It's just that Energy income is in your control, thus there shouldn't be any real reason you have too little, while for additional Metal income you are dependent on your map control.