Released Mods: - Extremely Efficient Engineers - Extreme Energy Combat - Low Energy Commander WIP Essay Energy is about situational demand rather than steady fabrication. This mod is an experiment. Right now in vanilla metal and energy feel kind of the same. Indictments Most energy is spent to spend metal. Fabricators and factories are the biggest energy consumers. Both of these things are already limited by metal usage. Attacking either resource has exactly the same effect: the player's build rate slows. The mod drastically reduces fabrication energy, and I'll probably experiment with removing it at some point. Demand is constant. Factories are always on and fabbers are usually fabbing. Storage is a mostly forgotten vestige of the TA heritage; a player who builds one in competitive play gets asked about the unsual move in interviews. In the mod the main energy consumers are units and combat. In practice with the systems available this means the ammo system applied across the board, as well as reconand nukes. Compromises: units are limited to one ammo weapon. Some units had to be switched to alternating fire, and units with independent turrets have a fixed maintenance cost instead of ammo. (Unfortunately game allows you to turn them off; the unit's vision has been tied to power so there is some penalty for doing this.) Current Status Fabrication has been reduced and ammo added. I haven't reviewed units that already had ammo to see if they are in line with current costs. It's still early in finding appropriate numbers for things, but I've had some quite fun games against the AI.
I haven't looked at this yet, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with the premise. Energy in vanilla serves two purposes. The first is that it puts a limit on the rate that your economy can grow and the second is that energy determines the efficiency of fabrication units. Without worrying about energy for fabrication, you can use a single t2 factory with 100 assisting fabbers. The only reason to make more factories is really just the roll-off time. Energy in vanilla is a little broken in that factories are so much more efficient than fabbers that you mostly just build factories forever and never a lot of fabbers. Vanilla is too far to one extreme, but I worry that this will be too far to the other. All I'm saying is just theory though. I would love to try this out and see how it actually plays.
My premise is that metal is the limit for building; you have so much metal income and if you transform it into useful stuff with 100 factories or a 100 fabbers is of less consequence. The high energy use of T2 units makes me think that it might be possible to reduce some of the metal costs. I'll need to experiment with with assisting to see if it's an issue, but one of the things I want to try is having mobile fabbers use a higher proportion of energy.
Seems like there might be a nice work around to this problem by placing "energy_efficiency_requirement": 1 onto the factories/fabbers that use energy. So they just automatically stop fabbing/consuming if there's no energy.
Thanks. I might try that on mobile units some time to see if it's possible to turn them off, but the effect I wanted to try was for factories to be unaffected by power shortages, not more affected.
At the moment, this mod as such will cease to exist. It will be survived by Extremely Efficient Engineers, Extreme Energy Combat, and Low Energy Commander.
