WYSIWYG- Harmful, or Helpful?

Yes but let's say both players manage economy well, that means all that is left is how a player uses said economy, even if they might go into below optimal numbers (go negative) it could still be worth it for that nuke rush or odd rush strat.

I think PA's economy is simple, and quite frankly a bit easy to manage, and I'm not one of those guys that memorizes all unit stats and tries to be exactly right every game.

Uhh what? That's not what I mean. I mean understanding that this structure produces this amount of energy, and this unit builds with a rate of this much energy and metal. Essentially what everything does and how it works. I never said I understood the best economy management, I just understood how it works... In Supcom, with everything costing different amounts of energy and metal build rates are really hard to guess and I can't figure out why piling 30 engineers on a nuke silo barely changes how fast it builds without asking somone...

You don't have to guess build rates in Supcom because they are written in the build menu... all build time, build cost, build rate and yield are written there.

probably because a nuke silo costs a **** ton. That's totally natural and obvious to me.
But figuring out how to do any decent build order in PA without crashing my energy. It's beyond me.

Yes, but you won't know how a unit will effect build speed until after you begin production, which is a bit annoying.

See that's a different issue in my opinion, if this is what you meant earlier then I misunderstood. That is a balance issue; the general idea behind PA's economy however is simpler than both Supcom and TA's we can agree on that, yes? As in: it's easier to see how a unit in PA will effect production in PA than in Supcom.

That may be, but it's incredibly confusing unless you already know the way the economy works inside out.

Having to look up whether you can afford to build something before building every single unit is far from ideal.

In PA: I want to put this engineer to work. Cost: XX energy.
In Sup Com: I want to put this engineer to work. Cost: What am I building? What is my current metal income?

How is having two additional factors, one which is counter-intuitive, easier?

PA basically would require me to constantly pause and unpause my engineer to use my energy in an optimal way. SupCom did that automatically for me.
I really should start implementing a UI mod for PA that hacks it back in: Pause stuff automatically if there is not enough metal for it. No need to waste energy. Gonna be the #1 mod that needs to be banned from ranked play.

It isn't that bad, I mean I was able to pick it up at 13 when TA came out.

It wasn't supposed to be helpful in the way you make it out to be, it was meant to help stop people from rushing things. It was pretty annoying as I could know that I could afford something, yet the engineers would just get slower and slower, even adding more could make production even slower or barely help at all.

How was that not annoying? When I tell a fab to fab something it better do it, and not randomly change. This wasn't to help manage economy, this was to hamper build speed.

Well yes, but it's tedious and I feel PA's implementation is better.

Though don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't change that about TA if I could, I may have in supcom as it felt more extreme there. Ex: Experimentals.

But stalling energy in PA is much less painful than it was in Supcom. So unless you're playing against really high-tier people (which by your comments, I assume you're not) It isn't really a huge deal, and you can focus much more on actual military strategy, whereas in supcom I have to figure out if I can even afford to build something or upgrade something and do some mental calculations before I do anything, otherwise my economy would die. Not nearly as much fun that way...

Stalling energy in PA is horribly bad. HORRIBLY. You can't get out of it unless you build more energy, which happens to be the most energy expensive thing in the whole game. Yey. So people instead spam units as that is so much cheaper compared to actually growing your economy.
I dunno what you mean by high-tier players. I have a history of playing people like elodea and matiz.

And never ever bring up "strategy" as a valid argument. That word has no meaning. At all.
If you stall your economy in SupCom all you have to do is pause whatever is stalling your ecomomy. That's not really hard to do.

actually, unlike in PA, adding more engineers to a specific project in FA would always speed up that specific project and slow everything else down. You've got it backwards, the issue you describe happens in PA. Or at least it did until they made it that mex work without requiring energy, in PA. Why? Because if mex require energy than basically in PA you can add more fabber to a project and actually hurt your economy by it. As in everything will be slower. Why? Well if you already use all metal you have and you are adding 10 more fabber tto build a factory which makes you energy stall on top of stalling metal you will reduce your metal income because you stall energy. So you reduce your metal income, reducing the speed at which you are building.
Really it's so utterly broken. They had to remove the "mex need energy" mechanic to "fix" this.

The SupCom economy might be completely misunderstood by some people but it was so much better than PA right now.

Erm, that's only if you didn't have the energy to support it. In supcom it would barely change no matter what! I could be positive everything yet still they won't fabricate at full capacity. Again, this was built to balance against rushing and in no way is it magically intuitive and easy to comprehend.

The issues with energy has nothing to do with how lathes work in PA more so to just how energy limited you are. Supcom fabs used energy as well, only the pgens actually gave you enough energy and/or fabbers didn't use too much.

Going from 10m/s to randomly 1000 E/s is a big jump and I hope they lessen that in the future.

So basically... We're not even discuss in the same parts of economy here, heh.

Sorry but that is all completely utterly wrong. I have no idea how you got these ideas.
In PA -before the mex fix, which imho is just an ugly hack to make a broken system "work"- you could actually REDUCE the buildspeed of everything you have by adding more fabbers to something. Like having a fabber idle was BETTER than putting it to work.
In FA your fabbers represent a fluid resource of buildpower and the more of them you put on something the faster that something will build. Simple as that. Ofc if you push a lot of fabbers on some specific project it will slow down everything else. Simple as that. Adding more fabbers would never hurt you. Idle fabbers generally were bad.
Also if you have positive everything you work at 100% speed in FA. No idea where you see a probelm with that.

No, just no.
The way the energy works in supcom had nothing to do with rushing. I played 1vs1 like crazy, I loved playing 5x5 maps rushing all day. I can tell you rushing was fine and worked in perfect harmony with the economy.

That's not true. Yes SupCom engineers used energy. But only if they had metal to do something.

@cola_colin

In PA I could put 50 fabs on a nuke silo and speed build a nuke easily, I'll go incredibly negative, but it wouldn't even matter as it'd build much faster than if I used the more economic way with less fabs.

In Supcom this was hardly the case, if I added so many fabs build speed still didn't seem to change much at all.

That's because in SupCom:FA there is a multipler on the nuke silo that drastically reduces the efficiency of supporting it. It's to prevent the nuke spam you goot in PA or SupCom vanilla where build supported 3 nukes out per second.
It's debatable if people want nuke spamming like that or not, but it has not really much to do with the issues I see.
But if all you are talking about is nuke spamming then yeah we are talking about different things.
Though you are wrong about:

negative does matter, it means you have more buildpower than resources. So you wasted resources on your fabbers. Just like you waste resources on engineers in FA if you only use them to support a nuke.

So then you do agree with me that it was created to prevent rushing? Because that's what I meant when I had said so earlier.

edit: And about that second bit, it doesn't matter if I wasted resources on speedbuilding a nuke if that nuke pays for itself in enemy damage, if I can get off a nuke snipe who cares what resources I wasted? Not me, certainly.

That's the problem with a few good players that I know of in PA, they're too afraid of going a bit negative, risk vs award and all that.

Nukes are not exactly the first thing I think of when I read "rush". Like not at all xD
But even then it has nothing to do with rushing. Yes it does slow down a nuke rush as well, as you can't support your nuke as hard as in PA or supcom: vanilla. But the reason why it was done like that in FA was more because in vanilla you could basically (like in PA) have a super late game economy that is able to spam out 1 nuke per second. So you'd shoot 1 nuke per second at your opponent. Total nuke fest, nothing else is important anymore.

But that's a super weird edge case of super late game and really has not much to do with the way energy and metal affect the build speed and each other and why these things are very questionable in PA.

The thing is, you're wanting this nanolathe effect to show you how bad you're stalling, that only works when you're zoomed way in, you know what will always show you how bad you're stalling no matter where your camera is? The bars at the top of your screen, this information is already provided to you at all times.

Well if I recall correctly it was the same way for many high tier things, experimentals, t3 artillery, etc..