WYSIWYG- Harmful, or Helpful?

It's harder than in SupCom

Interesting point! Both concepts are heading at the same direction. But I have the feeling that consistency is a much broader concept. In fact, it even includes thing that can't be seen, whereas WYSIWYG is just focused on the visual part of a design. For example I would argue with consistency in the economic discussion above, not with WYSIWYG.

I'm not sure if this will change anything in the discussion.

criz.

f**k!

you're totally wrong btw.

it's not harder, it's just broken. that's not the way Uber intends it to be end result. It sure as hell isn't the way I want it to be end result.

but it require less actions than in sup com.

for one you can area click all your eco which make macromanaging and micromanaging your eco construction super easy.
two you don't have to deal with complex adjecency rules. make the most optimal build with them ect...

you don't have to choose timely upgrades.
you don't have mass fabs to handle.

mass in PA comes in quasi-infinite amount.

all of that makes eco in PA (complete shi t, but also) way easier then in FA.

Yes, but you have to handle severe energy penalties. Not to mention if you play over 2000 hours with one type of economy it's naturally going to be a bit jarring to try out a new one, even if arguably simpler. No need to take his personal feelings to heart, or as facts, as it's simply just very subjective. In fact I'm sure someone coming from a game with a set economy might find PA difficult as well!

what you say has nothing to do with why I think the current economy in PA is broken.

Your point was "resources shouldn't be wasted if only one is lacking" and "energy for construction is scarce, but there are just no other energy sinks which would justify more output"?

Well, yes. In some way, energy in PA behaves the same as mass did in SupCom during the mex upgrade, your eco just goes haywire for a moment while you try to perform the initial upgrade.

Except that it is more severe in PA than it was in SupCom since your metal income isn't conserved in such case, it's just thrown away.

Problem is IMHO the fact that base construction is so heavy on energy.

Think about it, it's not maintaining the base which requires pgens in PA, it's establishing it.

And you have that weird hard link between construction time and metal cost - which does not mean WYSIWYG, it just means that you can't have structures which are taking longer to build (respectively requiring a bigger upfront investment in the form of additional fabbers) without devasting the eco during construction. Yes, you had 3 displays in SupCom, mass, energy and time cost. But the cost in terms of the former two was fixed. It was more complex, but you got precisely what you had asked for. All it ever lacked was a "assisting with this unit will drain -x mass/second, -x energy/second" estimation popup before actually assisting.

I would even go as far as claiming that having that interruption-free mex upgrade is the only benefit the PA eco system has over the SupCom approach.

can someone explain to me what Problem there is with the PA eco?

so metal is used for stuff to be build with ... energy is used to be able to build in the first place and how fast as well as maintaining stuff like radar and teleports ... so you need both to build right?

what happens if you remove the commander ... other than losing the game?
what if you have no commander and mexxes but only energy?
what happens when you don´t have the commander and any other powersource?

i imagine this to be generaly the same between PA and SupCom


so factories and fabricators use up a fixed ammount of energy per fixed ammount of metal they use for building
if metal is low they still use the same ammount of energy but only can actualy build up for when there is metal
if power is low but metal high how do they behave?
if both power and metal are low how do they behave?

what was different with factorys and engineers in Supcom in this regard?

the core issue is that in supcom if you have 5 metal per second and you are running an engineer that could do 10 metal per second the engineer will work at 5 metal per second and half energy usage. This helps to balance out your economy. You can't have "too many" engineers.

In PA the engineer keeps wasting energy, as it builds with 5 metal per second, but still 100% energy usage. So you can have too many engineers. This could be fixed by a player pausing and unpausing the engineer a few times per second. Or by a mod to do the same, but with the current API that would be a pretty damn hard to do mod. But possible.

They still use full metal, but the metal is not contributed to the construction. It is simply LOST.

If both are "equally low", the system works as expected. Otherwise the resource with the larger income is still lost.

In SupCom, fabrication was slowed down on insufficient resources, and the resource intake was scaled accordingly on BOTH resources. In PA, fabrication slows down, but resource intake remains constant. As a result, the cost of any structure or unit was CONSTANT in terms of mass and energy consumed. In PA, nothing is constant. Whenever your eco starves, the effective cost of any structure or unit increases.

hmm I never even thought of the fact that is the issue ofc also happens in that direction as well..

... so bad
Basically PA punishes any sort of resource stalling really really hard.

That's only with energy, the metal actually does scale AFAIK.

Remember when people complained it didn't punish you enough? Hehe.

hmmm yeah true, test confirms that. The tooltip's do not show it though. Only the economy bar shows a lower metal usage.
Still bad, it's not even consistent between the resources
and the energy issue alone is bad anyway.

Build power is attenuated, so the metal is not lost. On the downside reclaim rates are also affected.

Adv Fab (build 80) trying to build a halley (verrrry slowly) with 1/1 income. Storage is not decreasing.

I think that with this units and buildings should have set energy costs, and energy should scale accordingly.

so what i take out of this there rather the issue of energy getting wasted more
... i don´t realy know ... i don´t think it is THAT big a problem honestly
i think that this is rather a case of simply holding some of your fabricators until you have a more positive metalincome, no? you don´t want to ever be low on power anyway but i think being low on power seems to be less a problem than being low on metal in this game productionwise speaking ... now hopefully i didn´t mix things up ..
also lets not forget metalproduction unless reclaim doesn´t cost energy ...
in supcom if you stalled power you also stalled on metalproduction im memory serves right ...
in PA you can stall power but still get your metalincome non the less because it isn´t powerdependant

being low on power is a devils circle, as making more power production costs a lot of power.
If you make a pgen with t1 engineers it takes 75 seconds for it to pay back in energy.
In comparison a SupCom:FA t1 pgen takes 37.5 seconds to pay back.

So making t1 power costs more twice the power and at the same time units eat away power even if they should not require it.

Ha, I see what you did there ;-)

On a side note, is it really preferable to have there two efficiency factors affect each other? I would suspect that it would lead to numerical instabilities. Something like:
1) You stall on power, thus your combat fabber will reclaim less metal.
2) Now you stall on metal and your production will throttle energy consumption.
3) Your combat fabber has suddenly more energy, thus reclaiming more metal.
4) More metal will boost production, which will steal your energy
5) Rinse and repeat at 1)

BTW: If the rates of throttle energy or metal consumption isn't linear, you will get probably get more than one stable solution for this. Which means your economy can warp from one state to another, without any cause. At least if it isn't prevented by the developer.
I'm not sure how FA handled this, but it would be interesting if you could build resonate circuits of economy within the game.

criz.

i don´t like this .. this sounds to me like tweaking powerconsumtion so stalling is less of an issue .. and i don´t agree with that ..
like you could just go and throw a number of fabricators on a t2 factory and not care about the power being wasted because hey the fabs are smart enough to know how much to consume per metal even if it takes longer ..
i think your taking a bit of importance of powermanagment away with that ...

the economy in FA can be "crashed", which results in wild jumping around between metal and energy income indeed. Though I don't see what is bad about that. It's a clear indication of "your economy is not doing well"