Competitive planetary annihilation reduced to the zergling rush, the marine all in and the poxy gate

air isn't op because mobile AA is cheap and effective

Read the numbers I posted about the economy. What do you think is limiting players on t1? Not metal.

10/10
most accurate post regarding economy I've seen so far

I'd really like to see how larger/multiple planets affect the meta. Could be that T2 become useful in those situations

While I agree that energy may be the problem, may I humbly suggest a simple different idea...

Why not just halve the cost of the T2 facs? Well okay that may be a bit much, but I think it's in keeping with the risk reward thing that squishy mentioned. And that was a theme that metabolical mentioned when he talked about balance.

If you do that you'll probably see players rush t2 more often, just to get access to the massively better energy production.

Fair point.

I agree, it's stupidly frustrating how energy-stalling is so bloody inevitable.

Wasn't the balance in Supcom that even though higher tier engineers had more build options and faster build time, the T1 remained the most efficient on paper? surely it should work like that here.

Yes. Not only on paper, but in reality as well. t1 engineers even were much more efficient than all higher tech factories, so it was very normal to build only one or two of such factories and heavily support them. But I am sure by using stuff like long roll off times that can be prevented.
Having invisible factors for the balancing off this stuff would be quite helpful though. Without them it's definitely a lot harder to balance this stuff, as the energy cost on t2 is directly linked to what t1 fabbers use. If you make t2 stuff cost a lot more energy to run in general, than people will support t2 factories with t1 fabbers to circumvent the high energy cost of t2 factories. But making t2 stuff cheaper (or even just the same imho) on energy compared to t1 is kinda ... weird.
I am wondering if we really need fabber support factories at all. We rarely use it, so why even have it?
Maybe limiting the ability to support factories to "same tech level or lower" would be an idea to remove that link, so that t2 stuff can be more costly on energy compared to t1, without having tons and tons of t1 fabbers support single t2 factories again.

Another idea, that would buff the construction of sturctures as well is to reduce the build rate of fabbers and reduce the cost of all structures by the same factor. My Expansionist balance mod does that: Reduce structure costs by 25% and reduce fabber build rate by 25%. Also reduce the energy cost of running a fabber by 50%. This results in a buff for structures in general (they are cheaper) and at the same time makes fabbers rather bad to be used to support factories, as the fabbers have rather low build power compared to factories.

@tvinita

So would it be enough to tweak these numbers? Say the T1 fabber had a energy consumption of 500, so the efficiency would still be worse than the others and nobody would assist factories with it. And the T2 power production gets cut in half. So the new values would be:

the t2 fabber uses 37.5 energy per metal spent.
the commander uses 50 energy per metal spent
t1 land factories use 45 energy per metal.
the t1 fabber uses 50 energy per metal spent

Getting energy via t1 pgens build by a fabber yields you a net energy plus 37,5 seconds after the pgen is completed.
Getting energy via t1 pgens build by a commander yields you a net energy plus 37,5 seconds after the pgen is completed.
Getting energy via t2 pgens build by a t2 fabber yield you a net energy plus after 40,5 seconds


This looks better. You could buff the commander a bit to make him more efficient than the T1 fabbers. But building T1 energy would be slightly more efficient than T2 energy, fabbers wouldn't assist factories because their energy per metal is still worse.

Anyway Uber should really look into these numbers you presented. The system really doesn't make sense.

In terms of efficient fabbers being used to assist factories, what if you made fabbers and factories have the same efficiency? I don't mean the same build power and energy cost necessarily, but a fabber could build with x times the amount of metal and x times the amount of energy as a factory. Wouldn't this make it ok to assist your factory, but not necessarily ideal? You might assist if you were limited by space, but if you had lots of space you could spam factories. IDK, just a thought.

poxy gate