Power -- Too sensitive?

Back in Beta maybe Gamma players used to start the game with the same build of.

One energy, three metal, factory of choice, and infinite build of fabbers essentially. Back then players could get tons and tons of fabbers, and expansion was key to the game, it was the dominate strategy. I miss those days...

Yeah some do and some don't I suppose. I wasn't a fan of Doing nothing but build for 10 minutes before the epic tank battles. Now we get the tank battles earlier so I don't see it as a major loss.

Well I think there's a way to cater to both. You don't need that long start up... I guess I must bring up Statera to back this. ^^;

If the comm has enough storage to go factory first then we speed things up, but the comm doesn't need the freak build speed it has currently.

For me it's when i have like +90 metal and its not enough for my economy.

Yea. In TA you could reclaim some enemy's t1 units with good micro. And kill fabber with bomber was a problem.
As Clopse said its a little another game. All t1 units(except inferno) don't have HP in PA hah))

But we are talking about 1 vs 1 balance on little planets more.On big systems we will see much more fabbers and "multi-bases". I'am sure.

As you, me, and probably everyone else on here knows there are always a lot of different scenario's on subjects like these, you can for example:
- Have reclaim nearby (in FAF) causing expanding to have a lower priority at the start
- Have a map with choke points allowing fast expansion while only having to block off/raid some choke points
- Have water between the opponent and yourself
- Have a big map where super early raids aren't possible as the travel time is too long
- ...

Also note that losing an engineer isn't the worst thing in FAF, it'd be perfect if you didn't lose engineers at the start, but that barely happens. And although engineers don't cost a lot, they are very valuable time-wise (kill an engineer at expansion = has to send another engineer all the way to the expansion again)

The main thing I like more about power in FAF is that it's possible to manage it with more precision (less sensitive, more accurate however). In PA you can have 15 factories with perhaps 8 pgens, and don't stall power. OR you could have 2 factories and manage to stall power with 10 pgens instead of stalling mass. And yes indeed, then you are playing the game wrong...

What I like about map control in FAF is for example:
You have two starting locations and two main expansions. In FAF it could go like this (example): I try to grab both expansions, should I not be able to grab one I use air to kill his engineer and make sure I take the other expansion. And this fight begins right at the start! You send your second our third engineer already to an expansion and defend it with your units. In PA this isn't possible because you'll just end up stalling power. And as a FAF player the immediate reaction is putting more resources into power but then you'll end up stalling even more power without getting it faster.

Now to make the power more like FAF there is also another "solution": less metal points. This will make up for not being able to get power fast, example: (thanks for streaming me zaphod :3 )
http://www.twitch.tv/zaphodx1/b/596025322?t=2h56m50s
There is a lot of nooby mistakes in here probably as I was super new to the game... But this is what an FAF map would look like in PA. Okay now I'm tired of typing lol

I don't understand what you mean by what I said. I disagree with this. All my walls of text are meant to make people understand how these apparently energy unrelated changes can make a problem with energy more visible.
All the things you list basically were able to _HIDE_ the issue. But now that they were changed the energy issue, that always existed on t1, comes to full bloom.

So the issue with this is that it is apparently really hard to understand for some people that changing a balance factor A can make an issue with balance factor B, that always existed, a lot more visible. Now this ofc does not mean that we need to change A back, but rather we need to finally fix B.

I often feel misunderstood in arguing for the changes I want because people seem to jump to the conclusion that I want the "build up for 10 minutes" balance back. You mention that as well:

I completely agree however on not being a fan of that "wait for 10 minutes" phase. But what we lost is basically everything relating to proxy bases. The direction we moved in basically is the road that leads to "have the play spawn with 50 tanks instead of a commander and have epic tank battles in minute 0" (ofc we're still a good distance away from that, but that is the direction the game was changed into)
My whole line of thoughts is about how to get "epic tank battles" asap and, at the same time, allow for more expansion play. So the end result of my desires is to have "epic tank battles", as well as air fights, navy fights, whatever you want, all over the map within a few minutes, so much less than 10. Basically even more fights in even more locations. No need to painfully slowly expand because sending an engineer away to build a full expansion (so basically a 2nd base) is extremely expensive and cannot be sustained against a pure attacker.
So the solution simply is to make expansion as cheap as attacking. This will make players invest not more resources into expansion than they do now (so unchanged amounts of unit spam from early on) but it will yield them more expansions. This in turn will lead to even more action all over the map, as well as to a higher economy growth which in turn is the basis for interesting things as more common t2 and even orbital play.
It also fixes the main reason why wreckage has so little point in the current economy: Metal is less worth than energy.

Really my ideal balance would not be far away from what you play now. The only difference is you could effort sending out multiple engineers into multiple directions to build multiple bases while doing everything you do right now as well.

Here you kinda are exacly in front of my line of thought. Yes the cost to defend is much too large, as the cost of taking even a small expansion is HUGE compared to the cost of making a bunch of units to raid. You'll see that is a very important point in all my argumentation, read more about it in my essay "Of investments, energy, metal and wreckage". Basically the whole issue is that expansion is much more expensive than spamming units energy wise, so you can't really expand. If you make expansion cheaper you won't actually have much less units, as you will only make a few units less, expand and then have more resources and snowball into even bigger fights from there.

that's one of the core issues about power right now: getting more power is one of the most power costly things the player can do. It's a devils circle.

@cola_colin

It's possible to keep expansion while getting rid of the slow beginning, all we need is to give the Commander enough storage to build one factory. This allows players to go either factory first OR start with economic buildings at the beginning of the game

This is well tested; both RCBM and Statera do this, even UCBM if I remember correctly.

My whole point is not to require that weird exclusive(?) or. You have to allow for decent expansion while being able too fight as well.

unless you mean a logical or, in that case
But even then to be totally blant I don't think reducing starting resources is going to fix anything. The issue are not starting resources. Making armies is better than making structures. If you reduce starting resources you won't change that at all.
Mereds balance mod btw drastically increases t1 power production. A change that doesn't fix the real issue (expansion energy cost being close to 2x of army production energy cost) but that makes energy so unimportant that it still plays better than the stable balance.
RCBM I think introduces so many other changes that it basically is a different game that can't be compared based on that one value, not sure about statera, but I think it does some very major balance changes as well?

Statera doesn't do as many.. Drastic changes, what I mean by that is it doesn't completely change mechanics. Bots are still faster than tanks in Statera; that kind of stuff. Though I suppose it does make t2 much cheaper at only double the cost of t1 factory-wise and the units are whatever they need to be.

Anyway I didn't mean to imply you wanted to have to do the whole economic startup, but you seemed to imply that because of losing that thing nobody liked we lost a lot of stuff everyone did like! When truly if Uber followed what we did to go factory first I'm sure it'd keep into the expansionist game play we all enjoy whilst stopping people from NEEDING to go eeconomy first whilst still giving players the choice to do so if they want to.

I'm slowly starting to realize my problem is the amount of power storage and not the way the power works (after getting some more experience). So I'm just going to build power storage now

Increasing the starting power storage wouldn't hurt however IMO. A storage gives 100k, while you start with only 20k storage.

Power and metal storage become extremely useful late-game when all the raiding happens. You can keep all that metal saved up if the enemy destroys your metal extractors. But obviously, you need to exceed the storage amount (eco goes blue)

Sometimes I think it's better to stop all production late-game for a few seconds and store the excess metal for the future, if anything bad happens.

Statera is as much of a balance mod as RCBM, take that however you will.

I agree with @cola_colin

If it was not like this you would see different builds, and more t2 units in 1v1. If you go for t2 units, and you are playing against a good player, you will get swarmed by a huge T1 Macro based opponent and instalose because of that.

If you can get your t2 units out yea you have a chance, but its usually not worth it and it won't work if the opponent scouts which, as I said , in low level games doesnt happen but as soon as you start playing against higher opponents they are constantly scouting.

I only see t2 units if the game goes 20min+ , which considering the average time , happens 1 time a week

I feel storage is one of the most underrated buildings around.

How come when my commander works on factories power is fine but when it works on power gens my power goes all PMS?

Seriously, that's how I describe the power. PMS.

If I might be permitted to chip in.

I can understand the frustration, namely of cola.
All this statistical evidence is fine, and game settings is fine but in short I see (debatable) two effects coming out of changing power income.

Either you give more production to power, and you encourage people to turtle more.
Or you decrease power income, which forces people to expand more territory.
This second point is particularly good for encouraging more action both in 1v1 and also bigger games.

You'd obviously raise or drop the metal cost for energy buildings according to whether their output has been dropped or raised.

The obvious change should be for Basic power. Advanced power is a bit more tricky, especially when you're like me and you spam advanced fabrication aircraft. It's amazing how easy you go into negative energy because you've run out of planet space to build power generators, and have been forced to dedicate orbital fabricators to solar generators.

So either you've got excessive energy that you can't possibly use at all, and then you suddenly out of nowhere hit 'critical' something or other, and then it doesn't matter how much production you have, your in negative energy.

So on top of fixing basic power (for example dropping income slightly and construction cost more than slightly) introduce one or more of the following changes help balance out the discrepancies.

The obvious one: drop energy demands, and no other changes

The less obvious one: Increase energy production of advanced power generators, while leaving their construction cost unchanged.

The least obvious one: I've posted about this before, but I'd like to see energy used in more things like static/mobile artillery, uber cannons, annihilaser, planetary engines, etc etc.
So, maybe decrease energy costs individually for factories and fabricators, and then increase the number of different units/buildings that consume energy.

Decrease power income? By how much do you want to make them cheaper to compare? Our issue is "not enough energy", how is the income reduction of energy generation gonna change that?
Also what about the whole issue with t1 fabbers being more than twice as expensive energy wise compared to anything else?

Alright, fairly put.

But I'm seeing lots of comments of people tending to turtle lots as it is.
So rather than increasing power output, wouldn't decreasing it force them to expand more?
I'm not sure what I'd do with metal income, leave it for now?

Then the obvious solution would be as what you already suggested. Decrease power consumption.
That'd be more effective I'd think, compared to continually adjusting cost/output for income buildings.

If the devs are worried about decreasing power consumption too much, they can increase power consumption of factories and or implement more power consuming demands. I've posted this before, but having more things use power would counterbalance any sudden underuse of power if 50 fabricators suddenly used 35- 50% less power on the same scale.

You don't need to expand to produce more power?

That's it,

If you have lots of power income, then you're not tempted to expand as much.
If you're unsuccessfully pointing out the small physical size of the power gen and saying:
"you don't need to expand across half the map to build more power generation"

I'd absolutely agree with you, but I'm generating ideas to encourage people to expand at all, since that seems to be the common complaint. If you're forced to build more stuff (power generation) to accomplish the same thing then theoretically you'll be forced think ahead and plan ahead about placement, how to defend the new power generation, positions of factories and such. So that you end up with a much bigger territory despite the small size of the power generation.

Having said that, at the very least I'm trying to force more variety by limiting the amount people can spam units. If they wanna build 2000 dox from 100 factories as well as do everything else, they'll need 20 more power generators first.

That's the theory anyway.

I've posted this before, but if people don't want to change power output there's also increasing the number of things that use power+ decreasing the amount of power each thing uses.

This way you have less energy requirements for fabricators/factories. But you'll still need to build more power/storage for static defense if you think someone will attack you.

Running out of power because someone attacks you will be an interesting factor, which is easily avoided by building more power+ spamming less.

And then we can put more focus to transitioning up to advanced, focusing on what needs to be done to make other unit compositions more viable. If no-one practices any of this stuff then no-one will have any idea to what degree things need to be changes.

Again, that's the theory anyway.
This will also be an interesting