Power -- Too sensitive?

You've lost me somewhere along the way. From what I can read you seem to suggest changes that will make the issues worse? I mean the whole issue is that:
a) on t1 it is very hard to get power production up
b) spamming units costs half as much power per metal compared to building structures on t1.
This results in players making as little power as possible to spam as many units as possible, leaving no space for costly things like tech or expansion. Ofc bigger maps or maps with rather unique features allow to break away from that, but I'd consider that the exception. Not saying those maps are bad or anything.

So by making it even harder to get power production up you'd not really change much about these issues?
Same with the thing about "players should just waste less energy". Yeah ofc they should waste less energy, some manage to do that sometimes at least. But that doesn't change the fact that spending that not-wasted energy on more units is the better way to spent it.

Then it was probably me who was lost. I was obviously thinking about something different.

In your scenario, purely speaking about basic and not advanced.
The easiest thing to change would be the cost of producing units. Increase that cost slightly.
Reduce power requirements by fabricators (slightly?). I probably wouldn't change the power generators themselves, they feel about right where I'm happy for them. But that's purely my own opinion.

I try to create effects and consider bigger picture rather than details. Numbers are fine, and so is planet information. But at the end of the day they change depending on the game.

My thoughts specifically on power:
Increasing power income will only increase turtle players.

Decreasing power income without decreasing construction cost will make the game worse. Period.

Decreasing power construction costs will lead to spamming endlessly. I'm not sure how that'll effect the game.
I want to say that'll also be bad though.

So the solution is to only change income structures minimally, and reduce the power consumption by fabricators.
This way at least resource consumption will be closer together. If this creates problems where it becomes too cheap to use power, then either increase power consumption slightly or increase the number of units/buildings that use
power.

Anything else I should try to address?

That's something I can understand and somewhat agree on, putting details aside.

Don't think so, the resource that stops players from turteling is metal, as to acquire metal you need to control mex.

Indeed

Not quire sure what to make of this. On t1 it would probably make the energy issue on t1 less worse, though the main imbalance of the poor weak t1 fabber would stay. On t2 it would change.... not much I think, as t2 power is quite effective already especially combined with t2 fabbers. Energy should not be a big issue once you have a ton of t2 right now. Not sure what to make of t2 power in that sense.

Not quite sure which issue you are trying to address. My main thoughts are usually about t1 power, so I may just not be able to follow. Are you trying to fix some issue with t2 power?

Oh btw on the topic of preventing turtles and the size of power generators: I loved the nuke balance a few month ago where nukes would be so dangerous that players had to spread out there base to prevent nukes from killing them efficiently. That was part of that epic gamma balance of non-stop expansion. Anti nukes were only reasonable to protect the commander, everything else just had to accept that a nuke may hit it, so you better had everything spread out and redundant.

the answer to your question is yes.

Personally I don't think the issue has anything to do with the output of power generators. It has everything to do with the *cost of running fabricators*.

Fabricators have been made inefficient as a direct result of *some people being against factory assisting* but I ask myself why is that a probelm?

This is coming from TA and TA:Spring. In TA you always assisted your factories with at least 1 construction unit to get the most out of them (that didn't preclude having multiple factories however). In Spring (balanced annihilation) they even built a dedicated assisting unit (that was volitile making them great strategic targets) and construction units that were cheap to run.

I would be seriously interested to play a mod where t1 fabber consume 200e instead of 1000. Yes this would push the game towards less factories + assisting but it would also open up expansion play no end. Why is assisting such a bad thing? Why should I spend all game spamming factories with my commander when I'd rather actually be managing the battle / raiding / expanding instead?

We can have great expansion without ooverly efficient fabbers. I point you I believe gamma balance.

That's a misconception. In that balance expansion happened thanks to the t2-rush being just soo good.
On t2 pgens are much better and you basically just have so much energy that it doesn't really matter that your fabbers are less effective. That broke once t1 stuff got buffs and now you can't rush t2 anymore.

It always was, espacially in HighPlayerCountShareArmy games. Rushing your first storages gives you SO many resources to start with!

(you can play Instant Tier II with HPCSA BTW...)

I loved that balance approach too. I remember "planned retreat" as a very good strategy back then, you had real chances in 3v3v3 in those times! But up to date I don´t really know what exactly killed that feeling. I guess it´s a big patchwork of tons of different changes & lacking skill differences as "we" (my team) were quite bad and all others were quite skilled, so it was pretty satisfying to overcome others with unusual strategies...

Been a while, I'm back. I don't often come on but I noticed I posted before and felt bad I was ignoring cola.

Upon reflection, I realise that metal demands never even entered my mind and I have no idea why.
About the whole expansion/spammage thing. I do realise spamming units is cheaper? than expanding and doing more.

Why I was focusing on energy, it's easy to get more fabricators and completely bottom out on energy trying to build stuff. This doesn't really happen so easily with metal since it's a fixed cost. I can accept that metal might be the restricting factor about preventing people from expanding more, but I'm not really sure I understand why. It should be easy to simply not build the extra factory, and get 1-2 fabricators and build more metal extractors elsewhere. How is metal the restricting factor on expansion?
At the very worst, I'm simply not being as aggressive towards specifically to my opponent, and instead I'm attacking and controlling metal spots aggressively, which are closer to me and therefore don't need such a big army to start with, because it's easier to reinforce.

I'll try to preempt the answer by acknowledging there is one, and dealing with other issues.
Assuming that metal is a restricting factor, the only obvious way to fix that is by either increasing metal production, or decreasing metal costs. If you decrease metal production, you're simply making it more difficult to do anything at all, including expand.

The other obvious solution is play with energy numbers. Since there's only 2 resources, you're sorta limited on choice here. For energy though, there's the more complicated solution that I've repeatedly wanted which is to drop energy demands for fabricators and factories; and make more things units/buildings demand energy consumption.

But without doing that, the 2 options are either increase energy production, or decrease energy consumption.
Increasing energy production, as I've said before I'm happy with. My view on that is energy production related to everything that consumes energy (factories/fabricators/radars etc) So, decreasing power consumption for specific things, like only factories and fabricators, allows for minimal change and specific changes to only things that have trouble.

You're right that giving more energy availability doesn't free up a lack of metal, but I personally find it's much easier to go negative in energy than it is to go negative in metal. I don't play competitively though, and I don't like spamming units to win at t1, nomatter how good the strategy is compared to everything else (including teching up) in the meta. Because I will always try to get advanced technology if I survive long enough, without dying as a result of getting advanced tech.

The other solution I thought of is leaving factory costs alone, and only increasing metal+/ energy costs of units.
This will make spamming harder, and make expanding more manageable.

So I guess, rather than dealing with the issues people raised previously, I'm trying to deal with what I feel is the rather big discrepancy between metal and energy costs, or rather, the big discrepancy between how easy it is to get -x energy compared to -x metal

Maybe someone can enlighten me on some of the details if I've missed something important?