From what i can see, it seems like every planet with trees, except for pacific, is now 1 faber pgens + combat fabber + air spam. Which isn't good because it's basically a dominant strategy. Build anything else and you lose significantly. You can be down by heaps of metal even if you play perfectly without treeconomy What do you guys think? Is there a meta that i'm missing? Not having to build pgens with commander at all seems incredibly strong. You're up by 2 or 3 factories the entire game.
Combat fabs are definitely pretty important for reclaiming now. They're even able to go under water on Meso.
Why would you not build pgens because you have more metal? Either way I dont see why it should be bad to have to reclaim stuff if it is there.
Ooh someone else that sees air more often than they should? Maybe what I was talking about did hold some water.
you dont have to build pgens with commander anymore. First fabricator builds pgens from the start and you're pretty much set for the entire rest of the game.
Well using combat fabbers is a good move, I'm not sure why that automatically means air spam is the best option though (unless you using it to protect the combat fabbers)?
I'd say that is a good change (as that fabbers is a juicy snipe target for one). The commander building pgens is a pretty boring mechanic. My main complaint with the current balance really is that metal is still too abundant. The best build is almost always *constantly building factories* with the commander. At least there is some interest in the composition of the factories you build, but ideally I'd like to see it where metal is harder to get- so you have times where you can expand with your commander and proxy a bit without getting way behind. I'm not keen on the whole 'constantly build factories until there is no build space left' mechanic in PA. Whilst I know many don't like the 'make one factory, assist assist assist' route either, maybe we could find a balance in-between?
So you found a new way to build up more efficiently. I don't see the problem with that. I also don't see why that would suddenly favor air. Do you play air only now because of this? Independet from how the current balance works: It would be pretty sad if one fabber making one row of pgens is enough for a whole game. Your economy should grow
You should try it first though . We are talking 1 air factory vs 3 at like 1:30 into the game. Air is good for two reasons It has fast move speed. This means you can translate your 2 or 3 factory advantage into actual advantage super quick. The other is that with that ammount of air that early, you really cannot stop it unless you also do combat fabber. Nothing can stop your bombers unless he spams nothing but spinners, and then thats why you have dox. Also, there will always be a point of entry for your bombers. It's basically a snowball because of the insane economy. I was running stats to test these builds, and was pulling 30% more metal spent by 7 minutes. The point being that there is no other opening now but bot into air spam and mindgames with land factories.
Have you experimented with combat fabber powered builds that *don't* focus on air? How would combat fabber + hard tanks fair as a counter?
Energy was made cheaper, but certainly only in a careful way. It still is THE most expensive resource to get on t1. Though the treeconomy doesnt work by that. From what I understand the reason why you can make no pgens with your commander is because you can have an engineer make them from very early on instead because a tree reclaiming will make up for the later mex? I would hope that it actually is best to reclaim trees and play as normal, just have more metal and be able to use it. I guess that might not work out because the extra metal cannot be processed due to the limiting factor of energy?
I still don't get why you can reclaim trees for metal. I find it kinda breaks the simplicity of the game (metal spots and metal, the one limited resource). And with the changes to combat fabbers recently, it shifts you towards reclaiming trees. Bah!
imho the whole reclaim mechanic in PA currently is very very poorly implement. It is full of bugs (like using a combat fabber to reclaim a tree gives more than using a normal fabber) and it is practically unimportant apart from weird edge cases like combat fabbers reclaiming trees that work because of the broken mechanics combine like this practically at random (combat fabbers use no energy for reclaim + mentioned bug: have the best return rate due to their high build rate). Unless you use combat fabbers reclaiming is stupid because it trades precious energy for metal. And then there is the issue that units do not drop wrecks at all. meh
Yep, Personally I would prefer trees not giving any metal at all and adding an ability to add wrecked units in the map editor (probably factories and t2 units only, since I assume they give more metal for less strain on the game) Would look cool to have a wrecked base to fight over for your metal instead of teams of combat lumberjacks scouring the landscape of magical metal trees
The exact figures aren't precise as it depends on which patch of trees you reclaim but it does have a fairly significant impact on early economy given that all you have to spend is the initial combat fabber cost and then all the metal it reclaims is basically free. You don't sacrifice that many units to get this boost.
