Changes in PA.

Just modify what It can attack? ^^;

I disagree that jigs are OP, I'd actually say it's the anchors, not in general but in the orbital layer certainly. Jigs require manual spacing to avoid chain reactions, they've got little HP and enemy units can drop in right on top of them with no way of preventing it. If you take anchors out of the picture then you're left with having to have avengers patrolling to fight mass avenger drops and the concentrated drop will usually win or at least take out a large number of jigs before being dealt with. A few avengers amongst jigs with only avengers defending can make a real mess, especially if they're not spread, or the player has gone for an almost entirely jig based eco.

Add anchors back in and we see the problem. 1 anchor can kill ~15 avengers (more if they drop in on top of it and have to wait out the cooldown before they can return fire). Anchors are the only in game unit or structure that has no counter that it can't shoot at (imagine a t3 turret that could only ), your only choice is to overwhelm it. We need a longer ranged orbital unit that can attack anchors from outside their range but will die quickly to avengers, something like an orbital sheller, long ranged with a bit of splash damage (so they have a chance against stacked avengers caught unaware).

Jigs would be a lot less "OP" if a single unit can be dropped out of anchor range and kill jigs with impunity.

Not from what I have seen.

If they do then you can mod it away in like 3 minutes.

I'd heard that small clusters get placed to close with automatic spacing but planet wide area build spaces them ok. I've certainly killed 15-20 jigs with a chain reaction when the person had just area built them, though it might also depend on where on the planet they are placed with the whole grid on a sphere issue. But yeah, can certainly be modded.

But it doesn't change my previous point. Jigs are good, but especially now that they don't kill avengers straight away (takes about 4 death explosions now I think) they're not completely ridiculous. It's the anchors that make the jig fields impossible to attack without taking insane losses.

Been there, done that.

They've changed jigs to chain explode even if you area build them. Still, having them explode is still a silly way to balance them, when they could just make them orbital metal extractors only, instead of invalidating solar arrays on any map with a gas giant...

No matter what else happens I'm completely convinced jigs should not generate power and possibly draw it.

It would be interesting if the Gass giant had a max metal value. Each jig has a fixed extraction rate, but if the total jig extraction is higher than the planets max value the production gets split between all of the active jigs.

If the max value is low enough the Gass giant can't completely imbalance the game, jigs no longer need to detonate for balancing, peak harvest can be achieved with just a few 3-5 jigs while excess jigging becomes a new form of combat.

Even if you can't break your enemy's production you could steal a higher share by building more jigs than he has.

remove energy sat
buff jig energy production hard
remove metal from jig, this way ground economy still matters a lot, but so does gas giant energy, so battles will be fought on gas giant, but in the end, metal is still deciding factor.

Gas planets providing metal is more useful than them providing energy. Energy is already an unlimited resource (with stacked solar arrays, with ground energy the limit is physical space). Gas planet main use are to make sure that metal production can keep up and provide the eco needed for the incredible sizes of late game armies (or insta-building catalysts with 100+ fabbers without stalling). Changing jigs to only produce energy just gives you more ways to produce a resource that you're unlikely to be short of.

I think a metal only jig would be a good change, but it should just provide a set amount of metal with no energy draw. Attaching a maximum metal output to a gas giant would cause problems because there is no way of seeing what that number is and resource buildings with a variable income is just messy, not to mention that the player with the bigger income will be able to stop the other player increasing their income without actually risking forces in an attack.

As for jigs costing energy, I don't think it's worthwhile. If you're stalling power then you can use all your metal so it either goes to waste or if you're lucky goes into storage, not being able to use it effectively is punishment enough. It's also a matter of consistency, either all metal extraction should cost energy or none.

If a change is needed I agree with @emeraldis, separation of metal and energy makes sense, solar arrays are not that useful because jigs exist and you're better off using your orbital factories to produce other unit types.

Number one rule for these things is that complexity != depth. Weird mechanisms for metal/energy generation don't add strategic depth, they add artificial difficulty by making distracting you with minutiae.

I don't think we even need the ability to insta build the ultimate game ender. No good argument for a balance.

Ok, I agree not a sensible balance point. But the vast amounts of eco are needed to produce the nukes, unit cannons, T2 armies and orbital units needed to break through orbital stalemates and successfully invade late game. I know that's not everyone's preferred game type but it does exist.

In smaller games it can provide a lot of eco, but you're also unlikely to see the whole planet covered or held by only a single player unless the other player was already at a significant disadvantage when the move to the gas giant was made.

This is only true iff there is a gas giant in the system, which is up to the map designers choice. Without a gas giant solar arrays are sometimes useful.

How much metal are you going to get by sucking up gas out of a gas giant? None. It doesn't realistically make any sense, it's illogical. This is where the line is drawn between realism and awesome.

You get metal from the hard condensed core of the gas giant.

"may have"
I'd rather have ground-jigs that produce large amount of metal on asteroids and space jigs that produce large amounts of energy on gas giants... Encouraging rapid expansion and fighting over economy on different worlds. Make the asteroid jigs require a large amount of energy, and what we've got is a system where total control = unstoppable economy (as it should be) and partial control = lots of energy or little energy and lots of mass, (partial control is where most of the game is going to take place). In either case, lots of energy without mass isn't too useful and lots of mass with no energy is equally not useful - they work in harmony. It would prevent either from becoming too important until one side has a significant enough advantage to actually utilize the resources efficiently.
In essence, all it does is accelerate the process of victory, if one side secures both the gas giant and a few asteroids, that side would already be on track to win, even without the resource gains.

I have another idea, make unit cannons able to target the orbital layer, but only with boom bots, which would instantly explode upon contact with an anchor or jig :^)

Seems as good a place as any to put I recently played my first water planet naval fight, and it were good and entertaining.

I'm not sure, but I get the impression the idea of the JIG is that it collects hydrogen from the gas giant and then uses fusion to make metal.

The idea is great, and it sounds like a big fusion reactor that would make metal too, BUT... Fusing anything heavier than carbon actually consumes energy instead of releasing it. This is a big part of why stars die. Once they start fusing carbon into iron it starts cooling the star and the pressure reverses, causing a collapse.

If Jigs are in fact making metal from hydrogen then they should consume energy rather than create it.