PTE build 79270-pte now up

You should play the Orbital Warfare Overhaul mod, man. With the celestial radar not giving you that massive vision, gas giant bases become a thing. As in, people have a base that no one can see just like on a planet, but there's also an enemy there who is trying to kill that base... with intel from units and advanced radar sats. It's fun!

I keep playing FaF and realizing that engineers are really cheap in cost.

Why are fabbers so damn expensive to run in PA? @cola_colin what if we halved the energy cost of all fabbers? would that help the situation?

I could make a mod in a week or so if the meta stabilizes.

I certainly would not say no to cheaper fabbers. They are made of paper. They should not cost as much metal as a tank

EDIT:
Also random idea for walls: Make them able to move down. Basically disable them so you use them like a gate to let your units move through.

I have my first few fabbers assist factory, that's why storage first does not work for me.

hell yeah !!!!

If we were to have that, I'd like the model changed so that the base is flat, and there are two pillars on either side of the base that go up, with shields generated in between them.

I have. I really like a lot of the mod, but I distinctly dislike the Hailfire and super-charged SXX. I am not a fan of orbital having such a powerful interaction with the ground layer.

I feel like orbital should support ground, not replace it, and I feel like those two units do the latter.

Why? In the late game, you fight between planets. Why should you force people to invade and have these giant armies twiddling their thumbs in a stalemate?

Also, I'd be fine with orbital being a support layer - if gas giants weren't a thing.

Also, the hailfire and SXX are stupid expensive. It's really not that powerful.

I like the idea of walls being powered. For power management, how about just making it so you can turn off the power on all your walls by selecting a single one?

The power management rollout would have three buttons instead of two - On, Off, and "All walls on/off".

Can we not add more things to the power problem?
It's already crippling when your power dies. Now you want to take away my defensive lines and leave me completely open to attack?

I think your defensive lines should be crippled if you start focusing too heavily on building offensive units (causing energy stalls). You need to make strategic decisions whether you go offensive or defensive. If you aren't being attacked then you don't need the walls active and you can afford a temporary energy stall.

Well, walls and turrets do cost metal and energy to build. So there is a decision where to put the resources at the first place.The only problem with defences is when there is no counter to it and they basically can eat up all the resources the opponent had put into an attacking force, but this clearly isn't the case in PA.

Only time will tell if these new wall mechanics are OP. Walls are already hard enough to destroy (they have huge HP) and now the defender can shoot through them while the attacking unit fire gets blocked. This is likely to make walled off areas extremely difficult to breach. This encourages turtling. Maybe the granadier can be adjusted so that it has high electron charge grenades which destroy the new energy barriers?

From the change log it sounded like own units already shot through walls long before this patch, and this makes it only visually more conveying, like in WYSIWYG (just to mention this term again )

I could be wrong, though.

Turtling isn't a bad thing in itself - what we have to figure out is if walls help one expand by just walling off a mex field and putting an army behind it.

I agree that walls have a place, but there needs to be a downside or a counter, either walls cause energy drain or we get a specific wall busting unit (i.e. grenadier). If you think about it in regards to castle warfare, with seige engines.

Casuals need to know their place ...

Let's take a step back here. We don't make these changes in a vacuum.

Why do we need a wall counter? Why not just make building such a heavily fortified defensive line expensive and unnecessary if you have the units? After all, I build those walls to defend an area or a chokepoint. I'm really not interested in losing it to grenadier spam just because he built those instead of something else.

The ranges for all units are very close together, in that their differences are relatively small compared to their roles. Diversity is key, and we just don't have that right now.

A grenadier spam doesn't come at no cost. The granadier should be made a specialist unit which can take down energy barriers but isn't very good against anything else (which is what it's like now against most units). I never build grenadiers because they just aren't very good but if they took down walls this would force me to further diversify my attack party. Kind of like a Baneling bust in StarCraft 2.

I really like that the random map generator is back in and also that it is quite water happy now, creating quite some water planets from times to times.

Just a small suggestion. I'm not sure if it's possible, but it would be really helpful: Spawns and metal generation are two separated processes that don't work very well together for now. Isn't it possible if spawns could be generated first and then an even amount of metal spots would be placed in and around it? That would also render full random systems more balanced. There could be a function like x amount of metal spots are in a distance of sum y from the starting spot, which is the same for each player (or spot if there are more than one). Don't know if it makes sense. But at least there won't be spawns having zero metal around.