[Poll] (with pretty pictures): Halving the Metal Given by T2 Metal Pumps

@eroticburrito, I have had similar thoughts. I had an earlier thread that discussed similar things, and I'll just leave a link here. Its not exactly the same thing, and comes at the problem from a similar angle, but there ended up being some good points that might still be relevant.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/its-just-too-massive.55725/

Was there a T2 mass extractor in TA? (never played)

There was. There were also T2 mass fabricators that were pretty easy to support once you had T2 pgens running. Also, on metal maps you could put metal extractors anywhere. The only catch was that you couldn't put fabbers on permanent factory assist - you had to re-give the assist order for each new unit. So in other words, mass-producing Krogoths and Nukes starts to look rather attractive if you got to having a powerful T2 econ.

It's all a ratio of metal per spot compared to cost of units. Keep the cost of armies low, raise the cost of nukes.

Even if the metal spots made 100 metal per spot, if you control more than your opponent, you can build more stuff. Right now the problem is everything is cheap. I'm just throwing out numbers here but why not try making nukes 10x as more expensive and not assistible, try making catapults 5x. Towers... eh maybe raise them a bit but the disadvantage of towers should be that they are static, they should be able to hold off a good number of units because they can only do so in a specific area. Make them weak and why even have them, make them too expensive and no one builds them.

Yes, the moho mine.

I'm not sure if this happens in PA, but in TA if you ran out of energy, EVERYTHING shut off, base defenses (with possibly a few exceptions) and even metal mines. I think PA should implement that.

I kind of think that the metal the commander gives should be less than the metal a t1 mex gives. That doesn't make sense.

That's not exactly true, you could tell them to assist the unit being built, at which point they would go idle when it finished, however if you told them to guard the factory they would assist permanently.

Patrol would auto-assist any new constructions (and auto-repair) in the patrol route but would not assist a factory.

TA had metal not mass guys. Distinction being that Trees = Energy, not Metal.

It's not being condescending when you've made it abundantly clear you haven't read the thread in it's entirety. Stop clinging to this notion of me being "condescending" like it affords you any apology.

As for the difference between units costing more, and Metal Extractors generating less, I refer you to the post directly above your first one where you complained you didn't understand.

As in, the post directly before your post. I'm not being condescending. You came at me with attitude when you were confused about something I explained the post before yours. It's not like it was buried a page or two back.

The inference that you need to increase the Metal cost of every unit is false. Not every unit will be easily-obtainable, and there's nowhere near enough evidence in this thread (or elsewhere) that shows people have used every single unit and analysed their cost-effectivess with regards to Metal usage.

Throttling Metal production is definitely easier, you're right about that. But easier is not always the right approach, and I don't think it is the right approach in this situation.

That's not true. Set your builders to guard the factory. TA pathing was weird and the lathe was SUPER short range, so it was not possible to stack up a hundred constructors like you can in PA.

The moho mine was a bit awkward to use in TA and was very very expensive.
PA does change it for the better by having you stack two different extractors instead of deleting one and replacing it.

TA mines also exploded on death, making every extractor loss more tragic. For some reason this was removed in its successors.

That's not entirely true. TA had two tiers of energy use. The high tier was with weapons and base defenses. These drew directly from the energy supply and would not function without it. The low tier was with streaming demands. Construction and radar operated on a per-second basis. If they could not function, everything turned off for a second.

While Supcom and PA tried to use a purely autistic streaming economy system, IMO it does more harm than good. I'm not even talking about the horrible glitches that virtually every single device caused at low energy. It's simply less useful from a UI perspective and more damaging to the end user for no reason at all. Play with the TA "streaming" system and everything that is important with the economy can be learned FAR easier and more quickly:

- When metal stalls, all construction stops. Wow. That's called useful, instant UI feedback. In Supcom you could stall 50% and have a base that looks exactly the same as a functioning base.
- Energy is NOT wasted. When energy stalls, everything turns off. Once again it's instant, powerful UI feedback that doesn't punish the player any more than it has to.

How many new players could look at their Supcom base and not realize anything was wrong? Supcom causes a huge number of glitches at low energy as well, making for wildly inconsistent (and thus frustrating) gameplay. PA for some reason wastes energy during a metal stall. There is already an inherent waste of spending more money on constructors than you should have. A poor allocation of resources is bad enough and no further punishment needs to be forced on the player to get the point across. It's just petty.

Yep you are more correct I was in the lobby waiting for people to join a match so I rushed my post when it filled up.
There were also a few defense in TA that would fuction even if they had no energy, I believe MRPCs (Punisher and guardian, similar to the pelter, except they were actually good, for people who haven't played TA) and missle towers, would work even if you had no energy. Interestingly enough units had a energy draw (-1 per unit if memory serves) It would have been amusing if units themselves stopped moving / fireing if you had no energy, though I'm not sure if that would improve gameplay or just be annoying. There may have been a few units that needed energy to fire (BLoD for the Krog and possibly the Penetrator) but I honestly can't remember. I do wish PA would implement a system like this, where units (and defenses) with basic cannon type weapons could fire no matter what, but higher end (with harder hitting / better range) units / defenses would use weapons that need energy to fire.

Between SupCom, PA and TA I do like how PA does mexes the best, TA was annoying because you had to either reclaim or self destruct before you could plop down a T2, SupCom wasn't as bad since you could upgrade.

Most units in TA were self sufficient. The only units that could energy stall used big guns like with the battleship's gatling gun or the sniper bot. Laser turrets also used energy so they could slow down a bit in a crisis.

All in all the TA economy was very hard to screw up. When you did screw up, it was not super disastrous beyond your enemy having something to take advantage of (sucks for the player, GOOD for the game). This core game feature got the most neglect in later games.

yes make metal more scarce!

But it has 3 pumps...

A t2 has two pumps, you build them on top of a t1 which has one. It looks like the because it is-- but the t2 only has 2.

K