Economics needs more complexity

The objective of a game is to be fun.
And for several reasons, I believe that T2 economy being a straight upgrade from T1 does not encourage fun. I digress:

Forced decision
In a situation where T2 economy is a straight upgrade, it effectively gives no choice to the player as to whether or not to use it, as the player with T2 will out-produce T1, and overwhelm him. This is inevitable regardless of how you tweak the values. This consequentially results in a game of logistics, getting as many T2 extractors as possible, and on a large scale over many planets, that is a tedious job and not a tactical decision. Dawn of war was mentioned in this thread, in support T2 supremacy, yet in my experience Dawn of war was a game of who can be the quickest to upgrade every listening post, which was not (in my opinion) fun, and I find it hard to believe that anyone else, let alone the majority of the PA community, would either.

Leaves T1 behind
I also often find that when (in SupCom for example) you simply upgrade the production, lower level units get left behind as they require many more buildings and many more clicks to build and organise than more expensive (better) units. Even if T1is a more efficient model, because of the scaling of economy it requires an increase in micro far more than just caused by a larger area of battlefield, so T2 becomes more efficient in time to the extent that t1 can no longer viably be used, reducing the pool of units and variety of tactics that a player can employ.

So I agree with nano lathe that T2 should function differently to T1 and not just be a straight upgrade.

Who is Poe and why is he making laws.

Right here.

Mike

That Who is x and why is he making laws is a response I originally gave to Tim in another thread.

Ok thats fairly boring.

Honestly the longer I follow this thread, the more I'm with nanolathe. I too however have not seen a suggestion for how to change it that I'm satisfied with, it could require a bit of trial and error to figure that out, which we probably won't get as Uber are probably already stretched to their limit as it is.

Maybe we could brainstorm specific solutions in another thread specifically for how to modify T2 to suit this concept. The anger overhead is getting a bit heavy in here.

Okay, time to pull some numbers out of my ***!

T1 - Basic Extractor - 5 Metal per second, 2/3 of current health, 2/3 of current cost

T2 - Booby Trapped Metal Cap - 0 Metal per second, 1/5 of T1 health, 1x of T1 cost, visual stealth broken by Radar; if an enemy Fabber attempts to build on a metal spot occupied by one of these, the Fabber will build an extractor that is constantly damaged by the booby trap via reclamation; once the mex is finished, it is destroyed. The player owning the booby trap gets the resources once the mex is destroyed; alternatively, the booby trap can be toggled to explode once the mex is destroyed, at the cost of the metal and energy acwuired by the trap.

T2 - Energy Generator - T2 Energy Generators still produce +5000 energy, but must be built on a metal point.

T2 - Combat Extractor - 5 metal per second, 3x T1 Health, 3x T1 cost; Comes with a small nanolathe capable of repairing nearby units. Nanolathe uses 5 metal per second with the same efficiency as a Naval Fabber.

Off the top of my head, this kind of stuff is easy enough to think of, balancing is the trick.

This doesn't address an alternate method of increasing metal income except for outwards expansion. In the absence of metal makers, a T2 variant of a metal extractor is still needed. Nanolathe is saying this T2 variant shouldn't be better in every way than T1 and I agree. But T2 metal generation needs to be > T1, somehow.

Edit: Also, why would you build a T2 trap if you can build a T1 extractor for the same cost?

I really like the idea of bringing back geothermal, wind, solar personally and I'm not against the higher quality metal deposits.

I was thinking however what about a deep drill extractor which can extract at T2 rates but requires significant power to operate and is constantly in an overcharging state, so it will lose health over time, and causes a substantial detonation when it dies. This retains the ability for high income but also demands more micro and higher risk as well as more space requirements due to the constant repair access and power draw. I think this would make it a risky option for turtles where space is at a premium for the power needs, and they would also likely be very dense, increasing risk. Their fragility would also make them unsuitable for deployment in contested territory meaning a player can't simply expand to T2 and spread them all across the land.

thats all i'm saying, t2 metal generation > t1. how this will be acomplished issnt the issue just t2 > t1 else no reason for upgrade.

There are plenty of reasons where T2 Extractors could be favorable even if they generate the same income. For example T1 ban be cheap/quick to build but easily destroyed while T2 could be more expensive but much harder to destroy.

Mike

ok put them in, i also have no problem when there are several t2 metal extractors here. as mentioned before the disadvantage of t2 can be lower health higher cost or whatever for more production, also you can put in a stealthed one with t1 production, a higher hp one with t1 production and so on. they will never repay, but you have the choice to build them

Ultimately boiled down, the concept isn't to mess with T2 for the sake of it, it's to try and keep T1 relevant later in the game. This means that T2 needs an artificial weakness.

While I'm glad Uber are removing adjacency overall, it's a shame because I can see a lot of opportunities here, such as T2 requiring adjacent power to keep it running, etc.

I just had another idea, not particularly fond of it since it adds some of the arbitrary weirdness and micro that TA/SC/PA generally tries to avoid, but how about Metal deposits may contain a certain amount of near-surface metal that is easy to extract. This near surface metal is finite in a sense that it slowly regenerates. A T2 extractor could be extra-efficient at extracting this near-surface metal meaning when built on an untouched deposit they are very high yielding, but eventually fallback to a T1.5 once the near-surface is depleted, unless they stop drilling for whatever reason, the near-surface eventually replenishes.

Downsides on this could fit the easy methods of large structure size, high build time/resource requirements. Overall they would be better, however their break even point purely as T1.5 would be very inefficient, however their break even point on a fully replenished metal deposit would make them highly attractive. However this again means that their usage on the front line would be heavily discouraged due to risk of loss of investment, as well as enemy metal deposits possibly being depleted. If there was a simple, obviously way to indicate a metal deposits health in the UI I'd go with this, but needing to find and hover/click each individual deposit would render this idea a little convoluted.

Is reclaiming in properly yet?

If not, let's wait for that before putting in a T2 mex.

While a good idea for an additional metal extractor type, this doesn't address the inability to increase your economy if you can't expand.

That's a situational form of metal income. It should definitely be factored into the balance of things, but ultimately doesn't affect the answer of whether a T2 mex should exist, and in what form.

The question then becomes WHY you can't expand. Give some examples.

Mike

If it's because your enemy is in the way... well there is a reason you can make tanks afterall, right?

For a moment, assume that wrecks drop 100% of their metal.

As time goes on, after all the metal spots have been capped with T1 mexes, your economy is still going to increase. You'll have a bigger, and bigger, and bigger income. It'll never plateau-out.

In that situation, you have upwards economic growth without outwards economic growth. Hell, with 100% metal drop, you don't need to outward growth at all - just control the field, and you'll recoup all your losses, and all his losses too, and you'll have all that freshly extracted metal on top of that.


Now, do you really believe that it ultimately doesn't affect whether a T2 mex should exist or not?

If you get put on the backfoot even slightly, they are making more tanks than you, and all else being equal you can never recover from that. Because there's no alternate strategy to pursue to increase your metal production. This will make the game fragile, leaving players knowing early on who is going to win. There needs to be alternatives. Keep in mind that this increase doesn't have to be strictly fulfilled by a T2 mex - anything that lets you increase your metal income, without relying on taking additional metal spots, is fine by me.

This doesn't change that it's situational. And it relies entirely on you being in an utterly domination position to begin with.

As BulletMagnet said, reclaim must come into play before you can realistically say there's "no alternate strategy to pursue to increase your metal production".
Also, what about expanding 'upwards' to the moon (or similar)?