I know upgrades are generally not done to avoid micro management. I fully support avoiding micro management. However, upgrading metal extractors from T1 to T2 is currently very micro-heavy since you need to reclaim the old mex and *THEN* queue the build order for the T2 mex. How about either supporting mex upgrades, or as an alternatively allowing fabbers to construct T2 metal extractors on top of t1:s (e.g., could result in them reclaiming first, then building a T2). Currently, I rarely end up "bothering" with upgrades because I'm too busy doing other things to micro the process; especially later in the game (where upgrades might be useful) when performance concerns make microing even more difficult.
I liked someone else's suggestion of making buildings build atop of reclaim and automatically add the reclaim to the build, to take micro out of reclaim. This would work here too if you made t1 mex act as reclaim when building a t2 mex atop. Atm, i notice reclaim doesn't work, so i splode my mexes.
Agreed. Automatically allowing build-on-rubble by automatically reclaiming as necessary would be awesome.
Don't sound like works. Since economy streams, sounds like it actually is an exploitable source of economy.
VERY exploitable. As for the OP, Uber has stated, or at least hinted at, that they are going to implement Mike's solution for upgrading T1 -> T2 mex. T2s can be built "on top of" T1s, upgrading it to a "T1+T2" mex. Building a T2 on an empty spot would build a fully upgraded "T1+T2" structure.
So, if described like Tiberian Sun, It is like if you could build a basic power plant, you could build an advanced power plant on top of it to "just add two generators", or you could build an advanced power plant on an empty spot and get the basic with the add on at once. That sounds good. Only reason I suggested mine was because it tied into building over reclaim, which would be a very nice mechanic to do and might be similar in building t2 over t1 if it just treated the t1 as reclaim. If they implemented building structures over reclaimable destroyed building shells and other reclaim, then all they would have to do is make t2 mexes treat ALL ACTIVE STRUCTURES as reclaim, since they can only be placed atop metal spots anyway. If other structures can be placed on metal spots, you would want that metal spot easily used correctly anyway, speaking of, in that scenario you would want t1 mex to act as though active structures are reclaim too in order to build a mex over a factory that is blocking a metal spot lol.
I agree entirely with you Nano, I'm just relaying information. T2 Mexes provide an overabundance of metal right now, once you build a few, you don't really have to worry about metal problems for a good 30 minutes. And that's only when you build 5-10. If you have several clusters of T2 mexes, you can just toss metal worries right out the window. Metal is no longer a resource, it becomes more of a green set of numbers in the upper left hand corner of your screen. Energy becomes the only resource that matters, and even then, that's inherently exponential. I'd much rather Uber keeps T1 Mexes at +5 or +7 metal income and simply removes T2 Metal altogether, or makes it a sidegrade instead of an upgrade. I usually don't advocate the entire removal of an asset, as it's an insult to the artist and gameplay programmer that made the asset, but I think this might be important. However, we're still in Alpha. I can yell at Uber all I want over balance in Beta, but in Alpha I'm just happy that Multiplanet is "right around the corner".
Just balance it. Turn t2 mexes down, wala. Especially since metal is a limited location resource, you will almost go negative for a small boost, so make the bonus small. Make it mex-and-a-half.
