Metal Makers

if metalmakers ... then only make them viable if a player is with his back to the wall ...
so he can have a litlle chance for a small economical comeback ... metalextracktors and teritorial control should still be the mainthing ... expanding is always what should be rewarded ...
i think there should only be one metalmakerbuilding buildable by advanced contructors with a productiocapacity slightly less then a t1 extractor ...
so if a t1 mex makes say 7 metal a mmaker should make just 5 or 4 metal per second by the expence of 500 to 1000 energy (?) they should be tarain dependend ... i mean mmakers wouldn´t make sence on a TA style- metalplanet on a flipside they could make a lot of sence to build if one player controls a gasgiant for the energy advantage which again means you should/have to expand when you otherwise battle on a resourcepoor planet with only few limited mexes ... it should be battlefield dependant imo ...

on a standart battlefield metalmakers should be the least preferable to be build
t1 and t2 mexes are were it is at ...
mmakers shall only allow you to stay in the game buying you a bit time but not give you an advantage

Sea metal deposits should solve expansion problems, as players can then expand to the sea and use the vast oceans to build their bases.

I only hope we can get a commander who starts with the ability to construct naval extractors, power-plants and basic torpedo launchers.

Before Core Contingency, TA had a different type of resource system in the water. Metal was extremely scare, but energy was plentiful thanks to the tidal generator. This made metal makers far more viable and important on water worlds, while keeping them nearly useless on land.

It might be interesting to try something similar in PA. Perhaps metal makers might be strictly a water structure (water as the coolant), or maybe they'd only work as a special thing on metal worlds (leeching the super weapon as a power source).

The metal makers seen in Supcom weren't very good. It's too difficult to find a sweet spot where the income is both useful and not game breaking to spam. Adjacency didn't help either, as it gave an even stronger growth curve to metal maker spam.

it's the case

All the arguments for metalmakers (for comeback purposes or to be able to turtle) have one fundamental logical flaw.

If its efficient to create metalmakers I will expand AND create metalmakers, easily dwarfing your economy. (Also efficient mm give you an exponential economy, where the winner gets decided on who's better at spamming buildings and first at getting the ball really rolling).

If they're not efficient, your economy will be so small that you're easily overrun.

In both cases, the person with less territory control (read, less metalspots) will lose and metal makers won't help.

Metalmakers thus won't help a disadvantaged player, as all things they can use to get a comeback I can use too.

On the other hand, tying territory to metal production helps a smaller player, as some significant part of the increased income has to be used to defend much more territory. Metalmakers would allow the bigger player to concentrate ressources, making raids against their economy much harder.


And if you tie metalmakers to territory via less efficiency if they're loser together... you get the metalextractors (well, very similar at least) some spring engine game used (metal spread over an area instead of spots) which was so annoying to handle that none (or almost none) uses that system anymore.

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Having said that, I see no remaining purpose for metalmakers. They don't solve a need in the game and are incredible hard to balance.

The same is imo true for a system like overdrive. They add some complexity to the economy, but what do they really add to gameplay? Energy in itself is valuable enough (I'm more often energy starved then metal starved in PA). Additional economic expansion after planetside metal spots are used up can easily be done by metal spots on asteroids, which can be numerous enough to get an (almost) limitless economy.

meh,

mental makers based on the supcom 1 style but maybe they should use a bit more energy would be great!

so what if people use them for turtle its there choice of game play, ill use them to reinforce my expansion and they will add some interesting game play with low mass worlds.


would be nice if there was a sliding scale on the MM so you can determine how much mass they produce and the high the scale the high the energy usage is (exponential increase would b best)

but i do love the idea of asteroids being finite and breaking down as you mine them too much! should be able to reinforce a asteroid whilst mining it until it becomes too expensive and you have to stop mining or let it break apart!

but as long as they are balance and cost loads of energy to use they should defo be in the game!

I'm unfamiliar with the approach used in spring, but it sounds like the efficiency is tied to locations on the map, rather than the distribution of makers.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, a game called Perimeter used this approach (of reduced efficiency the closer resource structures are located). After some searching I managed to find my original manual for the game, which describes this concept rather well:

This behaviour can be seen fairly well in this video, with the player having to expand the "charge area" in order to bring in more energy. Note that there are no hot-spots where energy is more abundant, all ground offers the same resources.

If this process was applied to metal makers (calling them harvesters instead) you would still get the territory control for metal as players have to space them out to built a viable economy. Simply spamming them within a small area wouldn't be viable as the construction/operation cost of them per unit of metal produced would increase. It could also be possible to have different tier versions, with T2 having a larger radius and less energy cost per metal harvested.

To me this seems better than having pure metal makers on their own, as territory control remains, but without having some arbitrary inefficiency based on the number of makers you've built (as was suggested by nukesnipe).

P.S I'd be eager to make a mod to try this out when we get unit scripts.

I just want to point out the contradiction here. By using Metal Makers as you describe you aren't making things interesting, you're just homogenizing everything to be the same. Low metal planets should be interesting because they're low metal.

Mike

I can see a few ways to make metal fabricators more balanced, should they end up in the game.

-Make them optional; select/deselect in the lobby. Everybody walks away happy, never having to pretend the other side of the debate exists.
-Built by advanced fabrication units only. Also, this means there's only one type.
-Large; not factory-sized but big, easy to see and hit. High targeting priority.
-Explosive; and in a large enough radius that you don't want to put it near anything too valuable.
-Impossible to jam from enemy radar; always a target, and thanks to the above always a tempting target.
-High initial cost: thousands of units of energy (5-10K, depending) and small amounts of metal to build.
-High absolute cost: +10M -600E is substantially different from +1M -60E; you can't work up to it, you commit to the whole thing at once, which means your economy grows slowly and in fits and spurts.

Several or all of those would cut way down on the more egregious turtlery. And if they're not in the game when it ships, they'll get modded in sooner or later, probably in a form that annoys everyone; the best way to limit the potential damage is to restrict them in creative ways, not remove them.

I initially voted "Yes", because I interpreted it as "Metal Extractors". As in, up to not long ago, mexes could be built anywhere.

Then I realised it was about "Metal Makers" and changed to "Maybe".

One of the things I disliked about Warcrap/Starcrap was that the resources would frequently run out, ending in ugly and slugish attrition wars. One of the things I liked about TA was that the wars would just escalate and escalate and escalate. In SpringRTS, I've seen wars escalade into pumping out units equivalent to low level experimentals in SupCom not much slower than if they were freaking Peewees.



So, the answer is maybe yes, because I like the economy to be scalable (at least to a point - which is actually the only way to have decently big wars and to have tiers).

The answer is maybe no because I'm concerned with the unstoppable economies - ex: the eco-rush guys in SpringRTS, mod BA, who have perfectly tuned (and very straight-forward and hardly ever changing) evolution paths to reach X metal/energy production in Y minutes and 20 mins into the game pump out Banthas in less than a min. Not sure how bad this is, though.

More options never hurt anyone, as long as they're properly balanced. They just need to make using them on a map with enough metal to be sufficiently impractical. Maybe make them take 4 or so T1 energy towers to operate at 100%. You'd still need large tracts of land, but most of it would be given to energy towers as opposed to scattered Metal extractors. I guess the Idea I have for them is that you use them when metal is scarce, and limits your expansions significantly (more so than using metal makers). It would kinda help in the instances when the metal patch distribution is a bit wonky.

If they can be balanced properly? Sure

If they can't? I'd actually opt in for reclaiming structures.

Supcom FA: They were horribly imbalanced, and weren't even worth making unless you REALLY needed that extra mass. (took 1 t2 pgens to get 1 extra mass)

Supcom 2: Why build mexes when you can convert? It was also insanely imbalanced.

still haven't voted.... can't make up my mind.

In FA they the t2 ones where useless because you never start using them unless you have all the mass points you can reach for and all of them were t3 and by then you had t3 tech.
And the t3 ones were good but only if all your mass points were already maximum tech like I said.

In PA on a planet with 100 on the bar of mass points, you have enough mass.

I guess in a scenario where you have a planet with less mass points it would be interesting.

It would demand flexibility to be ready to change your build from one planet to another.

Good to see you diving in Soren!

I don't disagree with the sentiment here, the problem is that I think Metal Fabs and thier role in the Economy would make the overall balance really hard to get right considering you need to account for them to be optional.

You Forgot SupCom: Horribly Imbalanced to the point where the Metagame invovled building huge fields of them.

The problem is that it's very hard to control, Metal Fab's only real limiting factor is space for the Fabs and Energy needed to power them. An Economy can easily get out of hand when Metal Fabs get involved.

Mike

I'd like to see them. They're not needed in anyway, but I would quite like them, especially once we move onto solar system battles. Conquered a world, and its nice and safe? Fill the surface with mass extractors and powergens and turn it into your economy base for the rest of the game.

I know this is a bit necroing the tread, but I didn't want to open a new one about the exact same thing.

At first I was 100% full on for the fabricators, but then I remembered SupCom and the need to not expand since you had fabricators. I'd rather make it so that you can build Advanced Metal Extractors over/next to Basic ones.

Another option would be orbital extractors - satellites with a mining beam but the downside would be only a temporary boost when the satellite flies over a metal point, huge investment and large power drain.

This is already working in the dev build we're working on. Expect it next build.

Nice.. Now I just need to get the Beta.

Building advanced metal mines over the previous ones works like a charm and is a huge improvement.

Also just voted, and we now have 50% for metal makers. Anyone else want to help tip this into a simple majority?

I would prefer to have an option to go bonkers on energy and have a more defensible base.

of course, but not so strong, only a thing to help you eco (when w/out metal), I think that expand should be the main Idea