What's the point of energy?

You can increase cost or energy demand on the worker unit.

The alternative is that you increase the price of the fabber and decrease the energy it uses.
I'd think it be better if fabbers drained less energy than factories per metal spent.

Supplementing what he said. Energy is another factor slowing down the economic growth and potentially decreasing the slippery slope of the exponential economy.
Whereas territory and metal extractors could emidietly transfer into more factories and more units currently you also need to construct powerplants to use that metal which slows down the economic growth and inhibits your ability to turn territory into a military advantage.

You could also do that by reducing the Metal income to non-ridiculous levels, as forcing the player into building loads of PowerPlants just to keep up with their spending habit on Metal, is effectively the same thing.

In function, the idea to put the energy cost on the engineers is the same as it is now. The only real difference is how the energy cost to build a building is calculated. Right now it's based off the building's cost which could be anything. Placing the cost on the engineers standardizes the energy cost of construction so it becomes the cost of how fast you're building & not what you're building.

Bang on, nanolathe!

I'd like to hear what the Uber guys think of all this.

Metal controls the production of everything, and doesn't have much to do with the importance of energy. It's the energy users that create the situation of what does and doesn't require most of the supply.

Hmmm, I think I kinda see what you were trying to say now. Give me an example though, I don't fully understand the change you would make.

So as it is now:
A construction bot adds 10 metal to a structure every second at a cost of 1000 energy per second.
A vehicle factory requires 600 metal to be constructed.

• So a single Fab bot would take 1 minute to make a Vehicle Factory, and use 60,000 in total.
• Two fab bots would take only 30 seconds and use 60,000 energy in total as well. No real extra resource cost.

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A Fab Aircraft adds 6 metal to a structure every second at a cost of 1200 energy per second.

• Making the same building would take a single Fab Aircraft 1 minute, 40 seconds at a cost of 120,000 energy.

Ok, now that we have this example laid out, what changes in your suggested method ulight?

Each type of T1 engineer has the same energy use efficiency as T2 of the same type. For bots & vehicles it's 100 energy per mass, for air it's 200, & for the commander it's 20. What if T1 engineers had a lower energy to mass ratio then T2?

It is not really the same thing if you are referring to what I said.
Do you really think that the current default metal layout is at ridiculous levels? You can just decrease the numbers of mexes then. It would have similar effect as decreasing the output of a single mexes.

What do you guys think about the idea of T1 engineers being more energy efficient than T2 engineers but T2 engineers still being able to build faster?

That's not really on topic. Perhaps start a new thread.

As for everyone else trying to explain exactly how energy effects the economy, I think this just highlights its problem. It's an unnecessary over complication to the economy of fabrication and once again energy's other purpose of powering things like radar and weapons seems to have been forgotten.

I firmly believe energy should not be used for fabrication. Only the running of buildings and weapons.

Umm that is how it works already

your fabber can deploy 10 metal per sec, and it takes 1,000 energy to use the fabber, (it uses 0 energy if its not building)

so if your building takes 100 metal to build, it will take 1 fabber 10 seconds, 100 metal and 10,000 energy

an air fabber deploys 6 metal a sec, and uses 1,200 energy a second to run

that same 100 metal building will take an air fabber almost 17 seconds, 100 metal, and almost 20,000 energy to make the building

I think its a really interesting way to make the econ work, so far I love it

Bump. You guys have my support on this. I didn't get a chance to read absolutely everything and contemplate the possibilities, but Darac poses quite the engaging question...

Here is an idea that a few people have almost expressed; Energy is to your constructors in PA as Farms are to your units in warcraft.

Energy is food. I'll first explain using the ZK economy because I think the PA economy is needlessly complicated. In the end the complications are fairly irrelevant, it will just make the explanation a lot harder.

Firstly in the ZK economy everything costs the same amount of metal, energy and build time. This mostly makes it a lot easier to reason and talk about. It works very similarly to the PA economy because PA has some average metal:energy:buildtime ratio where the energy:buildtime cost is now determined by the efficiency of the average engineer.

Anyway, the example. It costs 75m to make a Mex with an income of +2 metal (it can actually vary between maps but ignore that, +2 is average) and 70m to make a Solar with an income of +2 energy. Mobile buildpower can be bought for about 28m for 1 buildpower but you start the game 'excesing buildpower' so this is not relevant.

The commander's intrinsic energy and metal production starts of equal. So at the start of the game while you are expanding it is very easy to balance your economy, all you have to do is build 1 Solar for every Mex you capture. Effectively it costs 145m to increase your income by +2 because if you only make a Mex or a Solar you will stall on one resource and effectively excess the other. Solars are effectively a Farm unit from a *craft game, they set the supply cap on how many Mexes you can use.

So now the question is this; "Why not make mexes cost 145m and remove energy?". The answer is raiding. Your opponent will raid your mexes but the solars are safely tucked away in your base. This almost halves the cost of your next Mex. If you have excess energy due to the loss of a Mex it only cost 75m to make and use another Mex. So each Mex your opponent kills reduces your income by 2 but also gives you a 70m discount on your next +2 income increase because you have already paid 70m for the Solar to run that Mex.

Here the purpose of energy is to make a player's expansion speed slower than their re-expansion speed. It slows down the early game 'land grab' without slowing down the rate at which they can expand after being raided.

It has the same purpose in early game PA but the economy obfuscates it. I think it is the most important effect of energy because if a game can't start well then the rest of the game is doomed. In PA the system is complicated a bit because engineer energy efficiency varies but in the end it is the same.

There are a few things which come out of this.


Energy drain is (almost always) better than equivalent cost.

Say you have two units A and B with equal parameters except one costs 200m and the other costs 100m and must drain 100e/s otherwise it dies. The best efficiency powerplant easily available costs 100m and produces 10 energy. So A and B have the same cost if you build a powerplant every time you build a B. But if you lose 10 Bs then you are able to rebuild those 10 Bs for half the price.

This is energy acting like supply. In Starcraft you have to build a farm for every 8-supply-units of army size you make but if the army dies that supply cost is waived when you rebuild.

The assumption here is that energy structures will be safer than whatever it is that you are using them to run. This is almost always true and creates an interesting target for your opponent.

Lastly, energy drain is a kind of tech barrier when you are able to unlock higher efficiency generators. If your energy generation becomes more efficient then the cost of everything which drains energy effectively decreases.

I like the way econ is right now........yes metal is more the limiting factor but it all makes sense how it works, and I think it works rather well

Making re-expansion cheaper than initial expansion can be achieved in simpler ways in PA though. Simply let a structure cost half if it is built on the wreckage of the same structure type (like in Sup Com). Reducing the micro of rebuilding on metal points with wreckage and also giving the same half cost re-expansion as you've pointed out in your post.

You can already reclaim mex wreckage. Energy gives you an additional discount for expansion in a different direction and does not give your opponent this advantage if they send constructors or their commander around to reclaim your mex wreckage.

True, I'm still not sure it's worth the complication of it all though...

Wait a minute... This is already true and would still be true if energy was removed. The speed of your recovery is based on the number of fabricators you have, not the excess energy as right now running metal extractors uses nothing and building with fabricators uses almost all of your energy. So simply having fabricators enables you to re-expand quickly at a cost of metal and energy at the moment, removing energy from this equation isn't going to effect this dynamic at all.

Reread it. To actually use a Mex you have to have the energy to support the constructor which will spend the metal. So to increase your buildrate you have to build new power plants as well as new mexes. If you already have power plants then you don't need to build them so increasing your income is cheaper. So it takes less time.

Constructors also fulfill this role. To increase your expenditure you need to increase your metal income, energy income and buildpower. But constructors are worse than energy or metal. To spend the buildpower which constructors provide they have to be nearby which instantly makes them a lot more vulnerable to raiding than power plants. Their local restrictions also mean that you will have a lot more constructors than you can use at any one time because many of them will spend their time walking around.