This is a strange bit of the game. When you run out of mass and you are building something, your energy continues to drain fully. A way to reproduce: Drain your mass, building something and reach negative net income. Then add more builders to a project, your energy drain will increase. This is a bit fiddly to mess with, jumping engineers back and forth to make it so you arn't wasting power. I don't remember this behaviour in TA, SC, or SC:FA. Bug?
It is an intentional change from previous economy systems. As far as I can tell it is supposed to make the economy easier to understand. It actually adds a large micromanagement barrier for good economic management and once you pass this barrier the economy is mechanically equivalent to that of the previous games. The correct way to manage your economy is to have zero metal (as always) but the extra requirement is that you must not try to spend more metal than you have income. Here is the thread with the announcement and quite a bit of discussion: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/planetary-annihilations-economy-system.44173/
it seems like they tried to implement a workaround fix to the problem. Its definitely better than it was, and defnitely going in the right direction, but they took the wrong way to do it. I enjoyed ubers original stance of metal extractors requiring energy to run, even if it was only a small amount of say 100 energy. But they did not fix the issue of energy stalling. The issue was, and still is, that any fabricator, regardless of any metal they can 'apply' to a building, will ALWAYS consume 1000 energy (for T1 fabbers) when working on a building. It should be the case that energy is only used when applying metal. What they did was remove metals dependency on energy. This solved the problem for the economy stalls, but i can still see this being a problem when units start requiring lots of energy to fire their projectiles due to having no energy (the fabbers are using it even when not applying any metal). In any case, this is a smaller problem than the targetting solutions currently.
Maybe it's draining because the energy is being converted into mass till energy also stalls and then production will slow down.
I wouldn't spend much time trying to justify it guys. The first UI mod I'm going to try to make is something that handles this sillyness for me I did the same thing in forged alliance for the mass fabricators.
Ok, time for a potentially stupid question. By 'stalled' do people mean (resource out) > (resource in) and the all reserves (the bar) have been emptied? I see the term bounded about a bit and wasn't sure of it's definition. Say that you have 700 mass/s income and you start building using 900 mass/s. You continue you run at 900 mass/s until your reserves are drained (you have stalled) after which your fabbers mass usage is reduced by a factor of 0.22 (1-(700/900)). Is that correct? If so, then absolute economic efficiency would be reserves empty and (resource out) == (resource in)? I ask this because I have been playing with the assumption that big green numbers = good, when that might not actually be the case...
In as simple terms as I can: Stalled = bar empty and heavily negative number on the right hand side. Energy should always have some in reserve. Green is good unless you have a lot in storage and you want to build something really really fast, then it's fine to drain into storage to increase build speed. You should always try to avoid depleting storage. Metal is more of a balancing act. Ideally, you want to have your metal at 0 in reserve (bar empty) with maybe -1 or -2 net to keep it there. If your metal bar is full and your net figure is positive, you're wasting potential production.
Thanks a lot for the information. A more abstract description like that gives me a better idea of when to build the mex/gens.
It makes sense. The fabbers try to spray nanolathe (The spray-tool costs energy!) but there is no metal to make any lathe, so they sprayer runs and runs and runs.. just nothing comes out of it. It should continue to cost energy.
Except: pretend a moment that you are a fabber, you don't have metal, and there are other fabers working on your project. What should you do? Answer is obvious. So I view this decision as against the grain of supreme commander. That said, SupCom also had made an against the grain decision with mass fabs, by making it so players had to flick them on and off. Just like that problem, I think a UI mod should be able to fix it. So no big deal.
you should take orders like a good little robot and keep trying spending whatever metal usage is handed to you by the second. Every strategy I play you must micro engineers in this manner. Not having to kills required strategic skill IMO, this is a strategy game for adults not busy town
strategic skill? I'm calling word salad on that. Micro and strategic belong in the same sentence only to illustrate their contrast. If you truly believe this is a strategic game, then you will agree with the following: A player who has an injured wrist and debilitated control, but superior understanding of the game, superior insight into the opponent, and superior tactics. VS a player with impeccable control and and macro. game mechanics push the contest in favor of one or the other. One game is Supreme Commander, the other is Starcraft. For the record, SupCom 2 failed because it tried to be Starcraft. (Among other reasons, of course.)
you should be penalized for putting engineers to work without having the economy. Otherwise why have economy in game if your engineers are fully automated.....
