So, i kinda got bored with how pointless metal storage is, and decided that a post was needed for people to suggest ideas on what could be added to it to make it actually useful in game. Do not suggest increasing its capacity, as this really will not fix the usefulness of the building. The entire game revolves around using up all your metal as quickly as you can, and storing metal is just plain bad play. No idea about TA, but in supcom, metal (or mass as its called in supcom) had a dual use of boosting metal income due to the adjacency bonus. This was literally the only reason to build metal storage. There was a potential use during late game with experimentals walking around when you needed to reclaim them, but even this is debatable as you can just pause the engineers and use up the metal you have stored, and then continue reclaiming when you are back at 0. Unfortunately, due to the direction that uber looks to be going with wreckages, reclaim will not be very big in this game due to the simple fact that most wreckages get destroyed during battles. Fair enough, thats how they want the game to be, but it does mean that actual reclaim opportunities will be greatly diminished. There are also no real plans for experimental esque units in the game, but there has been talk about the spiderbot, which i assume will be the most expensive unit in the game. So, because of the current direction, metal storage really does not fit in with the game, and does need a change or addition to the building, otherwise it will remain a useless building. The only real suggestion i can give is to introduce something similar to an adjacency bonus with metal storage, but i think i remember something about uber not wanting to have adjacency at all.
Yes, i thought the metalstorage is for noob players to waste their metal for it I never heard of that. i far as i know, reclaiming will be part of this game. how many wreckages are left after a fight and how much metal you can gain from them is something that is not finished now. expect a lot of changes here. I though the spider bot will be a "normal" unit. or is there a threat/post i dont have seen?
I thought having metal storage was a good idea because if you needed to build something expensive, your default 900 metal would run out pretty quick and you would have to wait a bit for it to be regenerated from the metal extractors... is this not the case?
No, its not. In the best case you spend exactly all the metal you get every tick. Thats more efficient than waiting for your metalbar to be full again and then start building. Its all about streaming economy. It streams in and you have to stream it out at the same rate. if you dont do this you will have a disadvantage over your opponent to the mid- to endgame.
I think people need to redefine "most efficient." Indeed, it is most efficient to use all metal every tick, but sometimes that just isn't an option. Metal storage provides a buffer so that when your mass of engineers get done building something, your puny 900 storage doesn't fill up immediately then start wasting metal before the engineers move on to the next large project. I build about 4 per game, and I assure you that in most games it saves you more metal than you lose by building them.
Yeah I agree... I can't imagine NOT building metal storage... it seems to help... surely you are constantly massively stalling if you do not have them?
Take any game past the 20 minute mark, and you'll see plenty of metal wasting going on(pastats). It's near impossible for a human to perfectly balance the economy for so many minutes. A storage simply grants you more time to deal with any mistakes that you are eventually bound to make. When an enemy is raiding your metal you should atleast have a bit of a buffer time to adapt your eco to your new income. I'm not saying that the metal storage is balanced, or that it can't use improvements. But expecting that players can play during a long period of time without making mistakes is just silly. The only thing that I really consider weird is that the advanced metal extractor is a straight upgrade from the basic one, while there isn't any advanced storage to save up all the much. They are still working on reclaiming, it's currently very basic. So why you seem to think that Uber Entertainment is taking this the wrong direction is not clear to me.
Then you really aren't spending enough metal if you have massive positive metal income between building with one group of engineers. ...with weak players.
Okay, i don't argue about the fact that metal is rare enough to be permanently used rather than stored. Zaphod is quiet right. I just assumed that the OP is true and i tried to find an idea. And so far i'm quiet happy with the following : Metal storage building could increase the fabrication rate of the factories around, this bonus would not be cumulative. You like it ?
I find them quite useful for bigger projects. Say you want to get an advanced sat done in a few seconds and send a fabber swarm to it. that can get your metal rate to -500.
Ok so I was thinking about it and metal storage is in itself an inefficient thing to be building – you should be using up all of your metal at any time and allowing storage to fill up is not as efficient as spending it immediately. Even if reclaim gets fixed and you have opportunities to get large swings, you should easily be able to plunge all of that metal into something before you fill up your starting storage. How about each metal storage you build boosts the % of reclaimable material you can scavenge from wreckages? As the game goes on and battlefield wreckages get bigger and have greater importance, so does the need to have additional storages for the larger buffer space and to get more metal out of the reclaim fields you successfully take control of. Also if wreckages can be reclaimed really quickly à la supcom then you actually kinda need the buffer space.
hi there, I must admit I also would like to see some change for the metalstorage like most of u guys mentioned before .. I would like to know what Ubers aim is for the wreckage at all (so I posted a question regarding wreckage in the latest invitation for the upcoming livestream in the "general-forum") .. maybe a sort of reclaiming were it is NOT a constant stream of metal/energy u get by it .. but a big energy/metal plus when your unit has finished reclaiming? @ZaphodX I like your casts very much and watched your latest one a minute ago ... so I think a "qucik" metalstorage would have helped you in your beginning when u were looking for a suitable place to build ;-) ... PS: a storage at minute 15+ would have also helped you PPS: .. and listen to yourself at minute 22:03 .. keep up the good streams ! moldez
Zaphod, your attitude is not contributing to this conversation. Good job, you're a good player, but there is no need to be name calling or posturing over "weak" players. In a game that requires your attention in so many places at once, there are many times a metal buffer is very useful. If you don't think that it is useful, don't use metal storage. If you do build them, it's not like you are wasting thousands of metal; they are cheap anyway. About bonuses for production or reclaiming: those type of dynamics aren't how this game works. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is not a single "build this and get +#% effect for X unit" currently in the game or planned. Those types of bonuses do not belong in a game of this scale. Unit veterancy was taken out for similar reasons. That being said, wreckage does not seem fully implemented yet. In TA, scores of units were preserved after large battles and it could make pathfinding a bear if you tried to take the same path twice. This dynamic needs to be reimplemented, because it allows reclaiming to be useful and presents obstacles for continued attack from one front. IMO, metal storage is fine the way it is, but it does seem that wreckage needs to be a bit more resistant so it hangs around a bit longer to make full use of metal storage.
You can't match production and consumption levels of metal. Every time a unit build cycle completes or a building build cycle completes, you have a momentary surplus which spikes your reserves and then goes to waste. Likewise, if your are always building in a deficit, you are also being inefficient. The best case scenario is that your production levels bounce both your energy and metal stores between zero and max without ever letting it hit either. That's not possible without storage.
your 'momentary' factory production is only apparent in the very early game with only a few factories. once you get into the higher factory counts of 20-30, it really does not matter. why? because NONE of the factories are synced. it really is weak play if you are storing metal. there is good reason why nobody at the top builds metal storage at all, and thats because it is literally a useless building. The idea that your engineers moving to a new project causes metal overflow is also silly. Your factory output should be above your metal income, so regardless of engineers moving, you should never be going positive.
Storage is a late game feature, imo. In a circumstance where your infrastructure is mostly complete, and all attempts at gaining more metal would result in conflict, if you are producing just enough units to where you're metal production is at a slight positive, then storage becomes important for emergencies. That tier 2 defense tower, that last stretch to finish a nuke; it's in these situations that you want some stores of resources so you can defend or counter. But like I said, late game only.
The goal is 100% metal efficiency. The inefficiency you are referring to in the first quoted sentence is build efficiency, which doesn't matter as much. Better to have 10 factories making tanks at 80% speed than 5 factories making tanks at 100% speed while wasting metal.
