What units beat what?

But that's still not realistic, it's what is usually called an ideal situation. Even then it doesn't change the fact that It is the slowest and most expensive building unit, offset by the fact that you can pile a whole bunch of them into a small space because they're flying units, but in order to do so you need a very expensive support infrastructure.

So yes, that CAN be the fastest building force in the game, IF you've wasted a whole bunch of metal prior to get up not only the larger number of Air Fabbers you need but also all the extra Power you'd need to run those Air Fabbers. Otherwise they're NOT the fastest building Force at all.

Mike

Thought so. New you would agree.

Infrastructure grows over the course of a game, so it's not unrealistic to expect players may occasionally find themselves in such positions, but I agree. they shouldn't plan for it.

Addendum: You also need air superiority. AA turrets can't stop a group of fighters from swooping in and annihilating all of your build capacity in a way that wouldn't work with the slower and more expensive bombers going up against ground engineers. Your build capacity won't be very fast when it's a bunch of wrecks, and you can easily afford to sacrifice a fighter for every construction plane you bring down due to the cost ratios and the fact that there's a time cost to dead build capacity and no such time cost to dead fighters.

Clever, but so very transparent.

Heck, I'm feeling pretty good today so lets get technical to show just how much of an idea situation you need for you to be 'correct'.

Lets say our goal is to build an Orbital Launcher, now a single Advanced Air Fabber(1350 Metal) takes 6:01 to build with a Energy drain of 3600E/s. That means you need 1 Advanced Power Plant(2700 Metal) for every 1.4 Advanced Air Fabbers you use.

So to build that Orbital Factory in 10 seconds you need;

36 Advanced Air Fabbers(48,900 Metal), 26 Advanced Energy Planets(70,200 Metal) and 24 Advanced Extractors(28,800)

So in order to build an Orbital Launcher in 10 Seconds you need to spend 147,900 Metal in preparation first.

Now lets do it all again with Advanced Bot Fabricators(1000 Metal), it takes a single one 3:36 to build with an Energy Drain of 3000 Energy/s. That means you need one Advanced Energy Plant(2700 Metal) for every 1.6 Advanced Bot Fabbers you use.

So to build that Orbital Factory in 10 seconds you need;

22 Advanced Fabricator Bots(22,000 Metal), 13 Advanced Energy Plants(35,100) and 24 Advanced Extractors(28,800)
So in order to be able to build an Orbital Launcher in 10 seconds you need to spend 85,900 Metal in preparation first.

So yeah, Air Fabbers are the worst builders in terms of RAW speed, RAW efficiency and The Needed Supporting Infrastructure and are only the best IF you ignore all that important stuff.

Mike

Now lets assume, that the only space for an orbital launcher is in spot A, the fabbers are in spot B, it takes 10 seconds for the air fabbers to travel to this spot, but due to movement pathing and speed it takes the ground-based fabbers 90 seconds to travel to spot A.

So now we have the requirements of spending 147,900 metal in preperation to build the urgently required orbital launcher in 20 seconds. And 85,900 metal in preperation to build it in 100 seconds. Now let's imagine an asteroid has been detected hurtling towards the planet and will impact in 120 seconds, and that once built it takes 30 seconds to build a lander with all that build power focused on it. And 10 seconds for the commander to make it to safety and secure a clutch victory.

But i'm probably ignoring the important stuff like efficiency....

If that's really the case, and you need an orbital launcher right now or you're dead and there really is no space anywhere, then you'd just ctrl-k a building near to where your engineers are and build an orbital launcher in its place. The extra 5k mass cost incurred by self destructing a T2 factory means it's still much cheaper to use vehicles.

And if your engineers are inside a cluster of those little plateaus, and the reason the can't build it there is due to a lack of buildable space, not free buildable space?

Irregardless my point was that in certain situations efficiency and total metal cost is irrelevant to the situation.

1) "Irregardless" is not a word.

2) Your "certain situations" are ridiculous corner cases. You can concoct cases that specific to support pretty much any insane course of action. If you spot a low health enemy commander in a game you're about to lose, and the only forces you have in the area are a hundred and fifty advanced fighters, it would be the correct course of action to self-destruct all your fighters while they're flying towards the enemy ACU in the hope of killing it with the air crash damage. This doesn't mean self destructing your own fighters is a viable strategy, and using planes to gain a significant fraction of your build power is about as economically sensible as self destructing your own fighters, given how much mass it wastes.

1) Apologies Mien Grammar Fuhrer.

2) That would not be a good idea at all. In such a situation, your best strategy is to avoid being in that situation.

Economics means nothing in certain situations, was it more or less economical for the US to launch an invasion into Iraq and Afghanistan. Who cares, get your head out of your accountancy orifice.

If you need a dozen point defenses in front of your base immediately due an enemy attack inbound, you don't have time to wait for your land engineers to waddle over, this is the jobs for air fabbers. They're also great on water maps, where certain possible expansions would be cut off from your land factories, doubly so on lava maps once they are finished.

Please try actually reading my post. You were about to lose the game to something. You don't have time to build bombers. I can make up stupid situations too, you know. If you can't support your point with situations that are actually likely to come up in a game, then there's no point in building swarms of construction planes and hoping for those one-in-a-thousand situations where you'll actually need them.

It's entirely possible that you'll have engineers out of position, i've seen it countless times watching casts on you tube. Stop getting hung up on examples, and learn to read between the lines.

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I'm bored of this conversation.
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