Energy vs Metal shortage penalty

Is it documented somewhere the exact penalties for energy and metal shortages?

If you don't have enough metal, does that reduce your energy usage - or does the extra energy get wasted?
(and reverse)

I know a few bits and pieces, but not the specifics, and not the total picture.
I know radar and defenses are impacted by energy shortage.

Thanks!

Not having enough metal does not effect your energy usage.

If you have positive metal or positive energy, that does get wasted and thrown out into the nothingness of space.

So ideally you want to have a barely positive economy so you aren't wasting too much of your economy. But you don't want to have a negative economy with no storage, because that severely hurts your production power.

I think it's something like half as fast if you don't have enough of either resource and no stockpile?

you don't need to think, you can know https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-economic-efficiency-ui-mod.52613/

Currently in PA:
If you stall on metal your constructors will still drain full amount of energy which in turn means that you waste energy as you could otherwise have
If you stall on energy your build rate will go down with it but you won't actually waste metal like you waste energy when you stall on metal.
Your radars might go offline and your bombers might reload more slowly though when you stall on energy.

As a general rule:Balance your economy and always expand your economy(builders, factories, Metal EXtractors, power plants). Try to keep metal slightly on the plus without ever filling up to full. Use 1 or 2 energy storages to control the high fluctuations of energy consumption and try to not fill up the energy bar completely in early- and mid-game. Small stalls are acceptable. Late game, have some excess power to account for sudden gains of reclaim, massive build-projects, and Advanced Metal Extractors coming online.

There are other structures that rely on energy right now. Currently I believe Catapults, the laser satellites, and stingrays all use energy. Uber has also stated that all defensive structures will use energy in the future.

WHICH IS GOOD, btw.

I still have not seen the exact penalty of shorting a supply.

Specifically for start of game, it seems people prefer builds that lead to early energy shortage.

If you are attempting to use 1000 energy, but only produce 500 - what does that mean exactly?
(2 different examples - with full metal and with half metal)

Does anyone know the fastest builder order to get out .. say 2 bot fabricators and 3 dox and 1 air scout?

Build orders are still in a very primitive stage at the moment. But what I've seen most people do is like 2 mex, 2 en, 1 mex, 1 en then factory. It leads to an early energy shortage but it doesn't last more than a few seconds until the first energy is done.

Check out this thread for discussion on opening builds.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/what-is-everyones-opening-build.53181/

Bunch of suggestions and builds there.

3 metal, 1 energy, 1 metal, 1 energy, bot factory.
Then 5 fabricators, 5 doxes, 100 fabricators.
My first 2 fabbers build metal, 3rd assists commander building energy, 4th assists first two fabbers, 5th build air factory then bot factories.

Some people go 3 metal, 1 energy, factory. I find that often leads to economy stalls.

It's also common for other variations like 3 metal, 1 energy, 1 metal, factory.

Some people will even build energy storage before the first factory, but I tend to find that building 2 energy plants before the first factory is enough to have a stabilized economy.

Once your storage runs empty your economy will "stall" as you try to use more resources than you produce. In this case all your production will be halved. Your metal usage will also be halved.
I'm not sure how weapon and radar energy uses affects this but I think that weapons will rearm more slowly while draining less energy.

It doesn't matter if your metal storage is filled or half empty.
A good analogy is a bucket with a tap in the bottom.
Your economy production is basically how much water you have flowing into to the bucket. When it is full the bucket will overflow and your excess will be wasted.
The size of the tap on the bottom is basically determined by how many fabrication units you have. If you have many fabrication units you can empty the bucket quickly and when the bucket is empty fabrication units will use resources at the rate at which you produce resources and this is called a "stall".

My buildorder to get 1 air factory and 1 land factory up and running is 3 mex, 1 powerplant, airfactory, 1 powerplant, 1 mex, land factory.

Reading this thread its pretty obvious that the game (by default) needs a much better economy UI that tells the player exactly what happens when they stall on something or they have an excess of something.

What does that mean? I'm an engineer. I need numbers. Words frighten and confuse me.

Isn't it good to waste your excess? It means when someone takes out a powerplant, you don't have to fix all your build orders accordingly?

If you ever fill your storage then you are throwing away resources for no gain. If your opponent isn't in excess then all their resources are going into stuff to kill you rather than lost to the aether.

Yes. But if you are producing the same amount of combat units as your opponent, you just need to destroy one economic structure to halve his production time. Your income just needs to be small and positive (say, less than +4) and that gives you much greater ability to deal with a crisis.

The actual maths, only talking about tier 1 technology, considering only the part of the economy related to the surplus, not the rest of it (I.e. its a longer game where both players have expanded to the point that every metal spot is built on, this is just a small snap shot.)

Tier 1 vehicle factory costs 15 metal per second. Three tier one vehicle factories cost 7 metal extractors. At this stage I have +4 metal per second.

The opponent has 7 metal extractors, 3 factories, one Tier 1 constructor. Income is -6 per second. Assuming we both have exactly 100% storage, if we both destroy one metal extractor in a random raid, I have twice as much time to produce units. He has to halt his fabber to have the same income, so whatever it is doing has to have more utility than having the same number of units as me when his storage is at zero, but half the production capacity.



What are the numbers? If you're in deficit, does getting one fabber to produce one mex cost the same amount of time as getting 100 fabbers to produce the mex?

If you're in deficit then putting more engineers on a mex build gives it more build priority to finish quicker and start producing mass earlier. During the build your factories will be slightly slower (Doesn't matter - you want the mex out quicker).

If you ever have mass in storage then that is mass that is not a unit that would be winning you map control. If you ever get to full storage then you throw away eco that your opponent is putting into tanks. Every second you are full on storage your opponent builds more tanks and dominates you more and more.

Read this:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-economy-factsheet-for-new-improving-players.52514

Let me try to explain it in a weird way, maybe it helps:
E := amount of energy per tick you generate, depends on the amount of energy generators you have
M := amount of mass per tick you generate, depends on the amount of mexes you have
e[x] := amount of energy x drains per tick (x is a production unit and can be a fabber, commander or factory)
e_req[x] := energy required for x to spend up to m_max mass per tick
m[x] := amount of mass x drains per tick (x is a production unit and can be a fabber, commander or factory)
m_max[x] := maximum amount of mass x can spend per tick
eff[x] := m[x]/e_req[x], efficiency of x, e_req[x] := required energy by x per tick
eff_max[x] := maximum efficiency of x
mcost[x] := mass required to build x
ecost_min[x, y1...,yn] := mcost[x]/average(eff_max[y1],...,eff_max[yn]), minimum amount of energy required to let y1,...,yn build x

E and M are divided as equally as possible among x1,...,xn. So, if E = 10.000 and you have 5 active production units they all can spent up to 2.000 energy per tick. The same is true for mass.

An eco stall is defined as: stall = E< sum(e_req[1],...,e_req[n]) M < sum(m_max[1],...,m_max[n])

If your eco stalls your production units get less mass or energy per tick than they could use/need which makes them less efficient.


Let's take a look at the t1 fabrication bot building a t1 mex as an example (I hope I got the values right):
m_max[t1 fab bot] = 10
e_req[t1 fab bot] = 1.000
eff_max[t1 fab bot] = 0.01
mcost[t1 mex] = 300
ecost_min[t1 mex, t1 fab bot] = 30.000

So, on it's own the fab bot would need at least 300 mass, 30.000 energy and 30 ticks to do build a t1 mex. If E drops below 1.000 or M drops below 10 the building process will be delayed and the fabrication bot will become less efficient.

Let's assume M = 10, E = 500:
In that case the fab bot needs to wait 2 ticks to gather the necessary 1.000 energy to spend 10 mass, so the construction time increases from 30 to 60 ticks. But since M is still 10 you create an overflow of 5 mass per tick. eff[t1 fab bot] stays at 0.01

Let's assume M = 5, E = 1000
In that case the fab bot can only spend 5 mass per tick but still needs 1.000 energy to do so which not only increases the construction time from 30 to 60 ticks but also virtually increases the energy cost of the t1 mex from 30.000 to 60.000. No energy overflow is generated instead eff[t1 fab bot] drops to 0.005.

That's not entirely true. If you're outproducing him(Say you have 50 mex to his 30), if you have a surplus you're not hurting yourself. You can still make more tanks than he does even if you're losing some of your excess to the aether.

The point where you hurt yourself is when you have more production than him but you're not making use of it. Mex is unlimited, as long as you're making more tanks than he is, how much is being wasted is irrelevant.

(The kicker is you don't know how many tanks he's making so you should try to use all of your economy anyway, but it's not an absolute that you're automatically losing if you aren't using everything to it's fullest.)

That's a little pedantic, of course you could be playing inefficiently and wasting mass all over the place but still win because they are magnitudes worse. That doesn't really prove anything other than you can play bad and still beat really bad players. If you play like that against a player evenly matched against you then on average your lose rate will become quite significant.

Right. I'm not saying wasting metal is a good thing. but it's not "if you're wasting metal you automatically lose"