Def Tower Poll

Your arguments are usually well reasoned but I find it ridiculous you are talking about this as fact. You have no idea how much energy it might take to fire defences, yet you state it will be possible to support a tremendous amount of turrets. If you have a massive energy surplus wasting energy and investing metal into those power generators then you are playing inefficiently, desperately hoping for the opponent to attack to make your investment worthwhile. If your opponent is sending all those resources into proactive investments then they'll have more eco/units that actually help them.

A robust energy economy means you have a large income and a large expenditure. Growing your income by building more energy enables you to increase your expenditure, such as by constructing more build power. And a larger gross energy income lets you distribute more energy however you like; meaning you will prioritize certain activities over other. And obviously weapons is a high-priority application because nonfunctional weapons means you are going to lose units and turrets for free. Consequently, you will ensure you have a sufficiently robust economy that you can power your weapons whenever necessary.

Whatever the cost to fire a turret or other unit is, it makes sense to have such a robust economy that your gross energy income makes the cost to fire your weaponry relatively negligible.

Suppose we are talking about a Bertha, which costs a very large amount of energy to fire in TA (2000 energy). You will only build a Bertha when you have a sufficiently robust energy economy that you can afford to fire it. In TA, this meant at least one fusion.

Likewise, if some of your energy is destroyed (say, you lose a fusion) you will have to disable some metal makers, but you are not going to cut weapons power for assets in use unless you have absolutely no choice. Your large global pool lets you keep your Bertha online at the expense of whatever else you deem of lower priority, anywhere else on the entire board.

Perhaps I'm not understanding you but it sounds like you think you should have a massive surplus of completely wasted energy to cope with the times you get attacked and need to expend energy for your defences to fire.

Very few have stumbled upon the actual point here, that base defenses are not mobile. What does this actually mean?

Let's say we take a base, think of it as a circle, and slice it into pizza slices. Each of these slices represent an area where the enemy can attack. Each slice is the size of what a tower can reach. Now, how many slices there are depends on the base size and how far out the defenses are put, but 4-8 slices are reasonable for early game. Let's say 6 on average. That means that one tower can defend 1/6th of the base from enemies, and, this is the important part, it can't be moved to react to attacks from different sides, compared to a unit based defense.

So, for a tower to be balanced in this scenario, barring any other modifier, it should be six times as strong as units for the same resource cost. If it's weaker, and the turtler have built an even wall around his base, you can just take the same resource cost in units and pile on one slice and beat through. And the turtler would be better off making units and send them to defend the base.

An important thing to note here is that the base defenses are stronger the smaller the base is, and inversely gets weaker the bigger the base. Theoretically that should mean that the defenses get considerably weaker as the game progresses, or the turtler have to limit his base size (and thus resources, and production capability) to keep up the effectiveness. Both scenarios seem to eventually put him at a disadvantage.

I don't know how turrets compare with units in strength per resource right now, though. So hard to answer the question.

There's of course also other questions involved, like firing range, and walls. And to be honest, I don't have enough experience with that to give a good assessment. This comment is solely on defense tower strength vs unit strength.

Not exactly. Although you would increase your standing energy production marginally (and then spend it) to compensate for expected additional expenditures, that isn't the main difference.

The turret has a fixed energy cost to fire. As a result, a player with a larger economy cares less about the turret's firing cost.

A turret that costs 10 energy to fire has quite a different significance between a player both earning and spending 1K energy and a player earning and spending 1 million energy. The player with the larger, and more robust energy economy simply doesn't care about the cost to fire the turret. Even a lot of such turrets just doesn't factor into a robust energy economy's balance sheet. Sure, it will mean a little bit of something else that wasn't as important didn't get quite as much energy, but that really is just the cost of doing business.

Because you can build an unlimited amount of energy, and it doesn't matter where you construct it, there is nothing stopping you from having as much energy production as you can possibly spend. And then you spend it all.

Consequently, if you have such a large energy economy, it no longer makes sense to talk about making the enemy unable to fire their weapons. There's nothing you can do to them that will make them unable to shoot.

I think polls like this should at least wait until we get some more units. I agree at the minute they are well over powered but A slow moving t1 artillery with low hp is all that's needed really.

To completely surround your base is not necessary. All you need to do is defend key expansions, scout his attacks and deploy accordingly.

How I feel about the turrets, I feel like I should wait till the game gets into the balancing fase.

The only reason why this currently works is cos we have no unit transports yet. The moment they are in the game good players will always attack the weak points in your defense.

Arguing that Artillery is the way to go vs. turrets makes them a binary mechanic: either you attack with Artillery and don't take any losses, or you attack with troops and lose everything without doing any damage.
This is horrible.
I cannot understand how anyone thinks the current laser turrets are ok in terms of the damage they deal. Well, maybe they are ok and just the units need three times the hitpoints.
Fighting with and vs. defenses should be fun. Waiting for your artillery to arrive while standing around is not fun.

Laser defense towers are fine because they have a high cost, are immobile, and are easily countered. It is extremely easy to simply go around them or kill them with Shellers, Stompers, Pelters, Catapults, or Nukes.

If you are sending wave after wave of units straight at your enemy into his hardened defensive line, then you are playing Planetary Annihilation wrong.

Please read my post again. Your suggested tactics are exactly what I call horrible. It establishes the concept of hardcounters (Turrets hardcounter tanks and bots, artillery hardcounters turrets.) which I thought we wanted to avoid.

Towers behind walls should be uber strong....

Why are you not building arty just oustide his base and destroying his front lines that way? I have yet to have a turtle offer any real resistance unless I just blindly keep sending my bot armies at them..... Sure I've sent armies of 600-1000 to their death..

I wanted to see if they could break the turtle alone! they did not lol. It took me like 5 mintues to arty and nuke him into the ground though.

Also MOBILE ARTY.... if you're not good at procing.. use mobile arty it eats everything even if it is wall protected.

If 10 tanks could take out a turret behind a wall the turret would be so useless... It takes no time at all mid game to pump out armies in the 100's.. like no time..

Are you guys not littering the map with factories?\

EXPAND EXPAND EXPAND, you are a virus infect everything.

Turrets don't establish the concept of hard counters they merely make army diversity necessary. If every turret could be destroyed by every unit type games would be extremely boring.
Turret's counter slow moving, low range units, that's what they are supposed to do. But they are not a hard counter, you can still use that units to crush your opponents defense, it however will come at a horrible price, you might not be willing to pay. Not now, and most definitively not later when reclaimable wreckage is in the game. And that's exactly what forces you to make a though choice, to rely on intel so you know whether or not an attack is worth your potential loses.

Artillery on the other hand is meant to be a hard counter for turrets, turrets simply can't do anything against artillery that outranges them. But that is entirely necessary cos you need a way to force your opponent to leave his fortified base and to engage you.

Why?

I just stated... mid/mid late game pumping out 600 bots can happen in like 2-3 mintues...

Mass factories.. I mean mass them, mainly T1 factories. I prefer bots because they are fast.

And why shouldn't you be able to push out the same amount of turrets?

If anything I'd say catapults where OP.. I put 10 in my base, you are never touching it with an army again. Again however procing counters this hard.

Engies are not as efficent builders and are very prone to attack if you mass them in one area. Turrets are also stationary..

Yes tower behind a wall should be strong but they're a little to strong currently.....I must agree this poll could have waited for more updates....