Energy vs Metal shortage penalty

Fantastic, now you're speaking my language! Sorry - for me numbers aren't weird, if I can build a mathematical model I see stuff a lot easier.

Can I just check I have this correct:

As displayed in the UI, your energy is the difference between E (your total energy production) and sum e[x] (the total energy used)

So if all of your power generators are destroyed, M = 10, E = 0.

You generate 1000 energy from your commander.

In reality, M = 10, E = 1000.

Have I got this right -

Let's assume you get 367 fabbers to construct mex

Your energy is -10000. Each fabber can use 2.72 energy per tick.

One fabber requires 10/2.72 = 3.67 ticks to spend 10 mass. The build time will be 30*3.67, so 110 ticks.

But there are 367 fabbers working together, so it will take 0.3 ticks?

If you double your fabbers,your energy is negative 20000, each fabber can only use 1.36 energy per tick. 7.35 ticks to spend 10 mass. Build time will be 220 ticks. But 734 fabbers working on the same project, so again, 0.3 ticks construction time.

And clearly that means one fabber will take 110 ticks? (just assume the energy cost from the other 366 fabbers is taken up by radar)


The actual negative value in your HUD is purely indicative of what the sum of e[x] is for all x, not indicative of the build efficiency of any particularly project.

Basically my plan is to turn this into a pretty spreadsheet/graph to alleviate the confusion.

Ok

I understand how the economy works now. With this thread, and with the UI mod.

I didn't realise that you aren't actually negative economy, but just less than 100% efficiency. So I didn't realise that the logical extension of that was that 4 buildings running at 95% was better than 3 running at 100% - I thought when you were negative, all of your buildings would run at 50% efficiency, so that it was actually 4 running at 50%, or 4 would run at 75%.


Sorry, my fault for not examining the numbers, but trying to follow the verbal arguments. Thank you for clarifying.

nearly.

It still depends to what extent.

Not sure about your level, but at my level, wasting metal can lose me the game.

Well comparing the competitive levels and the casual levels will always produce different results.

Since taking what I said the wrong way seems to be the order of the day, let me clarify.

The game does not immediately end when you waste metal.

When you have excess metal, what do you do? Build factories.

But your commander will not explode if you're wasting metal for like 10 seconds.

STALLING DOES NOT MEAN YOUR BUILD RATE IS REDUCED TO HALF
Where are you people getting this crazy idea from?

Here is, what I think, is the best way to sum up engineers.
A project will finish if and and only if its entire metal cost has been paid(output).
If you are stalling on metal, an engineer will output metal into a project in the following manner:
(amount of metal fabber would like to build with)*((Total metal coming into your economy)/(Total metal being requested out of your economy))
So, metal is distributed equally based on how much you want it and how much there is to go around.

If you're stalling on energy then the same principle is applied, except energy is distributed(rationed) and metal is spent based on the energy costs of operating that fabber.
Ex: It costs 1000E/s to run a fabber, and the fabber gets only 500E/s as dictated by the equation above. You can only spend (500E/s)/(1000E/s)=1/2 your optimal metal output.

If you are stalling on both then it depends on which one is more stalled and the other is distributed accordingly.

No one is saying "Your commander will explode if you're wasting metal for like 10 seconds."
What's they're saying is even though the game doesn't show the "post-game screen", you've already lost anyway, it will just come later.

See I really don't agree. There's much more at stake than 'wasting metal' when it comes to losing. If your metal is capped out it could mean many things. You have idle factories, you have idle engineers, you don't have enough production.

Yes, those things together for long enough can lose you the game, but suddenly capping out metal and needing to build more production is not game over.

It could be that you've just got a bunch of new MEX online and suddenly you're flooded. That does not mean you've lost.

If you were to read the rest of the thread, where someone gives me the equation, and we solve it, we find that yes, your statement in red is correct and incorrect, depending on the case.

The incorrect case lies in your proof, where you show that for specific values, the build rate will be half.

The issue lies with the argument. People are trying to express something which is purely mathematical using words. I got the crazy idea that a stall automatically resulted in half build rate from someone's post where they explained the system without stating specific numbers, or showing the formula (Answer only). The UI doesn't help, the economy UI mod increased my understanding exponentially, along with this thread.

Terminology doesn't help either. If you stall your car, the engine stops running.

If your metal extraction is very slightly negative, it just means your economy is running at 95% efficiency. That's not a stall. That's less than optimal.

Therefore I believed that it was true that your build rate is reduced to 50% regardless of the specific values of the stall.

There's also an additional issue with the argument.

If player A has 3 factories running at 100%, that's clearly better than 3 factories running at 99.%. (3 > 2.whatever)

If player A has 4 factories running at 76%, that's clearly better than 3 factories running at 100%. (3.whatever > 3)

For the latter case, so long as player A doesn't increase his factories to 6 running at 50%, he will always be better off than the other player running 3 at 100%.

The issue with the argument is that its focusing on the interplay between factories and metal/energy storage, when in fact it should be focusing on your factories, their efficiency, and your metal or energy production.

At the end of the day, that's all the argument is arguing for. It's arguing for having more effective factories than your opponent. And that's just common sense. The argument has been needlessly complicated into talking about storage when that isn't the main point of the argument.


(where an effective factory is the number of factories you have * the efficiency they are running at)

Current optimal economic play is having almost zero metal in storage, almost zero energy in storage and having all your fabbers either working on a project or walking to their next project.

However even a perfect plan that optimizes production as the economy grow can and will be disrupted as you confront your enemy.

There are 3 basic resources in PA.
Build rate(potential metal output by fabrication units, factories and whatnot)
Metal
Energy

All these 3 can be lumped together as infrastructure.

Build rate is a local resource. Only active fabrication units provide it and you have to trade it for distance as fabbers walk between projects. A metal or energy stall means that your build rate goes down on all active fabbers.
Metal is a global resource that is very much linked to how much territory you control as mexes can only be built on metal spots/patches.
Energy is a global resource which is not really limited. You can build power plants closely bunched together all over the system or use orbiting solar arrays.

In order to expand your production you need infrastructure, you need to pay for the fabber or factory providing the build rate, you need to pay for the metal extractor providing the metal and you need to pay for the power plant providing the energy.
If you have 10 metal production and want it to produce something you can calculate the combined infrastructure cost. This combined cost varies depending on what you want to produce. Producing t1 airplanes is more expensive than producing t1 vehicles as the airfactory is more expensive and requires more energy than the vehicle factory.

Providing the energy infrastructure to support construction is generally more expensive than providing build rate or metal production so initially you want to avoid excessing energy while excessing metal or build rate is more acceptable .
However as fabbers have to walk further and further away to produce mexes and the acquisition of territory becomes harder and harder as the conflict escalates and the battlelines hardens, metal do become the bottleneck resource that should not be wasted willingly.
Providing excess amount of fabbers might however be a good idea as it gives local production capabilities and allows you to prioritize wanted projects or erect defences rapidly.

TLDR
Striking the optimal balance between metal usage, factories and fabbers and power plants is hard and can sometimes be impossible due to the unpredictable nature of your opponent.
Expanding quickly and securing territory is something that you should do as fast possible and then it might not matter that you waste some metal in the process until your energy production can catch up to your metal production.

Well, if you want to be pedantic about it sure, under very specific and rare circumstances your build rate is cut in half.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean when you talk about efficiency of factories, here's why:

Let's say both you and your opponent have a net income of 10m/s and infinite energy(usually referred to as equal economies)
Your opponent is using 1 factory to build bots, and the net drain on his economy is 10m/s(including roll off time)
Now, you're using 10 factories to build bots.
In this case your opponent has 100% efficient factories, clearly better than your factories.
Here is the problem though:
By the time your opponent's factory finishes making it's 10th bot, all of your factories will finish their 1st bot, and you will both have 10 bots. The only difference being that your opponent had 9 bots while you had none for some span of time.
The other consequence of this is that more of your economy is directed towards bots. So, say you are both trying to build turrets in the field. Your turrets will take way longer to build than your opponents.
Given that this is an extreme case to show my point, if you have equal economies and 1 more factory than your opponent, that's not a very big deal.

You just described one reason why it is important to talk about efficiency use of factories.
In terms of build rate efficiency, using all the fabbers and factories efficiently, a stall is a bad idea as you simply are wasting build rate as you simply could have spent less resources on fabbers or factories or your fabbers could be walking to the next metal spot instead of spending time unnecessarily building other stuff while stalling.
However it can be acceptable to waste some build rate in a minor stall or have some excess fabbers ready to start working compared to storing a lot of metal or wasting metal.

Edit:

It should be excluding. The average net drain will be less than 10 metal per second with roll-off time considered.

I guess I understand what you're talking about. I look at it a different way than you do. I just sort of have an idea of how much I spending, where and on what. Then I decide what I need to do, what's more important and how many fabbers I need to allocate to get it done in an acceptable amount of time. I don't want my decisions governed by a percentage at the top of my screen.

That's what I wanted to say though. Including roll off time the net drain on the eco is 10m/s, just for simplicity.

My thoughts are you aren't penalized enough for crashing....... seems like twenty fab in a crashed eco build faster than one with resources to burn. I haven't actually timed it but that's how it seems and that just shouldn't be that way.I feel that you should make essentially no progress when this happens.

Thing is unless you're actually at 0 income you're still making progress. The economy doesn't shut down(some defenses do, but not the entire network), it just runs at a percentage of capacity, until the resources to run at full capacity are available.

So if you have two factories at 75%(It's easier to see this percentage with the economy mod), they're not running at half speed or 10% speed or whatever, they're running at 75% capacity, because that's what they have resources for.

As you get more energy and more metal, that percentage will rise until you're running at full capacity, 100%.

Your economy doesn't 'stall', it just slows down more and more the less resources you have available. (Stall implies it stops completely, which it doesn't).

I am really opposed to this sort of punishment. Currently a stall can be dealt with "easily" by stopping production. Even if a stall is much more punishing than now, players can simply avoid it by turning stuff off.

In my opinion the economy should be as simple as possible to manage but offer as many viable choices as possible.
So if you can't fuel laser turrets, rearming aircraft, heavy weapon systems, radar, air production, land production and your ubergun at the same time then it should be easy to prioritize what you think is most important.

ummmm...... what happened here??? I'm not suggesting some strange change, just that when you stall you actually stall. I stop fabbers currently to come out of a crash. What strange mechanic was misinterpreted as my suggestion.........

Currently in PA when you stall your economy do really "stall". At least according to the meaning it had in Total Annihilation and SupCom.
Actually I would like a metal stall to be less punishing by having the energy expense for production go down like your metal usage when your build rate efficiency decreases during the stall like it did in TA and SupCom.