The Mexes must be upgradbles.

It makes no sense to have to pick up the advanced engeniers to take them to other side off planet just to make advanced mexe,will take an eternity to arrive .

Makes a lot more sense and is much more useful to a particular basic mexe, we have the upgradble choice from basic to advanced, than have to take an engineer t2 ,and move it far away just to make a advanced mexe..

You can build advanced Mex on top of existing T1 Mex.

While it may be more convenient. it is very much not in the spirit of the game, additionally this potentially makes it important to control the ground between your mex and where you engies are.

I am actually opposed to upgrading mexes at all, using an engineer or otherwise.

The problem the moho mex is trying to solve is allowing a late game player to have more metal with the same number of metal patches, allowing economic development in a game currently in stalemate. But there are much better systems for solving that problem, other than having a different, more expensive extractor with a higher yield.

Advanced extractors naturally lead to consolidation as players build expensive mexes in territory they control. Cheap mexes is more interesting because it makes territory control more dynamic- you won't make an advanced mex in contested territory. And the contested territroy means less if you have a core territory with advanced mexes. Not to mention building advanced mexes gives you more metal with which to build more advanced mexes.

By contrast, mex overdrive actually encourages more expansion the more highly overdriven your mexes are. Distributing your excess energy over more mexes results in higher overdrive efficiency. This also solves the advantage runaway problem by imposing diminishing returns. A player with an economic advantage must spend more to increase their advantage still further. Whereas an advanced mex has a fixed cost, but an economic advantage gives you more resources with which to construct it.

It gives value to holding land and keeping it safe, other then just rebuilding the same throwaway building every time it gets killed.

Actually, if you run the numbers, it works out the same way, just with a higher level of economy.

A basic mex costs 300 and yields 7. An advanced mex costs 1200 and yields 28. Both are 42.86 mex ticks on their respective yield scale.

All you're doing is linearly scaling your economy. So the question is, do we want to encourage players to cap more mexes, or allow them to invest in higher metal production from within their controlled territory, without additional mexes?

I am aware that mex costs and yield are subject to change, but as they now stand they really do need to change. I am in favor of ditching the advanced mex entirely and just allowing the basic mex to scale directly by throwing excess energy at it. So you build extra fusions instead of building moho mexes.


Overdrive integrates and replaces both metal making and upgrading mexes. You are simultaneously encouraged both to build extra energy (just like auto-managed metal makers) and to capture more mexes (which, when overdriven enough, yield like mohos). But the mexes themselves remain inexpensive, and can be placed in contested areas.

Your economy can grow even while gaining and losing mexes because the energy infrastructure is apart from the lost cost of a dead mex. Your mex count can fluctuate independent of your energy infrastructure. Losing a mex increases your level of overdrive, and gaining a mex decreases your overdrive. Losing a moho means the cost to build it simply vanishes from the board, mitigated somewhat by reclaim.

Overdrive would also work well in conjunction with PA's new energy system of constant drain to use build power. Energy used to build (or fire weapons) cannot be used to overdrive. Your excess shrinks the more build power is simultaneously active. However instead of wild fluctuations in your energy, you get minor fluctuations in your level of overdrive.

I'm not certain I like the idea of overdrive, because it just compels people to make even more energy than they already do, and places people with less production(And less energy) even further behind than they are already with the way economy works in PA at the moment.

In my book advanced mex need to stay exactly the way they currently are. Due to their existence and the fact that they yield 3 times a much metal as basic mexes the majority of a players metal can be produced in a safe area. This doesn't only make turtling somehow viable (at least for short periods of time) but it also makes it easier for a player that lost map control to come back. You can destroy his forward basic mexes while the advanced ones in his base are safe(ish).
This doesn't make capping mexes outside of your base obsolete, they still boost your eco and give you an advantage, it's just not as big as it would be otherwise.

Overdrive is a neat concept but then again it adds more micro to the game and kinda contradicts the idea of single purpose buildings and units (hasn't neutrino said something like that?).

Overdrive gives you both options. And the weight of both options depends on your current board position. If you are highly overdriven, you badly want more mexes. And if you are highly expansive, you badly want more energy.

By contrast, advanced mexes give you a very flat positive cost-benefit exchange. You already have a mex that costs 300 and yields 7. If you spend 1200 you will increase that +7 to exactly +28. It doesn't matter how many mexes you have, how far ahead you already are economically, etc. It is a flat purchase of additional income.

You are spending metal, and getting more metal in return, at a linear rate.

The reason why this is pathological is because it will virtually always be dominant when it is available. Simply put, building 4 normal mexes will cost 1200 and yield 28. One advanced mex will do the same job for the same cost, but you only need to defend one spot.

Overdrive is completely automatic. It adds no micromanagement. Just the strategic decision of when is a good time to build more energy, and where to put it. And each of those peripheral mexes is just as profitable as any of your other mexes when overdrive is being used, unlike using advanced mexes, where they each contribute 1/4 as much compared to your "safe" advanced mexes. You need four times the land area just to match the same output, for the same cost in mexes.

And furthermore, overdrive has diminishing returns. That means when a player is behind economically, it is easier for them to catch up because the total investment required to catch up is smaller than the investment required for the player who is ahead to overdrive further. (only applies to being behind on energy; having fewer mexes is a big problem)

I don't like the more complicated overdrive mechanic is what I am going to say.

I'm sort of along these lines with how I view overdrive, and as I said above I don't like how it allows a player who's ahead to get even more ahead and the player who's behind has little chance of catching up.

I'd like the factories to be upgradable too. Why change things that worked well in SupCom? Isn't this one of the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" things?

The advanced mex is vastly, vastly worse in this regard.

A player who has more income can more easily afford the 1200 for another advanced mex. So it will finish sooner, and increase that player's income still further, making it still easier to afford another advanced mex. The advanced mex has a fixed cost. Therefore, the player with more money can build it faster, increasing their income at an increasing rate.

Overdrive has diminishing returns. That means the player who is ahead has a much harder time getting further ahead.

Making up numbers here. Suppose you and your opponent have the same number of mexes, but you are not overdriving. Your opponent is ahead of you economically, and can overdrive each of his mexes by +1 metal for some amount of energy.

In order to get +1, you need to spend the same amount on energy infrastructure that your opponent has already spent. Let's suppose that amount of metal is N.

However in order to get to +2, your opponent needs to spend twice as much as he spent to get to +1. If he spent a total of N to get to +1, he has to spend a total of 3N to get to +2 metal per mex.

Let's do the same thing again. Now you're at +1 and the enemy is at +2. You need to spend a total of 3N, but your enemy must spend a total of 7N (because 1+2+4=7) to get to +3. The enemy's income is increasing at a decreasing rate.

When you are behind, it is easier to catch up using overdrive. You cannot catch up using moho mexes.

You can. Build mexes. You're immediately caught up.

I'm fine with how they are now, but what's this overdrive you're ranting about?

I think once interplanetary and the UI smoothness required to handle multiple planets at once is fixed - including, perhaps, increasing the "snap-to" range for extractors - then going to other planets to try to catch up on resources will be more viable.

on that basis they wouldnt have been upgradable in sup com because they werent in TA

True, but it was tested and proved to work well -- let's consider it to be an improvement -- so why go back?

I just don't really like this overdrive idea. I don't think it really fits with the type of game PA is going for.

Some people dont think things worked well in SupCom (i freely admit that i had serious issues with that game). What i think was actually proven is that both approaches work. i dont think its possible to say that one is an improvement over the other from the data provided.