The Leveler

I'm a bit out of date. I can't find evidence that this happened. Did it?

Not that I know of.

If I were to add my Two cents, I like flat balancing.

Command and conquer red alert two had an okay balance sheet but it was diverse and specialized in higher tiers that made the basic units still usable with advanced. I feel like everyone just wants advanced units but not an advanced unit that outright wins against basic because its a sheer upgrade

An example would be a
grizzly tank 700$
Basic good versus everything
Prism advanced tanks $1200
Advanced only really good versus building and def

It wasn't the most perfect balance but if you rushed a bunch of grizzly tanks to attack a bunch of prism tanks you could still beat it. It was the extra specialization that made the advanced unit comparable. And since it was an advanced unit it still was awesome to have as a higher tier unit.

I guess you can throw me into the boat of preferred flat balancing.

I think the best way to put it is that advanced units should generally be less cost efficient then standard units, but if the advanced units are used the way they are meant to be, then they have potential to be far more cost efficient then basic units.

A great example is the sharpshooter from TA. If you had them distributed within your main force, they would die too soon to pay for them selves. However if you kept them out of danger and scouted out with other units, they had potential to pay for them selves many times over.

To me, this is what the majority of advanced units should be like.

That's exactly what I ment. But there could also be specialized advanced units that are especially good against basic units, but not against much else. I just wanted to mention that it's possible, not necessary.

What's the problem with that? It means that it forces you to go T2 at some point. All that does is to prevent you from going basic units all game long (which is good). It didn't tell anything about which units you're going to build.

Also it means that you're going to need more time to get to the higher tiers. And that's also a good thing imo.

I think we are kinda in a contest here yelling "The sky is blue!" "noo, the sky has clouds in it!" back and forth... it seems we agree on unit balance tbh.

That's my problem right there. You don't understand that so I'm not going to argue with you.

How do you reconcile your earlier statement (page 6), above, with your statement earlier on this page, quoted below:

You cannot actually have it both ways. Do the advanced units lose for cost? Or are they superior for cost, and you are forced to build them in the late game?

You actually can have it both ways.
Advanced units should lose for cost, but should be superior for cost in special cases (like in the right unit composition).

Now I'm only talking about troops. I wouldn't apply the same system to economic structures.
Yes there can be specialized eco-structures in T2 and above, but they should be strictly better than their T1 counterparts imo.

For example a huge solar power plant orbiting a sun should be more cost efficient than any lower tier eco-structures. But in this case it's also more difficult to defend.

So you basically disagree with your own position that advanced units should be 'upgrades' and instead say that they should be specialists, and therefore only situationally superior. And also situationally inferior to basic units. Because if they are flat-out superior, it makes the unit roster boring. You just always use the superior units.

The same principle actually also applies to economic structures. It should be a strategic decision whether or not to invest in infrastructure, not just an obvious, mandatory upgrade. And as a result a flat increase in metal income is extremely hard to implement in such a way that the player isn't just always going to upgrade. It's very difficult to create a simple system that 'specializes' or otherwise creates disadvantages for something as fundamental as increased metal income.

This is actually why overdrive is so clever; infrastructure development and expansion are now integrally related. If you have a huge investment in developing a small area, your incentive to expand becomes tremendous. And vice versa, if you control a huge amount of land but are not overdriving much, building energy to overdrive becomes more economical.

With a moho mex, you have a flat cost which yields a flat increase in metal income. It's just linear scaling of the economy size after a fixed investment. Just like how upgraded units are linearly scaled improvements after a fixed investment in the advanced production infrastructure.

You "upgrade" your army with specialized, higher tier units.
The units themselves aren't upgrades of lower-tier units.

And I don't see a problem with being forced to upgrade my economy.
It means that you can't stay on T1 forever. And that's good to prevent, because it would take a lot of skill out of this game if that were the case.

I make a difference between troops and eco-structures. The eco-structures are just a means to increase your unit production.

And what do you suggest instead? That if I go all the steps necessary to finally be able to build a solar power plant, maybe I'm even forced to build it in orbit, shoot it towards the sun, let it work there and protect it with orbital defences, that it won't even be more cost efficient than T1 power plants? I just wouldn't go through the trouble. So I don't see any alternative than to make it more cost efficient.

Obviously you are forced to increase your economy. However the way to do this is to build more of it, not to build more efficient versions of economy structures.

I would much rather there were no advanced mex, because it forces players to expand and fight over more land, especially in the late game when large economies are involved that cover large amounts of land.

If you want to be able to construct large individual economic structures, go right ahead. Such structures should have higher output and be more expensive, but not substantially more efficient without significant other downsides. However I think this concept applies much better to energy structures than to mexes, because you can already build energy anywhere. Having a few different scales of energy creation is fine because the difference in scale doesn't have a huge effect on the amount of land you need to contest.

Metal is such a fundamental resource that it makes sense to simplify how it can be collected, and to avoid metal makers and upgraded mexes. The need for metal should drive players to expand and to fight, without having variability of efficiency for different ways metal can be gained. A larger mex is massively better than a smaller mex because it occupies a single mex spot, and the mex spot is in many ways the most limited and critical resource in the game.

Yeah, downsides like having to defend it orbiting around the sun. I think that can be tradeoff enough (if you balance it right). I don't know. I'm just fine with how T2 is atm (not with the units, but with the eco system).

How often do I have to say that having T2 mexes in no way decreases your desire to expand and to fight, because having 10 T2 mexes will always be inferior to having more than 10 T2 mexes, no matter how you hold it.

It maybe delays it for a short while, but that's it.

Obviously, but you're missing the point.

The point is the comparison between the T1 mex and the T2 mex with four times the yield. If possible, you should always build the T2 mex on every metal spot because it produces four times as much metal.

Comparing a smaller number of mex spots to a larger number of mex spots misses the point entirely, because basic mexes have exactly the same dynamic. But if you have a bunch of basic mexes, you have the option of building T2 mexes instead of expanding further. In fact, building the T2 mexes means you don't have to control more territory, you don't have to risk expanding, and you don't have to defend more space.

If you already have nothing but T2 mexes, having more T2 mexes is obviously better. But that misses the point entirely. Designing the game around basic mexes produces exactly the same dynamic of incentivizing expansion, but does it sooner, with a smaller total investment in extractors, and over more surface area.

Yeah, but you have no alternative.

I don't see why it is so important to prevent T1 eco-structures from becoming obsolete later in the game.
I mean, we all love the T1 power plants. But I don't mind if it's only place is in the early game.

The tradeoff of removing the T2 eco structures would be, like I already said, being forced to "flatten" the unit roaster, taking away progression in favor of adjusting unit costs more to eachother.

It would certainly require you less time to get to T2 and higher tiers because of that. Making units available more quickly.

And here:

I already explained why I wouldn't want that. And with Galactic-War I was referring to the 40 player "event" multiplayer matches that await us.
So if you have a good alternative, I'm eager to listen.
But atm I don't see one.

The best alternative I have seen is implemented in Zero-K in a feature called overdrive.

Mex overdrive allows you to spend your excess energy to increase the output of your mexes. However, the amount of extra metal varies with the square root of the amount of energy put into each mex. This means extractor output increases in the late game without using a completely different or upgraded structure, and retains the incentive of expanding instead of tending toward passive play.

As a result of the diminishing returns of heavily overdriving only a few mexes, players must still expand. Adding additional mexes to your economy will then share the energy more evenly across all your mexes, resulting in significantly increased metal income.

Instead of building metal makers or moho mexes, you construct large-scale energy production. The effect of this is that you can reduce an enemy's metal income by destroying their mexes, and the first mex lost hurts the most. It also creates the surgical-strike option to destroy high value energy targets which will be in well-defended areas.

Under an overdrive economy, you always want to be stalling on metal and excessing energy. You obviously have to have enough energy to cover any energy expenses, such as production, weapons etc. But excess energy is actually very useful because it goes towards mex overdrive.



And I think it should be obvious that making a tiered economy is what really makes seeing big units "not special" any more, because the upgraded units will always appear in any game that goes on long enough. If anything, those units are more "special" in a game like Zero-K, where you have a great deal of freedom to choose units based on personal preference instead of by baked-in tech levels.

Case in point: SupCom had a LOT of every tech level get built, and a lot of experimentals actually get built. Because doing so is just a fact of the progression through the tech tree, and it is the exact same every time. Even on lower tech levels, both sides anticipate the other increasing in tech level because that is obviously the next step for unit and economy progression in every single game.

Well, I think the advantages of having T2 eco like it is now prevail the disadvantages.
I mean I don't see a reason to complain that you have to build T2 mexes every game, in order to progress.
You could also say that you're forced to build T1 mexes and power plants every game. Following your logic, that would be a problem. Because you obviously don't want to be forced to doing anything. But I don't see how one can prevent that without turning this into some kind of tower-defence arcade-game where you can build blue metal extractors, shooting ice, red metal extractors shooting fire, and white metal extractors shooting electricity.

The mechanic you mentioned is indeed well thought out. But it didn't answer my question on why eco-structures, that you have a harder time building/progressing to than the T1 ones, shouldn't be more cost efficient. Else, what is your reason to building them?

He went away, had a couple of drinks, decided he was doing really well, finished a bottle of spirits with close friends, and then started deriving under the influence.

So his friends, being engineers as well, found out what it was that had caused him to commit such a terrible deed, and then joined him for a couple more until everyone had forgotten about everything.

Stop an engineer deriving drunk - Legend.