Should metal extractors consume energy :

the strategic depth of this element in RTSs is probably even beyond my understanding.

there are SO MANY things to say about the pros and cons of E consumption for M...

...so say them! debate!

Hell No. For the same argument energy shouldn't require metal.

it shouldn't? ^^ how do you build it then?

Seriously though, energy generators require energy to produce energy currently in the game, and you can turn off their energy consumption but that would do the same to their energy production

Why does every thread have a poll now? ...

Anyways, technically metal already requires energy in order to be spent. If your metal income is much greater than your energy income, then you cannot actually spend all that metal because you don't have enough energy to power the fabbers. Essentially, this has the same effect as making mexes require energy to function, because either way, if you don't have enough energy, your metal economy suffers because of it.

I would prefer metal extractors to consume some energy, not too much but enough to be of relevance and has to be considered.
Just a personal preference.

I don't see the point. Expanding metal income already effectively costs you more energy, since all construction requires energy.

For example, fabrication bots spend 100 energy per metal. Adding a new metal extractor for +7 metal/second already means you'd better add 700 energy/second if you want to fund a fabrication bot to actually use that metal. Double that if you're using fabrication aircraft.

Adding a straight energy cost to the extractor itself seems redundant.

only a Bit, like in FA(F)

Both metal and energy producers require an input of resources. After that, for all intents and purposes, they don't require energy or metal.

You're making them consume energy per tick, as opposed to a 1 off investment for an increased return.

Sure, energy generators consume energy. But they produce more than they consume.

You do electricity? The energy generator can just be represented by a Thevenin Equivalent Circuit, where it has 0 energy consumption, 600 energy production and you turn off energy production, not consumption. As far as the player is concerned, it's exactly the same system, and they don't even need any understanding that a p-gen consumes energy.

It's fake complexity. Sure, every mex now needs a p-gen to run. Which means for every mex you build, you just build a p-gen. All it does is slow the game down. You may as well say it consumes no power and has the power supply integrated into the structure.
There's also the natural complement to this - it should cost a given amount of metal per tick to produce energy. And now the system has cancelled itself out and is at equilibrium, once again.

Solar, wind, tidal power wouldnt use metal to generate power. But oh, wait, theyre not in .

The pgen is (I assume) some kind of fusion or fission reactor. Latter needs an initial charge of whatever element(s) it uses that may very well last longer than the few hours/days a game runs. Fusion power constantly needs something to fuse, D/T for example. At least the floating ones could filter them out of sea water. Some fusion reactors produce hydrogen isotopes for example, wow, look at that, more fake complexity coming for ya.

In order for fusion power to run, you need some fission power to provide the hydrogen. A wonder of thousands of years advanced technology, nice, isnt it?
So not only you have to protect that pretty T2 gens, no, the T1 one suddenly became viable and not totally obsolete once youve got T2.

Metal extractors could use a minuscule amount of power but not something drastic.

What Cons are there in the current system?

Are people expanding to fast and grabbing metal to easily? Should the commander be slower to expand to have energy to just generate metal.. while energy doesn't require metal to operate.

I guess i'm just arguing that this adds another layer of complexity that is debate-ably not adding any depth whatsoever.

Your whole post is lore, not game mechanics. Don't get the two confused.

All this is saying is that a factory requires 1.125 power gens and 1.71 mexes to run. 1 mex requires 0.125 power gens to run.

Equivalently, 1 factory requires 1.34 powergens and 1.71 mexes to run. Assuming p-gens don't require metal.

If you assume that p-gens also require 0.1 mexes to operate, than 1 factory requires 1.25 power gens and 2.71 mexes to run.

All you are doing is making the economy harder to understand, without actually changing its fundamental behaviours.

In ta I believe metal extractors used around -3 energy. We need them to use energy so when you crash your energy your metal economy suffers. Plus it would make little sense to have an extraction building pull for free. It would be nice if some units had energy draw like TA, not just turrets. Gives the devs a chance to make more unique units and actually have a difference between them. Like the seraphim sniper bot in FA. I liked that unit alot, even if it was **** in straight engagements. But it was king at attrition.

Making fusion/advanced depend on some ammount of basic/T1 gens to prevent them beeing 100% obsolete is fundamental behaviour. The lore associated in that post to make it seem plausible is for not making it look that far stretched.

The ammount of hardness to understand that per mex you need a given ammount of pgens (lets say 0.1) and calculate the impact on a per factory number is infinitisimally small. As you have proven with your post.
Close to no one calculates that on the fly in his head during a game. Either people run spreadsheets on a second screen or more likely a mod to do that for them.

If an attack destroyed some gens, starving a player of power, there now is an added option of what to shut down, namely mexes. Currently it doesnt matter if they run or not.

An energy cost to basic metal extraction only penalizes bad players who stall on energy. It has no strategic impact at all, and serves only to make the game less forgiving on new players. Energy stalls now cost metal! It was already extremely bad to stall on energy, but now you pretty much lose right away since you've got no energy and no metal, and can't build anything. Such as, say, energy generators.

However the concept of using energy to generate metal is still good. But metal makers for a flat cost runs away. Players can transition over to a metal maker/fusion economy that just completely destroys the strategic value of territory control.

I think mex overdrive (as in Zero K) which uses diminishing returns is a very good idea. Using overdrive, an increasingly large amount of energy is necessary to give the same increased amount of metal production. It costs less energy to boost a mex by +1 than it is to boost a mex by +2, which is much easier than +3, and so on. In general, the amount of extra metal varies with the square root of the amount of metal put into the mex. Your excess energy is divided evenly between all your mexes. This also makes managing your economy conceptually simpler, since it is beneficial to excess energy instead of being strictly wasteful.

But your basic metal production should probably be free in terms of energy just because it is simpler.

It has definite strategic impact. If you cant control your energy expenditure its going to hurt your economy hard. Lets not simplify this so much that there is little to learn economy wise. Simple is not what PA is intended to be on ANY level. They have already screwed with a great formula by removing build time and having flat costs across the board, which I disagree with due to people not being able to understand that some units should require more economic power to produce than others. Depth is a GOOD thing. All I feel is that the PA pool is getting shallower with the omissions made for new players who wont even learn the basic economy, how are they going to understand the relationships between interplanetary combat and heavy economic macro? At least we arn't dealing with the MEX upgrade bug. Things like that actually do hurt inexperienced players because you don't get the overlay feedback to know what went wrong. Lets let the players learn how to play before we think that somewhat realistic economic operation should be simplified. IE its on - it consumes energy. simple no? No energy no metal production, simple. Makes energy a big juicy target! Rather than a mex only raid fest.

Havent thought about that, but good argument for making them use energy. Another point where simplification for the sake of beeing just simple could be avoided.

PA had enought simplification IMHO, more than so in terms of orbital.

Overdriving extractors/excess energy spending is nice, thats something Id like to see done in PA too.

Don't confuse complexity (or difficulty) with depth. It is very easy to make a game more complex just by adding a ton of arbitrary elements. And it is extremely easy to make a game difficult, such as by forcing players to perform a lot of manual tasks quickly. Strategic depth is very different, and results from having a lot of meaningful choices that interact with other decisions you and your opponent make to have highly variable outcomes.

Making all mexes cost a flat amount of energy adds nothing strategically interesting. It just makes the game harder for new players to even get started by making them unable to do anything. Building enough energy to power your mexes is not a strategic choice, and adds zero strategic depth. Making energy stalling cost you metal just means you must never hard stall, or you will definitely lose. I would challenge you to think of any justification you might have for making a strategic decision that involves mex energy cost. It seems obvious to me there is an extremely strongly determined play here to always have energy to power your mexes and other necessary energy expenses.

By contrast, using overdrive, the decision about how much energy to construct, and when to do so, has strategic significance. Investment in constructing troops now could also be constructors which could be used to cap more mexes. Or it could be more energy to overdrive your existing mexes, which would also increase your metal income, but create a valuable and vulnerable target the enemy can destroy.

Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Simple and deep is ideal for a strategy game; not arcane and complex, but ultimately deterministic and repetitive. Depth means novelty in each situation and novel decisions to make. Shallow means repetitive and a high degree of similarity between games, including the same decisions where the same choice should always be made.

Situation: Attack killed some power.
Descission: What to shut down, how to priorize energy.
Options:
a) Shut down radar and, if available, jammers.
b) Cancel some building/constructions
c) Shut down some mexes, maybe because theres a full storage waiting to be used for exactly that sitation.
d) Stop some energy consuming weapons
and of course e) Do everything else necessary to not hard stall as you will go down if it happens.

Mexes cost no power: Just continue and build a bit slower on energy stall. Metal keeps coming. Very forgiving solution that isnt adding too much of strategic depth either.

That alone justifies mexes needing power. NEVER hard stall your eco. Players have to dedicate some mental resources to prevent it.
If you can get your enemy under such stress that he makes a descission that really hard stalls his eco for a longer period, well done.

Thats the current state of PA.
90% of games are all the same. Deathball your enemy, add some nukes if needed.

OK. Do you really think this is an interesting decision?

It seems to me like it would take quite a lot of very fast micromanagement, and the decision itself is actually incredibly boring, of just turning off redundant radar, recharging weapons in areas that are not seeing combat, and other noncritical energy-using systems. Followed by powering down production, then however many mexes you need to power down, and lastly start powering down radar and weapons you are actually using.

There will not be very many circumstances where your priority will differ. But if you have hundreds of assets which use energy, locating them and powering them off individually to avoid hard stalling sounds... really tedious. And then of course you have to turn them back on again. Is this amount of manual labor click investment (which must be done quickly) really worth the rather obvious and illusory "choice" of what to power down?

Furthermore, avoiding stalling is only going to be challenging for very new players. The idea of mex energy cost hardly changes anything. And to the degree that it does change the game, it just makes the game arbitrarily difficult just so scrubs can feel good about beating newbies. Players who actually know what they are doing will just make enough energy that it isn't a problem. This, also, isn't really a strategic choice as it is obviously optimal.

I think it is very feasible from a lore standpoint that metal extractors have a reaction that generates enough energy for them to operate.

From a gameplay standpoint, I think making them require energy is not a good idea.

Think about it. If you're 15 minutes into a match and have dozens of metal extractors and they're all sucking up power. You then lose your power field, or the majority of your power field or something. You now have a negative economy and everything is screwing up.