Energy currently more valuable than metal?

This may just be crappy build orders on my part, but in 90% of cases I find that energy is the bottleneck, not metal. Is this intentional? Metal was always the bottleneck in TA and Supcom so I'm guessing not.

Does anyone have any tips on how best to avoid energy-stalling while floating metal? Should this be rebalanced?

Build more energy.

I normally have a metal deficit as do most other players.

Energy isn't confined to a specific spot, so it's not a precious as metal. Some people have said to nerf energy plants.

Just build more energy plants and get fabricators to assist those building energy.

Energy is subject to huge fluctuations, so you need the storage and income to accommodate that. It's easy to look at your income, think you're okay, and fail to realise you're going to be hit for thousands in the outcome column once a few more fabbers kick in.

Maybe the fluctuations may be a little too extreme, but I'm not sure about that.

For me in the early game energy is often quite scarce, after that it's not that much of an issue and metal begins to limit everything.

If you dont devote a fabber or 5 to immediately building a field of power plants, yeah energy can easily stall. I usually have my commander build a few metal extractors and power plants before building a factory and then just have him build power plants for a while afterward. The fabbers my first factory produces will create more metal extractors, factories etc. By devoting my commander to making plants at first, my energy needs will usually be covered till T2.

My initial Commander build queue
1 Mex
1 Power
1-2 Mex
1 Power
1 Bot Factory
7-14 Power

My BO is basically the same as Stuart's, although I'll usually put in a storage before I do a long line of pgens, it helps cushion any spikes. I tend to just use my com for making power as he's most efficient, but perhaps I should start assisting him sooner.

Well it sounds like you just need to build a bit more power. I would posit that perhaps you expand hard and get a lot of metal and don't build enough factories early enough to use all that metal.

The formula is that metal is very cheap to acquire, but can only be constructed on specific locations on the map. As long as you control the metal spots, you should be mining from them because it is cheap to do so.

Energy on the other hand can be constructed anywhere, but is expensive. This means that in terms of growing your economy's scale, it takes more time to acquire energy than metal. But it is also much more difficult for the enemy to deny you from acquiring energy, since you can always build it in locations you are already defending instead of in vulnerable locations out on the map.

Therefore, early in the game, you can acquire a lot of metal relatively cheaply and easily because mexes are easily acquired. Because you aren't being attacked yet, your metal income can increase very rapidly. The more resistance the enemy puts up as the game continues, the harder it becomes to cap more distant and contested mexes. But energy is still expensive in the early game. So it is not surprising that in the very early game you are more limited by the cost of energy generators than you are by the easily-acquired mex spots nearby.

In my opinion the correct change to make to PA is to have smaller, cheaper energy generators. You begin the game with 1000 metal and 1000 energy; having an energy generator cost 450 metal is a big problem, because you get zero income until it is completed. By contrast, you began a game in TA with 1000 metal and a solar only costs 145. And in Zero-K, you start with 1000 metal and a solar is only 70. PA's basic energy facilities are too big, making energy economy in the early game noncontinuous and obnoxious.

Smaller generators mean you can more finely control your economy in the early game, which is especially critical when resources are at a serious premium. Especially energy for very early-game construction.

I do wish they would tune the numbers for the economy to make them convenient to do quick mental arithmetic rather than "ooh big numbers!" A mex should just produce 1 metal, and energy costs should be on the same order of magnitude as metal, not a factor of 100 larger for no reason. Costs can be easily adjusted by the same scale to have zero effect except simplifying economy management.

I always build a few power every mex. Keeps them spread out and usually accommodates metal usage.

My energy always bottlenecks but it always when i make a push to build something big just to get it up.