Should metal extractors consume energy :

Dozen, Hundreds, a whopping thousand, doesnt make a difference if two keystrokes disable/enable them all. UI could also boast an option of shutdown order so a players can configure the order in which to shutdown building to prevent energy stalling out.

But you don't want to disable all of them, you only want to disable enough to get you back to positive energy gain, if this magic button is also going to take that into consideration, then why not just make it automatically shut them off as needed? I believe that's how it worked in TA/supcom anyways, if you were at negative energy, your metal income didn't go to 0, it slowly went down as mexes went offline because of the lack of energy.

As long as the player still has an OPTION to decide what happens, automatically or not, Im perfectly fine with it.

If mex overdrive gets in and works automatically with excess energy, why not make a similiar mechanic shutting down mexes as needed during energy shortages.

Because mex overdrive is already spending energy to produce metal. When you have less energy, you get less metal. And when you stall, you only get your basic metal income.

If you really wanted to integrate overdrive into mexes costing energy, you would just have a small basic metal production, and a relatively large impact of overdrive. As a result your metal income would drop to the non-overdrive production across each mex. But you don't have to toggle mexes on and off, and you don't ever get into a death spiral where you have no resources and no method of acquiring more resources.

Poorly managed economies will be inefficient, and will already make you lose against an enemy who manages their economy more efficiently. There is no need to impose such draconian penalties on players who energy stall, as they are already going to lose because of bad economy management. Making them unable to even play the game is not a good idea.

Making extractors use energy as a way of burdening a player just isn't very compelling. There will always be an optimal resource play, and it pretty much always involves no construction waste and maximum income. An energy demand will never change that.

One thing that energy can do is distribute the cost (and thus the risk) of building a structure. For T1 extractors there's not much point, as even though they're fairly costly it's not a big deal to build them. T2 extractors, on the other hand, can not be expensive yet still have a viable payoff. That's just the life of a resource structure. You can adjust this by adding energy demand to the T2 extractor.

If the demand was say... 2000 energy, you have a net side cost of 1500 metal (1080 T2 metal). This means the FIRST time you build a T2 extractor it costs 2700 metal, which is quite a lot. But as you tech up, cheaper energy brings it down to a more reasonable 2280 metal. If it gets destroyed and you have to replace it, the cost is only the base 1200 metal. So the net effect is:
1) Initial T2 spam is very expensive and difficult on an early economy
2) T2 growth becomes faster after T2 power (it might need a buff though)
3) Losing and replacing extractors is no big deal, keeping the flow of the game going.

I feel like I'm wasting my time bringing this up, because most of this thread seems to be about nonsensical micro macro bullshit.

I am currently away. There is a rather fundamental lack of understanding about how the economy works occurring in this thread. I suggest you, @SleepWarz and @occusoj get your heads together and do the maths. There are some awesome ideas which are ultimately based off a flawed understanding. I'll post on Sunday night with the exact details, NZ time. Or Monday morning if I'm late home.

Mexes don't go offline in supcom when energy stalling. They work as if there was engineer building the mass, the production gets smaller when you energy stall. This is strange to be honest, since it would be more efficient to put some of the mexes offline. If you stall real hard, the mass income is basically 0 in every mex, but they still consume energy.

Some mexes are less energy efficient than others (mass production of the mex / energy consumption of the mex).

From the least energy efficient to the most energy efficient:

t3 without storages (0.333...)
t3 with storages (0.5)
t2 without storages (0.666...)
t1 mex without storages, t2 with storages (1)
t1 with storages (1.5)

Which means you want to shut down the least energy efficient mexes first.

I think you have this dead wrong and I made a thread about it, Energy is weak Supply, to save me multiple explanations. In short drain is not always bigger because drain is just some certain fixed cost in power generators.

I go with no
Energy shouldn't consume metal
And vice Versa

@tatsujb ; @SleepWarz ; @occusoj
I see none of you did that maths. Tl;dr - look for the emboldened text.

Firstly - although you are arguing for this system reducing wastage tatsu, and not being about stalling,the system is completely pointless with that argument. Your metal income/energy income is completely arbitrary unless the other resource can match it so you don't stall. The system doesn't actually do anything that isn't currently in the existing economy. Sure, you're wasting lots of metal - but the solution to wasting lots of metal is to build metal storage or start spending the metal via factories. Once you start spending the metal, it is abundantly clear that you haven't built the energy to support your factories.

Therefore the system only slows down the rate of expansion, makes additional factories and fabbers more expensive, and doesn't actually encourage the player to build a balanced economy more so than is already present in the game.

And despite your objections, this system only adds "depth" if it affects the way that the economy stalls. Otherwise you've just slowed down the game, but you haven't actually added anything.

@occusoj - you're right. It is not really more complicated, and could be handled with an app or whatever.

The player has to think "oh, I need 1 bot factory. So I need 12 metal income, 675 energy income to run the factory. Which means I need 2 powergens. But I need metal to run the metal gens. So I need an additional mex on top of that. And are those powergens going to be enough to run the mexes?"

For your typical player, you've just made each factory more expensive, you've given them something else to think about if they get stuck in the nitty gritty, but you haven't actually made the fundamental calculation any harder, if they already understand the system. And that's my point. If they already understand the system, you've not added any depth at all. If they don't, you've added something that slows down the understanding of the system on the fly. It's harder to understand, but if you simplify it down you get back to the original system that already existed. It's fake complexity for no benefit.

On stalling

Consider this economy: You have 203 metal income, you have 17615 energy income. Each 7 metal costs 60 energy to run, as both t1 mex and t2 mex have the same efficiency. (10% of a t1 p-gen).

You have 1 commander, 4 bot factories, 1 vehicle factory and the rest are t1 fabbers. So you're total spending is 203 metal, 15875 energy. Plus the energy cost of metal extraction, so your spending is 17615.

For the purposes of this, 1 mex supports 10 power gens, 1 power gen supports 10 mexes.

Say you energy stall. Either you energy stall by not building enough energy, or you energy stall by your opponent destroying your energy.

If you energy stall to 60% energy in a system where metal extractors consume energy.

Your metal income decreases to 121.8.
Your metal spending decreases to 121.8 (because in an energy stall, each nanolathe can only use 60% of its energy per tick, and so it can only apply 60% of its metal per tick)
Each fabber spends 60% of its total available metal on a project. So your build rate decreases to 60%.

The proposed solution
Turn off mexes.

• Every 10 mexes you turn off increases your power generation by 3.4%, thus increasing your build rate by the same amount.
• Every 10 mexes you turn off decreases your metal income by 70.
• Now your build rate is 63.4%. Your metal income is 133 metal per tick. You are only able to spend 63.4% of that, so your metal spending is 84 metal per tick.

The proposed solution is terrible, in essence.
If you make metal extractors less expensive in terms of energy consumption, you just make turning off metal extractors more expensive for your economy.

If you make metal extractors more expensive in terms of energy consumption.

Say 0.9 power gens runs 1 mex. The energy cost of metal consumption is now 540 per 7 metal. Your spending is therefore 203 metal, 31,535 energy
You're in a 60% stall. You turn off 1 mex. Your energy production increases to 61.7%.

Now your metal income is 196.7. Your metal spending is therefore 121.4. Which is still less than 121.8.
The decision to disable mexes is a total non-choice. You are better off building more powergens, prioritising that project by reallocating build power and telling your fabricators and factories to stop spending metal on non-essential projects. Which is exactly how you are *supposed* to get out of an energy stall.

The same argument applies for energy costing metal.

All the system has done is made initial expansion more expensive, and hence slowed the game down.

Long story short, stormingkiwi is correct. Making mexes cost energy makes stalling much much more painful, but does not change your economic decision-making in any way.

Disabling mexes is both tedious to execute, and not an interesting decision. Even if you fully automated the process so the player never has to manually disable or enable mexes, it is still not a strategic choice to construct power generators to get out of a stall. You obviously never want to stall energy, and if you do you must get out of that stall immediately. Not having metal only makes getting out of that energy stall much more time-consuming, with more long-term effects on your economy.

Overdrive captures the energy-as-economic-strength dynamic of having mexes cost energy by allowing you to spend energy to increase mex yield. But there is no good reason to make all mexes always drain energy just to give you any metal; new players will just stall and be unable to do anything.

Instead, have mexes give you a certain amount of metal for free. And you can use energy to overdrive them to exceed that amount, with diminishing returns for increasing amounts of energy.

Players tanking their economy will do it regardless of how many omissions to gameplay we make. Keep the consequences severe and they will learn faster.

Not sure where to post this, but an interesting idea I had while reading this thread. What if T2 mexes were made to consume energy (as per the overdrive mechanic) and T1 mexes were left alone to give a flat rate for no energy consumption. Now there is an interesting choice between T1 and T2 mexes and it forces players to chose whether or not they want to risk increasing their metal income by making it be partially based on their energy income.

By T2, do you ever have to worry about power anyway?

this.

btw wtf? turn off metal production to have more economy whut?

Correct, but incomplete. There is no choice for the player who lost power, because the choice was made by the ATTACKER to destroy the power and force a stall.

Stop looking at things from a sim city angle. You have to consider vectors for both attack and defense.

Nice example.
Completely keeps energy-only consumptors out of it. Like various radars/sats.
Less severe stalls could therefore be handled by shutting them down and continue to rebuild pgens with 100% build rate because building, once again, is metal limited. Or shutdown mexes to save power on them since theres a full storage for exactly that situation and still keep the metal limitation.


The problem of energy stalling could be solved on many ways depending on the severity of a stall. Of course if you loose a good deal of power plants its most efficient to rebuild them, and only them, as fast as possible.
But once someone killed 40% of your power, your in most cases done with anyway.

As said, the model also falls short by omitting energy only consumptors which play an important role in maganing the shutdown order as well as the possibility to store short-term metal excess for later use or buffer metal in times for energy shortage where you can shut down mexes and NOT face the danger of metal limited build rate. .
IF the e-only stuff isnt needed, shut it down. IF you have a metal storage for backup, shutdown mexes, use the storage to rebuild power with 100% now power limited build rate. and so on.

The real problem is much more complex than such a simplified model could depict.
Also, your eco is unrealistic as neither metal nor energy production are able to exist in a real game. For metal its either 199 or 206, but 203 is actually impossible. Thats 193 metal income from mexes. 193 mod 7 = 4 and 28/7 is a straight out 4.
Energy, Id expect to be the same as nothing can generate ...5 energy as far as I know.


With storages, energy only consumptors, a first step towards a better model would be to describe the energy and metal as dE/dT and dM/dT.

Regarding the strategic choice:
a) Reduce metal income but keep arty firing at the price of slower rebuilding, might have a highly valueable target right there.
b) Rebuild as fast as possible and ignore anything else.

Two simple choices that COULD be available.

Sorry about late reply - didn't see there was a reply to this thread until yesterday.

There was a typo in that post. The proposed solution is to turn off mexes. In reality, the proposed solution you would never do, because it slows down you building more power generators. Sure, your build rate increases, but in every case it reduces metal per tick you can spend. Look at the second case. Your build efficiency increases to 63%, but the amount of metal you can spend decreases by 0.4 per tick. You're building slower than you were. You're better off reallocating build power and pausing non-essential factories/fabbers, which is the existing solution.

You shut down mexes, the building rate is now metal limited, not power gen limited. You are building more power gens. BUT you don't gain any benefit from every additional power gen that comes online AND you are now building slower than you were before you shut down your metal income. It is a complete non-decision. You would only do that if you do not understand the economy.


Not really.... if you look at the way people go T2, they often reduce themselves to that build efficiency while they build the T2 economy to match their production. Zaphod will reduce himself to that build efficiency in search of more unit production.

You're right, I ignored energy only consumers (radar and so on). They're not necessary to prove that turning off metal extractors which consume energy is a fundamentally bad idea.

If you include one radar in the first example:

The gain in build rate by turning (mexes/fabbers/factories/radar/satellites) off decreases. You still don't gain anything by turning off mexes, in fact you still lose build rate, and so mexes would ALWAYS be last priority to turn off. After that you are back to the current situation.

You're correct about the ecos not being exact.Basically I couldn't be bothered to figure that out correctly, so I figured out spending. We're only interested in spending. Income is really neither here nor there, and a stall is just income proportional to spending. The key is in the ideas this examines, not the exact value of the elements involved.

That's where the decision is... But you're kind of better to just toggle factories on and off.

dM/dT means

The change of Metal per change in time.

Saying 203 metal income per tick is exactly equivalent to saying dM/dT = 203 M/tick. There is absolutely no difference.

Err.. that's the only strategic impact such a system could have. Otherwise it just slows down the rate at which you can support fabbers, your build rate and so on. It doesn't actually make energy stalls more vicious. It slows down the rate that you can recover from them, but it also slows down the rate at which your opponent

Basically if people don't build economy to support their metal income, their metal income doesn't matter at all. It is actually worthless.

Stormingkiwi, you are correct but I really think such a complicated analysis misses something important about the idea of mexes costing energy.

For me, the guiding principle of game design is elegance, which means making the game as deep as possible while also being as simple as possible. And it certainly seems to me that making mexes cost energy increases the complexity of the game, but adds zero (or negligble amounts) of actual, interesting choice and strategic variation.

Mexes costing energy increases the complexity of the game, especially for new players who may energy stall themselves into a total inability to perform any ingame actions.

However making mexes cost energy does not create strategic options, interesting variations in different matches, or really add any depth. You simply need to construct a bit more energy, and sometimes may need to power down mexes if you make a mistake and stall.

Instead of denying players metal during an energy stall, it is simpler to provide players metal income for no energy cost. Having insufficient energy obviously makes your economy less efficient, which will very likely cause you to lose to an opponent who manages their economy better. But there is no good reason to freeze a player completely and make them unable to even play the game.

With respect to metal costing energy; I agree that late game economic scaling using energy can be a good idea, provided there are diminishing returns to prevent an energy economy from exponentially escalating out of control, giving the player who already has the superior economy an increasingly overwhelming advantage. However this can be done by making mexes use energy to give the player more metal, not by requiring energy in order for mexes to yield any metal.

Err... You misunderstand. I'm totally against the idea, which is why I broke it down. And I'm against the idea because of the quoted text - there is no situation where you would power down mexes. You don't gain any benefit, it makes negligible impact on build rates, just increases the amount of infrastructure you need for a stable economy (slowing the game down). Powering down mexes gives you more power, but not as much power as if you had just paused a fabber or a factory.

Essentially powering down mexes when you're in an energy stall would always lower the amount of metal you're spending so that your build rate is less than it was while you were energy stalled. You're better just toggling off the energy consumption of fabbers building power for a quick recharge.


the thing about the economy is that it is virtually impossible to dig yourself into a hole from which you cannot build yourself out.

Does that make sense? Or are my posts of late an incoherent mess?