Problems With Economy

Over the past few weeks of playing PA, I've noticed a major issue which hasn't been addressed in the forums. The problem is that the economy system is VERY forgiving to your build times when you're in the red, this sort of takes the fun out of PA and simply leads to fabricator spam.

Sure, in the start of a game if your economy gets to the red and you're struggling to push out a second factory, a mex, or a pgen, you've got a serious problem. A 10 second build order may take up to a minute which can destroy your ability to produce a mass of units to counter early game rushes.
However, once you've got to T2, all that is needed is a spam of T2 fabricators, either bots or vehicles. Up to now, having a surplus economy has been useful, but after I get 20 fabs and when i get 60...well I can push out a nuke launcher with a missile in 4-5 minutes, suffering a -100 metal and -50000 energy economy. And with a surplus, I cut down the build time to 2-3 minutes?

Having a surplus economy is barely worth it after t2 and I've noticed the differences in build times to be VERY small. There really needs to be a higher penalty for eco-starving because I'm sick of winning my games after I spam out t1 tanks and end the game with 8 loaded nuke launchers. I really don't want to use this "strategy" (maybe bad eco-model manipulation?) and I would hate for others to use it against me.

I don't know how this could be fixed but maybe some people have ideas, who have come across this on their own?

I'm not sure how much I agree with this, I don't usually fab spam and i'm almost always above the negatives when I play, and almost never get outspammed by someone who has spammed T2 fabs and has no econ. However, i'm sure more experimenting on my part is required before I take a definite stand, and in the meantime offer this possible solution for the problem as you see it.

If it isn't already implemented, make it so that the more negative your economy, the slower the build speed. That should adjust the fabber spam to make it much less OP.

Hmm well I think there is a problem with the eco when I'm saying to myself, "hmm I'm -100,000 on energy.." *builds 5 solar satellites* ...5 mins later..."DONE!"

Err.... it's kind of a non-issue.

Let's say you have 300 metal income, and you are trying to spend 30000 per tick. Your netmetal is -27000. But that figure means nothing, it's misleading.

Your build rate is 1%. If your metal income was 27000 and your netmetal was -27000, your build rate would be 50%. And if your metal income was 27000000, your build rate would be 99.9%.

The UI is hopeless foe economy.

Now there's an additional thing happening.


Let's say your metal income is 300, your Netmetal is -30000000 because you have a million T2 fabbers.

99% of then are spamming a nuke. 1% of them are doing other stuff.

The nuke will be built at 297 metal per tick.

So are you saying that if I have 100 metal per second and I'm using 600, so -500 per second, thaat if I add more fabricators so its -5000 per second I'll still have same build time? I don't think so...

That is the case. If you have other fabs doing other work, then it will speed up the construction rate of that structure at the cost of other production rates. The actual amount of metal or energy you can use when running on 0 is the income. If you're at 100/s income using 5000/s (-4900/s), you're actually only using 100/s, so more fabricators is useless (and will hurt energy cost because of it).
Similarly, if you try to assist a fab with a less efficient one while running on 0 energy, your metal use will decrease and you will build slower (unless you're also at 0 metal, in which case it makes no difference).

Extra fabricators in a negative economy = robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Imagine you have 1 fabricator on the nuke and 1 fabricator building an energy plant and a negative economy. They are splitting whatever income you have, 50/50. Build 8 more fabricators and put them on the nuke. Now the nuke is getting 9/10ths of your economy while the energy plant is getting 1/10th. So the nuke IS building much faster but only because the energy plant is building much slower. You didn't increase the income being split, you just changed the priority on HOW it's split.

Easy test:
Detonate all of your energy plants. Every single one. You can have a thousand fabricators at this point and it'll take you literally almost an hour to build the nuclear missile even with all 1000 fabricators working on it.

Incidentally, this is why I hate team games. Half the time someone on my team builds 100 fabricators and his base is doing awesome and the rest of us are screwed because he's taking the lion's share of the team income. He's also rendered us blind because with negative energy, our radar doesn't work.

And by the way, you never really want a surplus, except perhaps a bit in energy. Ideally your metal should always be just a bit negative.

Correct. You can't spend more than you earn. There isn't a debt system. Like I said, the UI is wrong.

So long as you can afford the power, you're fine.

The reason you may think it is better is because it is. You use more fabs to more finely tune your metal output and change the priorities of different stuff.

As Slamz described excellently

Yeah that was a good description, thanks for clearing that up. However I still feel that nukes and t2 buildings come out a bit too early, don't you think? It just seems that once you get to t2 by minute 10, for the next 2 hours you're not developing, just expanding on old tech.

Personally I feel like certain team members could have waited before teching, seeing as we didn't have the units to back it up.


It depends on gamemode. For FFA it's useful, for team armies also. For a 1v1 you can get away with not bothering depending on map size. A little T2 just isn't as important as lots of T1, a little map control isn't as important as lots of it.

I do agree that from a researcher RTS persona, tech tree is lacking. .. but then.... in most cases you never researched down multiple branches anyway, you just expand on the old tech and add the best stuff to complement your strategy. . .

I haven't looked at much of the proposed aspects of the game but is there only gonna be two tiers like in TA or are they going to add a 3rd like supreme commander? It would be good to see a third tier but where the third tier is 10 times harder to achieve than the 2nd. It would be good to see more powerful and sturdy units but without making tier 2 obsolete like in sup com, where if you had the eco to go t2, you could just go to t3 and skip unit building on t2.

Btw, Happy New Year stormingkiwi, from Australia to NZ

There won't be any T3.

On a side note, would you consider cheap T2 units and expensive T2 units? You shouldn't necessarily need to build a better factory to use stronger units.

I do think that T2 metal extractors are far too big of an improvement.

I don't think it's necessarily a problem that we can reach nukes so fast, but I do think it's a problem when we can reach nukes fast with a small base. You don't need very many metal spots with advanced extractors on them to be able to build a nuke fast. Let's see... 39,610 metal needed for a launcher + 1 missile... divided by 28 metal a second.... divided by 10 extractors... You could build a fully loaded nuke in 141 seconds if you just had 10 metal spots and put all of your fabricators on it.

Metal is just too easy to come by.

EXACTLY

This is why I get pissed at people who just turtle around 10-15 mex spots and build a couple of nukes to snipe people with while everyone IGNORES THEM because they arent a threat until they spam nukes every two minutes

And also, you can never build faster than your mex income. If you produce 500 metal a tick, your max production is at 500 metal a tick.

Fabs are just a way to distribute that income.

It already does divide power/metal amongst your fabbers to where using more actually gets you less, not to mention being negative in the first place gets you less from getgo.

It actually isn't terribly forgiving, it is easy to get outproduced if you dump too much economy on negative power or something silly. It is forgiving enough in my opinion for new players given how a lot of new players aren't expected to have played with streaming economy before.

It is barely possible but not ever usually winnable to sit atop a small t2 economy dumped negative trying to squeeze out production. I have done it before, I have held ground doing that, but I can't say I have won when put in that situation. T2 economy gets quite a bit of resource out of just a bit of land, but it still isn't going to outproduced a very well developed t1 economy. It will beat a passive t1 player, that is because you will have beaten him to nuke/orbital/levelers/hornets.

ALSO, did you know if your energy is negative it makes metal income less, but if your metal stalls it divides up metal amongst your fabbers yet they all consume full power? This technically is the only mechanic that double-punishes poor economy. Besides not "having enough resource" and no matter how many fabbers you have you will never build faster if you don't have the metal to spend... you also waste metal if you have negative power crippling your extractors, and you also waste energy if you have 12 fabbers pumping out 10 fabbers of work using 2 fabbers of energy wasted.

People were arguing to get rid of the above, but I am ok with that much punishment happening over economy. I wouldn't terribly be hurt if they punished less, I might be more hesitant increasing skill-gap than lowering it because of new players is all.

All right, I was just offering a solution to the problem as the OP saw it. As the other posters have stated it's not actually that bad.

Yep. If ambiguous, then know I was agreeing with you. I was just also, albeit longverse, reciting the previous conversations about this topic.

Some people think the eco is absolutely confusing, many players can't just play their first match and do excellent, some players can't beat the AI until they look up info about the game. Others think that TA was difficult but it rewarded good economy much more than this game does where you can be somewhat lazy with your economy and not completely drop the ball over it. I like it where it is at, there is some reward for economy upkeep, but costs are universal so unlike TA there is no random economy dump over building something you had no idea would devour resources like it does.

I would really like personally, for the build speed percent based on economy to be shown (like the player mod does), anything that costs power to display how much in it's unit description, and anything that costs metal to display how much in it's unit description, and anything that generates power or metal to display how much in it's description. THAT would be beautiful. I am hopeful for it to come, obviously it is a luxury in a beta like this.

Yeah, that would be something I would like to see.

Currently I see new players make the same economic mistakes over and over again. Not spending metal, not having enough energy, and suffering major energy stalling when they get back on track. Never mind the complete failure to use reclaim at all points of the game.

Most of the fault lies with the current construction system. The vast bulk of a player's energy usage goes directly to construction. All the other energy demands are pitiful by comparison, which sort of makes you wonder why the energy mechanic was included at all. Energy values are also way too large. A +5K energy looks fine next to 200 surplus metal, but in reality the player doesn't even have a quarter of the energy that he needs.

Then there's the double dipping punishment of drawing unused energy and refusing metal income when energy is low. Supcom was an absolute nightmare in this regard, with the upgrade system turning extractors into negative producers that could permastall the game. PA's punishment still remains somewhat severe while giving very bad player feedback, while TA is the least punishing and provides the most clarity of all.

TA is the least???? No an energy stall in TA killed your metal. But I liked it that way.