Metal Makers

What kind of complications do you think this idea might have?

Mike

Its eating the planet so it will also suck in and eat your buildings if the crater gets to them.
Also the longer you run one the more space it takes up unless you turn it off and build in the crater.
you turn it back on and it salvages the buildings in the crater for metal.

What I envision is a massive unit that pulverizes the ground with a powerful shockwave then sucks up the sand and smelts it for anything usable and would make an ever expanding strip mine.

There was some talk about a bulldozer unit to use the deform-able terrain this could be used to dig craters.

so its a metal extractor you can put anyplace on a planet and maybe even move, but it destroys the land leaving nothing but a big hole in the ground. how big the hole gets would limit how many you could have and the longer you use them the less room you have for them.

But how will all that work exactly? What happens to a building that gets 'eaten up'? is there a wreck you can still reclaim, does the crater maker automatically reclaim it? is the metal from the building just plain lost?

Overall, I think it's odd, it not only works against the idea of the original idea behind metal makes(making the most out of small area) but at teh same time it also directly competes with Mexes then as not only do they both require having space, but what happens what a crater expands to where a metal spot is? What also needs to be considered is that these crater makers essentially represent a limited resource, they have to have some limit to them because in PA we're playing on spheres, you can't just let it go on forever otherwise you'll have planets, moons and asteroids being massively consumed by them.

I don't know, I'm just having a hard time seeing what problem these actually addess.

Mike

I think the best way for metalmakers to work is to be the way of how lotr ressourcebuildings worked in battle over middleearth build it somewhere on the field and have it have an large aoe cycle on were it effectively produces metal ... that way you still would have to expand in order to cover a greater area having buildings in that cycle would limit its effincy or outright negate it ..
that could realy work actualy as metalmakers would be a propper risk to build as they would be expensive and quite open to attacks...

The problem with metal makers is that they are either so efficient they make mexes obsolete (see SupCom original), or so inefficient that there's no point in making them (see Forged Alliance). There is no middle ground, seven years of balance proposals for Forged Alliance have proved this.

Having said that though, there is one situation in FA where it is worth building them - super late-game, when all available mass spots have been claimed and all players are entrenched. In this instance it is worth building the T2 mass fabricator. It uses the output of 7½ basic power gens to create one unit of mass, which on PA's scale would be roughly equivalent to 3.5 metal (half the output of a basic mex).

Given that PA is less friendly to turtling, and that there are effectively unlimited metal spots, I think that this scenario, which is rare in Forged Alliance, would be so rare in PA as not to be worth having metal makers at all.

In my experience once you get to the point of having multiple orbital launchers, you simply can't spend the money fast enough. This may change if Adv mexes are rebalanced, and when more optimal ways of playing are discovered and disseminate through the community, but as things stand at the moment, no need for metal makes IMO.

Supcom and FA both proved that adjacency really screws up metal makers. The first few metal makers cost full price, but you get an increasing discount as adjacency reduces the energy cost. A fully boosted metal maker uses 75% less energy. In Supcom that was a HUGE deal, as makers were cheap and the vast cost was due to energy demand. In FA it was less effective, but still critical as metal makers needed even more energy for the same return.

Unfortunately, no one could see how adjacency led to metal makers being an all or nothing deal which caused their efficiency issues in the first place. Missing huge issues seems to be a recurring theme.

Could metal makers still work properly? I don't know. But I DO know that they can't work properly with adjacency borking it all up.

I would have any buildings take earthquake type damage until there destroyed then there wrecks get reclaimed by the strip miner. Metal spots in the crater would make you get more metal and would lower the metal spots as the hole expanded. placing it over a metal spot could be the best why to use it. this unit could be used to get that extra metal we are supposed to get from lava planets. If the mining unit reaches the plants core or a Lava layer I would have it get a massive boost to metal output as it is harvesting the core. after a fixed amount of metal has been harvested from the planet core based on planet size I would have it destroy the planet.