Why is air low metal?

Air factory's traditionally have a large energy cost to either build the air units, or in PA, to run at all.

Although assisting messes with it.

The pa-do website is outdated right now. If you check the top right of the page it will take you the build number it's values represent.

Cola_colin used the same system but his is updated. Believe the link is nanodesu.info/pa-db but I could be wrong.

yes, i perfectly read what you wrote, and that's exactly the part that is -to my mind- bullsh*t.

there is only one physical resource in the game : metal. and you're pretending that it's not what units are made of ? then what is the main component ? plywood ? cardboard ? fine, but where does it come from then ? does it magically appears out of nowhere just because you said so ?

well no, when you make something, it needs to make sense without needing a wonky explanation that raises more question than it solves. if a bot costs 90M and a tank costs 150M, and the bot is smaller than the tank, everyone in a sane mind would consider that metal is essentially what they're made of.
but no, thanks to you we'll have to explain why a cannon on tracks is sooooooo much more complicated than a robot that have to sort tons of issues such as walking/running/keeping balance despite difficult terrain plus handling fire knockback and so on.

so once again, your argument is a joke. consider someone who doesn't have access to your explanation, there's no way anyone would come up with something like the "metal cost" of something in the game being merely the limiting factor for technological parts.
A tank costs metal to build, and usually a tank is made of metal, the same is true for air units. people expect flying stuff to be light, and they expect units in this game to be made of metal, and i'm pretty sure "light" x "made of metal" = "a little amont of metal" this is what common sense says.

to conclude, in my flawed perspective, i observe that you're just choosing the easy option even if it means completely screwing up logic because you're too lazy to think of a solution that would both work, and make sense.

but hopefully, my perspective is flawed.

My source is the actual game, as of patch 59607. (These costs were changed in path 59549, not too long ago.) Nonetheless, you should keep up with the times. The patch notes are available from the launcher, aren't they?

There is a new DB that uses the same presentation and methods but will hopefully be more reliably updated;

http://nanodesu.info/padb

We had a couple threads talking about it recently.

Mike

So, in conclusion, you're perfectly willing to sacrifice gameplay and balance, just so your little noggin isn't freaked out when a plane costs more than a tank (which they do in real life I might add).

I think we wrapped that up nicely then.


Again I'll state for the record that I'm basing my argument on Metal as a unit of cost, rather than a unit of weight

Haha I think this is an argument for the sake of having one now. It's just a cost; Planes are normally made of alluminium and tanks steel. Who knows what the nano spray really is? Or what kind of metal we are extracting. Feck it, let's just call it gold.

I feel the op was talking more on the gameplay side and not the actual consistency of the unit.

It absolutely was.


And I think it's fair to say that the decreased metal spending makes build times longer, while the increased power makes it become a threat later in the game, and the relative fragility to anti-air weapons like the Stinger/Spinner make it much more expensive

i'm not saying that we should sacrifice gameplay and balance, i'm saying we should explore other possibilities than "make it more expensive".

you can lower their HP, you can increase the energy cost (which by the way is supposed to reflect complexity) you can decrease they attack/precision/range, have them cost energy when flying and so on.

there's plenty of ways to balance air without touching the metal cost, that would make people think they are too heavy to fly (even if you don't think that's related, i do, and i'm probably not the only one)

Metal is a limited resource. It represents the overall strategic power of the unit (and no, power is more than the sum of health/damage/range).

If you want a unit to be used often or potentially dominate the game, you under price it. If you want it rarely used (a valuable target for essential stuff), over price it. If you don't really care, just rock/paper/scissors everything and leave victory to the best blob.

In this case, it does.

Supcom had air which required low metal and high energy. What happened? If you guessed "slow buildup to completely dominate the late game", have a gold star.

I for one think the game would benefit from having planes be more expensive, more powerful, and more valuable than common land units. Increasing their cost and power means they will be fewer in number, but you don't need a large number in order to be useful. It also makes anti-air more significant, and to some extent removes the need for AA spam, unless you want to cover a lot of areas using anti-air. A very large, consolidated blob of land AA should just be inefficient, not encouraged to deal with a swarm of planes. Expensive planes are also more interesting to use, since they can reliably do damage, but you risk losing the plane each time you expose one.

The relative quantities of air and land units can then become a central balancing factor between land and air. A squadron of aircraft can kill a certain number of ground units effectively, but there will be more ground units, so the aircraft don't have the same staying power in a straight-up fight that a ground army does.

I think it is not a good idea to define aircraft as being approximately in the same weight class and numbers as land units because of their incredible mobility. Such fast units need to be risky to use, because if it is possible to acquire a meaty, stable army of such fast units, that will frequently be a very good idea.

Metal in PA uses a smaller unit of measurement than in TA because each mex yields +7. Planes could cost five times more than they do now just to get up to TA levels, and arguably they should be significantly more expensive and individually powerful than they were in TA. It would also create a nice contrast against the large armies of inexpensive land units.

Okay Ledarsi, you've sold me.

That doesn't sound so bad. Placing air into a bigger package means less micro for the most troublesome units to control. It also gives flex room for air to last individually longer, and behave more consistently. That's pretty good for a unit that otherwise depends on killing and dying in an instant.