I played a game last night that really highlighted this issue for me. Despite focusing on my economy and playing to always stay Energy and Metal positive, I was actually BEHIND on my army size in comparison to player who did nothing but make factories to pump out doxes, regardless of Eco. To me this makes having an Eco utterly pointless, why bother making sure you can afford to build something if you can just make another factory to make up the lost time? Others may not see this as an issue, or that I was slow in my progress to build an army, which could also be true. But if players can just spam factories from the start and have the time penalty of having a poor economy rendered moot by building, another factory, why have a streaming eco in the first place?
To be honest it just sounds like you were significantly outplayed. Playing factory/unit rush build is a perfectly viable play but against an equally matched player an eco build can easily counter it enough to leave both players in a very evenly matched situation where neither player is ahead. It's not an issue of whether they should be given even greater eco penalties, it's more an issue of they used their eco far more effectively than you did. You metal should be always be stalling or about to stall and your power should be just about to stall for the entirety of the game.
You can't just spam factories, eco to do that doesn't appear from nowhere. I always try to scout the enemy early on. Focus more heavily on army if they're close, more heavily on eco if they're far away. Any force they can muster will take longer to get to you the further away they are, so the (flawed) logic is your base will be that much more secure by the time the enemy gets there. Disclaimer: I'll let you know when I get this strategy to work
Your eco may have been effectively managed but it doesn't mean you played as efficiently as they did. E.g. your eco might have been managed excellently but if you were playing a very strong player you would still be completely crushed due to a skill mismatch.
That's very contradictory. Effective management of Eco IS efficiency. But beyond the point. I'm saying that there is a point where building another factory outweighs the time lost from proper eco building. If this is the case, why build eco in the first place? Is there a cap on the maximum amount of time you can be penalised for going eco negative? Because apparently, there is and it's not enough.
Give us the link to your game on PA Stats. If you didn't use it, download it and show us the graphs for the next game you lost while thinking you did a better job at managing your eco.
Because you still need resources to build the units. No matter what you do, if you have an income of +100 metal you can only have a certain amount of tanks. The perfect amount is not only depending on a perfect eco balance, but also on how much spent on factories, tanks or more eco. Balancing the three is not trivial and can make a big difference. You can i.e. rush economy hard but not make any factories, so you will have more economy but no tanks > bad You can also rush factories but ignore eco > will yield you a few tanks, but not a lot. Find the perfect middle and you'll own. Your aim is to produce as many fighting units as possible, not to just amass economy. EDIT: Also you said you tried to stay energy/metal positive? Positive as in full storage and positive income? That's bad play. You are losing resources doing that. Perfect play has a slightly negative balance most of the time. All resources in your storage equal unbuild tanks.
interessting thread....normaly when you have an income of 100 metal, you can build for 100 metal....if you do it on 10 factory's or on 20 doesn't matter as long as you don't waste metal by having positive income. (it only matters of the time the vehicle needs to get out of the factory because then there is nothing procuced, but if you slightly stall on metal this shouldnt be the problem)...
If you have 10 factories, thats 150 metal usage/tick. 150/7 = 22 mex. Usually you can get to 22 mex in about 9 minutes. dox get pumped out every two - three seconds, so with a stable eco, at ten minutes you could pump out 100 every 20 seconds. Mind, that means stopping everything else. And, running a deficit does run huge problems for your eco. If you stall only a little bit, your efficiency stays in the 80-90% range, so not much changes. My last 1v1 I was in the 60-70% range at the 8 minute mark, which hurt my production a TON. you have to keep in my mind also the size of your eco. You could be running a stable economy just fine, but if your opponent has twice as much metal as you do and runs at a 60% deficit, he is outproducing you.
Not entirely. You build ground units, I build bombers. I kill all your ground units, you don't kill any bombers. No matter what our metal outputs, the way I structured my economy was more efficient. Where your metal goes matters, not just how much you spend.
There are a few things to consider... 1) You should never have a positive metal income. 2) Who had more metal income? 3) Building up T2 resources is expensive and pays off later. Spamming T1 units instead of going to T2 can pay off now, especially against someone who is putting their entire income into upgrading. e.g. 5 advanced energy plants = 13,500 metal = 150 Dox When someone shows up with 150 Dox to fight your 5 advanced energy plants, guess who wins. A popular thing to do among hyper-aggressive T1 rushers is to keep dropping mini-bases of T1 factories and keep building out more and more T1 mex. I'd bet the guy had a lot more metal income than you and that's what really killed you, in addition to you probably putting a lot more resources into the long game whereas he spent it all up front on units. You can beat these guys without playing their game but you have to be really snappy with defense. I find early T2 bombers help a ton. The T1 spammers are just pushing bots everywhere and don't have time to oversee what they're doing or setup fighter escorts so a couple of bombers can do a lot of good. Other than that, small stations of 2-3 single-barrel laser turrets behind a small V-shaped wall is my new favorite thing. I don't try to ring my entire base in defenses, I just try to position these cheap defenses in critical areas to augment my own ground force defense. When I see a big wave coming, I try and flop down the V-wall with 1 fabricator while any others nearby try to spring up the turrets. With just a few of your own Dox showing up to join in, you can decimate significantly larger forces and the V-defense will still be there for the next wave too. (The single laser defense turret only costs 300 metal and can kill a dox in 2 hits. Behind walls they are pretty useful against Dox rushes.)
Also, economy is means to end (ie units) not the ends itself. Its getting the mix of base building and offence right that leads to victory. Not hitting tech 2 first (though it helps )
The deal is, when you are negative your build speed is behind. When a factory is stalling it builds slower. When a factory is added both build even slower. To specify, when power is stalled, fabbers build slower by the percent lack of power, AND metal extractors extract slightly less. When metal is stalled, fabbers use the SAME power thus wasting some of it, but no matter how many more fabbers you use the same metal is spent, meaning another fabber literally uses 0% more metal from the economy, there is no metal for him to use, he uses metal he borrowed from other fabbers slowing them down. So, if you had better eco whole game, that means you had MORE eco structures, metal and power, AND you didn't let the bar stay full because that means the structures aren't doing anything, their metal and energy are pouring onto the floor and seeping into the cracks to be lost forever. If you had better economy, MORE resources and ALL SPENT and theoretically never even stalled... Then how did he have more units than you? What did you build? Where did all the metal even go?
If there's one thing Supcom screwed up over TA, it was making production stalls nearly invisible to the player. Paying per second was good enough and it didn't offer any real advantage over a pure production stream. It only obscured an economic crisis by hiding it in a tiny number at the top of the screen, while everything else looks fine. So a new player comes in, thinks they were doing everything peachy, when in reality it wasn't. This would not have happened in TA, because TA's stalling is immediately obvious and painful to see.
As I've said before, nano streams could stop as a representation of how hard you're stalling e.g. if you're 10% over your energy income then nano streams only show for 9/10 ticks. TA used this system and not only did it make stalls obvious, it also allowed an opponent to know when your economy was in trouble and thus made scouting more interesting and useful.
Other people have covered pretty much everything but here is two threads talking about economy. Energy is weak Supply The Roles of Mass and Energy
