Has expansion become less important?

It strikes me that, watching some of the top players, expansion is no longer important like it was. I don't know if this is due to the unit cost changes or because of the air meta, but it seems that aggressive expansion and proxy basing isn't a factor in games the way it used to be and that generally bases exist on a smaller scale than in the past.

It may be the sample size though, so I'm wondering what others have seen.

I'd say it is because of 2 things:

1.) Energy is limiting players, not metal. So expansion is not helpful as long as you cannot provide enough energy. Energy really needs to be cheaper, it's always so painful when energy limits expansion :/
2.) Air is just so damn powerful right now that you do not need big armies everywhere.

... so yeah let's hope this will get fixed and we can go back to the epic expansion & rading madness.

I don't feel that expanding is that hard, but raiding is very easy.

Not that that is necessarily a problem however.

Simple answer to the original question:

Yes. Definitely less important.

I watched an older game of mine last night. It was the patch just before the bot factory changes. Big tank armies on both sides, harassment early game actually mattered, and advanced air was nigh unheard of. Useful? Sort of, yes. But Levellers man....LEVELLERS.....
And every single mex on the map was either taken or being contested. It was awesome.

Anyway. That was before Ants were nerfed down to Pounders.

As mattrmunson and matizpl have proven time and time again, you only need 7 mex and 10 energy plants to get up t2 air by the five minute mark. OP and ridiculously stupid.

​

This memo was written by
The Committee to Nerf T2 Air
Chairman, Mered4 of The Realm​

I'd agree that it is the t2 air meta that shuts down such early unfettered expansion. T2 bots also adds to that.

If you go for a centralized build you can basically go straight to t2 and start pumping out t2 units.
Some 10-15 mexes provides enough metal income and if the enemy harasses you with bots you can defend with just a few turrets.
If the enemy keeps building more energy, expanding and more t1 factories you will have good timing window where the enemy is very weak to t2 Bombers before they can get up flak or to a Slammer rush which combined with a commander is a real killer.

T2 bombers requires that you have air superiority but t2 Fighters are so much better than t1 fighters that you can just make a few t2 Fighters and then produce bombers for defense and offense.

Personally I don't think that energy needs to be cheaper or that power plants should produce more energy.
Nerf t2 air and t2 bots and expansion will become a lot more important.

Probably true, but I won't miss any chance to complain about the -in my mind- broken energy mechanics of PA. It's just so much harder to manage than in FA, justified as "we are trying to make it easier". meh

Well you certainly do need more powerplants to keep stuff running.

But I personally kinda like that, as you need to set up a whole bunch of infrastructure to run your army's.

Although I wouldn't mind a better power out put per building, but what if they were much bigger and too up more space as a trade off?

...That's called t2 Power.

.....it produces 9 times more energy than the t1 version

You can get effectively infinite metal from a small patch of T2 extractors. They really need to nerf metal extractors and have less metal points around.

177*28 = 4956 metal from a not atypical planet. You will never be able to use even a fraction of this in a real game. So it's just not important to expand beyond the point where you can reasonably win because you get to a point where there is essentially no limits.

They really need to do this math and tune the generator for it. A big planet should probably not have more than maybe 1000 metal on it. Possibly less.

and take up like, what? 1.5 as much space?

Nope, I don't like that powerplant either, or that it FULL ON replaces the original.

Which further compounds the tech race problem.

True enough.

But honestly, how big should powerplants be? If we get big enough, it could become necessary to expand just to have the space to build enough energy.

Hmm

Interesting idea.

I'd prefer they drop T2 MEX entirely as I think it kills expansion, but that's an issue I've raised before.

No need to drop it. Just make it less effective, so getting many t1 mex is far better and you only start teching to t2 mex once you cannot get more t1 mex. Look at FA for how well it works.

An issue for another topic I think.

The fast construction of combat units we have in this build encourages getting more factories up earlier rather than fabbers for expansion. It's just a matter of getting the balance right.

But has the unit cost change been a good thing? I wasn't entirely sure what the purpose of that change was. I thought that the combat to expansion balance was pretty good at the end of 2013 and led to a very aggressive and exciting game, a little weighted in favour of structures but this was primarily due to pelters and catapults.

The original point of the MOHO extractor as it were was to trade energy for increased output to help in situations with low metal.

But that concept relies on a number of assumptions that aren't true. For one, energy is pretty much "free" so once you got a decent economy going there is very little penalty to using it as a straight upgrade. I don't really see a way to make the low-metal role work at all.

A flux economy takes a number of traditional RTS balance elements and basically invalidates them. We've learned that the hard way and I just hope Uber has learned too.

For example, some RTS games like Starcraft employs "high initial cost" by making certain research and production prerequisites expensive and take a long time to build, this basically forces a hard limit on that units build time and how many can be had.
That isn't valid in flux because you can simply throw more build power at it to make the barrier go away. The only thing that happens is that power is diverted from combat to eco expansion by shifting the balance of how beneficial combat units are versus tech.
A good expansion strikes a balance between being able to fight and being able to go to the next level. If you focus completely on fighting you will not be able to keep up on eco and automatically lose. If you focus completely on eco you will of course not be able to defend yourself or damage the enemy.

The only thing high initial cost does in flux is to shift that balance. The only meaningful limiter in this system is how many resources it takes to mass produce and how soon you can get those resources.

T2 MEX take incredibly few resources to mass produce. And because they expand your eco, any cost no matter how high is worth pursuing. It just shifts the balance and imposes no meaningful limitation.

Mass fabs in supcom had exactly the same problem. They were meant to allow startups in low mass situations, but the only thing that happened was people farmed it leading to the "post-T3" phase of the game. After it was nerfed, people just built farms with a different layout.

I think the problem here really is that there just isn't any feedback on what a given construction is going to cost you in energy.

Thats why we have fab bots. You can spend more energy to make it faster, or you can spend less energy and be able to fight better. Its a tradeoff, and IT WORKS. No, really. IT WORKS.

We could use a UI that shows the change on net economy when you browse over a building with fabbers selected.

Showing how it will change if you choose to assist building.