Has expansion become less important?

Isn't there a build power mod that does this? Pretty sure you just select fabbers and it shows the total amount they will drain the eco if you use them.

It shows the total amount of metal a structure costs. It does not show the drain rate of your builders.

Sounds like I should make another mod!

I'm not so sure it it actually the efficiency of power plants that is the big deal. Rather it might be the abundance of metal spots.

In FA, t1 mexes cost 10 energy for every 1 metal. T1 Power generators also cost 10 energy for every 1 metal.
T1 power generators produces 20 energy while T1 mexes produce 2 metal. Also 10 energy for every 1 metal.
It is similar in PA except that you multiply energy usage and production by 10. Mex: 7 metal output. Power Plant 600 energy output. It is pretty close to 100 energy per 1 metal but Power plants are also comparably cheaper than FA power generators(75 metal, mexes cost 36 metal, twice as expensive as mex). PA(450 metal, mexes cost 300 metal).
It takes 100 energy to spend 1 metal for most fabbers.
In FA, T1 vehicles also cost about half the energy of t1 Power plants like bot and vehicle factories in PA also drain about half of most fabbers.

However, players rarely start with 10-20 mexes around their starting positions in FA.
In PA, that is common and in order to spend all that metal income you need to make a lot of infrastructure because otherwise you are likely to be outecoed by your opponent unless you put on a lot of early pressure and actually do some damage with it.

Yeah gameplay has actually improved this patch with the lower costs. Before it was expand or lose. Now the windows as godde said are bigger because expansion still takes the same time but you have double the units as before.

If energy gets cheaper we will be in the same position as before as I believe mex is to become cheaper. From the dev streams it appears there is better balance with ground units. So if energy remains the expanding factor and t2 bombers fixed a little this will be by far the best gameplay patch we have seen in a long time.

To be more precise what I still don't like is the way I cannot control my energy output by stalling metal. I don't need a mod that tells me that I will stall hard when I build something. That's not helpful. I need an economy system that can be controlled without having to pause/unpause everything. I can't wait till we get the right modding hooks to build a mod that mostly removes this issue by auto pausing/unpausing stuff faster than any human could do.

EDIT:
@Godde:
so basically while the numbers might be scaled up for the most part there are 2 things that result in the energy stalls:

- More metal
- A lot more energy usage due to the constant 1k energy drain of everything

Well I think that the economy needs a slight overhaul. T1 needs some changes while T2 is the one that needs a bit more drastic changes.

T1 mex - they are becoming cheaper, which is good, but I had not quarrels with them.
T1 Power - I believe it needs to provide 1k power instead of 600. Either that or it needs to be cheaper.

As for T2 - currently it is just an upgrade, but it needs to become more differentiated - specialised if you will.

T2 power generators should become fusion generators - the should go nuke when destroyed.
T2 orbital solar array - They are ok now, but they need to be planet bound and maybe a tiny bit costlier.
Add:
T2 Ground solar array - can provide as much power as a fusion generator for half the cost, but provides no power during the night.
T2 Thermal power plant -
provides as much power as fusion generator but needs to be build either on or adjacent to lava
T2 Hydroelectric power plant - provides twice the amount of power as t1 for 3-4x the cost bu needs to be build on water.
T2 Battery power plant - needs to be build on metal /it consumes metal but provides 2-4x the power of T1 plant.

As for T2 metal again we should specialise it more:

T2 metal extractor - provides the 3x the amount of resources the T1 does but has as much HP as t1 one this meaning it can be easily raided and destroyed if build on the field.
T2 field metal extractor - It provides twice the amount of metal for a T1 one, with as much HP as the current t2 one and has a single laser defense and missile tower built in - It needs a bit bigger raiding force to take down, but it produces a lot less metal also should be a bit costlier.
T2 orbital mining laser - very ineffective (1.5 metal production) for 2-3x the cost and some power usage, but safe from any ground based attacks, but can easily be blocked off by building ground structures over the metal.
T2 metal pump - provides as 5x the of !1 with half the hp as the current T2 one but for a limited time (up to 500-1000 metal), then it drops to 0. It also destroys the metal at the same second it is finished. Think of strip mining. Also needs protection once it is build because it immediately destroys the underlying metal point and requires you to reclaim the already placed T1 metal extractors (to prevent t1 mex still extracting after the point has been depleted).

P.S. Should I have posted that in its own topic?

That would be nice. Now you can pause broad unit types at will, or create a more complicated version that uses control groups so the user can customise what's paused; but it's hacky, requires selection/deselection so it's buggy, and should be killed with fire.

I think if I were to put in a day or two I could get it working by caching user input that is given in the wrong moment and putting it into a queue later on. It's just annoying to do.
hmmm....

How about the other way round? Detect when the user is in the middle of doing something (like they have something selected), then dynamically hijack the end command for the action, to do what you want afterwards.

I don't know if I'm being clear, so:

• Poll the energy to know if we need to do something
• If we do, check the user isn't in the middle of an action
• If they are, hijack the function that ends the action, adding what we need to do to the end of that function (otherwise just do what we need to directly)
• Revert the function back to its normal state when complete

Would require knowing in advance what functions end what actions, or perhaps hijacking every end function to be safe. Probably riddled with holes, let me know your thoughts.

Not sure. If I remember correctly it needs to work like this:

1. We want to i.e. pause all workers
2. Store old selection
3. Select all workers
4. Give pause command
5. Go back to the old selection.

Now the issue is that this all happens asynchronous between JS and native code. So we have a big race condition, if the user gives commands between 2 and 5 he will give commands to the workers, without wanting to do so.
To prevent this we need to block that input and execute it after 5 is finished. Should be possible. But due to the way the message exchange between native code and js works I don't think we can just do it somewhere in js after the user executed a command. We need to call some engine call and react to the changing selection in the handler for it.

Thats not something new, clopse was doing that back in early alpha...

Back in the alpha, T2 air wasn't.....wait. I wasn't here that far back. I've only been here since beta began. Was it OP back then?

I dont know how much the T2 air fac costs now, but before they doubled the cost of the T2 factories, clopse was getting 3-4 metal extractors then going straight to T2 air and using the bombers to 1 shot T1 factories. If you didnt go air first, or a couple buildings after your bot factory, you would be in a very difficult position.

Took a little skill but was a pretty easy cheese way. Back then 6 t2 bombers would kill a com. Factories cost like 1800 or something and the bomber 1 shot pretty much all buildings. Was rightly nerfed and been quiet until around the second 2v2 tourny.

So, the same cheese as it is now, just a little less prevalent with less players.

Fantastic. At least we have a precedent for this nerf

Looks like bmb was wrong on this one. The Build Power mod does do pretty much what igncom wants. It's so hard to keep track of all the mods!

By "it" I meant the vanilla game, not a mod.

I like the idea of making T2 power more than just "bigger power"

Either make T2 power something that can explodes (and thus a bad idea to cluster in the center of your base) or make it something that can only be built on Geothermal spots so people have something cool to fight over other than metal.

Another idea might be to make metal spots rarer if they aren't as important as energy. Right now people can just pick a spawn with a lot of metal and not bother to get any more.

Oh... Your post looked like it was a response to my comment about a mod.