How we Bring Back Expansion: Make Metal the Limiting Factor

Metal is easy to get. It's cheap and plentiful and oftentimes players have more than they know what to with, but another resource is keeping them from increasing production to match the metal so that the cycle of expansion and industry can continue: energy. Energy ATM is too expensive and fabbers consume too much of it. Fabbers should be less efficient than factories, yes, but not this much less efficient. If they consumed the same amount of energy as factories they would still be less efficient because they don't spend metal as quickly as factories. Vehicle factories are also worse than bot factories as they consume more metal but have no energy cost benefit compared to bot factories. How do we fix this?

T1 PGen Cost: 450 -> 350
T1 PGen Power Output: 600 -> 675
T1 Vehicle Factory Power Consumption: 675 -> 560
T1 Non-Air Fabber Power Consumption: 1000 -> 675
Air Fabber Power Consumption: 1100 -> 775

The result of these changes will be that you will be able to get up production much earlier in the game and will thus metal cap earlier, before your T2 is up. This will mean that you will need to expand a lot more.

Thoughts?

I definitely think further balance is needed in this area, and this sounds like a plausible solution.

Right now getting a few groups of air fabbers to build metal extractors all over the planet and not worrying about defending the metal extractors is all too easy. There's simply no downside or risk to sending air (or ground) fabbers all across the entire planet. The income they generate is big. It's simply way too much reward for no risk.

Expanding shouldn't be as fast an easy as it currently is.

In order to receive a big return, there must be risk.

oh I was thinking that was me only, fabbers use much energy...

They should all quickly die if you don't protect them though. That's the whole point of fighthing over areas.

Making t2 metal extractors a lot less efficient would help, too. I don't think there is any one way to make expansion more important. If you make a big change to one thing, there can be unexpected balance consequences. Instead, they should make very small changes to a lot of things.

Fabber speed could increase a little, but too much will encourage assisting factories rather than spamming them.

Except even if they die quickly, they're still worth it.

If a metal extractor is alive for 22 seconds, it's worth the investment.

Practically no risk, and lots of reward.

If there's a high reward, there needs to be a risk.

I remember holding a group of 16 t2 mexes. I was only barely using every drop of metal and not too much nor too little, and I was using 40 t2 bot fabbers.

16 t2 metal extractors is sufficient metal for endgame, so it should actually take 25 t2 mexes to produce what 16 does now. That way, one would actually be hungry for metal all game, instead of getting a couple handfuls and being too fat with metal to burn it all off.

FA had 18 seconds of pay off time.
So we can go even lower
Can't see the issue with fast reward from expanding. It's promoting people to expand. That's what we want.
Once everyone tries to expand really hard they'll naturally clash over the mex that are available.
That was one the things that completely broke SupCom2: It took minutes for mex to pay off. Nobody ever expanded more than a few mex, because it meant simply losing the game to attacks.

The rewards of a single mex are not all that big. You need to build stuff around that mex or your opponent will quickly take the mex away from you. So expanding heavily actually is quite costly at first, if you want to make your expansion permanent. It's costly enough to give you a hard time for a while, should your opponent just rush hard at you.

@brianpurkiss, @Cola_Colin
I don't necessarily disagree with you guys, but I think you missed something that, maybe @thetrophysystem mentioned.

I think the problem here is metal density.
Metal is too available. Such that, you never compete for it.
I didn't play any competitive TA, but from my FA days, metal was king and you had to fight for it, then you went for the win. Think back to Seton's, people fought for the wrecks in the middle and the islands on the sides.
What I'm noticing with PA is that it's optimal to expand up until you start overproducing metal, and your limiting resources becomes energy. Except you can build as much energy as you want, that's limited by how many fabbers and energy you have. What I think this does is move the game from revolving around metal, to time. I don't really know how I feel about that right now.
I think what happens is people decide how they want to go about killing their opponent (air snipe, orbital snipe, just running them over with tanks) and then execute the appropriate build. No one really fights for metal. If anything, people fight over power. Nuke someone's power and that's it, no radar, no turrets, no D-GUN, or production. (This was the case in every TA style game though)

Half of this is just me ranting, I think competitive plays could have more focused input if we knew where the developers wanted to take this game. I know Mavor said that he wants static-d to have its place in the game, so I think he want to go for some sort of territorial type play, at least at some point in the game. So scarcity of resources would move us in that direction.

While we're on the topic of metal spots, normalized spawns would be nice so we can start having openers and standard builds, you know FA type stuff. Maybe some people aren't okay with that though, I haven't taken a hard on stance on either side yet. I just want it so I can have some sort of routine to judge myself against.

Edit: to say more:

What happens, at least to me, now, is expanding becomes really awkward. Because once I'm maxing out on metal, I put as much fabbers on energy as safely possible until I've built enough to support the spending of all my metal. At this point, I'm probably spending all my metal and energy on building offensive units, and I don't know how to smoothly expand while also building offensive units.
I think that's my problem, with the current UI I don't know how to fine-tune my economy. I don't know how to predict how much metal I'm going to be using, how much metal is going to be available, and therefore how much power I need.
I don't know how to fix this.

I don't really agree with this. When balancing a game there exists a vision for the game and guesses are made about which changes would move the game closer to that vision. Sometimes implications of a change can't be anticipated, but that's okay because that's what the developers are there for.

So you make one change and see in which direction the metagame/game moves and act accordingly; instead of observing an unwanted effect, slightly adjusting the entire game, and then wonder what you need to do to get rid of the same effect after it rears its ugly head a few months later.

I can´t wait for the greyed out sliders in the system editor to be finally activated .. metaldensity - metalspots .. I think once those will be added, the balancing problems described here will be somewhat solved by community testing .. or am I wrong?

Well, I think a lot depends on what the default planets look like. I don't think a good solution is one where I can generate a balanced planet, but the average lobby game is a money map.

It's fairly common terminology to refer to a player's attention as 'the third resource'.

At the moment, this third resource is the main limiting factor in the late-game. The Zaphod limit for PA past about the 20-minute mark is still quite high, particularly where there is combat taking place on several planets at once.

I think it is worth considering adjusting things so that the two main resources, (energy and metal) are able to do a bit more to limit what a player is capable of, rather than demanding Starcraftian levels of attention!

I don't see what making metal the limiting factor has to do with expansion. The t2 nerf will just mean we have less metal which builds less units. Players still need to expand, it just happens a little later.

I will just add that having less metal spots was tested in alpha and it was horrible and quickly reverted.

.. but I can´t remember if the unit costs and balancing were anything like they are now .. I really can´t remember .. I´m gettin old

But let us remember that unit costs have been slashed since then.

I agree that energy is out of whack with metal. I find it a bit silly that we have to build reams of energy nonstop and that this is the major limiting factor.

It's also rather nuts how much better T2 metal is. As we just discussed in another thread, "300 metal/second" doesn't sound like very much because we are used to T2 income, where even 3000 metal/second is entirely feasible. In T1, 300 metal/second is forty-two extractors. That is a crapload of extractors representing some pretty major expansion. For 3000 metal/second in T1 you would need 428 extractors, so like the entire surface of 4 good sized planets.

I don't know that we want to remove T2 extractors but we definitely don't need them to be what they are today.

And units were made of paper. So you had expensive units, that were even more expensive because less metal available, that died really fast.

Edit: to say more about my previous post:

What happens, at least to me, now, is expanding becomes really awkward. Because once I'm maxing out on metal, I put as much fabbers on energy as safely possible until I've built enough to support the spending of all my metal. At this point, I'm probably spending all my metal and energy on building offensive units, and I don't know how to smoothly expand while also building offensive units.
I think that's my problem, with the current UI I don't know how to fine-tune my economy. I don't know how to predict how much metal I'm going to be using, how much metal is going to be available, and therefore how much power I need.
I don't know how to fix this.

I think the issue isn't just the abundance of metal, it's the fairly even distribution across the planets. There are slightly denser and slightly less dense areas but on the whole, it's fairly homogenous, and there's always some to be found not far from anywhere.

As an alternative, metal could be just a LITTLE more scarce (say, 70-80% of its current average abundance) but also located in tight clusters of 3-6 points each. Make the extractors more expensive (equal to the power plant, in my opinion) and expansion becomes MUCH more of a risk, though the reward is still critical to success.

You could also go in the opposite direction. Increase the cost of mexes. Mexes are so cheap and durable that you don't really need to defend them. They pay off so quickly and are built so quickly that you don't really need to defend the fabbers either. When mexes costed 300 metal you had to defend the mexes since they were much more expensive and you also needed to dedicate more units to building and defending the mexes.

Add to that t2 mexes are so good that you can just rush t2 and just boost your way to the lategame without expanding much. I'd say it is more an issue with t2 combat units being overall better for cost than t1 and that t2 mexes are so effective.

A bit of a side topic but related, something I have noticed is expansion is hampered greatly by Aircraft and by Nukes. Metal may indeed need adjusting but without Aircraft and Nuke adjustment expansion will always be restricted. Both of these factors are also whats greatly impacting the land wars (which this games is really more about when you talk about combat modes).