Internal Playtest – Econ Balance Changes and New Teleporter Model - 3/27

http://www.twitch.tv/therealsorian/b/514797603

• Excess economy now shows blue instead of orange – and blue makes more sense.
• A lot of the balance changes are confined to advanced.
• Commander metal and energy production hasn’t changed, and Sorian is pretty sure the storage hasn’t changed either.
• The goal is to make advanced take longer to set up but to ramp up more along the lines of basic once it gets going. This will likely mean the timing for stepping up to advanced will be more important than ever – we’ll see though.
• Teleporters are cheaper and have more health.
• No update on the orbital fabber model
• Advanced Bot Factory consumes 108 metal and 2,250 energy per second to build. So the costs of running advanced factories is much greater, so it’ll be very easy to stall your economy if you build an advanced factory too soon
• Advanced Bot Fabricator consumes 90 metal and 3,000 energy per second.
• The costs of advanced economy buildings have been increased.
• New Teleporter Model. A lot smaller so it can be built easier on smaller planets and anywhere and whatnot. Maybe this new teleporter change will accommodate moving naval units?
• Advanced energy plants still produce 5,000 energy
• Advanced Metal Extractors produce 84 metal per second. Not the change that the community wanted. But maybe it’ll be alright due to the massive increase in cost for the advanced fabricators. We’ll see.
• Due to the advanced fabber changes, building basic buildings will go incredibly fast. Can build laser defense towers in seconds. Not sure how I feel about that. I’m concerned that it’ll invalidate basic units even further.
• There’s still some crazy pathing bugs on Lava planets.

More info

Since this is mainly an eco balance, I wonder if this isn't going to be released, and instead there's going to be one large build that releases both eco and unit balance at the same time later down the line.

I like the idea of making it harder to reach T2 and making it more rewarding once you get their. The downside to this is once you get their T1 looks even worse.

The change to the advance metal is surprising but I suppose it so as the fights get bigger you will be able to support bigger production. At the moment if you once a planet lack of metal can really mess you up as you can always make more power and not more metal.

I'm surprised they didn't change laser turrets. The teleporter changes look promsing as it will hopefully encourage more ground wars and less nuke/orbital spam.

What we're trying doesn't make it harder to get to T2. I just makes building factories much easier once you get there.

Yeah. That's my main concern as well.

I really like the idea of making advanced more difficult to obtain – but once you get to advanced, basic becomes so incredibly obsolete. And it also makes PA into "first person to advanced wins"

It's really difficult to judge until we get our hands on it. And to be fair, their increase in metal consumption from advanced fabbers would balance it out – in theory. I'm not so sure just yet.

Have costs gone up? That 84 metal income doesn't make me think factories, it makes me think nukes, especially with the fabbers become so much more energy efficient. It'll become more important to get T2 fabbers with that setup I think and they'll make T1 fabbers redundant because the speed gap has become enormous.

Hmmmm, The thing is it will be harder to get there as you will need to spend longer on your economy to be able to produce T2 units with out stalling massively. It's hard to tell what it will be like till we play it but that's what I'm think atm.

He was a little vague on those details.

But he did seem to think that advanced economy building's costs have gone up.

Unit there are better ways of sending units across space I guess this will just help nuke and orbital laser spam.

THIS IS SOMETHING WE ARE EXPERIMENTING WITH.
THIS WILL PROBABLY NOT SHOW UP IN THE GAME IN THIS FORM.
Just wanted to make sure that was out there.

There is one main thing we're trying to solve: At Tier 2, the number of factories is drastically lower than the number of Tier 1 factories. We believe it's because the time to build the T2 factories is so much greater than the T1s. With more T2 factories, we believe that we'll find more unit-play at T2 rather than just going right to the super weapons.

THERE ARE STILL OTHER THINGS WE NEED TO IMPROVE ON THE COMBAT SIDE OF BALANCE TO MAKE UNIT-PLAY MORE ENGAGING.

But we are mainly looking to dial in the economy balance right now. Now that we've had the last round of balance settle a bit, it's time to shake it up.

How do we accomplish this? We like how long it takes to get to T2, so we didn't want to just reduce the metal cost of the T2 factory. We didn't want to put in some crazy, un-intuitive hack like the first T2 factory being more expensive than the second. So, we kick up the T2 metal economy so the T1 is still the same, but the T2 fabbers build things faster.

We increased the metal income, the fabrication costs, and the metal costs of all advanced structures to compensate, AS AN EXPERIMENT.

I really need to talk to metabolical about not streaming these tests...

I really like these tests.

I'm well aware of how these aren't final changes. I suppose I should have made that more clear in the original post. I'll edit it.

I really like how we can watch the game evolve and put in our input. Really makes this experience a lot more engaging and enjoyable.

Side note... there is a new orbital fabber model coming. This build was in an experimental branch of our code base and isn't completely up to date.

I think I like the old teleporter model better...

Nice!

Can't wait to see it.

I think the other one looked cooler – but not by much.

However, this version is MUCH better gameplay wise.

I like the change.

Thus the change. Should be much easier to find a valid location to place it on. Especially on smaller moons and asteroids.

I like to see the tests, it's cool to see the different ways you take to change an aspect to balance it ect

Also I and I assume most people know theses are tests of things that could be put in the gamma of a game. We know it's not final. All I'm doing is speculation as it's interesting to think how different changes to the game can effect different things.

Anyway loving the engagement with the community. It makes it a different experience to interact with devs.

Awesome.

You rock.

I love being apart of this process.