The Importance Recovery

I know.

But it'd be REALLY cool if they set up something so it could work. A special version of PA Stats or something.

Yeah and give me access to their current dev builds in the process
But I doubt that is reasonably possible, especially since they seem to use multiple internal branches. It's quite possible that it would sometimes need extra versions of PA Stats depending on the branch used as well.

Don't crush my hopes and dreams!

Oh I dream of access to preview builds as well, don't worry. I already made up concepts of how to organize PA Stats, so it can automatically handle different builds and thus switch over seemlessly after patches xD

That's awesome.

Uber has implied that eventually we'll be able to launch multiple branches of PA from the new Launcher.

So hopefully we'll be able to test out multiple balance options.

yeah I know. I just wonder how long until we get that and how version numbers will be handled.

Yeah... it'll be interesting – but I look forward to it.

well there is actually a difference between numbers snowballing and actual snowballing. As in, if your economy does better at the cost of losing a lot of metal or territory in lost fights, id imagine the numbers are deceptive compared to situation.

honestly, if they need to, if it were a problem, obviously they could lower t2 income, increase t2 cost, preferably increase cost of t2 mex and pgen so they only boost economy by initially being negative for a minute or two after build

You forgot to mention that power stalling also means all your radar shuts down, so you don't get to prepare for incoming attacks until your power income has recovered.

Overally, I'd definitely agree: the importance of power in PA means it's very hard to recover from getting a significant amount of your power destroyed (whether by nuke, gunship, vanguard drop, or direct attack). Part of that is how T2 pgens tend to be clustered near your first advanced factory for the sake of convenience. I suppose another factor is that building the pgens further out is even riskier than clustering them all together, since getting several T2 pgens killed by raiding units is a lot worse than losing a few T2 mex.

I wonder if this could be addressed by making all forms of power generation cheaper than they are right now. You'd still need to provide a half-viable way to fight T2 with T1 to make things somewhat competitive after losing an early T2 fac, but allowing recovery from major power loss would be a nice start.

I think a good way to fix this at least partially would be that if you try to rebuild a destroyed factory on a wreckage of an identical factory the cost of the wreckage is instantly transformed into build power. Supcom had this system and I liked it a lot.

Yes true. Currently rebuilding stuff on other stuff just slows down your rate of construction immensely.

I'm watching Zaphod's video of Cola_Colin vs Matiz.

At... about 4 minutes Cola_Colin uses a Bumblebee to bomb four of Matiz's fabbers. Zaphod says "this could be GG right now" – at 4 minutes in! And he's actually not that far off.

I'd say that's a HUGE testament towards the issues that PA is facing. One small mistake or one step back can mean complete loss. And it doesn't even have to be a mistake, just one really good move from the opponent.

That's a huge flaw as it drastically reduces the amount of strategy involved in the game and more boils down to making just one win or one mistake.

The lack of recovery options is a huge flaw in the game right now.

That was a really perfect hit. I don't think you can get rid of that completely.

It's just an example, and it really was a good hit. And I'm not saying that mistakes shouldn't mean something.

I'm just saying that super small mistakes shouldn't determine the entire outcome of the match – there should be the possibility of recovery.

Well yes, but in the first few minutes of the game that has an exponential growth curve you can always end up with super painful mistakes. The delayed t2 in the upcoming patch will probably make it a bit easier to recover from such an attack, but even so: If you lose 80% of your engineers before minute 5 or 80% of your energy to a vanguard drop that is just gg.

Yeah, I think this was more an issue of Matiz not preparing enough for a strong current meta: bomb the opponents fabbers. Throughout that series of games, he never focused on AA enough, and Cola punished him for it. He could have built AA defenses/bots, but he didn't, and paid hard for it (especially that last vanguard drop on his power in game 4, ouch). But people will learn the hard way that early air is a good strategy and make some stingers,/spread out their fabbers, and all should be good.

While I don't think that example applies, I do agree with the rest of your post regarding making recovery viable, particularly more in the mid-game.