Tried several 1v1 games against the AI, starting on identical small moons with relatively low metal orbiting a main planet. Thoughts after several tests: The orbital factory is expensive enough that going Advanced before orbital is a better idea, even when metal is limited and there's a whole other planet with much more metal to fight over. Traveling to the main planet with a fabber and building there has a much slower payoff than rushing Advanced in this case. My suggestion is to lower the cost of the orbital launcher to 1/4 that of an advanced factory (~1500 to 2000), which is ~3 times the cost of a Basic factory, putting it in a good range as a "tier 1.5" factory, encouraging earlier orbital travel & combat. Fabricator efficiency increases dramatically from Basic to Advanced. I believe this is a bad choice, as using Basic fabbers after this point (even the ones that are already built) becomes expensive, and so using them should be avoided. It also brings a considerable build advantage very quickly after going T2. Keeping the same fabber efficiency between Basic and Advanced simplifies things and makes energy a bit more meaningful in my opinion. The Astraeus could be made a bit cheaper in my opinion. It still doesn't feel economically viable to invade using astraeuses. Really like that factories are far more energy efficient than fabbers . Definitely promotes factory spam over assist-spam, and makes energy management far more interesting, as some economies and strategies will require a different balance of resources now. I've got some more thoughts on it as well, but most of those also relate to the current stable build, so I guess I'll leave those to other discussions. EDIT: Also noticed that you can give factories "use" commands in this build (but not in the live one). That's VERY useful
The biggest non-obvious change in this build is that combat fabbers are very efficient and have a large throughput. They're not quite as efficient as tier 2 fabbers, but efficient enough (better than the commander) that you don't need to go to tier 2 for efficient scalable build power. I did some analysis here: http://www.pa-mods.com/article.php?article=v64758-balance_combat_fabber_analysis tl;dr Combat fabbers greatly change how you should play the tier 1 game.
Yeah that unit needs to be renamed to something like "mobile nanolathe tower" if it stays like that. But I doubt it will stay like that.
If it were more efficient, I would be okay, but it is definitely an unintended mistake type of efficient right now, definitely needs lower.
If it were lower it would be much less useful as a combat repair unit though. You cant have them use soo much energy that your whole economy dies from it unless you have a ton of t2 power.
Holy crap that build assist. Perhaps this will end up being an edge case needing a fix like 'combat fabbers can only assist units' .
I don't know, it's a nice way to have some sort of equality between tier 1 and tier 2. For tier 1 to be strong you need to be able to spam it out quickly and efficiently. Combat fabbers do seem rather extreme as it is but that's the mantra, and their stats are necessary for their intended function of repairing units in combat. Because of their stats they are a natural way to make tier 1 factories more efficient. It might be better to make the tier 1 factories more efficient directly, but then you'll end up with efficient tier 1 factories being assisted by efficient combat fabbers. The only problem is it's not obvious that combat fabbers are this good. Sure experienced players will look at the stats and start salivating, newer players may not. [wishy] If it does turn out that combat fabbers are too efficient, my initial reaction would be to make them as efficient as commanders, just with a higher throughput for their reparing role. Say 45 metal/s and 2250 energy/s (or 60 metal/s and 3000 energy/s). Which starts to make going tier 2 for fabber efficiency look too desirable, so make tier 2 fabber efficiency the same as combat fabbers were (ie 120 metal/s, 4000 energy/s). So, a step up but not a leap. Now that I think about it, we are now trying to balance energy eco when going tier 2 means you use it more efficiently AND have a means to generate it more efficiently. Screw that, advanced energy plants now cost the same but produce 3600, but health is increased to 11000 (or whatever is necessary to mean a nuke strike takes it out if it's in the epicentre, it survives otherwise). [/washy]
Good points. I have also been asking for more T1 unit spam and hadn't even though of assisting. Although I do like sprawling out a long line of factories, I guess i'm willing to forsake that in favor of a better overall t1 balance.
