I'm sitting here watching the rest of the game I was in, I see 25 builder bots helping build tanks in an Adv. Vehicle factory, 1 every second. That is simply broken. (as in very much insane and should not be a function of the game.) Please remove this feature entirely.
If you don't want to remove the feature, at least put a min. limit to how quickly a unit can be built. It's just ridiculous. It's cool and all, but yeah, ridiculous.
It's not broken, it's simply an issue that needs to be addressed. My proposal is to increase the rolloff time, increase the energy efficiency of factories, and decrease the energy efficiency of fabbers. Maybe even increase the cost of fabbers and decrease the cost of factories. That way it's much more beneficial to build lots of factories rather than a lot of fabbers. The main balance thing is making factories to be a lot more energy efficient.
Decreasing the cost of factories I approve of for sure, but won't be feasable unless we get Generalists and Specialists instead of T1 and T2.
Wrong metric. The correct answer is "overall cost per production power", which is a battle that T2 factories... win, surprisingly enough. They are just a touch more efficient than spamming bots. But while the best efficiency seems to depend on building more factories, it makes far more sense to use the construction power that you already have. There's no time to waste for reclaiming your old stuff and replacing it with better stuff.
Nope wait I lied. The basic combat fabber sports a beefy 60 construction power for 2K energy at a pitiful 720 metal cost. It is VASTLY superior to all other construction options in the game. Can it assist construction? I haven't checked. If it can, spam the hell out of them and nothing else.
Yes. I've been experimenting with having the com assist a bot factory to combat fab, then having the combat fab assist the commander - 90 metal for 3500 energy. You do need to make a few basic fabbers to start things, I been doing 1-1 so far, and of course you need the income to support their build power. The nice thing is it makes map control the limiting factor.
If you build 10 factories they build units 10x as fast as 1 factory! Clearly that's overpowered! I've done a lot of research into this and in the long run it's almost always better to build more factories, but having a few idle fabbers assist a factory if you have them spare gives them something to do. Having units do something is cooler to watch and more interesting to play than having units sitting around doing nothing. Combat fabbers, because of their efficiency and massive 60 metal/s build rate, are a very good way to speed up production in the PTE, and are potentially OP in the regard. Meta and I discussed stopping the combat fabbers being able to assist and aid in construction, so they could only repair. That might help.
Combat fabber construction is not "potentially" OP. It literally renders all other construction options obsolete. Remember FARKs? Yeah. That's child's play by comparison. Why does the Combat fabber need such a huge construction power anyway? To repair with? No. Your default repair rate formula must be screwed up. A problem over there causes problems over here. It's not rocket chemistry.
How does PA work for determining construction power and build time of a unit? I know that units have a fixed amount of energy / metal that they use for doing any sort of construction, is the construction power directly related to metal usage? Quickly scanning a unit json, I don't see a build time, so I'm guessing it's directly related to metal cost. I really liked how TA's system worked with each construction unit having a worker time and the amount of metal and energy per tick was determined by the metal / energy cost of the unit divided by the amount of time it took to build (which was itself determined by the unit build time / worker time of the construction unit)
Yes. If something builds at 20 metal/s it will be twice as fast at building than something that builds at 10 metal/s, no matter what it's building. Is good. Repair, just like build rate, is based on metal cost of the unit being repaired, and not on unit HP.
Thanks for clarifying. It does make sense as it is consistent, and I can understand why they moved away from TA's system, in PA if you need to free up 10k energy you know you can stop 10 T1 workers and you know that will free up 10k energy, in TA you could have a single worker using 10k on an expensive construction while a group of 10 workers assisting a cheap construction might not even use 5k. Still I think TA's more complex system allowed for finer tuning that you can't do in PA.
