The economy in pa is too easy. Metal: Most maps have so many metal spots. If i dont set the desnsity- and the clusterslider in the editor to >10 i have 10 - 15 metal spots near my spawn. 1 metal extracto provides 7 metal 10 -> 70 15 -> 105 A bot or vehicel factory needs 15 metal per second. That meas, i can power with the metal near my base 5 - 7 factorys + 2 for the commander (30 metal per sec). Thats no porblem. The problem is the rest of the planet/s. On a planet of medium radius (550-650) are 50 - 80 metal spots. If there are 2 player with 50 % mapcontrol and both have ca. 35 metal extractors, both can run 16+2 factorys. The bases are getting realy big and there are lots of units. Now they go t2 and build advanced metal extractors. The metal income will rise from 245 to 1085. What means: 16+2 -> 72+2 t1 factorys or -> 18 t2 factorys. If you compare the are for the factorys with the metal/planet and size of the planet you see: something is wrong! If there are 2 or 3 planet in the game, the metal incom will rise >2000 easely. Then you need 20 adv. fabrication bots and 25 seconds to get a nuke. Take a look at supreme commander or ta. If you play a sc game wit unlimited metal its boring. Same here. Energy: Energy. You need it to build and to power your factorys. Its too linear. fab. Unit needs 1000, plant produces 600. So you know: 2 fab. units need ca. 4 plants, foctorys the same. Where else is energy needed? Radar, teleporter. Thats it! Some recharge stuff is tere too, but with nearly no effect. Wrecks: Reclaiming the trees is a joke. If you realy use it, its very very strong. One tree gives 22 metal or so. But no one is using it, there is already enough metal available. The economy needs to be changed. Look at fa or ta. 1 Less metal spots ore less efectiv extractors. 2 A lot more energy aonsuming stuff and stuff that nees energy in storage. 3 If 1 is accomplished, high metal wrecks on the planet to fight for. 4 Units need to drop metal. If you dont like wrecks because of your pathing problems, just paint it on the ground like in ta or zero k the destroyed wrecks.
Though to be fair PA seems to want metal economy to be pretty easy to come by, considering it scale. A fun thing they did in a PTE once was give both advances metal and basic 5 metal production, this meant you had to expand to get more metal, I'd suggest advanced get a health boost compared to basic though, so it can be different.
What? In my eyes eco is really a driving factor in this game: 1st: Unsecured MetalExtractors can be annihilated with a few bombers in no time. 2nd: Expanding Eco is full of riscs. If you are building defense to secure them this is like wasting resources if the enemy never attacks them. If you are letting them undefended they are very easy to kill. The only save way is expending your base and-of course---this is the most resource intensive way! 3rd: Parallelismeats all your resources! If you want to build on multiple nukes at a time, you really have to secure every MeX you could secure! 4th: Storage vs. Generators. This is a very hard decision. Storage in general is a nice thing, but EnergyStorage is the hardest decision! 5th: Jigs. They might make it too easy. But on the other hand they are the big part that leads to very hard orbital battles! REALLY hard ones...
With 1 and 2 i dont have problems. Why should i build multiple nuke at same time? 4: There is no need to store. Just the radar can go offline
too much early energy for some funky reason. Prof of that is : you can't bring it down at start of game without crashing mass.
No need for storage?! You can expand WAYS faster with storage! Why multiple nukes? Because they are awesome. OK, real reason: You need them if you are fighting multiple enemies! Or if enemy got real good defended and large base.
If you find eco too easy, try playing more and/or harder opponents! My eco always gets harassed to hell and back, specially mex
Unfortunately planet creation has a lot to do with this problem. That's why people spend so much time generating a "balanced" planet. 1v1's you'll find resources are NOT that abundant (especially if it's competitive). On larger maps, it is important to pay attention to the player counts to make sure there isn't metal EVERYWHERE. And lastly, interplanetary battle is expensive when it gets to the later game. (8-10 orbital factories, Halley's, Nukes/anti nukes, Teleporter invasions, SXX snipes, *cough* experimentals *cough*) Also, late game, I refuse to send units groups of less than 1000.. Call it overkill.. I call it a quick and "merciful" death to my enemies. edit:typos
Since its so easy to make worlds it has the counter effect that many players can make it easy for themselves by adding alot of metal thinking its a good idea
As Squishy said, eco is supposed to be easy. If you're playing a single planet game against easy/medium AI it's going to seem boring because of it. A 2 player game with each player having 50% map control is incredibly rare, raiding kills off expanding engineers or unguarded mex long before it can get to that point. Once you start facing harder opponents or playing on multi-planet systems you'll find that the "easy" eco is a blessing. Running T2 plus orbital takes a lot of eco, especially if you're throwing away massive armies trying to establish a beachhead on an entrenched enemy planet; rushing anti-nukes with 30 t2 fabbers because you're enemy is 80% through a nuke or trying to win a halley building race. Not to mention how hard it would be to rebuild a more build intensive eco if a stray nuke or vanguard suprises you and wipes out 30% of your power. Long story short, it's easy to use up all your eco and if you're not doing so you'll lose because a good opponent will be using all of his/hers. Uber have said they wanted a less micro intensive, massive scale war game and that's what they've given us. TA and SupCom both had unit limits that PA laughs at. I've ended PA matches with more fabbers than TA allowed units.
Screenshot of 30+ min game stats with 100% eff, 100% energy and metal used, zero wasted (aside from energy you naturally waste at beggining). Or didn't happen.
It's so you don't have the problem of energy stalling. **** brb need to go nuke a planet out of existence.
If you play aginst good players it will be rally hard to manage the "easy" economy due to LOTS of raiding and especially since the dox can actually do their job now. Why build multiple nukes? Check the gif´s Geers put out above. And storage is KEY to efficient warfare in this game, inbetween massive construction you are going to have + 1k metal and + 100k energy late game, and this is needed to be stored so that you do not enter the red zone. Especially good when nuke-spamming or invading planets.
