Edit for poll: I forgot to add annihilaser/halleys to the list, as for the question poll. Put them under uber cannon. I dont' really consider them a "defense". Hi all, I've been thinking lots and I wanted to reign in 2 ideas I've had. So I thought I'd take time out from my uni assignments to give myself a breather and share. I'm gonna try and keep this to my solutions and ideas only to avoid extra commentary. The problems should be obvious, since I'm basing my solutions off what I found in forums. So my first solution is more like my personal very strong wish and a playtest experiment is to re-introduce energy consumption back in to (almost) everything. At the very least, into static defense (including orbital anchors), uber cannon, and maybe mobile artillery. In so far as I say almost everything, I'm not sure firing regular weapons like bot or tank cannons or movement of units should be considered costing of energy. Having said that, I think proportional energy consumption to movement or gun firing could be an interesting dynamic problem for example to counter balance to swarming dox'ies early game vs smaller counts of vehiculars. For example if running metal extractors cost the same as firing a dox, or firing a tank, which should be minimal but it means you have to choose how aggressive you are. Some thoughts to throw around? Secondly is the complaint of balance / fun that got overheated in another 'conversation'. Someone pointed out though everyone opening the same way with the same units then it doesn't feel fun even if it is 'balanced'. If Uber/modders can implement something to balance it out so that vehicles do have early game viability. I think it'll introduce more dynamic and varied games. For example vehicle fabbers building noticeably faster than bots. I'm not really sure how this could be properly implemented, but I am sure that I don't like the idea effective early game could be restricted to a single choice of factories/ build order with no deviation. At the very least, I'd like Uber to consider increasing everything's mass cost by 50%, everything's hp by 100% or 75% (except maybe suicide bots, or maybe include them) And increase the 'distance' of advanced units (tech 2)/constructions. I feel like the technology/resource cost difference between nukes/orbital lasers/ catalysts/halleys are a bit too close in some cases. Like I could just rush for halleys and skip nukes. That's probably not 100% accurate, as I originally said I've been busy with uni to playtest my ideas to 100% perfect account of the game state. But I wanna throw them out there and have people talk about my various ideas. Hopefully this sparks interesting ideas on various possibilities on balancing vehicles/bots and tech expense.
Some of those ideas are pretty drastic. I think they are interesting for sure, but not sure how they work out in reality.
If you want to try out how energy consumption affects defences and units, download RCBM. In RCBM anything that has a slightly more tactical weapon draws energy. Some examples include: Double and triple laser defence towers, bombers, Sniper bots, Shellers, SXX and a few others. On the other hand metal is a lot scarcer and harder to get meaning that bot resources are very important, but for very different reasons.
I like the idea of using Energy consumption to limit the effectiveness of powerful units without removing their usefulness altogether. It gives some more options for strats, like going energy heavy and throwing up some energy storage so you can spam out a certain unit (like T2 bombers in the Community UberBalance). It can be completely overdone, however, like the vanilla Holkins.
Well, thanks for the input . I'm not convinced they are drastic changed, but I do agree they'd be interesting to playtest. I just wanted to post this because it's something people seem to dance around but never quite nail and talk about specifically. I'm hoping that people will at least throw ideas out there as a thought experiment. Even if they are drastic they could work out well. But I didn't know about the RCBM. I'll check it out thanks
I definitely agree with the static defenses and Ubercannon classed stuff. I'm less sold on air, but I can totally see orbital requiring energy to move. I'm torn on the tactical units thing, so I only voted in favor of static and uber, either way I'd like to see this discussed more.
I love the idea of defenses being tied to energy, and it might work as a tie-in for increasing their effectiveness. However, I worry about the cost-benefit of units vs. defenses getting even worse; a weapon you can't move, which now also requires an energy infrastructure to back it up, versus weapons that don't cost jack to use which also move. Not a hard choice - countering units with units makes more sense. It's also worth noting that the binary state of "Broke/Not Broke" in regards to energy is problematic. Radar hinges on this binary for its function, but adding defense function and even unit function to that would mean any amount of energy stalling is a death sentence.
If defenses were to consume energy, dedicated defense killers (long range units, melee tank units including Infernos and Vanguards!) would need to consume energy as well. Medium units like Ants and Dox may require energy, but it's not necessary. No, it wouldn't. Streaming eco is also used for weapon charges, so weapon still charge proportionally. That annoying binary state is only ever used for radar and portals. Should it actually do that? I don't know. But it does mean that you CAN cripple your enemies defenses by striking energy first.
Given how vulnerable energy production can be since we don't have shields in this game, I don't think this will have the effect you want. If you can shut down huge amounts of things, it becomes worth it to send bombers on suicide runs to take out energy plants all the time, which will rapidly become annoying. This was manageable in SupCom due to shields meaning that a couple AA structures could shut the down if it was the sole tactic your opponent was doing. Also, energy is already too heavily bottlenecked by the high price of T2 energy.
TA had the whole fusion reactor. Going from 20 E/s t1 to 1000 E/s t2, and it didn't have shields. If fabbers require less energy then that means energy bottlenecks units less, and we'll see metal being the limiting resource a a it should be.
Agreed, I feel like energy for just fabrication and radar/teleportalstargates isn't good enough. I don't know how easy or costly it is to implement from the perspective of a computer actually managing all those variables in the background. But I think someone being able to knock out your power grids and all your main weaponry suddenly shuts down is a very real and immediate danger you should worry about. Alternatively, if there's 0 storage and Negative power, rather than completely shut down, we could have reduced/halved effectiveness. Half rate of fire for example. Thirdly if there's power storage but negative power income could have reduced rate of fire when you're running When you have 0 power left, then total shut down. Noone said anything had to cost huge amounts of power. Just more than 0. It's a very easy concept that introduces difficulty without really introducing complexity. Robots need to be powered right? Laser towers? just the same as factories. It also give you a reason to use storage more which is probably undervalued. The only difficulty I see is managing factories/fabrications in times of huge invasion where you suddenly get a big spike in power usage if you have lots of defense towers defending against a big attacking army. Is that really a problem? Or is it a consequence for your negligence if you don't have enough power or preparations for it? Just throwing ideas out there.
Already works like this. Streaming eco, all I can say. Every single point of energy which is produced somewhere is also used somewhere else (either used by fabber or streamed into ammunition pool). Except for radar and portals, they continue to suck proportionally, but shut down entirely.
You're right, but there's no implementation when it comes to defense towers/anchor/heavy units. If you read the thread more carefully, you'll notice I'm talking about those things. People might have a problem with total shutdown of everything that can do damage. And for practicality's sake, it might be easier/better to reduce effectiveness of towers/units during null energy, rather than cut effectiveness completely. In an above post, the Annihilator from TA was given as an example, no power meant no annihilator laser. So weird using that word in the context of the annihilasors *Coughdeathstarcough* in PA. Anyway, the example with TA's annihilator was fairly local to only the really big heavy guns like annihilator, vulcan/buzzsaw big bertha/intimidator? Stretching my memory now. Been so long since I played. In my post, I'm proposing the energy consumption be more universal. I think it'll be an interesting mechanic/gameplay dynamic. Without really being complex in the way adding all kinds of units or features can add complexity.
