While playing a 5x eco game I noticed that metal gained from fabricator reclaim was effected by your eco multiplier while metal spent repairing was not. Because of this imbalance, it is possible to both repair and reclaim something at the same time keeping it's health constant and gaining metal. This allows for players to win a game with massive amounts of metal while having 0 metal extractors and is the safest and most efficient way to gain metal on large eco multiplier games. The only downside to doing this strategy is the energy cost. Done correctly it is a completely automatic source of infinite metal in the safety of your own base. The minimum economy multiplier is 2 because of how reclaim / repair is done in Planetary Annihilation. When repairing something it gains health based on how much of it's total metal cost was restored, so if a 100 metal structure gained was repaired for 10 metal it would gain 10% HP. Reclaiming on the other hand deals damage based on how much of the unit's "alive metal" was taken away with alive metal being (metal cost) - (wreckage value). If that same 100 metal structure had a 50 metal wreckage value and was reclaimed for 10 metal it would lose 20% HP. From testing I've determined a structure's wreckage metal value is half of it's metal cost, meaning that most units will be reclaimed at twice the rate they are repaired. Mobile units on the other hand have slightly less than half their metal value as wreckage value. I find the best way to set up an eco farm is by first building a titan since it's mobile and has a very high metal cost, then creating a lot of t2 fabricators and assigning 2/3 of the fabbers to assist and 1/3 of the fabbers to reclaim. Assisting is important because they will automatically start repairing again if the unit is healed to max. Once you have the basic setup you can keep adding more fabbers in a 2:1 repair to reclaim ratio to increase metal output. Although this oversight does not affect a lot of games I still believe it should be fixed since it makes 5x eco games unbalanced. The problem could be solved by making fabricator reclaim rate scale with economy multiplier or preventing a unit from being repaired and reclaimed at the same time. In the image below you can see the eco farm near the commander, very well protected even from ares titans. By the end of the game I had around 20k metal income with a 9x eco multiplier. 17415 metal/second came from the 43 t2 bot fabricators reclaiming the atlas while 3991 metal/second was spent repairing it making the net income 13424 metal/second.
This has been known to be the case for quite a while, but the alternative is also quite the compromise. It affects very few games, and absolutely none of those games are competitive; I don’t see why scout’s honour isn’t enough of a solution here.
Well I disagree that "the same reason it never is" applies here. Are people actually making the game less enjoyable for others using this technique? How often do games with that level eco modifier get played by people that both know this behaviour and want to exploit it? The only case where I can see this meeting all those criteria would be a large FFA with a significant bounty. If you fix this, you stop eco modifiers affecting reclaim as expected. I think I'd rather live with an exploit that nobody uses than sacrifice reclaim in those games, before even considering the time spent fixing the issue.
wreckage health ratios: structure: 1.0 vehicle: 0.7 bot: 0.7 Exceptions: Boom: 0.0 Locust: 0.0 Mine: 0.0 Wall: 0.0 *Not including Legion; all values taken from the game's .json files on patch 112589 This means that, for mobile units, the living portion should be equal to 1 / (1 + .7) of the unit's metal cost, or ~.588. So, with an Atlas or Ares, I believe a 1.7 eco modifier is actually the minimum required to break even on reclaim costs, but balancing 17 fabbers per 10 fabbers is definitely a bit complex.
