Mass Fabs

I want mass fabs basically identical to how they were in TA.

That is all.

I want mass fabs but metal extractors should be much more efficient than mass fabs!!!

Define conversion. I think there needs to be a way to convert energy to metal such to create another way to invest in the future. But I dislike the exponential standard MM approach which can eventually make territory unimportant.

I don't like mass fabs with flat conversion rates. But ZK does something pretty interesting with overdrive. Diminishing rates and mex-based conversion means that map control is still important while still allowing you to boost your metal production with energy.

We really don't need fabricators, at the very least make them an option to disable/enable. I would prefer a finite amount of resources so that you have to tactically manage them instead of building nothing but power plants and mass fabricators *cough* SupCom2 *cough* It wasn't as bad in FA at least. SupCom2 was a 'dumbed' down version of FA

i really liked it as compensate for maps where were less metal spots.

*ignores sc2 flamebait*

I did a cool mod for SC2 that was an interesting way of managing these. I first converted the sc2 mass fabs to the sane continuous production version, then made them do the following:
* Every fab up to a cap produces the stated amount-on-label
* Every fab up to a second higher cap produces a linearly decaying amount based on how many are online including it (more on this in a minute)
* Every fab past the second cap produced no further gains

About the second higher cap thing; Let's say you have a base cap of 5, second cap of 15, and a base production of 1. Fabs 1 through 5 produce 1 mass/second each. Fab 6 produces 0.9 mass/second. Fab 7 produces 0.8 mass/second. Fab 8 produces 0.7 mass/second. Etc. Fabs 15 and up produced 0 mass, since you were at saturation for the area.

Combined with some spreading code to make each fab produce the "average for all existing fabs" amount so the UI didn't 100% suck, you had a system that would let fabs help while limiting their total use fairly heavily. Granted, the UI to communicate this kinda sucked since SC2 was tricky to mod anything in the UI, but i think a system like this could work well.

That system does limit the exponential nature of the classic MM economy. My gripe is that it has to be tailored to games of a certain size. In small games you may be able to make a large proportion of your economy out of MMs. With large games MMs could be worthless because you quickly hit the point where they are inefficient. Basically total territorial metal income can vary but the efficiency scale of that idea stays fixed which only makes it balanced for some range of map incomes.

Zero-K style overdriving metal extractors from excess energy sounds like a much better option than metal makers, it reduces the complexity and thought needed for economy so you can spend more time on blowing stuff up

...then again, there is the whole idea of gas giants being gigantic sources of energy. At some point with a gas giant, energy to metal conversion might come in handy...

I suppose I'm not 100% against energy to metal conversion.

What I would prefer though would be if the game was balanced so that energy is always a limiting factor in some regard, so that you'd have to choose whether to use it for conversion to metal or something else.

For example you could have shields that get stronger when supplied with more energy, with diminishing returns. Or similar effects for radar, cloaks, lasers, etc., or units that use a lot of energy to fire or use special abilities.