I did a search for this, really, as best I could, and I couldn't see this idea anywhere, but if it has been suggested, apologies! In SC, each T1 power gen created 20 power. One T1 Energy storage stored 2,000 So 1 storage unit could supply the equivalent of 100 T1 power gens for 1 tic, or 1 Pgen for 100 tics. But what if each pgen had built in storage? I have no idea how muchstorege per pgen/mass extractor, this would have to be tested and balanced, as we don't want too much, since it comes into place automatically. More powerful PGens would store more energy in tune with their increased production The idea here is that power (and mass) production increase, so does storage, linearly, and with no effort. however, as production facilities are destroyer, so too is the storage. What this also does is simplify one aspect of the economy, without requiring any change to the way it works. Mass storage tacked on to mass extractors means we are limited to what we can build, but doesn't that incentify exploration and fighting over mass spits, now not just for production, but storage as well? Thoughts?
It's not a bad (or that new) an idea - the biggest problem is that it's sitting on too many assumptions to really discuss just yet. Storage buildings are essentially a logistics unit, so it really really depends on what level of logistics they are going to want to implement.
Most people build storage in case they lose their powergenerators. So this would seem kinda counter-intuitive. If all your power is running, you generally don't need the extra storage. And when you lose power and want to rely on storage, it's gone.
I remember that in TA storage did increase with some units/building that were not storage building. I liked the idea, but the implementation was very inconsistant. Still, it should be quite low to not remove the utility of storage.
From that point of view, I'm okay. But I would like storage be usefull before a big and lengthy attack. To be sure to have enough power to maintain the big laser functionning.
There is some merit to this. Those who modded TotalA are likely familiar with a little glitch as the economy approached extremes. Energy would bottom out and guns would stop firing, despite huge amounts of surplus. This was due to energy being utilized in two separate ways. The first was through the flowing economy system, which most units shared and was updated every second. The second was with direct access, such as through lasers and the big bertha. The glitch happened with the latter. With the extreme economies, a single tick of energy would instantly fill storage and spill over. That energy was gone, unable to be used by weapons that drew directly from storage, and leading to a blackout. Building extra storage gave a larger buffer and fixed the problem. How much storage does a power generator need to avoid this bug? At the very least, one tick of storage is required. This means that a generator can put all its energy into storage at once, which lets it be accessible to weapons that draw directly from storage. Anything more can be left to dedicated storage.
Indeed. In Supcom, big demands simply linked up to the flowing economy. Don't we wish everything could be this simple? It wasn't, because it made a new problem- one of of energy priority. TotalA prioritized the flow economy, and anything tied to storage worked with the leftovers. This prevented energy from stalling everyday use. If there wasn't enough for a big birtha, it was the first to shut down, but it didn't necessarily get rid of energy for the small guns. Dealing with power shortages wasn't that hazardous, since the economy was extremely flexible and inherently gave "dibs" to construction tasks. There was some issue dealing with fabs, which IIRC toggled endlessly at low energy, hurting the economy and being an annoyance more than anything. Overall the system was pretty damn solid. Don't go hatin' on an old game just because it had a few quirks, and especially if a little tweak makes it all good again. Supcom tied practically everything into the flow economy. Many unit demands were not flexible, such as with artillery or fabs or shields. When fixed demands were greater than the energy supply, that was it. The economy died. It permastalled, and breaking this death spiral was a lot of trouble, if possible at all. The wrong type of energy crisis could basically render the game unplayable. I don't think that kind of disaster should return in PA.
You are basically talking about patching and glitching in a game that's barely under development. That's the wrong kind of attitude to take towards the development process. There's a million options and ideas that can be used to prevent this entire thing from even coming up as a problem. Regardless of whether or not I'm "hating" on TA by pointing this out. You don't start a project with the intention of copying something so directly that you're literally taking over their glitches and are looking for ways to patch them off the bat. You copy the concept of what they did, and try to improve upon it. I'm 100% positive there's a worth-while fix to this problem that doesn't require patching glitches in 15 year old games to work. Even if they did it "pretty damn solid". That's just not the right attitude.
Right, the reason you build storage is not so you can survive an outage, but so you have a bigger buffer to deal with bursty flow. (this is true even in non-flow based economies, but is less obvious) Examples from TA would be: 1) when you have one or two geothermals powering a bunch of Big Bertha artillery. The geothermals keep a steady amount of energy coming in and the Berthas use great gobs of it for their occasional pot shots. Every once in a while they all fire at once and you blow through 10k energy in one go, but that's what the energy buffer was for. 2) When you plan to reclaim a whole bunch of metal. You crank up the production a bit, throw down a spare metal storage unit, let the metal store get mostly empty, then reclaim the nearby building and fill your buffer back up. Honestly I think generators/construction units/factories should provide some small amount of storage (like 1-5% of their generating/production capacity) so your buffer grows somewhat as you expand. If you find that you actually need to manage your buffer, then you build a few dedicated storage units (which are cheap and have respectable capacity) and get on with life. I think TA basically nailed this, and I only remember needing to build storage when I was needing to manage rapidly fluctuating resource rates. I don't want to have to build storage as a matter of course, that's boring and makes me focus on the truly tedious parts of economy. It's one thing to need more resources and switch your focus to maturing your economy, but often having to set up storage farms is actively annoying and mentally throws me for a loop. I didn't hit that energy crash in SupCom as often or as hard as you describe, but yeah, it was a lot more annoying to manage when it happened than it was in TA. TA was a lot more forgiving in recovering when your economy stalled. Yes, we need a well-designed priority system for the economy. I don't even mind not being able to touch it, just that it needs to recover smoothly when someone accidentally stalls it. A possible priority system: (power each category's units from lowest consumption to highest) Production Weapons Radar/Shields (ok, no shields in PA) Storage Ally overflow *Note: Ally overflow should be disable-able if I want to briefly test my economic ability to survive on my own. I can picture a domino scenario where I didn't realize my/my alliance's economy was actually being completely supported by the newb with all the power generators, which then collapsed and hamstrung me/all of us when the newb gets killed.
Yes indeed, anything that takes away the need to babysit economic structures is a boon. I already havee to manage mass and energy income vs production vs expansion (to make sure I'm spending all my new found prod) vs losses (to make sure I don't tank mass or energy income after a savage offensive wipes out a lot of my energy, but not my mass prod or vice verse) I want to have a small percentage of my game time managing production, less then 5%. Doing anything to help that is good, automating storage growth with economy growth by incorporating storage into other facilities achieves this. To me, it's a no brainer!
Good points about needing storage to support a major offensive. Although I must say about the reclaiming, that Zero-K (and possibly other games) fixed that need for storage by simply converting reclaiming into a steady flow of income as well, which works much better than TA's burst reclaim. Still, I think I'd prefer to see major artilllery and superweapons to drain a steady amount of energy over burst-mode. Proper prioritizing of energy use by the system (with the option to overrule by the player) would probably be easier to manage. Perhaps, to still a keep a need for energy storage occasionally, it would be interesting to include a few weapons that start devouring more and more energy with sustained fire, and that will ultimately fire with such power that you can't possibly support them with production. Although the burst mechanic of TA did have that satisfying "Look how powerful that thing is!" because of the bouncing energy bar. But it was ultimately unpredictable and a bit glitchy.
