Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

So one difference is that units and buildings no longer have an energy cost, although it costs you energy indirectly through powering the construction. This could lead to the ability to find more efficient methods for building your units. I wouldn't necessarily call this an exploit or abuse.

I don't think this description implies universal or localised economy model. I'm sure this would work for both types.

Straight forward. I like.

One mild complexity I'm a little curious about-
Will metal extractors require energy to operate? If so, I assume the amount of mass they produce will depend on what % of their nominal energy input they are receiving. Would it be possible to, in certain circumstances, prioritize certain units or classes of units to keep using their full energy input and then prorate the remainder going to other units? For instance, let's divide energy-using units into the following classes and say that at a given instant in our game, each class as whole would use the specified amount of energy provided that there is enough energy available:

From highest to lowest priority:
1. Metal Extractors - 2 energy/s
2. Defense Structures - 4 energy/s
3. Constructors/Factories - 8 energy/s
4. Metal Makers - 16 energy/s

When you have energy in storage or are producing at least 30 energy/s, all of these run at 100% capacity. However, let's consider the case where you have no energy in storage and are only producing 22 energy/s. In such a case, the buildings in classes 1, 2, and 3 would all run at 100%, but class 4 will only run at 50% since it only has 8 of the 16 energy/s it wants.
If energy production were to go down further to 10 energy/s, then categories 1 and 2 would run at 100% and category 3 would run at 50%. Category 4 would not run at all.

While it might be a little too much to write this into the UI (i.e. give the player the ability to control what gets priority), I think that a little bit of this sort of logic, especially with regards to metal extractors, could help prevent economy stalling in situations where you are running a power deficit, especially if one's metal deficit is worse than their energy deficit (which in my experience with these games, it usually is).

EDIT:
Just noticed Neutrino's post that answers some questions above.:

I guess that the proof will be in the gameplay, but if stalling is still and issue and the focus is ease-of-use, I think that prioritizing extractors' power usage could make the game quite a bit more user friendly.

Easy solution let the engis drain more energy per metall then the most expensive factory (mass/energy wise).

Except in sup com, you were still paying the same, just building slower. In this model, you pay less.

Sounds good. Also makes factories even more important than spamming engineers.

It will still cost the same metal, but using less energy costing engineers will make it build slower to my understanding.

I suppose that the lathe 'gun' would work like normal weapons, but with very short reload : this way, an engineer is limited by energy and it would visibly stutter when running low, giving clear visuals of the stall.
When lacking metal, I suppose it would have a duller, less dense lathe beam?
Will smart prioritization will make excess engineers shut down when running low on metal, to avoid 20 engineers running at 10% and consuming lots of energy?

That's the only problem I see with this. Even without pausing the factory, you can screw with the intended metal/energy balance by having lots of engineers for few factories, which is probably not a good thing.
The obvious solution would be to always have energy cost proportional to metal cost (Zero-K-style), but it's removing the abuse-prone element, not fixing it.
Other solutions would be to have only specific engineers being able to assist factories (I don't like it) or having the engineer energy cost depending on what it's assisting (I like even less).

Other than that, it sounds like a great way to streamline the economy, can't wait to see how this will work out!

What about radar? Will its range be reduced proportionally or how will that work?

I think there is a way to sort of break things in the above quoted principles. If an engineer outputs a fixed amount of mass/s and a unit requires a certain amount of mass to be built, then it seems that from an economy perspective you would only want to use the type of construction vehicle that has the highest mass-output/energy usage ratio. Also, if a bot factory uses a lot of energy and not as much mass, then I'm only going to build 1 of those and assist it with a ton of engineers and crank out bots at a ridiculous rate.

I'm not sure that we need to prioritize extractors but it might make sense to special case them if that makes life easier for newer players.

Generally speaking I'm not in favor of building a layer for prioritization on top of the existing gameplay. Part of the philosophy here is to keep things on the map and visible as part of the gameplay and systems that are invisible to other players make me cranky. This is the beauty of mobile fabbers which are flexible and can be used to prioritize things but are still visible and vulnerable.

From a technical standpoint we could make the economy manage itself in low resource situations automagically but that's a pretty major part of the game to lose. Creating a meta game of min/maxing the priority system doesn't sound like fun to me and makes the player gap larger.

Because of assisting, in general, factories are going to have metal outputs about a magnitude higher than engineers. They have to or engineering assisting becomes too powerful.

To me it would make sense that mobile fabbers are inherent less efficient than fixed installations.

Also given the variation in fabber types you may not want to use the one that has the best build rate in all cases. Your theory only holds with the caveat of "all other things being equal" which isn't really the case. There are plenty of tradeoffs to make between different fabbers unrelated to build power.

PS Scathis beat me to it.

Perhaps that will work. By doing that, base building is going to demand the most energy by default. It's not necessarily good or bad, it just has to be kept in mind. Energy demand will be highest as fabbers begin rapidly developing bases(perhaps at its worst when generators are under construction), then will go down as more efficient metal users turn online. This naturally leaves spare energy after the fact.

Fortunately there are 2 tools to keep things sane in the early game- the Commander and the "egg". Either unit can utilize a high efficiency lathe, or provide some critical starting energy.

How it plays out in the late game depends on how the economy works across worlds. Generally, base development will be rough if energy is tight.

Many people are going to look at the build power per cost. A factory that builds at 10 but costs 1000 (5/500) is going to work better than an engineer with 4 build speed that costs 500 (4/500). Simple math.

Energy will play some role, but it may not be as drastic as the pure metal numbers.

If a player is tight for both energy and metal, will a metal deficit allow energy to become more efficient due to the decreased energy need from the incoming metal?

WARNING: Gratuitous "told you so" post.

Reckon I got pretty close to this.

If a factory gets 50% of its energy, it will put out 50% of its metal.
If a factory gets 50% of its metal, it will still drain 100% of its energy.
If a factory gets 50% of its energy and 40% of its metal, it'll output 40% of its metal.
If a factory gets 40% of its energy and 50% of its metal, it'll output 40% of its metal.

This is done so you can't get into a feedback loop when you've drained both metal and energy.
Metal output is always capped by the energy input.

So power will function more like a power bar, but for whether something works at 100%?

Spending more metal does not affect energy at all, so no feedback loop.

So more metal patches, means more production. (Money)?

More power means more stuff that require it to run. (Pop/efficiency cap)?

That sounds a hell of a lot easier to use! I like it.

I can't help but feel the explaining in short needs to be done delicately to old fans. an addendum to the running of things, energy is used to run things, including running the construction of things.

You'll have a stored amount of energy and energy income. In any given tick you'll have X amount of energy available. If everything trying to get energy is < X, everything will run at 100%.
If you don't have enough energy to power everything that needs power in that tick, the energy will get split up between all the units and structures that need it. Then the proration of metal output happens.

Lost income is gone forever, and lost metal is going to be especially dangerous. Out of all the economic penalties, prorating extractors will by far be the most painful. All the things in the middle would be active defenses, construction, and extra stuff. Metal makers are waaaayy out in last place, with most economy mods turning them off at the first sign of trouble. Just as well, since a metal maker mostly exists to suck down excess energy(ZK's overdrive did a similar thing), not to cause nightmare stalls.

If energy goes south, it's not bad to keep extractors going and stashing the excess metal. In previous titles, extraction was a trivial expense and the exchange rate can't be beat (<5% energy for 100% metal? Yes please). When generators are rebuilt, the excess metal can be quickly used up. If someone has inadequate energy for extraction, they were pretty much screwed anyway.

Balance numbers are the things that will change the most during alpha and beta. It's important to not jump to conclusions about strategies that can be changed by simply changing numbers.