The 'new' flow based economy

Then how do you explain that to a player?

Because the problem with a priority system is that you can't see it, and it won't always be what a player wants to happen.

This system you present is difficult to understand where the resources are going to, and gives no advantage to attacking a players energy economy, because mass will never be affected by it, meaning that effectively energy doesn't affect them like the rest of the system.

Metal in that instance might as well not have a power cost because by the time you can un-power them is when a player has no power left anyway.

Leaving you with a system like in SupCom2 where you will only need 3 power plants for the first 30mins of a game.

There's only one priority: METAL. And showing it is easy. Shave it off the top and deal with the excess. If a player runs less energy than priority metal, then they are in an emergency shortage and everything is prorated as a matter of triage. However, the triage state is always going to be weaker than a healthy economy that maximizes its metal income.

When a player gets in a triage state, they are pretty much dead. There is little way to recover when your energy is SO BAD that it can't even provide the metal income. Such a state is subpar and should only be used during a crisis. In all other circumstances, favoring the extractors is the correct way to play.

No energy weapons
No energy defenses
No Commander abilities
No abilities at all
Lost radar/sonar
Lost stealth/cloak systems
No repair
No resupply
No artillery
No unit guns
No teleporters
And oh yeah, no death star doom rays

I don't know about you, but it looks like EVERYTHING is compromised when energy runs low. Hitting the metal supply is just unnecessary.

Why is is unnecessary?

Power is important, but why should metal be excluded from your list?

Metal is no where near as critical as defence, so why not a priority for them instead?

The only way i see prioritizing working well is if you give the player a very simple couple of buttons. They don't necessarily have to be hidden away somewhere but they shouldn't be a major part of the interface, maybe just next to your resource bar.

maybe click and it drops down to 4 options or so.
1 button for prioritising mining, all energy goes to extractors first and everything else second.
2nd button for intel prioritising, i know you are all annoyed when your power flickers and all your hard earned unit identification in sup com goes kaput.
3rd button for prioritising combat, weapons get charged up and everything else be damned.
4th for balance, the default, no priorities.

They might not necessarily be selectable options and be toggles instead, and its not a perfect solution but it works.

All that being said i'm not in favour of priorities, but if i had to have them, that seems a solution that is self explanatory.

The ZK system was mostly redundant and left the most important aspects of priority as an exercise for the player. That was no good. yogurt312 points out that there are very few real situations that a player cares about:
1) Maximizing extractor income (the default, healthy, and optimal state for the economy)
2) Keeping intel online (for more cautious players)
3) Forcing defenses online (for emergencies)

That's 3 on/off buttons to manage every aspect of energy that matters. The 4th button isn't even needed because they're mutually exclusive options.

Because metal is more important by default. The entire point of the game is to fight over extractors, so why would they NOT be prioritized? Extra metal gives the money needed to build more generators, so favoring extractors automatically gives access to more energy. Also, the previous math shows that it's far simpler for new players to work with, as stalling does not give a permanent penalty the way prorating does.

Then shut things down? You are of course speaking of the standard prorate mode, where the ideal operating state is thrown out the window and it's every device for itself. This situation is rarely needed and is often the result of enemy action. The best assumption is the base will survive, so you want the most money out of it, or it won't survive, so you want the most money out of it.

You don't need to, not for the most part. The point of priority is that it's invisible to the player and doing the best thing possible, until it becomes a problem. A unit would basically have 3 modes of operation:
Maintenance (high) priority.
Standard prorate priority.
Off.

Big, global (or at least eco-bound) buttons make it easy to manage. The worst case scenario is the player mouses over the tooltips to see how much energy he needs and where it's being used. (Though the weapon priority is only theoretical, it's still a good idea to show how much the full defense grid needs to operate). All in all, it appears to be one extra data point for the main energy tooltip:

As for metal, well. Priority isn't needed for metal. You put construction power where you want it. That's all the priority you will ever need.

Not good, do the math for 2 mexes same income.
for 20 seconds:
+400M earned 0 used 400 stored, If storage <400 x wasted
better:

Well consider too, that in the above post there is no dicussion about other energy users or behavior on a Mass or Energy bank.

Please tell me how you got +400M in 20 seconds, from an economy that by definition is extracting 10 metal per second. That level of magic is beyond my understanding.

For metal, it prorates. Whoever used the most before, uses the most after. For energy, it prorates. Whoever demands the most before, gets the most after. Big deal.

There are some concerns when an energy shortage stalls fabbers(or indeed any unit) of different efficiencies. Ideally you want the most efficient things still working, sometimes, maybe, depending on the situation. That's ultimately a very minor issue and I doubt any system is more effective than letting the player solve it.

The problem is how messy things get when the income rate is stalling. When income changes, everything around it changes as well, dealing permanent economic damage(lost extraction time does not come back). The tragedy is this damage is preventable most of the time, without requiring any input or player experience, with a simple application of priority. That's what I intended to show, and the examples show it in a fairly clear (if long winded) way.

Code:

2 fabber vs 5 fabber scenario

The 2-fabber setup matches the income rate, but there's not enough energy for everything. In that setup, over 20% of the metal income was sacrificed to gain about 20% production speed right now. That's a pretty brutal trade off in the long term, and not recommended for a novice.

The 5-fabber setup is a deliberate "herp derp" scenario. Both energy and metal are over extended to the extreme. The metal loss caused by this stall is immense (60% gone) and could easily lose the game. If the extractors used priority, the metal would have gone into storage, and the situation could still be recovered.

Having your infrastructure attacked and have to deal with the results of that is part of the game. Doesn't too much automation make this strategy not work on some level?

I think one important thing people are missing is that weapon systems which rely on energy generally are not going to be turned off, just slowed down in firing rate. The capacitor method where they charge up to fire mean that you won't just completely lose your defense even if your power grid has been hit hard.

You can do some pretty interesting things with a recharge based system like that.

sounds awesome if u ask me. The resource system is pretty much the same as in Supcom1 as far as i understand. And that is a perfectly good resource system.

This depends on how much energy mexes drain. If mexes just drain as little as they did in SupCom or TA then you would never want your mexes to turn off because you should rather turn off something else.
Having mexes drain as little as TA and SupCom mexes is just unnecessary as it doesn't add to the strategy. It just adds to the hassle of avoiding stalls because then you always want your mexes to run at full production.
Give mexes a substantial energy drain and you will sometimes see players turn off mexes in favor of defense, production, or heavy weapons. This is using manual priority but yeah it would be better handled by a priority toggle of some sort like bobucles proposed.
Or just make it easy and scrap extractor energy upkeep.

I was assuming the same energy income from 50 as in your exampla and added another mex.
Now energy consumption equals income 2 mexes 25 energy each.

If you just change that, your system generates my explained outcome. But if it is true that per definition there wont be a circumstance in the game that the energyincome is equal or lesser then the energy used by all mexes and therefor all other energy using systems shout down, because mex energy use is cut of first from energy and only remainder is splitting apart other consumer, i am also pleased.

Some systems may work under special circumstances but not under all. That was what i mentioned to show.

And with the second post i was refering to my own and adding: that i did not take other energy consumers like radar or defense into equation. So it might even be harder to find the best working solution. It also depends on your stored up metal and energy.

While it's good to have hazards with a stall, having a robust economy is far more important. In most other RTS titles, you can't spend more money than you have, but you aren't punished for trying. Both TA and Supcom punish players for spending too much, with drastic bugs turning the latter into a nightmare. It's a terrible feedback system to have your money crippled by trying to spend it. Moreso, it's an unnecessary difficulty for learning the flow based economy.

If a player can master the energy demands of their most important resource, then they should not have to worry about it breaking. Running low on energy carries its own set of hazards, numerous and critically dangerous on their own. Prorating extractors goes above and beyond those hazards and causes more damage than it tries to address. Perhaps you can find some magic numbers where the tables are reversed and shorting metal is critical for victory(protip: lolwut). But for the course of standard play, it's simply not worth it.

Pay the utility bills, get the metal. The worst case scenario is that you can access an emergency reserve of energy by shutting down factories and intel (pause-all buttons are ideal). Even then, shutting down your mexxes on top of that is a stupidly high risk to take.

I don't think that will really work. Less metal automatically reduces your production, and less metal means fewer generators and storage to increase energy. It hurts every way you look at it.

Paying extreme amounts of energy for metal is going into Metal Maker territory, and we know that an optimal system still uses priority. The only difference is that the priority is reversed, with metal income placed at the bottom.

In TA, energy was far more valuable than a maker's output (1000 energy => 20 metal, less than a single scout). The best bet was to run the device at 0% until energy overflowed, at which point all the excess E gets used. But with that kind of system you're looking at a LOT of downtime in the early game. Extractors have to pay for both themselves and their generators before the game can continue, so a steep energy bill is going to slow things down big time. Yuck.

So you agree that mexes should not drain energy at all then?
What is the point of mexes draining a small amount of energy?
The only thing I see is that it punishes players for stalling on energy even more.
Managing the economy well in TA or SupCom means that you should never stall because you simply lose metal production when you do.
You can have priority system so you doesn't have to manually turn off stuff when you stall in order to keep your mexes at full production but the drainage on the mexes still have minimal gameplay effect then.

However you can move the energy cost from the spending of metal to the extraction of metal and keep the same economic growth without slowing down the start of the game.
Scenario with cheap extraction cost:
Extraction cost:1 energy for 1 metal
Spending cost:10 energy for 1 metal
So say you have make a bot that cost 5 metal. You spend 5 energy to extract that metal and then you spend 50 energy to make the unit at the total of 55 energy cost.
Scenario with expensive extraction cost:
Extraction cost:10 energy for 1 metal
Spending cost:1 energy for 1 metal.
You make a bot that cost 5 metal. You spend 50 metal to extract the metal and then you spend 5 energy to make the unit at the total of 55 energy cost.

You spend the same amount of energy in both cases. The unit would be done at the same time in both scenarios. The gameplay isn't slowed down.
If you want airplanes or something else to cost more energy to make you just add to the production cost. So if you want planes to cost twice the amount of energy for the same amount of metal you add that to the production cost. So a plane that would cost 5 metal would drain 60 energy when it builds. 50 energy for extraction cost + 60 metal for spending cost = 110 energy which is twice the amount of the bot.

The difference is that the energy drain from mexes are substantial. Keeping the metal extractors on all the time is not always optimal. Sometimes you want to turn the mexes off to allow faster production, more energy for heavy weapons or cloaking your commander. This gives the player more choices as prioritizing between metal extraction, unit production and making excessive energy production.

Ehh... maybe. There is legitimate value to having extractors draw energy. The first part is that you need more energy overall. The second part is that during a crisis, you can access the auxiliary energy by shutting down extractors. But in every such scenario you are looking at a total panic mode where everything is on the line. It is not a standard problem.

The ideal economy has zero metal in storage. Turning mexes off will NOT allow faster production, because the production is already maxed out. There is perhaps one scenario where extractors don't need priority, and that is because your metal is overflowing from reclaim. But that's a temporary scenario. You STILL have more metal at the end of the day by keeping the extractors on.

Every one of your scenarios is a conscious choice to turn off extraction in some kind of emergency. I wholeheartedly agree that such emergencies do exist, and during those times you need to shut everything down to squeeze every last drop. But accidentally drawing too much energy is NOT an emergency. It is a mistake, and one that many players will make while learning the game. The most damning part of an energy stall in previous games has always been the loss of income, which exacerbates the crisis. Keeping the income stable is the strongest and most effective way to recover from a typical energy stall, and the math proves it.

60% of the time, you want extractors working every time.

Yes, they do appear similar on paper. What you're actually doing is changing the value of reclaim (assuming 0 cost to reclaim). If extraction is cheap with expensive production, then reclaimed resources will be very difficult to spend. In Supcom this was the main cause of an energy stall, but is fixed in PA. If extraction is expensive with cheap production, then reclaimed resources will be very easy to spend. The end result is how quickly reclaim can turn the game around and give advantage. If production is very cheap, a good chunk of reclaim can instantly win the game.

High upkeep extractors are a recipe for trouble. If you want proof, just play a game of TA or Supcom. Instead of extractors, place metal makers at mass points. Let me know how long you last before going crazy. Even then, priority still matters. With metal makers, the best setup is to not provide ANY metal until you overflow on energy. With cheap extractors, the best setup is to not SACRIFICE any metal until your energy can't take it any more. Either way, the ideal setup is to keep either or metal or energy at its highest.

T1 mexes drained a tenth of a t1 powergenerator. This is next to nothing.

I remember a few games when I lost all my power and were forced to turn off some t3 mexes to be able to produce energy. This is extreme panic mode and it rarely comes up and doesn't really have any significant gameplay effect in general so we could just let mexes extract metal for free rather than for a tiny amount of energy,

Reclaiming is mostly what I had in mind when I wrote that. Another case would be if you are saving up to be able to make a super project fast before the enemy have time to scout it.
Anyway, with larger extraction cost for metal there can be some interesting tactical decisions by turning off mexes under certain circumstances.

Yeah, I agree. If metal extraction cost is low then they should pretty much always take precedence over other energy expenses. If metal extraction cost is substantial or high then the player should be able to prioritize if he wants his mexes to take precedence over other energy expenses because it is a meaningful tactical decision to make during emergencies.

You still need the buildpower to be able spend this reclaim. Excess buildpower might not be good in competitive games of PA.
Turning off your mexes to be able to faster use up reclaimed metal seems like an interesting tactical decision.
Giving wreckage metal an energy cost to extract is an interesting way to mitigate this if it is a problem.

I played with only metal makers against 1 AI in TA. Then 2 AIs, then 3, then 4 and then I'm not sure how many more I were able to beat. I found out that you could add more skirmish AIs way after I were able to beat 4 AIs on Painted desert with just a metal maker economy.
I have also I've played Green Fields in various games on the Spring engine. From time to time it is a pretty popular map.
The map lack any metal so metal makers are the only way to increase your income.
Running a metal maker economy is easy when they turn off by themselves when you run low on energy.
I don't see why it would be different with a high metal extraction cost.

In Supcom (and Zero-K to some extent), there was no value to storing energy. Every single device was self sufficient or used a constant drain that could be predicted. The only sporadic expense was with the ACU's overcharge. Therefore, the ideal was to spend every last drop of energy on more tanks and upgrades, unless you need to use overcharge or didn't want your shields to explode. It was fairly straight forward and caused players to push their economy to the very edge.

In TA, BA and the like, energy was vitally important. Many weapons could not function without power, and the d-gun alone was a huge expense. Storage played a huge role because these extra expenses were unpredictable, yet running out of energy was unacceptable. The standard play is to always run a little bit of energy surplus- not enough to overflow the storage, but enough to keep your energy reserves full for battle.

With the first system, priority resources win above everything else. Good luck finding a combination of numbers that prove otherwise. With the second system, you still want priority! When things are good, you want the economy fully operational despite any hiccups. Metal storage is more than capable of absorbing the impact of a stalled production line. When things are bad, you want the guns fully operational and to hell with everything else. Either way, the greater good involves shutting something down.

I think TA's system was fine. FA's is good too but balancing the tech upgrades is tough, and the penalty for stalling your power is downright painful. I think the economy management could be kept simple simply by making it more forgiving. No need for radical changes really.

I don't understand why this is even a question.

Mexes should be prioritized, period. There is literally no scenario in which you would be dismayed that the system automatically prioritizes metal production. Any scenario where you would WANT to disable that priority is easy handled by the manual on/off switch on individual extractors.

An automatic system that takes metal out of your hands silently (prorated mexes) should probably have some kind of visual indicator. I suggest a flaming tank falling out of the sky for every 50 metal wasted.

You people want to remove every bit of managing your own economy out of the game. The economy management is something that definitely contributes to my enjoyment of the game.
If you've made the mistake of not having enough power the game shouldn't just say "That's ok, we'll make sure you don't lose any metal". It should just say Tough luck, be better next time.