energy storage gameplay suggestion

I always liked the energy storage building/capacitor system in previous games. I’m not sure if this has been already suggested/implemented so ignore me if it has.

I like the idea of energy storage building exploding with more force depending on the amount of energy it’s holding. A fully charged energy storage building should cause a much greater explosion than an empty one.

This would allow interesting tactical options. For example energy storage building could be set to purge/transfer its energy to the other storage buildings on the grid when under attack to protect buildings around it, or if you have spare energy in the system you can charge the building to full and take out some attacking enemies at the same time (it would be energy costly but possibly worth it in some instances).

What do you think?
Regards

devil's advocate here, what exactly do you like about storage? what does storage do to the game for you? would you be against unlimited storage, if so why? what about storage tied to resource production buildings and why?

With no storage needed (or unlimited storage) a player can more easily get a runaway economy going early on and stomp their opponent early due to his much stronger economy. Now you may say, well the other player should just learn to play and do the same thing. Which is valid, but I'm under the impression that PA is geared to be a grand scaled game. It takes time to build up to that scale and resource storage is one way to set a pace to the game so it has a better chance of reaching that scale.

I would think the opposite. The OPTIMAL use of resources is to spend them as they come in, not save them in a bank only for their value to decrease as a result of resource inflation. Spending early resources on storage capacity instead of units to harass your opponent, or additional resource production is inefficient.

I fail to see how necessitating holding on to resources and therefore slowing down the pace of spending would facilitate a larger scale game.

Um the basic idea of energy storage: You don’t need to generate at MAX all the time. It’s expensive and you need to build power stations all the time.

Ideally you want to generate enough energy to support your economy and store energy to support any peaks in demand (eg, weapon firing). More storage should allow you to take care of any extra demand while you get your energy production up..

-> energy storage is a "capacitor" for your energy economy. <-

Right, I'm asking how do you feel special storage buildings improve gameplay over just having unlimited storage or storage on power generators. The latter would still allow you to absorb demand spikes with less hassle.

just one way off the top of my head: it lest you stockpile resources for a major attack. Cripple enemy stockpile and you give yourself an advantage/buy some time.

It gives you another strategic option and that is a good thing in an RTS.
Also, energy storage would be much much much cheaper/quicker to build than power generators.

You can't have unlimited energy storage. That would break economy really quickly.

And having storage on power generators is an option but it's an expensive way to store power and you're putting all your eggs in one basket. which is not a good thing when in combat..

But you're assuming that there's a reason to store energy. The optimal way to play is to spend resources as soon as they come in. That has nothing to do with the cost of storage either, that is purely a function of resource inflation as the game goes on.

Okay but if you're having power problems then building storage would actually exacerbate the problem by leaving you less resources to produce additional power generators.

How so? Many games in Supreme Commander can go entirely without wasting mass and wasting very little energy. Unlimited storage would just eliminate resource waste, which competitive players already do.

Assuming an appropriate amount of storage, you'll be able to handle any sort of spiking. If you're wasting energy you need to produce more units or structures not storage.

It is true with proper design storage could be useful and perhaps worth targeting but my question is why force it? If storage doesn't add any unique elements, why bother? At this point it's a vestige from days before complex unit interactions and powerful user interface. Today you can make a deep, fun RTS without arbitrary economic micromanagement.

Even the very best players waste a lot of energy in games that go on more than ten minutes. If you had unlimited energy storage there would be very little point in taking out energy production.

Imagine the following scenario, pretty realistic in terms of Forged Alliance:

Energy income = +4000
Energy expediture = -3800
Total storage available = 20,000

In this case if I lose a T3 Pgen (-2500 E), my economy will be running at an overall deficit of -2300 and unless I sort it within 8.7 seconds I will energy stall and my economy will grind to a halt.

Let's say that you remove energy storage, by this point in the game I could have over-produced 250,000 energy and would therefore be sitting on a massive stockpile, to the extent that I would have over a minute and a half (108.6 seconds) before I energy-stalled.

Granted PA's eco is somewhat simplified and it will be harder to powerstall to the crippling extent that you can in Forged Alliance, but nonetheless the principle of forcing your opponent into a stall will still be a valid tactic.

As for metal storage? There's arguably no gameplay reason to have a limit on metal storage, but there is a consistency argument for it and I have always liked that these games are internally consistent, and for that reason I'd argue for the inclusion of metal storage even if it was of no practical use (say if standard metal storage limit was 20,000 or something).

Metal storage places a soft cap on how much reclaim can happen at once. Early game, a loaded urban map will place a choice between denying wreckage to the enemy, or keeping bits intact to use. Mid game, it limits the power of getting wreckage from enemy attacks(perhaps offering a chance to destroy or contest it). Late game, it limits the mobility of bases against things like asteroid strikes, where a powerful set of reclaim can absorb your base before it blows up.

Have you played TA or SupComm? You wouldn't have a power problem if you had a ton stored up. If I have 30k power stored up and see that my power bar is going down at an alarming rate, I usually have plenty of time to build another power generator to support the demand. But while that power generator is building, I can continue to power my economy because I have some stored instead of being dead in the water until the new generator comes online.

Greetings all, I'm a bit new here, so I'm probably missing something, but I'll throw my two cents in anyways.

I think resource storage/limits is/are a pretty crucial element to gameplay for the following reasons:

1. It slows down the "teching" (and thus the gameplay) pace, which is important... if I want a fast paced RTS, with less emphasis on resource management, I can play SCII, or any number [insert random RTS name here].

Using FA as an example, one could easily dump out an exp unit much earlier than intended if storage was removed, as there would be no limit to the player's economy, thus allowing him to save up vast amounts of resources in the early game to dump into an early tier 4.

2. It creates additional strategic elements. Without a limit, as has already been pointed out, the necessity of protecting your resource production is minimal at best, as it's easy to always have plenty in store to quickly rebuild. In FA, for example, a player without adequate storage reserves could be critically damaged on a strategic level by eliminating some key metal extractors or T3 energy generators. This would simply not be the case without limits.

In addition, resource storage now becomes a targetable objective for your opponent. Assuming you have adequate storage to protect against a direct attack on your resources, or assuming you're using your storage to save up to dump out large quantities or large units quickly, your opponent can now destroy your ability to do that by targeting your storage.

Wall O' Txt Summary: it adds a strategic layer that makes resource collection, base building, and targeting key aspects of economy much more significant and deeper.

That entirely depends on the Numbers involved, 30k storage is a lot if you only have a drain of 100 per second, but insufficient if you're draining 2k a second.....

Mike

Wrong, how much power is built would simply change. How valuable power is as a target will still be a function of how robust your opponent's power production is. If you hit your opponent while they are making use of energy stores they will be more vulnerable. If your opponent never makes use of their energy stores and you do they will have invested more mass into power and therefore be weaker.

Sure, assuming we do not have dynamic control over how much mass we can spend. I personally prefer the easy spending in Forged Alliance. In PA easy spending might be a function of just having lots of otherwise patrolling/idle engineers. The point is the value of storage to gameplay is minimal at best - and if we need soft caps on storage I would prefer it to come in the form of intrinsic storage on resource production or engineers/factories (like SupCom).

If you are saving an experimental amount of resources to dump out at a whim you will lose the game to a competent player. That is simply a suboptimal way to play because of resource inflation. The optimal way to play is to spend mass as soon as it's accumulated.

Again this is not a function of storage, this is a function of economic surplus. Accumulating a great deal of surplus is necessarily suboptimal. If players in FA had unlimited storage they would simply make less powerplants and plan out their economy making use of full power production.

That easy spending was due to ridiculously overpowered engineers and projects that had vastly increased construction demands. That won't be possible in the current PA economy, not without making an explicitly broken constructor.

The value of storage is in absorbing unpredictable changes in the economy. For metal this comes mostly from reclaim (as extractor+factory is going to be extremely stable with the PA system, good luck trying otherwise). Energy storage is utilized by everything that works intermittently. The only known unit that qualifies at this point are bombers. Nothing else is known to have an unstable or unpredictable demand for energy.

Artillery won't qualify. The devs stated it would consume at a fixed rate to charge its attack (as seen with Supcom arty), so you'll know exactly how many generators go with each arty.

I more meant how easy it was to transfer build power from a slow draining project to a fast draining project e.g. moving engineers from air production to experimental production. In SupCom you could also just upgrade something and it would drain extra resources automatically e.g. radar towers, shield towers, MEXs, factories. There were a lot of ways to easily absorb income spikes.

None of that will be possible in PA so my best guess on how to deal with income spikes will be having extra factories/engineers lying around.

Of course it worked there, but it doesn't exist here. So it's a moot point.

Fabbing looks like it'll consume tons of energy, so burst construction won't be very effective. From the vids we've seen so far, constructing over the limit killed energy storage insanely fast, and failing to build things wasted tons of energy. I don't think deliberately stashing metal is going to be very effective in this game.

The best way to deal with a reclaim spike is to store the metal. Sure, you want to spend it quickly, but doubling your infrastructure to use a 1-time income surge is a terrible idea. Keep just enough surplus construction to use your average reclaim, and let the storage deal with the spikes.

So basically what I said?

I think it may be a bit early to make judgments about the current balance of the game's economy. There hasn't been a single balance pass yet.

We can theory craft all we want about how things should be balanced but using the live streams as examples at this point is just silly.

I like the mass / energy storage in TA. Why? who else can say they defeated a 200 rocko bot army with just their commander. Without 20k energy stored he would have been very dead. With unlimited energy storage, by that point I could have destroyed sum stupid amount of bots. I also play Supcom / TA / FA for FUN, a point that seems to be missed from time to time. I'm not some elitist guy who makes sure my mass consumption is equal to my mass production, I want tanks and I want to kill things. That means I get sloppy and waist / overuse mass and energy.

In Supcom 2 that just lead to me having 7 bomb bouncers 3 magnetrons and a few Rexes. And you're right, I would have lost, my friend sent a massive army eliminating all but my poor commander and a few bomb bouncers (though he learned that bomb bouncers can kill ground units as well). After a full retreat to a safer location (and some intervention from my other friend) I managed to put up 3 nuke launchers and 10 exp gunships and win (due to the stupid amount of resources I had left from my now dead and slightly reclaimed base). If their were a resource cap I would have not been able to create those nuke launchers / experimental and would have lost.

Supcom 2 had limiters though. They were research points. You couldn't just rush an experimental early in the game, you had to level up first.

Unlimited resources make it easier for newbies but also make stupid comebacks possible. I prefer being lazy with my resources, but I should be punished for doing so (unless I get some storage).