Metal Converter Building

I have searched a little throughout the forum but didn't see anything with this in it. So I am suggesting that a building that is added that can convert energy into metal. This could be done like in supreme commander were you open the converters UI interface and click a icon to convert energy into metal.

Or you could continue with the theme of the economy in PA and make the conversion live through out the game and you could adjust the speed of the conversion in the buildings UI interface. With like a slider, from max to none, kind of thing. Of course to have any conversion you still need to have a convertor built. And if you guys choose to do this, allow us to be able to select all of our converters and adjust the rates all at once.

It was generally decided that metal converters are a bad idea.

Players should be rewarded for holding more ground, rather then for stacking all of the stuff into a corner.

That idea is good. But it does matter much because one well placed nuke would end people from building strongholds.

don't bother ign. this thread doesn't need to be reignited.

But the flames....

Metal Makers are an idea that looked good on paper, but never really played out that well. It is possible that asteroid mining might pick up a similar function of providing late game resources. Currently the numbers for it look a little obscene.

If you want money maps, play a money map.

Nah since it completley counters the idea of having to fight for metal spots when you can just place a power plant down which is basically a metal extractor with the converter in the game.

Actually, the opposite would make sense. Highly effective power plant which consumes excess metal in return.

Gas planet nuff said

A very effective way to lose in record time!

If a unit really has that high of an upkeep, it may be better for it to use some metal instead. The biggest example is the nuke launcher, where every "shot" requires a lot of metal.

so hows about that not reigniting the thread?

Most people don't like the idea of metal converters. It is generally accepted that energy you can build anytime as much as you want anywhere, whereas metal will be the "threshold" resource as you need to get metal points for metal and requires you to collect a lot of territory in the form of raw surface area control for that "edge" over your opponent. I suppose this is so you fight over those points.

I wouldn't mind a structure or even a game mode where you can mex anywhere, like metal worlds in TA. Just not main-game atm.

Also, personally, I don't even mind a converting structure as long as it is balanced to be SO weak that it would literally take building them across vass vass lands to get the equivalent to a few metal spots. Reason for this is because it CAN be balanced honestly, if it took you 3x longer to build them than just building mexes, 4x the land investment, and the fact all those dense farms pose an even greater threat of being destroyed because of it's size, while the time you take to build for all that time is taken from your unit build rate which is more important currently, you want the army more than the build power diverted to building tons of structures. It actually makes you vunerable for the things it does FOR you.

But, it won't happen, and so far the game is pretty good for it. Metal actually needs to be LESS abundant, cut back metal spots and/or make t2 mex a lot less metal/second.

Personally, I think metal makers worked perfectly the way they were implemented in TA. They didn't produce much metal but cost a ton of energy to upkeep, so they were very inefficient compared to taking over additional land. It allowed people who started in an inconvenient location (such as directly between two opponents in a free for all) at least some way of building up over time.

That being said, I've given up trying to convince people of it, as it appears a vast majority on the forums are quite opposed to any sort of metal maker implementation, in part, I think, because they were poorly executed in Sup-Com.

TA's MohoMetal Makers produced a crap-ton of metal.

The highest Metal Extraction rate of a Moho Mine was +19.2 per second and that was on the purest metal deposits.
MohoMetal Makers made +16 Metal per second for 800 Energy and could be placed anywhere.

Don't claim that they 'didn't produce much metal', it's totally false.

The actual "metal makers" are the basic versions which did not produce much, (1 metal per second I believe) which I think is what most people have suggested implementing. I wasn't referring to the Moho Metal Makers, which you are correct to say did produce much more.

+1 Metal per 60 energy.
About 85% as efficient as the Moho.

They also cost 0 metal to make.

Metal Extractors produced +0.8 to +2.1 per second, depending on the Metal Patch's quality. Rather pathetic really.

The only attribute that matters is "time to payoff". The faster it pays off, the faster you can double your economy.

In TA, the basic maker paid off after about 7 minutes of 3xsolar, while the moho took a little over 4 minutes on fusion. It turned out okay, if a bit easy to spam in large games. It was more useful to make water maps bearable, until core contingency added underwater resources.

Supcom vanilla varied wildly due to adjacency. Without bonuses the T3 fab took about 2 minutes to pay off, and with the 75% adjacency discount it took about a minute.

Since that disaster played out so well, Forged Alliance took the nerf bat to metal makers. Without adjacency the T3 took over 10 minutes to pay off, and at 75% discount it took about 6 minutes. Generally it was a waste of time, but if you went all in it might have been decent.

But hey, each of the games has their own pacing. FA was arguably the fastest paced of all, so the slow payoff of fabbers hurt even more.

Thinking about it, we already HAVE a building in PA which would qualify for the role as metal converter.

I'm talking about the T2 metal extractor. The T1 version currently requires no energy upkeep whatsoever, whereby the T2 version does the same, it only costs slightly more to build.

To me it would only make sense, to cut down the cost of the T2 as well as the base metal production rate, but add a energy to metal "conversion" feature on top of it. So if unpowered, the T2 will actually yield LESS than a regular T1 mex, but if powered up, it will convert excess energy to metal so that the total metal output equals about 150-200% of the T1, at the additional cost of 1-2 T1 pgen's energy output.

Don't worry about payoff times so much, first that building would be limited by the presence of metal spots. And second, they already come at an additional cost since you also need vulnerable energy plants to pay for the increased metal output. Long term it still makes sense to go for the T2 extractors, thats for sure. But you always have to gamble, because you are scarifying metal production in times of energy shortage.

Wouldn't be so sure about that either. Think less about paying for the construction upkeep or other constant energy sinks, but rather situational upkeeps, e.g. mobile artillery firing during an assault.

You could try to feed such attacks from energy storages, but when in doubt, it could actually turn helpful to be able to "burn" excess mass for an significant increase in energy in an all-in attempt. The ratio should be slightly worse than the bonus mass from the T2 extractors so they can't pay for each other.

Just Throwing this Idea out there. But from what I understand, the general problem with Metal Converters is that they use is only limited by the real-estate rather than the number of Metal points available. I'm thinking that if Metal Converters were Giant structures(Advanced Navel Factory scale) then building them may mean other large structures(Advanced Factories, Orbital Launchers) would have to be built somewhere else. In this way the player would have to seek out large arias of open ground to fuel his/her economy. In this way Metal Converters versus Metal Extractors, would be the choice between controlling a few discontinuous Metal sites. or large swaths of an otherwise useless dessert. but because both require controlling more and more land the player is still forced to expand in either case.

Edited for Spelling

I am pro metal converters ;-)