What's the point of energy?

Yeah... I think it's a subtle difference though.

Energy also acts as a functional limit on the Commander's abilities (you know, if he had any). The current system forces a huge increase in energy very early on, which makes it more difficult to keep these powers out of the hands of Comm rushers.

But I must be wooshing so hard right now. Oh well.

If you only have 1 resource for building, wouldn't you just end up with this?

Closer to that, yes. But still with a lot of fundimental differences like being able to build multiple things at once. Different tech tree design, different resource collection mechanics, different scale, different units, I could go on.

There are some really nice things about how the eairly C&C games played so I don't see this as a bad thing.

But I mean without flow-based energy along with metal as a resource.
All you are left with is a really building enough energy to power your units/structures.

Don't you think that would be a bit oversimplified?

That's exactly what I'm getting at.

Why is simple bad?
Does it decrease the action? Does it make the game boring? Probably not.
Does it make it easier to play? Does it make it easier to learn and teach new players? Probably.

What's bad about that?

Do you remember supcom 2 eco vs supcom eco? that's why...

It wouldn't be like SupCom 2 eco. SupCom 2 eco forced you to wait till you had enough resources before building something to avoid any stalling. I'm not saying it should be like that.

I don't Simple isn't inherently bad.
Sometimes, it makes things less confusing.
Sometimes, when you simplify, you lose a bit of depth.

For example, I think the SupCom economy had a fatal flaw by having a 3rd factor in unit production "build time".
The problem with SupCom is that while income was steady, easy to understand and predictable.
Spending was not.

Spending in SupCom is based on the unit/building you are producing.
A T3 engineer building a T1 Power, no big deal.
A T3 engineer building a Monkeylord? Suddenly you drain all your power and you are mass stalling.


I think PA rectifies this by making the "spend rate" based upon the producing units.
I think this a very good type of "simple".


I am what you would call an "eco whore" in SupCom.
I am very good at what I do. But even I get thrown for a loop because the spending is not very predictable.
So I think this type of simplification by keeping things more constant, more linear and removing confusion is good.


You maximize the ratio between Depth vs Easy-to-Learn/Manage.

Agreed. I don't think removing energy from building structures is going to reduce any depth.
- You still need to build energy to run your base.
- You still have to protect your energy to keep your base operational.

More importantly, you need energy to produce buildings and units.
I think by keeping this part of the flow based economy, they made it much easier on the player.

It's not only much easier to learn.
But it's much easier to manage too.

They have made it so Metal Extractors don't require energy to run.
I think this cost us a bit of depth. In SupCom, attacking the power grid was also a viable strategy since it could cause a mass stall for the opponent.
But I guess I'm ok with that loss of depth since it will be much more forgiving on a new player.

I've just posted a fairly in-depth look at what happens when you stall in PA in the PA Economy Factsheet thread. PA's stalling is different to supcom's, but it's still pretty bad.

More power to run MEX
Less power to construct
More power to use units/weapons

It will still cost energy to produce units as running factories will cost energy. The difference will be that it's flat rate and always on rather than fluctuating when you assist/stop/pause production of units. This will make the energy a lot easier to track and read as it won't go form +10000 to -6000 second by second.

In a system like this, by attacking your opponents energy you would be temporarily deactivating base defences, radar, unit production and possibly more. A pretty big and immediate impact! (Depending on their storage volume).

With the proviso that you may well be better informed on this than I am...

I like the intent of what energy is trying to do in this system, I just don't think it achieves its goals. (Mostly because building costs too much energy, and services too little, and many weapons none at all, despite the initial design idea in that direction, which I thought was good. So I essentially half agree with you)

I'd disagree heavily with removing energy costs from construction, because there ought to be a tension between powering your weapons and buildings and your economy. This tension between building and attacking makes it harder to succeed at minimizing resource waste while also having enough energy to attack or defend with large amounts of units. Having a reason to max out your energy may complicate the game somewhat, but it also means that there is an interesting choice between building a sufficient excess to fire a lot of guns indefinitely and building what you need to EITHER run your economy at full bore, OR shut part of it down and fire all weapons.

Now, about builders taking too much energy at the moment, a really interesting way to diversify it from metal is simply that adding additional fabbers increases the energy cost more than linearly, and that the cost of a single fabber working on an item is significantly cheaper than it currently is. So one fabber can produce a structure slowly for a very modest cost in energy, but running ten at once will tax your energy while the construction nanobots and fabber processors work overtime trying to co-ordinate all the pieces locking together correctly in a much shorter timeframe. This would make the effect of energy on building no longer analogous to metal, and would actually create a trade-off to spamming builders on the same structure or factory- that you have to use more energy.

There is already an encouraging mechanic to build factories over assisting a single one. The pause during unit rolloff.

I say this because when you say to make something cost nonlinearly, we aren't buying what your selling.

This game so far has sweet love for its steady cost fabrication economy.

Ask for more things requiring energy, i think a heavy artillery build and a base just entering t2 are really only ones meeting energy. They could add more things to build that cost energy to run. Like make stationary artillery cost little metal, then make energy artillery require good chunk of power but no metal.

Am I the only one the sees micro management of energy, turning on and off factories, spamming power gens, microing fabricators as a waste of time? This is a war game! The fun parts are the battles and explosions! We should be reducing economy micro so we can spend more time playing the fun part of the game!

Eco management is hugely disproportionate in its value to the outcome of a match. Someone that chooses to micro units or scout and gather a lot of intel will almost always loose to some who sends a blob to the middle of the enemy base and then goes back to producing more Eco. It's a runaway train! And we haven't even really got multi planet battles going yet...

Again, I'm not saying get rid of energy. I'm not saying good Eco management should not be rewarded, I'm saying the game will benefit in all other areas from a simplified economy giving the player more time to think about and control everything else.

Here you go. A game with no eco management that rewards single unit micro. I suggest you go and play it. Meanwhile, other people want to play a strategy game, not a tactics game.

If you've got nothing useful to add can you not talk?

You asked a question and now you're getting annoyed when someone answers it? Yes, you are the only one who thinks like that. Well, there are other people, but they're all playing DotA. PA has very little eco micro, barring the T2 switch (which is largely an artefact of T2 mexxes being far too good at the moment, and quintupling your mass output). If you can't handle it, just get good; it's not hard. There's no massfabs or RAS-spam like vanilla SupCom, and no reclaim-heavy builds or power consumption spikes like SupCom FA, so there's barely any eco micro at all. And with the random maps, there aren't even any build orders to memorise. Even power stalling isn't that much of an issue because energy storage stores a hundred thousand energy for 450 metal and is non-volitile.