will there be a way to produce mass out of energy?

In TA and FA there were units and buildings that did that.

You would trade production capacy+space now for more income later. As in FA mass points are more valuable by a magnitude. But after that you still can keep your eco growing by diverting some of your income into that.

You could capitalize on your current map control or turn your superior micro into more income.

Because of the dimensions of such a complex (a useful one that is) you can not really turtle. To keep it save you have to somehow hide it or place it out of imeadeate reach.

It would be interesting to hide such a grid somewhere under the ocean or on a small suposedly inabitated moon.

yeah bring back the "Moho Metal Maker"

NO.

Sorry, I felt like yelling. Simply holding an area should generate enough metal; you shouldn't have to go out of your way to put down buildings that cause the area to generate "more" metal.

In addition, it has been agreed upon multiple times in the past that the metal fabs in TA, SupCom and SupCom 2 were aids and gay poorly balanced pieces of machinery, being too powerful in TA, too powerful in Vanilla SupCom, completely useless in FA and FAF, and possessed by satan directly associated with mashing buttons in SupCom2.

hahahaahaha i missed that thread. damn.

but what about a planet raduis 1200 with only 20 mex on it.
wouldn't it be good to have moho's to use, then if you don't build enough energy you will stall both energy and metal badly.

but also point taken if its been discussed no point in rehashing on passed idea's

there is the advanced metal extractor you know that ?, i stacks (as far as i saw) with the normal extractor, because you can build the advanced ontop/over the standard/small extractor... pretty much 7+27m/s (cant remember the correct numbers?)

Can you explain why increasing the value of a terrain over time breaks balance? I am not very good at these games, so this is an honest question. What do metal fabbers change.

Well, I personally consider metal fabbers a black and white unit. Meaning it is either overpowered and underpowered, with very little room in-between to fill a role. Either it is more powerful than metal extractors - and players take time out of their play to build them, it is less powerful than metal extractors - and therefore useless, or it is just as powerful as metal extractors - and is therefore better than metal extractors.

Obviously that is a very watered down analysis of metal fabbers, but my point is that whether they are useful or useless, they add absolutely no depth or new features to a game, and are therefore frivolous and must be purged with extreme prejudice.

As for the reason increasing the value of terrain over time is "bad" or "breaks balance" is because it causes the value of the map to diffuse over time. Metal points represent "high value" areas, while featureless areas represent "low value" areas, at the most basic level. Obviously I'm not taking building space, maneuverability or tactical advantage into consideration by saying this. Anyways, by introducing metal fabbers to the mix, you can increase the "value" of a piece of land both for you - because it produces more resources - and for your enemy - because it is valuable to you. What this results in, eventually, is that all land has about the same value, and it is much harder to perform a surgical strike, or a strategically planned strike of any sort for that matter, because everywhere you can attack is worth the same. This functionally removes the "fight for metal" which so defines TA and SupCom and whatnot, and replaces it with a "fight for land" and a "fight for intelligence". While the latter sounds fun and all, cold wars really aren't all that fun unless you're looking for a cold war simulator. Energy Generators become the primary "fulcrum unit", as your economy eventually ends up depending almost entirely on them. And because energy generators can be placed anywhere, they completely nullify the point of actually having a map. Fighting on a blank, featureless sphere would be just as interesting, strategically speaking, as fighting on a self-destructing ball of planet-destroying metal.

tl;dr - Metal fabbers are bad because they invalidate strategy at almost every turn.

Do a search before posting. This has been talked about.

It will not be in the end game, for all the reasons MushrooMars brought up.

PA is about map control, expanding, and fighting across an entire solar system – not turtling up on part of one planet.