I've expressed this idea a few times on this forum so far, most completely in the thread PA Economy Factsheet (for new & improving players). I keep seeing people with the wrong idea about energy and explaining it many times deep within threads is a bit of a waste of time. So here is a more complete general post. In the end I reach the conclusion that, given a unit is balanced, energy drain is a desirable attribute (in the sense that the unit is powerful). Supply Supply is an RTS mechanic well loved by Blizzard and Microsoft. Players have some limit on how many units they can control. This limit starts off quite low and can be increased by creating a specific unit or structure (Houses, Farms, Pylons). In these games there is a maximum attainable Supply but that is not important for this thread. I know that PA aims to have no hard unit cap. I will put forth an argument that Energy in all TA-like games is quite similar to Supply but instead of limiting unit count it limits construction and other energy-dependent abilities. The Energy mechanics result in a more flexible supply system (hence the word 'weak' in the topic) but in the long run they are essentially the same. Just to be completely clear, I am not advocating that Supply should be added or actually that anything should be changed. I am simply stating the way in which I think the system has always worked. This will not directly convince anyone to do anything but should aid more specific discussions. Energy Hopefully everyone here knows how energy works in PA. Here is a quick overview: Energy is a stockpilable resource which requires no territory to collect. Some unit abilities cost energy. Some types of ability completely fail to work if there is not energy energy stockpiled. Other abilities are scaled down when they are unable to drain their full energy requirement. These abilities currently include construction, repair and radar. Any ability could be made to drain energy; unit movement, metal extraction, weapon reload etc.. Energy as Supply In short, the energy system can be thought of as Supply if abilities consume Supply and power plants generate it. The amount of Supply you have is your current energy income. This idea may be complicated by storage, it definitely matters in the early game. For long term predictable energy drains, such as construction and radar, you will just need enough storage to absorb small fluctuations. So in these cases storage is mostly irrelevant and I will ignore it. So why is this useful? Supply is a much simpler system to grasp than the full income/expenditure/storage energy system. Supply is just 2 static and fairly easy to manipulate numbers. Thinking about energy in this way can lead to problems but in many situations it is a reasonable approximation. For some people I have just taken a long time to say "make sure your energy income is a bit greater than your expenditure" but firstly this is not obvious upon being introduced to a flow based economy and secondly I have more to say. The correspondence between energy and supply can be used to explain some mechanics which are simple for supply but somewhat harder to notice for energy. The effect of Supply What does supply actually do? It has one main effect on the games in which it appears; Supply makes the first army you build more expensive than subsequent armies. The first time you produce an army you also have to build the houses to support that army. This increases the cost of building a large army. If the army dies then you do not have to rebuild the houses when you rebuild the army. So armies are effectively cheaper once you build your first. If your army consisted of units which have no supply cost (and otherwise balanced) then your first army should be more powerful because it does not give the added benefit of making subsequent armies cheaper. This effect carries over directly to energy. Here is an example with Metal Extractors. Game A is a game with an implementation of metal extractors which drain energy. Each extractor costs 100 metal to build and requires 100 energy drain to run. Game B has no metal extractor drain and the extractor costs 120 metal to build. In both games the power plant costs 100 metal and produces 500 energy. In both games it costs 600 metal to construct and run 5 metal extractors (given that you energy started off with no net income). If a raid comes by and kills the extractors then it will cost 500 metal to replace them in Game A and 600 to replace them in Game B. So for the raided player it is good that the extractors drain metal. Every unit effectively has two thing which contribute to its total cost; the cost of constructiont and the cost of the infrastructure required to run the unit. Infrastructure is safer than most other things so, given that total cost is unchanged, it is better for a unit to have higher infrastructure cost. In other words energy drain makes units powerful. This is very easy to think of in terms of supply. Constructors The advantages of energy drain are even more apparent in the case of constructors. This is because they have intermittent ability usage. The less often a unit uses its energy-requiring ability the more powerful it is given constant total cost. Say we have two constructors, one costs 1000 metal and has no energy requirement for construction while the other costs nothing but drains 1000 metals worth of power plants when constructing. If they are otherwise equal then the energy draining one is clearly better. T2 Power Generators When you gain access to a more efficient power generator then energy draining units become cheaper. In effect a unit which is balanced for early game generators could become too powerful in the lategame where power generation is cheaper.
Nice overview. But I don't think this will be liked by the PA community, let alone be implamented. PA is more like TA or SupCom, not like Starcraft. Having units limited by how many power generators you have just doesn't sound fun at all. What's more, it doesn't quite work from a lore standpoint either. Tanks these days have diesel engines. Our tanks don't need a power plant somewhere else in order to operate. Your proposed format makes recovering from having large portions of your base destroyed very difficult. Which pretty much means, get nuked once, lose the game because it costs too much to rebuild. With how it is currently, it's doable to recover. I played a 3 way FFA game once and got targeted by both players. One player went unit spam, the other turtled and nuked. I had my base destroyed two times and kept on falling back and moving and spreading out my base and adapting. Finally I had moved out of the way and my two opponents started fighting each other after the nuke guy lobbed a nuke at the unit guy. So I was then left alone for a little bit. I had lots of metal, rebuilt my energy, and amassed an army. I got back into the game and was a valid threat. I was pretty sure I was going to be able to pull off a win, but the server crashed and I'll never know. Really frustrating – because that was a good match. With your method, it would have been too difficult for me to get back on my feet in that match. I was able to get back on my feet, despite having lost practically all my energy. I still had some units and a lot of metal. So I was able to focus on rebuilding my energy and growing my army at the same time. With your method, it would have cost way too much for me to get my army back up and running and I might as well have quit the game after the first attack from the unit guy and the first nuke from the nuke guy. While I don't play Starcraft, and have only played it a few times, I think the difference between Starcraft and PA is quite drastic and making them more alike would be a mistake. In the case of Starcraft, it seems that army clashes are very common. Micro in those fights are what wins. It seems that losing parts of your base is rather rare. In PA, losing parts of your base is very common, and very possible to recover from, if you know what you're doing. So, long story short. Having to increase the cost like that seems to be increasing the cost for increasing the cost's sake. When you increase the cost of the first army, it makes PA much more difficult, and not in a good way. If you make the first successful attack, you win. Right now, it's possible to win even in very back and forth games since recovery is such a possibility. Such a change would remove that possibility.
brainpurkiss you've misread the post. This is not a proposal for a new system to be implemented. This post is about how the system currently works. There is nothing to change. Energy acts as supply in PA which limits simultaneous ability usage not army size.
While this is a good post, i would just add that your energy economy is more a limitation on bandwidth than a quantity ceiling. For example, energy is also used for production, not just energy-using abilities. More energy lets you build more quickly, not just increasing the ceiling for the number of units you can have. The same concept also works for energy-using abilities. Energy limits the number of such weapons and effects you can have active simultaneously, not a hard limit on the maximum number you are allowed to own at once, like supply in Starcraft. The reason I think this difference is significant is that supply functions to make your first army more expensive. In order to increase your army size, you must pay to increase your supply limit first. In a weak way energy also serves this function. However energy also adds maintenance costs to the units you currently have and are using, unlike supply. As a direct result, when you have a very large army, your maintenance expenses will be larger, and more of your resources must be spent maintaining forces you have, instead of producing new units. This means that it is easier to build units when you have fewer units. Not just for producing your first army, but constantly and organically throughout the game, as you both produce and lose units. I don't think all units merit energy maintenance or weapons which cost energy to recharge. But it is a useful mechanic. I also think this is yet another reason why overdrive is a good idea, because spending a lot of energy on maintenance and weapons recharging will mean less energy for overdrive. With overdrive, a large army's energy maintenance will literally reduce your metal income unless you build even more energy.
You're getting way too complicated on this. If you consider that: 1) Factories basically use up supply. 2) Energy demanding units use up supply. 3) "spellcasters" and abilities depend on free supply. Then it all fits together.
As bobucles said, I have covered the unit production aspect of energy by simply classifying it as an ability that drains energy. Building quickly is simply running a certain number of constructors and each of these take energy. It fits into the idea of income as supply quite well. Energy in PA does not make your first army more expensive. This is because combat units do not constantly drain energy. If they did drain energy then the supply mechanics would come into effect here. I am not arguing for or against any type of energy drain in this thread. I just want this to be a used as a tool for thinking about energy so it can be used to fast-forward past tedious parts of many debates on this forum. People often fail to see the outcome of the mechanics they propose and it's a pain to explain it in each specific case. For example this idea can be applied to the mex energy drain debate. If you make mexes drain energy then it costs more to expand the first time around then it does to re-expand after a bunch of mexes have been destroyed. Energy is not just used to run mexes so you could shuffle usage between different areas, in spite of that it is still a useful approximation Take this example: You can think about this purely in terms of energy as supply. Say we have units constantly draining energy and construction which costs energy, so these are the two things which can use supply. Clearly if you make units without increasing the amount of supply you have then you will have to cut back on your use of supply-using abilities (this being construction). So it is a bit complicated. But if you wanted to increase the number of units you have without cutting into your ability usage (a reasonable thing to want to do) then your first army is still more expensive. Sure, you could have game mechanics which make the supply view useless. My point is that we don't have such mechanics and that for most mechanics that people propose it is sufficient to apply supply to see where the mechanics will lead.
