Why is air low metal?

A discussion in another thread put this question in my head. Why is air low metal? In every game, from TA through SUPCOM to PA, air is the low metal unit.

Why?

I just wonder whether this is actually the best approach, or one that's being taken out of habit. Due to air units being able to overlap air spam can be incredibly powerful and hard to balance, so I wonder if making them the cheapest units in the game is really a good idea.

I'm not saying it is or that this approach is wrong, but I think it would be worth discussing.

One factor is that aircraft are generally built lightweight, so they frequently use as little metal as possible. Energy cost should be high, because complexity and manufacturing costs of modern aircraft suggest that while a future air combat vehicle might be made through nano-latheing, it would still be a complex assembly.

Maybe it's to do with the scale? Perhaps, on a large planet, or multiple large planets, you want to be able to easily pump out a number of units that can quickly travel across the planet and discover/attack a base? This should be balanced with them being fragile, IMO, so I suppose cost could be a factor.
Not to forget, that with the inclusion of a unit cannon and teleporters, the size of a planet may be less of an issue...
Anyway, just some thoughts on it.

I belive the reason to be simple logical.

As Navycude said they are usally light weight but complex.

No, that's stupid, this is a game. There needs to be a gameplay reason.

Not everything need to be designed with a gameplay reason in mind, ya know.

My suspision is that they tought "Ohh this makes sense and makes them a bit different" when they considered the whole concept of aircraft and then found no gameplay reason to change it.

(Unless you think "makes them different" to be enof of a gameplay reason).

Not aiming for sense, aiming for awesome. It seems odd that the devs would base it on "real life" considerations. And if it was based on that, then I would imagine if it was OP then it would get balanced out anyway...

They allredy do real life considerations everywhere (Boats being in water, thats realism for ya), but only if they dont mess with gameplay.

Gameplay comes first, but that dosent mean realism isent in there somewhere (very low on the list).

Btw the awsome thing was taken out of contexts (its been said many times). The origin is "Why is there sounds in space? Becuse were not aiming for realism were aiming for awsome!" or simular.

Metal is not a measurement of the weight of the unit. Metal is the ' limiting ' resource that allows construction; the game's Unobtainium if you will. Planes have no reason to cost less of this rare metal than any other unit from a lore perspective, or any other perspective in fact, save what's good for gameplay.

I fully support the OP in his questioning of this low-metal trend for aircraft. The most mobile and abusable type of unit in the game shouldn't be the cheapest unit to produce in my opinion.

Notice that high energy drain requires more power plants. Planes simply requires more infrastructure to produce. While the cost of power plants and factories are basically a one time cost it does make a big difference in a growing economy as producing planes simply requires more infrastructure both in factory cost and in power plant cost. Mm... although I might have to do the math again since the latest patch.

IS air low metal?
T1{ Bot: 90M, Tank: 150M, Fighter: 135M, Bomber: 180M
T2{ Bot: 360M, Tank: 450M, Fighter: 270M, Bomber/Gunship: 540M

And don't get me started on the fabbers...

A high infrastructure cost delays the production compared to production which only require little infrastructure.
Lets take an extreme example.
We have unit A that is 20% stronger than unit B and cost the same metal. However unit A costs 10 times the energy to produce. This means that to support the production of unit A, a player would need about 10 times more energy production to produce unit A at the same rate as unit B. By the time a player have the energy to support production of unit A the other player might have already produced a lot of unit B and simple overrun the few unit As that have been produced.
Producing unit B is actually the best option for as long as the economy grows. Switching to unit A is only a good alternative once the metal income growth slows down and you can make the long term investment in power plants to produce the superior unit A.

Perhaps. However running costs of factories didn't change.

@Quitch - As Dementiurge has quoted, metal costs aren't cheaper.

Of course, if you take into account metal cost of factories, T2 air certainly is cheapest.

Also, because metal isn't your only resource. You have time and energy as well.

Because of the factories low metal costs, but the high expense of units, it takes 7.5 seconds to build a Dox, 10 seconds to build an Ant, and 15 seconds to build a fighter (20 seconds to build a bomber).

I think it is justified for gameplay reasons because air is fragile compared to other types of units. T1 bombers are very much "fly over there, drop a bomb and die before you get home" by design. AA tends to kill air without it actually doing any damage to it's intended target. I think that's the reason.


Note 1)

I don't think that units are supposed to be able to build advanced air factories without an advanced air fabber, based on Meta's actions in one of his recent live streams.

Note 2)

If you check PADB, the build time for each Advanced factory is 9 minutes by the basic fabber (i.e. if an air fabber and a bot fabber start an advanced air factory/advanced bot factory at the same time, they'll complete it at the same time)

that's strange, i always thought the more metal you put in something, the more heavy it is. maybe that's because metal is heavy, oh silly me !

no, seriously. how can anyone NOT imagine metal cost and weigth to be related ?
i understand the concerns of balancing air if they're metal-wise the cheapest unit of the game, but increasing their metal-cost would be awkward.

maybe having each plane cost enegy while flying, that would limit the number of planes you can spam, and you would have to be very carful with your energy production.

But a good way for a designer to come up with gameplay dynamics is to think about the real world.

Having said that the gameplay mechanic is clear to me. Faster units should have lower health, but higher cost. And air units are FAST.

at least in supcom Air use a lot of energy...

Air was balanced in TA based on very high energy cost. Due to how PA deals with energy this can't really be used to balance it. On the other hand as posted above air isn't actually that cheap.

I agree thatgames don't work off trying to make real life sense, cod games would be bullshit cheese with wall destruction.

ask for aircraft, depends on their dos, cost of ammo, and health. Currently, all those are overpowered. Cheap if expected to die every mission sure. Cheap with ammo cost sure.

In exactly the way I described to you in the post you just ignored past the first sentence. I've added back in the part you apparently failed to see. If you don't read it, it's not my fault. If you're so set on equating 'metal' (which is a pretty nondescript term) to the total mass of the object then you're unnecessarily blinkering yourself and artificially restraining gameplay and balance based on your own flawed perspective over what 'can' and 'cannot' be used as a balancing mechanic. Again, that's not my fault.

How? Again, unless you're forcibly equating metal to the actual sum cost of the entire unit and disregarding the possibility that metal actually refers to a unit's rarest parts (say the metal needed to form the circuits, the anti-grav device, the AI that allows intelligent targeting, the resource that fuels its internal reactor, or whatever you want it to be) then I'd say it's your flawed perspective on the situation that's making it ' awkward ', rather than the situation itself.

Uh, unless it's lore, yes it does. You don't make gameplay impacting decisions without evaluating the impact on gameplay, that would be stupid.

I checked in the unit DB before posting and those weren't the figures I found. Where did you get the figures from? I guess the DB might be out of date.

pa-db.com lists an Ant for example being 225 metal. I didn't actually check the T1 bomber because I never use them, but you're right, the costs are closer than I thought.