Energy consumption for mobile units

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To help address the issue of snowballing advantages, consider making mobile units consume small amounts of energy just for being alive. T1 units maybe 1 energy per second, T2 more. Units consume more energy when moving.

This would give a benefit to players that have fallen behind as they're not paying the additional costs of large armies.

Thoughts?

Energy while using powerfull ammo ( artillery, longrange missiles, bombs) or special Abilities (radar, jamming, enhanced visual) yes
Just for beeing alive ? Nope ... i dont even see the benefit to it .... at the very worst you would do more harm to the weaker player by destroying his energy ... the powerfull player could easily expand on energy anyway it wouldnt make any difference to him imo ...

I think it's a good idea: energy consuption on movement and even higher consuption on attack. The purpose i see in it is to improve role of energy storage and to force players to foreseen future increased consumption of resources. Buffering resources would be more common.
This would introduce intresting mechanics where player has to retreat his army because his energy supplies were destroyed.

Power at the moment is actually probably the biggest bottleneck in the game. It's used for many things and when you don't have enough it kills a lot of production/protection.

Why in a game about SIZE would you pretty much add an artificial unit cap(units=power)? As soon as you add unit maintenance to a game people stop using large armies and instead build smaller, more "advanced" armies. The Dox and Pounder will be skipped for the Leveler and Slammer.

It will punish people playing the game the way it is supposed to, instead of "tech rushing" and then nuking/planet smashing.

Energy is already consumed for some ammo types, it should be left there.

But why should people who have fallen behind get any benefit?

Right now the growth curve of a player is exponential, the more they have the more they can expand. This leads to a small advantage at the beginning massing into an huge advantage 5-10-15 minutes later on. I think what needs to be addressed is the exponential rate of growth and tame it closer to linear growth. This will allow a slight setback early to be somewhat recoverable...

How that could be achieved... I have no idea. I don't think the ideas here would have the intended results. If anything it'll just obscure the state of your economy even more than it already is.

Energy is a soft form of supply. Units that use energy would take more initial investment and be more difficult to spam.

Currently there is such a huge emphasis on building energy to supply your construction efforts. For anything else to be comparable they'd have to have insane upkeep.

This is true, but if units were to use energy then I'd rather they always use a consistent amount of energy and not use more when moving or firing so that the economy remains simpler to understand. I've watched a lot of PA matches and I've played many as well and all too often (pretty much every game) players are saying "What the hell happened to all my energy?!?!" Then frantically click around stopping things until they suddenly have a tonne of energy again. This is the result of a complicated fluctuating economy that we have now and will have more of with the proposed changes further up the thread.

A fluctuating economy is not bad if there's enough storage to buffer it.

Currently the economy gets tanked by half a second of construction. That's simply not enough.

They tried in ta too but the units generated energy when idle and consumed rhat same energy (=0) when doing stuff, that wasnt a good idea they found out, they will probably not touch that again

This suggestion is basically identical to how Supply work in Starcraft or Food in Warcraft.
You pay the price for the Pylon, the Farm or the Power plant to support more units. If the unit dies you still keep the Power plant like you keep the Pylon or the Farm.
Okey. You can use the energy for something else once the unit is dead but it is still pretty similar.

It isn't capped. You can build as many power plants that you want which means that you can have as many units as you want as well.

But, as I said before, this will push more people to ignore large armies and instead tech up instead of wasting time building a ton of Pgens.

If all units cost 10 Power to exist, then why not jump to Advanced and get more bang for the buck instead of building 20,000 pounders?

However if advanced costs 100P to exist, it's more likely that people will largely ignore Adv. and instead only do basic.

Pretty much you force people to choose Adv, or Basic based upon a bad supply system. Since the amount of power you can gain is exponential, why force people to build more Pgens for no real gameplay reason.

Also, what happens if someone wipes out all your power or a lot, suddenly your P has tanked and your in the red. What will happen? Will some units work and not others? Will the be very slow? It would become a headache.

Since the game has no unit cap, no supply system should be added. Since the supply system only cause everything to take longer with no added benefit.

As with any unit stat, it is a matter of balance. A more powerful unit should arguably have more power drain.

Yes, I agree that the gameplay effects are dubious. I'm not sure it really counteracts snowballing either. An energy drain on units can simply be seen as an added cost to units. In order to support an additional 10 units of unit X it requires an additional Y number of power plants. A player that is ahead would still be able to build more power plants than the other player and field a larger army. Although if you lose your army it is cheaper to replace because you don't have to build additional power plants. So a player that just lost his whole army would be able to replace it for a cheaper cost while the other player have to keep constructing more power plants if he wants his army to grow bigger.

This is also a serious concern that would have to be addressed by the game balance and mechanics

Well it adds another balancing mechanic where some units could be more "supply" heavy than others.
In the end, a supply system encompasses deep gameplay changes while not really addressing the concern of OP.

TA had no problem incorporating units that consumed energy. Most of them were non essential units- snipers and radar jammers and laser cannons. There was a cloak or two in there, and the Core battleship also leaned heavily on its energy laser. That's not the problem.

The real question is- will energy demand change your reason for using the unit? Is it a weakness that can actually be exploited? Is it even manageable? Players have enough problems dealing with the energy demand of constructors as is.