Hey Forum, Another question here... I was curious if anyone knew what the build cost meant or how it's factored in. For example, the Bot Factory has a build cost of 600 metal, however, I don't see this. In an AI game I set up, I made a Bot Factory first to see where I stood afterwords. Upon completion I was left with just under 600 metal (598) and well above 12,000 energy. After a few seconds I was back at 1,000 metal and 20,000 energy, where it stood until I built more. No where did I see 600 metal deducted or taken away or financed for myself in the match. So what does the build cost mean? Thanks again in advance, Justin
The thing is, while you're building, you're also generating. The commander generates metal per second, and the metal extractors generate metal per second. So you have a pool of metal in storage, it gets pulled from and filled every second. If your consumption out does your generation, then your metal pool empties and you begin stalling. If you generate more metal than you're consuming, then you fill up your metal storage and the excess metal is tossed aside. Same goes for energy. Except it's not quite used in the same way. Fabricators and factories consume X energy per second whenever they're building. Different fabricators are more energy efficient than others. For example, bot/vehicle fabbers are more energy efficient than air fabbers, which is why most players use primarily bot/vehicle fabbers rather than the fast moving air fabbers. Does that clear it up?
The most important thing to understand about the PA economy is that income and expenses are both continuous. What this means is that the count of metal that you currently have is not actually that important. This number only changes based on the difference between your income and expenses. If you have 100 metal income and spend 100 metal per second, the number of metal that you actually have in storage will not change at all. Suppose you build a bot factory that costs 600 metal. How much it actually costs to build also depends on how quickly you build the bot factory. If you had 60 constructors each with 10 metal/second of build power, you would complete that bot factory in only 1 second, costing 600 metal. But if you have only one constructor with 10 build power working on the factory, it will cost you only 10 metal per second, but will take 60 seconds to complete. Imagine your metal like water in a sink. Your metal extractors are the tap which fills the sink. Building units and structures is the drain at the bottom which empties the sink. If the sink is being filled faster than it is draining, then your number of metal goes up. And if you are draining faster than you are filling your storage, then the amount of water in the sink falls, until it's empty, at which point you can only drain at the rate you are filling it.
Oh I think I understand now... So when I use my Comm to start the bot factory at the start of the match, my eco is: +10 metal/s (COMM gen) +1,000 energy/s (COMM gen) (-30 metal/s) (COMM cost) (-1500 energy/s) (COMM cost) ---------------------- -20 metal/s -500 energy/s @ Comm build rate 30 metal/s for 20 seconds to get 600 metal. This leaves me with 600 metal and 10,000 energy. Okay this makes sense now! haha Thanks for making me think more on it, all good now
So far so good! To confuse things even further, how much metal or energy you spend building something works in two separate ways. The metal cost is fixed and you can find it if you hover you mouse over something via a notification in the bottom right corner or via info text in build menus. However, there is no fixed cost for energy as it is decided by what builds something, rather than what is being built. So in the example above, if you build a factory costing 600 metal in 1 second using 60 t1 fabbers will cost you 60 000 energy in one second. Building the same factory using only one fabber will leave you at -1000 energy per second for 60 seconds (as it spends 10 metal / second building it so it will take 60 seconds). So how fast you can build something is dependent on how much fabbers you have and how much energy you have. It's definitely worth keeping an eye on what fabber builds what as not all of them consume 1000 energy per 10 metal, it varies a lot. This way you can keep your energy spending to a minimum. If you want to compare units stats pa-db.com is a great resource.
Although if you have a fabber that has an expensive run cost the only way to avoid the cost is have the fabber idle ie wasting it's engineering power. So it might be more handier to strive for the ideal of keeping all your fabbers running and regarding the fabbing energy cost as a fixed constant upkeep.
I think I explain it best. so, in c&c red alert 2, you have credits gotten from ore, and energy as well. The credits like 800 a harvester trip back and forth. A pgen costs 800 so it costs a harvy trip. well, PA uses a streaming eco. Its like many different things. It is like Yuri, where he has tons of small workers making steady rapid small deposits. It is like the ore refinery instead of giving you 800 credits every minute long harvester trip it gives 13 creds a sec which adds up to 800 a min. It can be seen like energy in red alert 2, where it is a bar not a storage, and your goal is to employ as many factories and fabbers as it takes to get the "red bar" (usage) to fill the greed bar (availability). so to simplify, if you keep factories on continuous, they spend your surplus metal for you so it don't waste. What you don't spend immediately, you waste. If you don't have factory on continuous, your game goes on, you don't lose or gain metal, but you also don't have an army lying around for practically free. If you do keep the factory spending, your metal continues to come, but you also get a free army out of it, and you will need that army if the player has one to counter and repel his. if you get fabbers spread out, collecting metal points and building lots of pgens in between, you can afford to build another factory so often, upgrade to a t2 sometime, add more fabbers to existing ones, build defended like artillery close up to your enemy, send and replace army blobs, ect. in one last thought, think of the metal as an energy bar to be filled up to overuse as closely as possible, and think of random factory bulk unit buildup AS STORED METAL, the only way to store metal is to build a combat unit with it and have it sit around, or build some buildings or towers and have it sit around. as long as you remember, you must spend it instantly or else the metal becomes thin air and empty space. Its easy to do by storing metal value in standing army. -------------------------------- knowing the eco works like that, advanced tactics. one, is to harass your opponents eco. Your army is bigger if you have more metal to spend. So build a handful of early attackers, bombers, grenadiers, ants, quickly aquire enemy location, shoot his most defended builder to stall his metal obtaining, shoot just his eco preferably just metal or just bulk energy so he has less to spend, do so while collecting your own mass metal and energy. Its devastating, your enemys 8 mex can't stand up to your 14, your armies twice as big, you can steamroll right over top, if you start early to suppress and keep low their economy.
