Birds Bees and the Fireflies

hey guys masterofroflness here and I`m going to showcase to you guys a video in which several realm members including myself play a game using only fireflies and T1 bots...high level plays do not exist.. The video is also in different perspectives so take a look!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqpfwLpMEh4 Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFgAZfXyeLE killer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCwPRgD6hB4 Wpmarshall

Wow. It's way too hard to spend metal in early game. The Comm's lathe needs a buff!

I think it's early game energy production that needs a buff actually. Comm should generate more energy and T1 power plants should be un-nerfed. Right now you have to spam energy generators if you want to use all the metal you expand to.

That's a lot of number wrangling when the simpler answer is to make the Comm's lathe cheaper. It directly addresses early game energy (and adds more value to the Comm) without messing anything else up.

That would work as well, how much energy does the comm drain though? It may be too little to make a difference.

From what I can find it's currently at 3x of a standard engineer for a 50% energy discount. In the long run the Comm's production power will inevitably be eclipsed by the sheer weight of its other assets, so it's okay to play with wacky values.

Doubling the raw metal rate would give a 6x engineer for a 75% energy discount. The total economic benefit is like starting with about 2000 extra metal at least half a minute sooner. It almost doubles the game's starting pace, and creates a serious metal deficit that demands reclaimables (and conflict over reclaimables) extremely early.

The only issue is that metal swings too easily between "excessive" and "complete economic stall" too easily early game already, let alone trying to manage reclaimables. I usually build 4-10 metal storages just to buffer these metal income swings. Even once Uber reduces the frequency of metal points and fixes the algorithm, we still have to worry about energy.

Assuming you are building at maximum capacity at the start of the game, it takes approximately 8-15 minutes for your energy economy to catch up to your metal economy, assuming your enemy never raids your energy generators and you have enough factories to defend your territory. Once your energy economy picks up, you have another 5 minutes of wasting metal while you increase your production power to compensate for your now-saturated economy.

But I digress, we're having a balance debate about economy, which are two things you shouldn't do in an Alpha. I guess I just play so many semi-competitive games I feel strongly about these things.

Ah, poo. Anything is fair game at any stage of testing. The economy is just as alpha as anything else.

The act of building a base demands FAR more energy than running a fully established base. That is unusually the opposite of what one might expect. The fault lies mostly with the current economic system, which demands that mobile production (base builders) need more energy to be less efficient than stationary production(factories). The only indirect leverage point is with the Commander (and maybe egg). As a unique unit it can subvert the rules, providing cheap build power without demanding that one already has a base.

Well, the problem is clearly that you don't have anything to reclaim. As planets get more stuff and players get more experienced, undue stalling will become less of an issue.

Although to be fair, PA does have the smallest relative storage of all the titles. TA had 1K metal storage with +2 extractors, Supcom had 650 storage with +2 extractors, ZK had 500 storage w/2'ish extractors, and PA has 800 storage with +7 extractors. It just keeps getting smaller and tighter with each game.

What I'm saying is that to keep up with raw metal income in terms of production, you need a disproportionately high energy income. The metal income from reclaimables would only be needed once metal frequency is reduced.

Currently, to keep up with my growing metal income, I need 5 Fabbers and the Commander constantly working on Power Gens for about 20 minutes, after which I usually keep 1 or 2 T2 Fabbers on energy.

The metal income from reclaimables would help during an energy stall, but metal income is usually so high that even during a -5k energy stall metal is still comig in positive.

nerf metal 420

Part of the problem lies with the high cost of extractors. It takes 2 minutes for an extractor to pay for itself AND the paired generator that it needs. So when you see like 15 extractor points, it can take upwards of 10 minutes before seeing a dime go towards any units.

The other part is that base building is the most expensive part of base building. Fabbers are the base builders, and the economic system forces them to have higher upkeep and be more expensive than factories at all times. So it should be no surprise that the base building stage of the game is the biggest hurdle!

Oh well. It's just another thing that needs to be tweaked.