I've took down all the economic buildings, fabbers and factories in this spread sheet:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0An_H1QQ1KR-rdHhQbzZBS3lXTGpfUnpyVUlMc2VxTEE#gid=0 Feel free to copy it and modify it. Code: Unit Build speed efficiency(unit cost and energy requirement cost divided by build speed) Commander 32.143 Fabrication bot 82.286 Fabrication vehicle 86.786 Fabrication aircraft 173.571 Fabrication ship 139.286 Adv fabrication bot 97.619 Adv fabrication vehicle 109.286 Adv fabrication aircraft 203.571 Adv fabrication ship 127.778 Fabrication sub 113.839 Bot factory 86.161 Vehicle factory 68.929 Aircraft factory 138.929 Naval factory 79.702 Adv bot factory 101.290 Adv vehicle factory 90.040 Adv aircraft factory 118.849 Adv aircraft factory 118.849 Adv naval factory 87.024 To get a low value(good) it requires that the unit has cheap cost or drain little energy per 1 metal it spends. The commander is the most efficient mobile builder. It is free and only drains 50 energy for every 1 metal. The Fabrication Bot is the second cheapest mobile builder(180 metal for 10 build speed) while draining 100 energy energy per 1 metal spent like Fabrication Vehicles, Advanced Fabrication Bots and Advanced Fabrication Vehicles. The Advanced Fabrication Aircraft is the most inefficient builder as it is one of the most expensive builders(1350 metal for 18 build speed) and drains 200 energy for every 1 metal spent. The Vehicle Factory is the most efficient factory in the game. It costs 600 metal for 15 build speed and only drains 45 energy for every 1 metal spent. The air factory is the most inefficient factory as it costs 720 metal for 9 buildpower and drains 92 energy for every 1 metal spent. So this should tell you that you can happily assist the Aircraft Factory with Fabricator Bots since the efficiency difference is the largest there. 87 vs 138 efficiency. Air constructors should only be used if you want really mobile fabricators that can avoid pathing issues. However, a note on energy production. Cheaper energy sources benefit mobile high energy demanding builders more. If your energy is completely based of Advanced Sea Power Plants, which avoided the nerf that the land based equivalent received, it looks a whole lot different: Code: Commander 18.000 Fabrication bot 54.000 Fabrication vehicle 58.500 Fabrication aircraft 117.000 Fabrication ship 94.50 Adv fabrication bot 69.333 Adv vehicle bot 81.000 Adv fabrication aircraft 147.000 Adv fabrication ship 94.78 Fabrication sub 80.250 Bot factory 70.250 Vehicle factory 56.200 Aircraft factory 113.000 Naval factory 65.170 Adv bot factory 83.611 Adv vehicle factory 77.311 Adv aircraft factory 93.444 Adv naval factory 64.870 Now it looks a whole lot differently. Fabrication Bots are even more efficient than Vehicle Factories and the Fabrication Aircraft is almost as efficient as the Aircraft Factory. However if you do want to use mobile builders to assist factories you gotta think about the roll-off time. On Vehicle Factories and Bot Factories I have timed it to 9 seconds which is rather long considering a Fabrication Bot and a Fabrication Vehicle are built in 15 seconds. I might do an analysis taking roll-off time into account later. I did not factor in the cost of metal extractors since it is just a basic cost added for the build power of the unit. About reclaim Reclaim is currently very slow and extracts metal at the builders rate. Repair is much faster while costing metal and energy. This means that you can have several Fabricators reclaiming while one of Fabricator repairs. This is free metal. How many Fabbers you can have reclaiming for everyone repairing varies on structure. I think it depends on HP or something. On T1 radar you can have like 20 Fabbers reclaiming and one repairing. Considering you currently can place metal extractors anywhere this doesn't really matter but once metal extractors are limited to where they can be placed this needs to be fixed or else players will exploit this to get free metal. I'm not sure what Ubers intentions with reclaim is. Feel free to point out errors in the spread sheet, my analysis or add your own supplements to the analysis in this thread. Edit:Added fabrication ships.
About energy stalling: An energy stall will reduce your metal income with how bad your stall is. If your energy production is 10000 per second and you spend 20000 energy per second your metal income will be halved. Adding more Fabbers to a project or turning on more factories will only make your metal production go down even further.
I've included roll-off time in my spreadsheet now. It had a large impact especially on Bot Factory and Vehicle Factory. I think the roll-off time is uniform for all factories and units. I've estimated it to 9 seconds. 9 seconds is a lot if a unit only take 15 seconds to make as is the case of Fabrication Vehicles and Ants. Code: Unit Build speed efficiency Minimum time spent idle Commander 32.14 Fabrication bot 82.29 Fabrication vehicle 86.79 Fabrication aircraft 173.57 Fabrication ship 139.286 Adv fabrication bot 97.62 Adv vehicle bot 109.29 Adv fabrication aircraft 203.57 Adv fabrication ship 127.778 Fabrication sub 113.84 Bot factory 110.16 32% Vehicle factory 92.93 38% Aircraft factory 162.93 23% Naval factory 90.20 18% Adv bot factory 117.00 20% Adv vehicle factory 105.75 20% Adv aircraft factory 129.85 15% Adv naval factory 91.61 11% So if a factory is producing the most expensive unit it will be idle at this percentage. If you add assisting Fabbers, the factory and the assisting Fabbers will be idle for a larger percentage. It is interesting to see how the naval factories rise to be the most efficient factories while Vehicle Factories fall behind both Fabrication Bots and Vehicles. Although assisting a simple T1 Vehicle Factory would be stupid considering how long time both the fabber and the factory would be idle. With Advanced Sea Power Plants the naval factories are even more ahead. Code: Unit Build speed efficiency Minimum time spent idle Commander 18.00 Fabrication bot 54.00 Fabrication vehicle 58.50 Fabrication aircraft 117.00 Fabrication ship 94.50 Adv fabrication bot 69.33 Adv vehicle bot 81.00 Adv fabrication aircraft 147.00 Adv fabrication ship 94.78 Fabrication sub 80.25 Bot factory 94.25 32% Vehicle factory 80.20 38% Aircraft factory 137.00 23% Naval factory 75.67 18% Adv bot factory 99.33 20% Adv vehicle factory 93.03 20% Adv aircraft factory 104.44 15% Adv naval factory 69.45 11% Now the Advanced naval factory is the most efficient factory and it also benefits the most from being assisted.
Nicely done. It would also be nice to see efficiency split into metal cost and power to upkeep metal cost. It is useful to amalgamate both these costs into one cost (as you have done) if you plan on constructing at a full rate in a safe environment. If you have constructors with downtime or in dangerous situations it is better for their cost to be in energy plants than metal cost. I'm not expecting you to do more analysis, I'd just like to note some things about the economy in general. Firstly power plants are like soft farms. To build and run a constructor you need a certain amount of metal in power plants. But if the constructor dies you can rebuild it without spending the power plant cost. Secondly constructors may not work all the time. If your constructor spends a lot of time walking or if it has to wait for factory rolloff time it will not use it's full energy capacity. Another constructor can use it's energy allowance during the downtime. Also factory rolloff can be fixed with adjacent factories and slightly smarter units which assist any nearby job.
I was thinking the same thing. Different mass cost efficiencies and upkeeps can create an approachability barrier as well if there isn't a heuristic involved or delineated engineer roles e.g. vehicles are the sturdiest, bots are the cheapest, air is the most mobile. Indeed, if the aim is to make marginal factories more efficient than marginal assisting engineers this is a stopgap measure at best.
Way better than my thread! Spreadsheet for the win. I think the only errors are the t2 mex +metal numbers (I think its 24 not 28), and for some reason the t1 naval power gen shows +500 energy, not the 700 of the land one. Interesting reclaim exploit......... One fix would be to have reclaim work faster than repair, even if the incoming metal/s wasn't changed. Another might be to have the right click on buildings command assist the first worker to do whatever he's doing. Make it so you can ONLY build, reclaim, or repair. Not all at once. Either way, if mexes can't be upgraded, only reclaim->build better one, reclaim needs to be faster EDIT: also, VOTE FOR STICKY!!!!!!!!! (at least, if you wanna keep the sheet up do date as builds happen........) :mrgreen:
Thank you for pointing this out, in particular. The information all together is very well presented, as well; thank you for posting it.
Thanks. Changed. Yeah. The first solution could work. You would still be able to reclaim the unit down to 1% to get back some resources while still keeping the structure functional. The tradeoff is having a unit on lower health but you get metal for free by reclaiming. This can be an acceptable tradeoff on your power plants in your base for example. The second solution only tries to make it harder to micro. You can still reclaim, repair and repeat forever with 1 single fabber. We will have to see the Devs intentions about reclaim. Thanks. Yeah, it is very easy to update. Just plug in the new values and the rest of the table is updated automatically.
But that's the point. Repairing requires metal, reclaim gives it back. By not being able to do both simultaneously there'd be no point in reclaiming active structures, and if you did reclaim->repair->repeat your metal income would sine wave like mad, and would prolly only be useful if your metal has already crashed, just so you could build more mexes at full speed. Never mind the micro management and attention required to keep an eye on your base to make sure you didn't miss starting the repair cycle and there goes all your generators! And I'm pretty sure that the devs have said they wanted to avoid that kind of heavy micro in favor of a set it, leave it to work, kindof thing.
So a couple of notes: 1. Reclaiming is barely in. The system doesn't have all it's functionality so there's no way to balance it yet. So don't bother trying to calculate anything there because the system isn't quite there yet. 2. It's really cool to see you do this. The only thing I'll mention is that calculating efficiency based on cost isn't as useful with this economy because the cost is more a determination of build time. You also get into the mix of how much each fabber decreases build time, so it's a very interconnected system in that way. 3. Roll off time is currently animation driven. Like reclaiming, this will be changing so we can actually tune it. So expect changes there.
For example: The Fab Bot is better efficiency, according to your numbers, but it still has the same build time of the Fab Vehicle. So, trying to go all bots doesn't buy you faster build times. In general going Bots will cost you more energy but less metal than going vehicles. It's about a 20% difference.
Thanks. It is fun. It depends on how you look at things. I'm talking about metal cost since I expect metal to become the bottleneck resource once metal extractors can only be built at metal points. I guess you could say that Fabrication Vehicles and Fabrication Bots have the same build time since they are both built in 15 seconds (24 with roll-off time) in their respective factory. However you are still paying a higher overall metal cost for the Fabrication Vehicle which I expect to be the most important limiting factor when you can't build mexes anywhere. I have column in the spreadsheet(column W) where I include the infrastructure cost of metal extractors to run a factory or fabber which is accurate considering you can make mexes anywhere in the current economy. The difference in efficiency between Fab Bots and Fab Vehicles is much smaller then, 125.14 vs 129.64 (only 3.6% difference)from 54.00 vs 58.50(8.3% difference). When you are comparing the power of assisting and mex placement is limited, then I think metal cost is very important. Do you buy a Fab Bot with 10 build power for 180 metal or do you buy a Fab Vehicle for 225 metal and the same energy price? As for if you want to produce tanks or bots for combat is a whole other question. Like how does a 180 metal Scamper bot compare to a 225 metal Ant tank? I don't know. They take the same time to build and cost the same amount of energy. You could be making a Vehicle factory while I make a Bot factory. We could have our factories at full production but I have some +3 metal production to spend on something else. How they stand up against each other on the battlefield is a whole other question I'd say.
Ideally, the same amount of metal expended should result in a fair fight. So Bots may cost you 20% less metal but you'll need 20% more of them to win a fight vs tanks. These numbers also relate to some long-term plans. There are going to be planets where energy is more abundant and metal less abundant where bots make more sense. Or maybe a planet where energy is less abundant but metal more, where tanks make more sense. I had to differentiate the units some how or else we'll end up with bots feeling like tanks with different art. So bots are faster, more nimble, and cost less metal but do less damage, can take less damage, and cost more energy.
Well then I say my build speed efficiency analysis is pretty much on target. Currently you need the same infrastructure cost, not counting mexes, to run a single Vehicle Factory or Bot Factory. Infrastructure is in this case cost of the factory + cost of powerplants required to run the factory. However that gives you less build speed/metal drain on the bot factory. If I calculated it correctly a bot player making Scampers would have to spend 25% more into infrastructure in order to keep up the same rate of production as a Vehicle player making Ants. However I guess you could argue that the Bot player get cheaper Fabbers which compensates it somewhat. With current balance Scamper production would actually still have to spend 25% percent more even if energy production were free. Anyway. I guess you are gonna change this when it is appropriate. A simple way could be to reduce the price of the bot factory. I were hoping that Bots would be able to go in hills where Vehicles couldn't go. Although who knows what the future brings. Another thing would be to turn around the energy drain for fabbers and factories where factories drain more energy per 1 metal spent in general than fabbers. I think it would be easier to balance. The price of fabbers would have to go up or their build speed reduced in order to compensate that you need less power plants for the fabbers. However I'd think it would be easier to balance air factories and other energy heavy factories then since those factories could be comparatively cheap while requiring a lot of power to run. Their total infrastructure cost per 1 build speed should of course be cheaper than fabbers but they would also benefit more from cheap power than fabbers. I'm just speculating.
One thing I must note about this game is that factories should be more efficient than bots, or just as efficient. This is where the complaint in supcom came from where T1 Engineers are more efficient than Factories, and you would have 200+ T1 Engineers assisting a single T3 Naval Factory, which looked absolutely RIDICULOUS. It also made for poor balance and slowdowns late game.
Some good info Scathis/godde! Part of the reason I went number diving was to see what the actual power/metal use of the facts/fabs are. I know its just the alpha ui, but being able to plan my energy/mexes out before going in the hole is nice :mrgreen: It's helped me plan out a beginning game (especially after watching Sorian's stream the other day) that doesn't totally suck. Or even knowing that the equivalent advanced power output from regular gens costs 3214 metal, instead of the 2700 for an advanced gen on its own. Either way, I bought the alpha for 2 reasons: To help hunt bugs down, and to see the game evolve and change. I'm really looking forward to where the numbers end up
Yeah this is my concern too. Definitely liked that idea as well. I think they're interested in bringing dedicated spiderbots back at least though. I could see the purpose of bots being superior skirmishers e.g. having decent range and speed such that they can flank but losing head to head against vehicles.
I frigging LOVED spiderbots in TA, I almost peed myself when I found the combat-capable spiderbots in TA Spring.
Interesting numbers. and I like the idea of "penalizing" air constructors to balance out their swarm build advantage a bit. Be interesting to see how this all balances out as the game evolves.
