Decoupling Mexes from Energy

Yes it is. If extractors cost energy and you run out of energy, you don't get that metal; it never existed. If extractors don't cost energy, then that metal is stored and, once you fix your energy problems, it's there for you to use. So if you can recover from your energy crash, you can "catch up" at the cost of some more constructors/factories.

That is not an Idea I support.

Catching up means more then spending money, so I would rather punish players for losing money by losing their power, and all of their stored power then by providing an incentive to overspend on power after a stall.

You obviously aren't understanding the implications involved. You're not really catching up, because you'd have to increase your investment in contructors and/or factories, which would still put you behind. Basically, you'd be behind what you could have theoretically been at, but you'd be ahead of your pre-crash production. It's not a get out of jail free card, it just makes an energy crash less sever then it could be. So a energy crash goes from "definitely" game ending to "potentially" game ending.

I don't see how you crash with this system anyway.

Losing a few power plants won't be end all, as you would be at like 80% production/income.

So being game ending isn't something it can really do unless you lose everything anyway.


So I really don't get the problems involved here, you lose a bit of power, everything scales to the amount of power you still have.

Yes, in addition to your metal income, you also lose your production speed, your firing speed on defenses and whatever else, while your opponents loses nothing. The key points here are production AND metal income losses. So now you're making less AND building less.

If you consider a snapshot in time x seconds after you energy crash (incoming bs numbers): Your opponent has 10 tanks and the metal to build 10 more tanks. If extractors are energy dependent you may only have 8 tanks at this point and the capacity to build 8 more. If extractors are not energy dependent, then you you'd still only have 8 tanks build, but you'd have the capacity to build 10 more.

Also note that with energy dependent extractors, energy crashing is worse than metal crashing. Why should this be the case?


At the end of the day though, the question is this: how badly should a player be penalized for energy crashing. The answer is really going to be dependent on the individual.

So that's pretty much my last post on this subject; I hope I'm making sense, even if you don't agree.

You are, and I do not.

You say metal is the capacity, but I feel like that should be the role of energy, not metal.

Personally I think it makes sense to have your metal income slowed at the same rate as construction. If you are using 100% of your metal, and build 10 tanks per minute. Then you stall energy to 80%, then you're still using 100% of your metal and building 8 tanks per minute. How would it be fair if you are still getting enough metal to build those 2 tanks? Because chances are good you'll be able to spend that metal later when something would have been free...

So if you keep the same amount of metal, you're losing very little in terms of economics other than some build speed, which might seem significant on paper, but with the amount of engineers and construction buildings we'll all have, it won't be a huge ding in the long run.

If you actually LOSE the metal, then that's a big penalty, it means hey, if I energy stall, I'm going to have less actual resources to work with. It forces you to do two things 1) Don't get energy stalled. 2) If you do, fix it quick. I think that's the reaction people should have to being energy stalled.

This. If metal output does not scale with energy output, when you run out of energy your total metal income will be higher, and probably overflow. I personally think it might be confusing to new players to see that when their energy bar goes down their metal bar goes up.

You're at the perfect balance of power for your current number of mexes. You then lose 20% of your power... In supcom/fa, you would crash hard. In this economy, you dont crash. You just go down to 80% income until you rebuild the power.

This is already a far more forgiving system than forged alliance. Decoupling energy is going too far.

From what I can tell Power Sniping is still plenty effective as building anything requires power, so kill the power and they'll not only have LESS build power, but also need to put a portion or all of that remaining build power into gettign more Energy!

This is of course on top of the OTHER things that will be using Energy.

Mike