Do not upgrade to heavy metal

So you say that if you build T2 mex on T1, there will be two different mexes on a single mass point? Is it a bug or something? I have always thought, that building T2 mex on T1 simply replaces it.

No, you do not upgrade your mexes. You'll have 2 mexes on one spot, and that's not a bug.

so..metal haves mass in it right? then people should be alowd to call metal spot Mass spots!

Can I call planets units and projectiles mass points too? They have mass in them.

yap you can if you wanted to

but in my personal humble opinion, its bullshit in its current form.

don't get me wrong, its great, but the fact nobody has any clue on this, shows testament to its obscurity. It either needs to be obvious with the model which or both, or the t2 mex construction needs to cause destruction of the t1 underneath upon completion, or something...

I think it would be better if the T1 mex was built by the T2 fab when he builds the T2 mex automatically.

uwotm8

Well that's a choice of extra cost, and isn't something you should force on a player.

I'd be interested to know why T2 metal doesn't replace the T1 mex. I find it somewhat confusing and only became aware of it when someone mentioned it in the Balance forum a while ago.

Basically the idea is that TA, SupCom/FA and SupCom each dealt with the issue differently.

In TA to place a Advanced Extractor you had to first reclaim the Basic Extractor. I'm sure you can imagine how much of hassle this would be in PA given it's scale.

Then in SupCom/FA you didn't have to reclaim anything and the Extractor could upgrade itself but the system was really buggy, like while upgrading the Extractor still produced mass unless you stalled at some point during the upgrade, then it stopped producing any metal until the upgrade was done.

SupCom2 tried a completely hands-off approach and made it so that Research could provide a boost(assuming you went down the appropriate structure branch of upgrades) as well as having the Extractor gain veterency over time and increase it's output that way. This took the least amount of work from the player but result in some awkward gameplay, Turtling to protect your core Extractors was important because they had the most Veterancy and expanding was awkward to do because you'd have to protect it for quite awhile before it really started producing and combine with it's high cost you could just keep slapping them down when raiders took them out.

PA's system is kinda a Mix between TA's and SupCom/FA's in that you do still need to build teh Advanced Extractor with the Advanced Fabber, but you don't have to worry about reclaiming things nor do you have to worry about bugs hampering your Metal income. I think the idea that you should be building Advanced Extractors on top of Basic ones hasn't been well communicated and they should do something like update the models to better show the "stackable" nature of Extractors.

Mike

When I first started playing PA, (with no experience with the supcom games or TA) I immediately saw that the extractors stacked. I hadn't watched a livestream, or any gameplay videos yet, but to me it was totally obvious that they stacked. Encouraged by the pretty obvious effect of being able to build one on top of the other, and that the fabbers wouldn't remove the first... I don't really understand how people don't notice this...

I'm going to guess it's because they played Supcom before they played this game since you'd replace it in Supcom; the fact you build onto it they thought it just you upgrading it as apposed to you building another extractor. But you can easily see there is two extractors, the base extractor and two more- I can tell by the oil hing like things.

That and the fact that you directly place one on top of the other.

Yep, aslo- sorry for how that was written I seem to have dropped a few IQ points whilst writing that based on the spelling.

Oh! It's back.

Just a fyi, the SupCom 2 way of veterancy with extractors was kinda nice, at least in my games with my mates, it made raiding expensive over the long term, rather then in the cost of the units actually killed, but in the potential profits lost.

Not suitable for PA, but still rather nice in execution. (Considering that the research upgrades for them didn't work with the new system, its like you cant upgrade them at all, and that's nice.)

But that's not true. If you zoom in closer and look at the t2 extractor model, it fits over the t1 like an exoskeleton, and adds additional pumping arms. It doesn't sit inside it, they combine into a three pump system. T2 on its own has 2 pumps, t1 on its own has one- it's pretty neatly designed when you look at it

Agreed, I thought it was clever when I first had a look.

well that's exactly what I mean... It doesn't replace, it just adds to it... It's really not that hard to get IMO...

i realy like the stacking function for mexxes ... especialy area commands allow you pretty easily to max out every metalspot productionrate ... you just need to make and area command each with a t1 and t2 fabber and dont have to be afraid of nonworking mexxes like it were the case in supcom ... it was simply once build=constant metalproduction till beeing destroid ... it´s a very good system ...
people just need to remember THAT they can stack those ... maybe something with strategic icons can be made that gives the player a quick notification of " hey you can still build a t1 mex to that t2 mex to get 7 metal/s more out of that spot" like two symbols on a spot linked together one with a 1 or I and the other with 2 or II
so players can quickly see that the other part is missing?