I know it is my personal technique to not let my mass or energy actually go to zero. I will stop production, pause a build, ect. to ensure it doesn't happen. However, how much does your production actually slow down if you run out of mass or energy and is one more harmful to run out of? I think I heard that you will be able to pause factory production instead of just canceling the build que but what about for fabricators and the commander? Will there be a pause button for them that doesn't completely delete my build que?
Yes there will definitely be basic eco management tools like this when the game is feature complete. Your builds will slow down proportional to how much you are overextending your economy e.g. if you are trying to use twice as much as you are producing then everything will be built half as quickly
I noticed there is a selection for "energy orders" that's consume/conserve. I imagine it should become a general economy thing. I don't even know if it works yet........
Personally I find energy is the worse to run out of. When energy goes into the negative, then it starves the metal extractors from running at full, this becomes a dangerous snowball effect. Making precision strikes against an enemies power supply before a main attack is very effective. Their defenses slow down, units build slower, and generally have a very hard time recovering if the power outage is followed with a full on assault.
This If you lose your metal economy, you rebuild it. If you lose your energy economy, you lose the game.
Never ever lose your energy eco. It means death! Also, I've tried the "feature" in the alpha that seems to allow the player to set factories to "conserve" energy. Doesn't seem to do anything at the moment.
hang on, but is not the commander and engineers supposed to generate very little mass and energy. This would solve the issue and this is how TA used to be.
Nah, only the Comm generates energy, and even then, he only generates like +10. Engineers added Mass and Energy storage in TA, which was a nice feature but was kinda lame.
Not true; in TA, all construction units produced a small amount of metal and energy. Many normal units produced energy too. For example, the adv. Construction vehicle: http://units.tauniverse.com/?p=u&v=261 +0.5 M, +21 E, plus 100 Metal & Energy storage
I like the idea of builder units having built in storage. It makes sense that they would have a "capacitor" for their nanolatheing goo. But it also allows a natural scaling of your metal and mass storage so you don't need to build as much dedicated energy and metal dedicated storage.
I haven't seen an effective use, much less an actual need for energy and mass storage as of yet. Are you guys in the habit of actually building them? For my money, I'd rather just build more production.
I usually build 3 of each as a buffer. PA Engineers have a tendency of instantly draining any and all energy because of the massive rollout time on factories.
