Economy management

I was watching some of Zaphodx's recent videos yesterday evening, generally competition 1v1's on fairly small moons. In one game, one of the players got up like 8 bot factories, all driven off just 2x metal extractors (at spawn point; no need to expand at all) and equally few energy plants. The guy produced an absolute ton of dox, destroyed all his opponent's metal extractors (who had been trying to expand) and overran him completely.

That just didn't feel right to me and if you made metal and energy even more efficient, would anybody even bother to try to expand at all? Just build one extractor, cover the planet with dox...

What if you added some caveats to the metal extractors and energy generators? For example, regardless of the income generated you have another rule which says that for every factory, you need one metal extractor and one energy generator.

What about if you make the metal extractors and energy generators less efficient individually, but groups of N get an efficiency bonus (or perhaps for each group|set you can build a new structure which greatly increases their efficiency)? That would reduce the dox zerg spam strategy as you could no longer drive so many bot factories from such a very small number of resource buildings and would encourage expansion, as otherwise you'd be at a significant production disadvantage compared to an opponent who did expand.

You could have the economy scale somewhat with the map size. Small moon 1v1; less efficient economy, players need to expand and vary their strategy up.

The risk/reward/punishment structure of the game seems wrong currently, especially on smaller maps. Zerg rushing your opponent seems to have little risk and great reward. A rush tactic should beat somebody going heavily economy-greedy, but should be punished against somebody who's playing a solid, safe opening; greedy beats safe, safe beats rush, rush beats greedy. That shouldn't be a hard and fast rule, but if you break it too much then there remains only one viable strategy and the game becomes flat.

Seems to me like the whole game needs to scale correctly to the map size, not employ exactly the same mechanics for all maps. That could involve other aspects of the game as well as economy. For example, take the radar; on a smaller planet its range could be scaled back, perhaps related to the curvature of the planet. Maybe it is already..? I'm not knowledgeable enough to know for sure.

I don't think that doing this would nullify differences between map sizes, but rather create better strategic balance between them.

On the subject of the game needing a greater variety of units, maybe even upgrade paths for units etc., I'm just not familiar or experienced enough to comment on that really. One gut feeling I do have is that the hike between T1 and T2 is just too large, perhaps prohibitively so; do the improvements in the units really justify the increase in resource costs? I dunno, maybe it's about right, and merely needs a scaling tweak depending on the map size.

This is mathematically impossible.

2*7+30=44 metal per sec
15*0.6*8=72 metal per sec

This isn't even counting all the wasted metal and time building the additional factories that were going to run at lower than 100% build rate. And pgens that were going to power said useless factories.

Was his opponent afk?

My bad, I didn't remember the game precisely. It was this one:



The green player did get up his 6th bot factory whilst being powered by just one energy generator, but he had put down an additional 3x metal extractors than I'd remembered at this point.

That green player was me.

6 factories off 4 pgens, and 10 mex. This is called a 1 fabber rush build that counters other dox spam builds on that specific 450 radius map. It isn't as effective anymore in the current state of the game. Still strong, but there are counters now.

Also not sure if you know, but this is like balance from last century. The game has changed a bit since.

Yes, I know. I didn't want to seem overly familiar by quoting your name is all.

Maybe eventually, but at 3:15 in, there's 1x power generator with the 5th factory going down, 6th queued.

What I remembered this morning was what the commentator said at that point in the game, "...sheer efficiency of build, all he's got here are two mex built with the commander, single power gen with the second one on the way... "

What specifically (that's relevant to the build)?

Ok so,
1) The first four factories and the bot fabber are using up all the 3k commander energy. That is why it is a rush build, and not a macro build where you might use instead 2 or 3 fabbers to consume the 3k energy.

This has nothing to do with actual economy production buildings. From here on out you need essentially 1 pgen per 1.5 bot factories. I am not going to build those pgens with the commander but with a 2nd bot fabber instead, which means I need to plunk out 2 pgens in a row just to get a 2nd fabber up and running.

You can't just look at peak usage of free starting resources, and then extrapolate that the same relationships hold true with incremental resources which arn't free. You gotta look at the point at which a certain rate of expansion of production becomes sustainable. Different builds have different points at which that happens

2) Bombers

Is there an arguement to be made that 3k energy is too much? Possibly. Though I would argue that it is t1 fabbers being slightly too relatively inefficient.

I agree we need more variety in this game and that's what I always want(and it is why I don't want to fixed maps). But I don't really think simply change of eco will really help this. People don't use this unit or don't build this factories is because they think they will not get advantages by doing that. i.e. not much people build T2 in 1v1 now is more like the T2 is less cost efficient that more bolos or doxs in this 1v1 situation. Same reason for the orbital(they are useful in navy battle, so I build them in navy battle). It is true 1v1 now is just doing 90% same things again and agian unless the map is quite different with the other one.

The possible reason for this, I believe fundamentally is we don't have enough different types of units. This limit the way we play. Then is the T2 and orbital can't boring too much advantages for 1v1 on single planet(even we can drop satellites will be better). The eco do restrict the building, but if certain building is worth the cost, there is not reason for not doing it.

The problem I don't think some people are getting is that increasing the amount of money a player has won't fix this, it will just make it even more prevalent.

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Cheers for the info, I tried a 'similar' build last night (i.e. lacking in any finesse) and was q. surprised at how many bot factories I was able to drive from a couple of energy gens and about half a dozen metal extractors. I think I've been trying to play the game I think should be there rather than the one that really is there...

I usually make energy plants for ubercannons only. You can make like 8 botfactorys and run them pretty smoothly on 3k energy, you might need to get rid of your fabricator at one point (1000 energy to make metal you can't spend anyway). But if you shoot 1 ubercannon, your energy will be gone and a 2nd ubercannon will take very long to charge.

Play on The Cult's home system. It's up in the Clan Wars folder. It was made with strategic play in mind and to minimize the importance of eco management.

:/

If your on over the weekend I'd like to play you 1 v 1 and you try that build against me... I've not gone pure bot in ages, even on small maps and my 1 v 1 record is pretty strong for the relatively small number of games I've palyed (time is an issue for me these days).

The build I now follow is a mix of bots, tanks and air which I adjust on the fly depending on what my opponent is doing. All dox is a pretty poor build these days in 1 v 1 as far as I can tell, as a few bombers can *demolish* a group of bots and I tend to have them early (ish) to help catch my opponents single expansion fabber off guard

I've even gotten t2 in a few 1 v 1 games which can really turn a match around... And I'm talking about games against palyers in the top 10 on the 1 v 1 ladder. I think people are too quick to assume there is no depth, it takes a while on a perticular balance for people to find the best options and from my expreience you can be pretty flexible now.