Energy and metal storage?

This seems more appropriate than the other ideas. AS in let's not have the kbot army stand THAT close to the big barrel full of highly explosive fuel/battery acid/bananas.

From memory, the way TA and Supcom handled energy/mass storage was to just add a number to your energy / mass bar (so immersive ).

So it would be like this:
[||||||||||||||||||||||||||___] E +1000 (1800 / 2000 cap)
[|||||||||||||||||||__________] M +25 (175 / 250 cap)

Adding energy storage would do this:
[|||||||||||||||||||__________] E +1000 (1800 / 2500 cap)
[|||||||||||||||||||__________] M +25 (175 / 250 cap)
Diagrams not to correct scale. ||| represents full, ___ represents to fill

There was no physical storage of mass / energy (such as how silos work in tibsun). When energy/mass storage died it exploded and your bar was reduced, losing all energy/mass above that point. For example, if you have 2500 energy and that is the max, when one 500 energy storage blows, you lose 500 energy and your new max is 2000. As everything, exploded mass / energy storage would leave wreckage.

You could perhaps up the game here and make the amount of mass reclaim from mass storage scale more for how much was lost and energy storage scale to be more volatile (scale being the key word, do just let them have all of the mass back, there was an explosion after all).

As to metal spilling out and being auto picked up by units, I would prefer not. It is an interesting idea, but there area a few issues. CPU cost have been previously covered. My concerns are: if I have an army in my base ready for assault I do not want them wondering going off to defend a lost mass storage. Not to mention that your enemy can use this to weaken your defence force if you are not paying attention to your base, by popping a storage unit and overwhelming the automated response.

BTW did you get this idea from tibsun (command and conquer) or similar? Awesome game.

The more interesting question is that if storage should contain the resource is it distributed evenly or does one fill up before the other?

This is an interesting point. In TA and sup com, the storages that got destroyed first were always magically empty (no resource loss unless you no longer had enough room).
In Sup Com, this contradicted the unit design, as the fill % of the storages were visible (and all identical).

CPU cost? What CPU cost? What is the difference between a wreck and a metal spill?
Both contain metal. Both can be reclaimed. I don't see how one would be more CPU expensive than the other.

Animations, poly count, readability, style, etc. There are lots of differences, some that affect the CPU and GPU, others that visually affect the player and some that do both.

So, What's wrong with wrecks then? Why should they be changed in favour of "spills".

What animations? The storage goes boom and now you have a metal spill texture applied around the wreck of the storage. Reclaim the spill and the texture disappears.

I'm not saying that wrecks should be changed to spills. Actually a full storage could as well have the spilled metal incorporated into its' wreck.

I'm rather indifferent to the idea as I don't think it will have a significant impact on gameplay.
But saying the idea is complex or heavy on the CPU just seems wrong.

At which point why bother?

If it's such a minor, pointless visual quirk that does nothing... then why make it?

What's wrong with wrecks?

Wait, wait. You think there's some kind of difference between wrecks and spills? They're literally the same thing on all levels.

The only possible difference I could see between a wreck and a spill and that would actually impact gameplay is that a spill is a wreck that is bigger than the unit that spawned it. As in; blow up the metal storage, generate difficult terrain for units to move around in.

Both a tactical retreat and a sneaky attack that cuts off reinforcements would become possible.

Exactly. So what's the point in everything else having "wrecks" and storage getting something special like spills?

Or you could just assume that he meant "a wreck that includes whatever it was storing". Since he's talking about storage.

How does energy "spill"? Are these robots really still using chemical storage... crude acidic batteries, to hold the energy produced by several... if not hundreds of FUSION REACTORS?! I find that hard to believe.

Surely, with fusion reactors it'd make more sense to store energy as created matter... solid state energy storage.

What about Hydrogen storage? Grid-Energy storage? SMES?

You're really telling me they're using Electrochemical cells?

Wouldn't solid state energy storage still spill? I mean; it's still some form of material that is subject to pieces breaking off under stress and all. :roll:

Then it explodes. And it's a metal wreck, not a flow of liquid that's spilled all over the floor. And what about Hydrogen storage, Grid-Energy storage and SMES?

Assuming the solid material is tough and metallic in origin, perhaps. Many substances (even solids, although there's no reason to assume it would have to be a solid) will spill everywhere if you blow them up.

It's not really a requirement. Spilling is perfectly reasonable, if it'd make the gameplay better. (Probably won't, but who knows. Making difficult terrain with material spills might be fun)

Honestly SMES (Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage) is so efficient I've no idea why Future-Robots wouldn't use them. SMES loses the least amount of electricity in the energy storage process compared to other methods of storing energy with only about 2% loss for energy in - to energy out...

And you can access it SUPER fast too... they've got the highest release rate of any storage method... bar fission of course... but then again fission is very dangerous, SMES Units are much safer.

The only downside they really possess is cost. to which I point you in the direction of our Future-Robots... that can build factories in less than 30 seconds. I'm thinking "Cost" isn't high on their list of priorities.

I could. Because not using them would be better for gameplay

There is no question that storage will be in the game.

However, I do want to point out that during a serious gameplay you should never have positive mass EVER!

So, who builds these things and why? The answer is casual players in custom games that like to turtle. Where do turtles build stuff? In their base. Their not going to put one of these things out in the middle of the open. Thus if you have blown the thing up you must be inside their base attacking them. If you cleared the base enough to be able to bring in a engineer to reclaim this wreck/liquid whatever. The game is already over, thus the idea of resources spilling out does not add anything useful to the game.