Energy and metal storage?

Who builds storage? I'm pretty sure anyone who knows how to play a TA or SupCom builds storage. While the latter part would be true in those games someone coming that far into a base may not mean the end of the game in PA since you are not limited to one map.
While I see some merit (not much) in this "spilling out" for more of a "bonus for destroying said persons base" I think the only thing that would be worth adding is a % onto the metal storage wreckage while energy storage should just be volatile.

Link me a single video of a replay from a SC tournament, quarters or above, where you saw someone build mass storage.

Err... not just games from highly competitive 1v1 are relevant.

Well there is usually wrecks to reclaim anyway when you destroy the enemy base.
Anyway, is there anyone left defending this idea?
Does anyone think it would have any significant effect which reclaim already doesn't for-fill?

I don't agree with this positive mass = evil viewpoint as a cardinal rule, however I do agree with the sentiment. Excessive inflow is wasted in a flow based economy. You don't have to store up like in traditional RTS games like AoE, Star Craft, etc. All that means diddly squat to new players or casual ones and you don't want to alienate them. As stated before, storage is in.

At any point, a storage container that is destroyed should not be repairable and the material stored in it reclaimable. Your storage should be protected, period.

The real question becomes, how much gets put in each container? Is it evenly divided across the system, planet or area around the planet (i.e. asteroids and moons)? After you decide on what pool of storage containers you are considering, do we then do like TA and SC and lose storage only when empty capacity has been accounted for?

Some of the discussion here is around mechanics that haven't been specifically ironed out by Uber (at least not that we know of), since they have said they are leaning toward universal (almost said global :? ) economy, but haven't shut the door on a localized economy just yet.

I agree, my point was to illustrate that it is reasonable to assume that a player constructing one of these would likely build it inside their base.

Storage was redundant in SupCom. It's useful to manage spiking income but in SupCom you were better served not spending resources on storage and simply building units that spiked spending e.g. experimentals. Mass storage might be more valuable in PA because of the normalized mass drain but honestly, what depth does storage really bring? You need dynamic high cost units on necessarily low income maps to make storage at all significant. I think it'd be simpler if all resource producing structures had storage. SupCom attempted something similar putting storage on all engineers and factories but it wasn't enough.

You mean like... all of them? They obviously weren't built for the storage, though. Mass storage was used for the extraction bonus from adjacency. The math is elsewhere, but the ideal upgrade path is extractor -> T2 -> Storage -> T3.

Energy storage is something you rarely see built in SC. It's fairly expensive, the storage values are low when compared against the scaling economy, and anything that's gonna tank your eco is gonna tank it HARD. A little bit of storage isn't going to fix that, not when you can instead spend the resources increasing your energy income to prevent the stall. Perhaps its ONLY use in game was to enable the use of overcharge post-patch, and that only takes 1.

The math, ripped from BSR_Destructors Guide;
Don’t be stupid, t1 produces (+2), if u spent on mass storages (200 each X 4 = 800) around them, u gave just (+1). With the same mass you upgrade to t2 to produces (+6), later with mass storages (+9).

bobucles go watch the replays the game rarely gets that far.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edjZTr34OVQ

That's beside the point really, whether or not it makes the full progression to T3 is irrelevant, when it DOES happen, that's how it's always happened.

Mike

Ok, fine assuming that we have two absolutely amazing players that are so evenly matched its not even funny. They in this rare instance make it to T3. Then yes it DOES happen. But I don't usually form strategies off or in this case assumptions based off things that occur <5% of the time.

However, my original point was to illustrate that we can assume that if mass storage is built that it would be inside the base of a turtle, and thus if you are blowing this it up, and have the ability to walk an engineer into their base. The game is already over. Thus stuff spilling out isn't really necessary.

Thankyou for not reading the whole Thread. See below:

followed by further discussion I was relating to starting with ("CPU cost have been previously covered"):

Engis on patrol will automatically suck up resources regardless if they're a "wreck" or a "Spill". There isn't any difference between the two, and no reason to have a different AI response.

But more importantly is that mass storage wasn't built for the storage. They were built for the extra income, with the storage as a side benefit.

The value of storage lies in dealing with unpredictable surges or drains in the economy, where standard production just can't keep up. Knowing this, PA will likely have little use for storage facilities. The resource spending model is much simpler from Supcom, and there aren't (yet) any unpredictable expenses to deal with. As long as those things remain true, the best answer for storage is to just manage your flow rates better, so it becomes a moot point.

TA didn't have much use for storage, and neither did Supcom(as storage) or ZK. That's not really a bad thing. There are a few ideas for expanding that in PA, mostly on the energy side of things. But for metal, there isn't much happening with storage. Maybe expanding on it could make things better or worse. Maybe the best solution is to abstract it out. Maybe the best answer is to keep it as is. After all, finite metal storage still serves as a way to limit the power of huge reclaim. That could very well be all it needs to do.

The value of storage is in absorbing income spikes and saving resources. FA rendered both of these values redundant. You were better served spending income spikes on fast draining projects (e.g. experimentals) than wasting resources on storage and regular projects. Saving was usually fruitless as well because of the inflationary effect of FA's exponential economy. The faster you accumulate resources the less your previous resources are worth, wreck reclaim and exponential growth only exacerbate inflation. In FA any resources not immediately spend on units were better injected back into the economy. Income spikes were trivial to deal with and saving resources was economically unsound.

I don't think storage adds much depth to gameplay - even in the way it's used in Zero-K. I think attaching storage to resource producing structures would be the best move but I'm likely alone in that opinion.

I have read the whole thread. Have you?

The value of storage is in absorbing income spikes and saving resources. FA did that by having absurdly cheap engineers, which were spammed as the cheapest source of build power in the game. A mass surge could be consumed by building experimentals, which consumed at a vastly higher rate than any factory project. Over taxing the economy also had no direct penalty to it, at least nothing more than watching your energy crash the moment any wreckage was recovered. It was very easy to demand twice your income and let wreckage fill in the rest.

None of those things are true with the known PA system. Engis are going to be FAR more expensive to keep factories competitive, production is going to use fixed rates that don't allow for spike demand, and over drawing on the economy is still going to burn a hole in your energy. Perhaps the only thing not set in stone is that last thing.

The need for storage is going to much more closely match what happened in TA. Metal storage is useful for dealing with big reclaim, and energy storage remains useless except as a novelty to argue on message boards.

I wasn't disagreeing btw bob and I agree with your assessment of storage in PA. I'm still not convinced that storage adds much to the game though. Having to actually invest in storage dissuades resource accumulation in a system already rigged against it. And simply needing to have cheap storage for absorbing wreck fields is unnecessary tedium, it doesn't really add strategy to the game - nobody targets storage over actual resource production. Admittedly certain circumstances could change that.

Grab the energy mop! We have cleaning to do!

Why in these conversations do people keep forgetting Gas Giants!? It doesn't make sense for someone to hit that level of energy income and somehow simultaneously have the energy outflow to balance it immediately. Either you build up structures and units to use the expected power ridiculously before you set up the energy extractors on the gas giant and are energy locked, or you have to ramp up afterwards and are wasting energy until you use it up. Energy storage will have a direct use in this scenario.

Also, we don't know what the energy demands of the kenetic engines that move asteroids will be, but it has been hinted that it will be significant. With a large energy drainer like that which will be destroyed on impact, it makes sense to buffer energy storage to handle the burn time on the engines. Having your energy income at a level to power this short(ish) term drain doesn't make sense because you are wasting that energy until you turn them on, and then after it impacts the target.

The discussion needs to stop drifting into the do we need storage or not debate. We will need storage to handle scenarios that are unique to PA and it is absolutely ridiculous stupidity to assume otherwise giving examples from other games that don't have the same mechanisms that PA will have.

We will have storage and we will need it, end of story.

Does it make sense to have storage structures retain most or all of their stored mass/energy as wreckage(of some kind) when destroyed? That is the question this thread is asking.

As stated before, I think those resources should be lost on detonation. I also like the idea mentioned earlier that the energy storage could cause a proportional detonation and destruction around it, based on what energy was inside. This of course depends on how the storage mechanism works, and how the resources are distributed among the available storage structures.

If energy works anything like TA, FA or ZK energy storage will be useless.

Then again, from what we know about the economy model and Uber's plans for the economy model it probably won't look that much like TA, FA or ZK. So maybe we should stop assuming that it'll be just like those games.