Energy and metal storage?

What do you mean by this?

Because wasted Energy doesn't matter too much in most cases, having a higher RATE is more important than having Higher Storage.

As with Gas Giants, if they do provide a High Rate Energy Source you don't need storage because the important thing is the Income Rate. If they provided Lump Sums of Energy, that's where Storage is more important, but that brings up other considerings, like is the cost in the Gas Giant Extractor(s) and the needed Energy Storage better spent on Traditional Rate Based Generators? To counter this do you increase the amount of the Lump Sum?(BTW this also means you need more storages as well so it's a bit of a catch-22)

The only way I see Storage seeing much use is if the standalone Structures are the ONLY way to increase storage at all, and/or some Units/Structures/Weapons require 'Lump Sum Deposits' to function, so something that needs X Energy all at once to function and it cant be charged over any period of time.

Mike

I think we should allow it to be useless. Think about it if we make all these gamey mechanic changes all we are doing it adding micro to the game, but does that make the game more fun, or awesome. I don't think so.

You'll have to specific exactly what you mean, I covered a few different things and my post and have no idea which you're referring to.

Mike

If they provided Lump Sums of Energy, that's where Storage is more important

Maybe I don't understand something about this. What I was thinking is something like the following:

Your energy usage is fairly balanced and shows +50 (50 inflow in excess).
You fire a rocket (with whatever is used to set up a refinery on the gas giant) which causes the energy flow to go -450 until the rocket is launched.
Once the refinery is built (have no idea how this happens yet) your energy balance goes to +5050.

Now what?

Next scenario:
Your energy usage is balanced again at +0.
You have stabilized your position on the planet you spawned on and want to place an asteroid in orbit around the nearest planet to establish a beachhead/bombardment platform. You fire an engineer toward a suitable asteroid near your planet and your energy goes to -500. Once he gets there, you start him building the large engine structures required to move the asteroid. Your energy is at -1000 for the duration of the building of each engine. You want to speed up the process and send another engineer. This means the launching and building puts you at -1500 until he leaves and then you go to -2000 when he starts building. When you are done, the 5 engines you built fire up and you are at -5000 for the duration of the burn until the asteroid reaches the targeted orbit.

Should you have built up a surplus of +5000 before this began, or would it have made more sense to operate at a +100 for a while putting the unused energy into storage for these brief energy usage spikes?

What happens if you are attacked during this process? Do you expect your defenses to not use more energy while firing vs standby? The balanced energy input would seem to be a bad thing in this situation alone.

These are some of the scenarios that make me wonder why in the world someone would consider energy storage to be a bad thing, or useless. How would wasted energy not be a bad thing period? I keep hearing these statements that good players won't have excess metal and energy... then others (or sometimes the same people) make statements that say wasted income isn't important... which is it?

I think of it in terms of an energy requirement for normal operation and a storage mechanism for rapid discharge of large energy amounts for periodic activities.

Yup, I think Evo-RTS is doing something like that as well by requiring energy to fire any weapon. That's quite a departure from the typical TA energy system though. From what I understand Jon wants aircraft ammo to have an energy cost so that will play into this likely.

The limiting factor of growth will be mass not energy. As such players will rarely float risky energy rates, let alone juggle energy stores as you're suggesting. As knight explained, energy rate not stores will matter. Any type of periodic energy upkeep, e.g. aircraft ammo won't affect that prioritization either, energy rate will always be conservatively kept well into the positive to avoid a possible stall (which ultimately also results in a mass stall).

Which sounds like a good idea as long as energy rate is cheap and energy storage is expensive. Which to me sounds like the wrong way around. But if it's cheap to build a lot of storage and expensive to get a lot of rate, storage gets much more attractive.

Especially with things like base defenses chewing through 500 energy per second to fire, but only firing for about 10 seconds until end of battle... it's better to get 5000 energy storage than it is to get +500 energy per second. Your small surplus can recharge the batteries on your main base defenses as they await the next assault.

This ignores the required metal to get to the excess energy inflow situation you describe. I can operate at +50 for some time and have more storage for less metal expense, than building the energy systems to give me the +500 I need to fire a rocket (for example).

Maybe at end game excess income can be ignored, but at the beginning, these kinds of things may make a big difference in getting the critical leg up in the space race.

Damn it... I am doing it just like I said we shouldn't.

There will be storage in PA... fact, and I would bet on in. The question this thread was about was what happens when a storage facility is destroyed.

You THINK there will be storage in PA, nothing has been confirmed on that regard yet.

The User friendly solution to the question thought is that when a storage unit is destroyed you total storage drops by the amount the unit stored, if your current total is in excess of your new storage total is ti lost.

Bam.

Mike

I KNOW there will be storage.

Riiiiight, what's you're basis for this fact again?

It's a very bold statement to make on a game that isn't even in Alpha yet. There is NO telling what kind of changes/adjustments the Alpha/Beta will bring, especially as we lack a lot of Key aspects to help us develop a proper theory for PA's actual Gameplay.

Mike

This comment for one: Neutrino talks about storage in a streaming economy.

But really, this comment: "Metal and energy storage will allow you to build up reserves of resources. This allows players to have some buffer room when the resource drain exceeds the resource income." made in Scathis' economy outline post here.

But that can change.

Everything can change.

Also it's kinda a quick one to go from talking about Storage Structures and segwaying into Storage in terms of the entire mechanic.

Mike

indeed, there's a difference between how resource banking is done and actually having a resource bank. many games use unlimited banking or income-proportional banking. and i hope nobody tries to appeal to realism, we're shooting for awesome (not that traditional storage can't be awesome ).

Storage is... a pretty safe bet. We certainly don't know how useful or necessary it will be, and if it's truly useless it may be removed in part or in whole. That may be the case for metal, I dunno. It's not as though you can win games by storing metal in a game like this.

Even in pre-alpha it is easy to see that energy storage is a MAJOR thing to contend with. The spikes and dips are extremely sharp, and finite storage is the reason it can be that way. Removing the need for storage would screw that up, and denying extra storage structures can be equally problematic as the economy and energy spikes grow.

Alleged mass stall. If the energy system stays as is, metal income is going to be wrecked from everyday use. Losing metal from an energy stall will be chronic and severe. That's no good.

Extractors are a strong contender for having unique high priority energy access, or not demanding any at all. By freeing up players from this disaster, new and more exciting disasters can take its place. The final result obviously remains to be seen.

This was something that was only mentioned for artillery so far. Energy consuming defenses are a great way to separate base defense from units, and I hope Uber considers it as the norm for turret design. Rather than structures being self sufficient, they hook up to the energy grid for ammo. It lowers the cost of defenses(cheap tower, expensive E), it increases the value of energy storage to power the peak demand of defenses, and it creates the risk of blacking out and dying a horrible turretless death.

Besides, if you wanted permanently active defenders you could just pay the premium for standard units. Simple, really.

With artillery, air, Uber-Gun, and static defense requiring energy to fire maybe it's worth going the whole way and requiring energy for all weapons fire - like Evo-RTS.

Indeed, it's really punishing on inexperienced players when this happens. I'm not saying it shouldn't be bad, but the traditional "energy stall->mass stall" doesn't make the game more interesting. An experienced player can avoid energy stalling and so it's normally just a pitfall for new players.

Based on the LS, Uber seems willing to reexamine their design approaches. I'll try to hold my speculation until after May.

Anything that uses energy is pretty much on a soft unit cap. Energy users demand extra generators, which are huge, helpless, and become increasingly difficult to defend as your base grows.

Add energy demand to every unit, and not only will bases grow to some rather obscene levels, but the energy spikes during combat will become unbelievable. It's probably better for most units to tend to their own energy needs. The only reason it's appropriate for turrets is that it offers a downside to justify keeping them cheap (rather than flat out cheating their cost), and keep them more efficient than (but not always superior to) mobile units.