Exploring Storage Options

I apologise in advance because I scanned this topic.

I just want to point out (if it hasn't been already) that supcom was not separated. The storage was integrated into buildings like factories (as well as separate, dedicated storage for mass and energy) and also into engineers, ACUs and SACUs.

This 'hybrid' you are all talking about already exists. It's called SupCom. The poll is misleading.

I don't think that supcom goes far enough.

I feel like mass extractors and powerplants need at least some storage capacity.

I suppose it's a valid argument, however what are you really asking for?

On the grand scale of things, each extra building/unit that we add to the list that have storage is making the player's economy harder to damage. In doing this, we also reduce the value of dedicated storage itself. At which point we might as well do without dedicated storage altogether. This is bad because it removes strategic targets.

The difference between integrated and dedicated storage in SupCom was interesting. In vanilla, a T1 factory could store about 20% as much energy as a dedicated storage unit (mass is more like 16%). That means that as players build their storage increases considerably. The thing is that it is evident, if by nothing else but the poll, that this pretty significant increase in storage has gone unnoticed by some players. That is because they got the balance right.

Building storage early on was not a requirement for most, indeed generally it was built late game around T3 mexes, T3 power and T3 mfabs to increase their output possibly more so than for the storage they provided, which is quite ironic really. This is generally because the better the player, the less their need for storage due to their ability to better balance their incoming/outgoing resources. All the time keeping in mind that what we are really interested in is mass. Wasting energy is not so much of a crime.

TLR. The trick with all of this is to maintain a balance between the necessity to build storage and the value of it as a target. By increasing the number of buildings/units that can store resource, the less need we have for dedicated storage and therefore we remove strategic options in this way.

Is storage a valuable target if the correct course of play is to spend all your resources?

If there's no reason to explicitly store metal or energy, there is little reason to build up storage. With no real reason to build storage, there's no real advantage to be gained for destroying it.

It will be interesting to see in PA how this will work without the adjacency bonus system.