Extractors

I also noticed factories are different sizes so I guess you won't be able to locally upgrade much?

Nope, but then again why would you want to stop factory's form building units?

I'm under the impression that Uber is going for more of a TA style tech-progression.

For those not in-the-know, T2 factories were built from units that came from T1 factories. No in-place upgrading happened at all.

well as long as T1 is useful throughout the game that should not be a problem. having to reclaim older tech is bad design.

The Plan as we know it is for T1 to be General Purpose while T2 is for Specialization, with no power gap.

Check the Topic Index In particular the First Entry in the Global Game Mechanics Section.

Mike

Personally I think they should implement the BFME style resources build where by when you build a resource gathering building it gathers experience over time, and then its eligible for upgrade. For a cost.

Looking at Neutrino's comments in the Planetary Annihilation's Economy System thread started by Scathis you can find here:
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=44173&start=380

I wanted to add a few things to this thread.

It looks like Neutrino is not currently interested in a lot of the robust Zero-K economic features like turbo-mining due to a desire for Energy Collapse to be a mechanic of the planetary warfare we will be waging.

This would probably also affect my request for Mass Fabricators to only sip the extra energy in the economy too, because it's undermining the same principal goals of Energy Collapse game play.

If energy collapse is anything like Supcom it'll be awful. Having a damaged economy is one thing, but the instant death perma blackouts from Supcom were rage worthy.

Could you give a description of the details?

Just make it to late game and have your T3 generators blown up. It's pretty nasty.

Early game, if you had full storage you might have been able to survive for half a minute on battery power. Which was plenty of time to turn a few things off, and hurriedly build more power plants.

Every factory and every engineer came with energy storage. So as the game went on, the size of your battery backup grew. However, rates of energy consumption and production grew faster than storage did.

In the end, you'd burn through that storage in a fraction of a second - a far far too short a length of time to react to the loss of a power plant. That would pull down all your shields, radar, and stealth.

[EDIT:] Before this gets too off-topic, it's important to note that Sup1/FA's energy woes weren't because of extractors. It was everything else that pulled power. If PA plans on using energy to 'run things' then it may suffer the same fate (especially with a global economy).

As some people on the first page said, I too do not like the idea of having to upgrade your extractors manually. This can get very tedious and time-consuming when playing in large systems. I prefer the extractor getting better over time idea.

I don't know if you've heard it, but SupCom2's latest update added this idea.
You start of with mexes that give 0.6
They grow over time
After 18 minutes they are the highest level
They then give like 3/4 times the starting amount

The only problem was the low start production. The early game was really limited because of that.

It was an absolutely terrible idea in supcom 2 though because nothing was expensive enough to allow you to use all those resources from doubling the output.

And again things happen automagically without the player having to do anything, bad game plays itself.

Just leave extractors as they are.

:lol: You could always try building more factory's, like these games are designed around.

I don't like Supreme Commander's excecution of direct extractor upgrading. In theory, it streamlines the upgrading process, but you couldn't reliably order a load of extractors to upgrade, as they would all upgrade at once, creating a massive deficit. It was most efficient to remember to upgrade each extractor one at a time.

Assuming two tiers of extractors- I certainly hope for the ability to build mohos on top of basic extractors. Having to manually reclaim first was annoying as sh!t. Or at least, make catchment areas flexible enough that you don't have do build mohos directly on top of basic extractors, like in Spring.

Interesting post, you quickly identified the flaw of the system used in SC (different grow rate for energy produced/used and its storage).

But then you say that if PA also "uses energy to run things", it may suffer the same fate even though "using energy to run things" wasn't the inherent flaw of the system.

Wouldn't making it so that storage would grow as fast or even faster if necessary fix it then?



Personally I hated the mex upgrading in SC. First, it was badly balanced and a pain to do. Secondly all those extractors just looked too similar so I had no idea if it was upgraded or not at a glance.

But making metal production opaque and move part of it out of player control isn't something I want either. (Hm.. I've built this thing sometime ago... who knows how much it now produces and how valuable it is?)

Also as it has been said, it would make the most valuable mexes those safe inside your territory and those extractor you fight over less valuable since they hardly could improve up to the ones which don't get destroyed every few minutes.


Imo, just simplify the whole ugprade process. You can build a bigger t2 over an existing t1 mex. The t1 mex gets integrated into the new t2 (that's the lore reason) and thus produces metal while the new one is built.

Finished.

It still gives the player the decision when and how to build the expensive economy upgrades, it makes it easy to see which one has been upgraded (its a bigger building), its simple to order (2 clicks, one for what type of building and one on the spot where to build) and it prevents accidental stalling since you still have your normal ressource income during building and can even abandon it without penalty.

Indeed you're right; making energy storage sufficiently large would help greatly. Alternatively, one could just make energy consumption not grow very fast.

Regardless of whether the game includes storage as an independent structure, I think it would make sense to have economic buildings provide storage. Each mex gives you some metal storage, each power generating structure gives you some energy storage. It might also be a good idea for certain high power consumption units or structures to provide some energy storage. After that, it can be decided whether an independent storage structure is even necessary.

this

It also makes sense for constructors to have some storage. So who's going to get what?

The TA economy had a few slight energy problems, which could have been solved by giving all generators a single second of storage.