Extractors

The problem with storage built into production units is it makes actual storage units redundant. The hastle of storage units comes from that you need to build them so rarely that you forget to build them ever. If the need for storage units was ubiquitous that players are always mindful about it, it wouldn't be thought of as such a hastle. I certainly would like to see storage units get some love.

I like the idea of having constructor with storage. I would go further and have to storage relative to their energy consumption.
For example you could give every engineer enough storage to work for 30 sec.
That way you could tell that if all your energy generator are destroyed and your energy is full, that it will last exactly 30sec with every engineering working.
Making the system more predictable.

The problem is, that storage units are only useful if you screw up.

Failing to spend metal is a bad thing(tm). Building metal storage is like saying "I don't want to spend my metal anymore". Which is kind of stupid. If you have a surplus then the solution is obviously to build more bases, factories, and units. More storage won't fix that!

Energy storage is a bit different due to its greater volatility. Energy usage deals with spiked demands and ends up more difficult to predict (depending on who uses energy, of course). So while generators are obviously necessary, only storage can handle the peak demand of weapons, infrastructure and abilities. Building E tanks is like saying "How much emergency reserve do I need?", and bigger spikes mean that you'll want more reserve.

TA seemed to strike a good balance between metal and energy storage, and I hope it gets utilized again. The heavy resource had a substantial storage capacity, taking over a minute to deplete or refill from empty. It was very forgiving and easy to utilize properly even for new'ish players. Energy storage was fragile and short lived, only good for a dozen seconds of power or so. Min/maxing it was nearly impossible, and largely unnecessary as raw energy is cheap. Energy production was also decentralized, given to a vast majority of units so that a Supcom style blackout was nearly impossible.

I'd rather they cut storage units entirely and just give resource production structures storage.

that's way more minimalist and easy to understand without losing any strategic depth

Another dumb thing to say. Sometimes you don't have enough builders or there is a bit of a lull in the action while you're upgrading something. Having a buffer so you don't waste resources and can use them later in full force is a good thing.

Energy storage in particular as you say, is good for allowing you to overspend now and then without any ill effects of things shutting down

And putting storage in non-storage units is incredibly unintuitive.

Pretty much. In TA metal storage devices were only really useful for reclaiming wreckage that was bigger than you current storage limit, and this was only the case because wreckage reclaim did not fit the flow economy model.

It depends on the scale of course. At game start, if there's reclaimable rocks lying around, you will generally run an excess for quite a while (rocks near your base = metal in 'storage').

But when you have multiple bases, they should be using all your metal income, with spare BP for surges. There is no point waiting, might as well build your army NOW and use it to get more extractors. Or build a new base somewhere, rush that moon rocket/unit railgun/asteroid thruster, or failing all that, dump it into more builders to use it. Past mid-game, I expect TA-style economies to be essentially a bottomless pit for metal.

Hell if your not relying on radar, or shields you can more or less just stream all of your energy out too without worrys.

What's so dumb about it? The whole point of a streaming economy is that you get shortages from trying to spend too much. If you can't spend it, it's because of:
A) You didn't build enough factories. This is a fundamental player mistake that can not be fixed by the game.
B) You got attacked and lost a lot of stuff. Such is the price of failure.

The reclaim mechanic means that you're almost always going to be demanding more resources than your typical income. Reclaim will create surges in mass, which gets used up because the correct thing to do is use those resources. There is SOME use for metal storage, as a way of stashing up the spoils of victory. But it is not something that will be or can be used to fix player mistakes.

Not if you value the d-gun you won't. Keeping energy in storage is going to be important, but obviously only if energy is needed for the essential things.

Except that building the necessary power plants and build power to rawly intake every windfall represents a crushing expense which could have been allocated to fighting units to win you the game.

Even with flowing wreckage reclaim, you are still going to have those windfalls from after-battle wreckage fields which you can't predict will happen.

I can totally predict that wreckage fields will appear after battle.

But yes, there is SOME use for metal storage. A streaming economy only cares for how much TIME you want to store- be it minutes, seconds, or even less. TA has fairly large metal storage, each silo capable of lasting a minute or so at full production. A good graveyard could easily fill that up and take just as long to use again.

Beefy silos with big metal storage may end up working just fine for PA. It helps the economy scale into the late game, where big numbers get thrown around and it's not reasonable to be handling metal on a second by second basis.

You can't predict when and were the actual battles will break out. That was my point.

There is some use for storage - which is why it should be part of resource producing structures. Nobody ever sees a huge wreck field, begins building additional storage, and then reclaims it. Storage on PGen and MEX would simplify this all for sure.

I liked this idea. I mean, to make it make sense, what you can do, is show a buildup animation as the extractor starts up, up until it is at max production speed. Like, it starting to dig into fresh ground slowly, then as the ground is dug away you start seeing the machinery hauling the metal up getting faster and more cycles per minute, until it is a deep hole with a dense conga line of metal being hauled up quickly.

I am okay with this idea and others.

The t2 extractor thing is being over-thought. Reguardless of how it is implemented, upgrade or fresh structure, it simply needs to have a balanced extra-cost and extra-reward.

Costing initially more but producing more metal (thus paying for its cost in approximately 7-21 minutes of operation and afterwards profiting higher) is a high risk high reward scenario where you can profit if you defend it or lose if the enemy gets rid of it prematurely, and rewards the strength of defence of the land you have, rather than rewarding the volume of even poorly defended land.

It could also cost more but have a buff, like the powerplants in TA that would fold up to defend against damage when in danger. This would cost more to get the same metal gain rate, but would be ideal for high-risk areas, so it would be an investment paid to keep from losing an extractor in a dangerous location compared to not wasting that investment on an extractor in an already deep-territory well-guarded area and keeping it vanilla. The balance here would be making the extractor cost enough to make it only mildly cheaper and worthwhile than the full-force army of units and towers to defend it (whatever design says is the cost of a squad flexible enough to defend any type of enemy unit attack and/or a few towers).

I suppose it could lastly be the opposite. It could have an upgrade that doesn't cost anything, and increases metal income rate while decreasing structure max health. So it can only be upgraded if one is sure it won't even see so much as a .22 calibur handgun round hit it. This would reward quality of territory defence over volume of territory loosely held onto.

Just some ideas. The last one for instance, could work both ways. You could have the option to have a vanilla balanced metal extractor, a glass-fragile high-speed extractor, or a low-speed heavily-fortified extractor, and these buildings could be seperate or an upgrade from one another and could have same price or different price or a price of upgrade or just cost a short time worth of energy to upgrade or be absolutely free.

It would add to the strategy and be entertaining.

If you assume that reclaiming reduces the wreck's metal and adds to your stockpile continuously (aka. streaming reclaim like in BA and ZK), you can totally predict reclaim income. It's just the number of builders you have on the front lines.

Match with some amount in the back (which normally do base maintenance or constructing cheap light infrastructure that costs alot of "walking around time"), and your reclaim income can be around the same as the expenditure.

Alternatively, since reclaim is sporadic and not always around, you can mass reclaim and share to teammates.


In either case, you can and should stay on top of your reclaim income.

In BA constructors reclaim at like 50 metal per second so it's not the same as in Zero-K where constructors reclaim at like 5 metal per second.

On the topic of extractors in general, what about their health? I remember in TA extractors were very cheap but very low health, meaning they were easy to set up, easy to raid. In SupCom and SupCom2, extractors are more expensive but also have a lot more health. Anybody know which way PA intends to take?

Personally I feel I prefer the TA style better.

SupCom2 is in a field all on it's own, but SupCom1/FA wasn't too bad, the T1 and T2 Extractors only had about double the HP of a regular unit(on average) in it's own Tier, it's only T3 that was a little off, but it was mostly Dependant on the unit being compared, for example a UEF T3 Extractor has 8400hp, but a Titan has only 3400(HP and Shield) while the Percival has 9300hp.

Now because of the Power Gap between Supcom1/FA tiers it makes it odd when a small T1 raiding force comes up to a T2 Extractor(3000hp) when they were originally balanced to work against T1 Extractors(600hp), but as long as you keep things within the Tiers it works out pretty well.

But, for PA, I dunno, I think it's more important that they promote expanding, even if that means they need to be a bit tougher so that players are more at ease about leaving them along and somewhat undefended, we are dealing with spheres time around...

Mike

SupCom2 now level up their HP as they themselves level up in efficiency.

By the end of the process they end up with minor experimental levels of HP, but considering that this amount of HP isn't much to deal with TML's still kill it in seconds.

Hitpoint figures for Balanced Annihilation(I don't have figures for Total Annihilation) are 170 for the ARM metal extractor; 570 for the Flash; and 1530 for the Stumpy(the two ubiquitous battle tanks). Extractor health in Forged Alliance is an increase to the power of 6.7 and 18 respectively.