They encourage tedious micro. You need to revisit all the spots you've already built on and build on them again to stay competitive. They discourage expansion. Why expand when you can instead spend the resources in your existing safe territory? I always hated the moment in TA and the SUPCOM series where you stopped expanding and instead started solidifying. The expansive nature of bases, which allows for multi-front battles and raiding, are what make this kind of RTS great. Allowing people to simply invest in safe technologies, be it converters or upgrades to existing resource points, takes away from that. A player should be pushed to expand, always keep expanding. This is what will help drive the conflict and encourage people to push on to other planets.
Doesn't matter, there are only two scenarios: 1. They're good enough that you will want them in your safe zones, leading to tedious upgrade. 2. They're not good enough that you will want them in your safe zones, in which case why are they in the game? But it allows you to snowball in relative safety. Your core economy is not only in the safest places, but it's spread out in a way tier 2 energy probably isn't.
I would rather adv. mexs and gens to have some sort of tactical liability so that using them would be a risk that doesn't exist with the basic versions. maybe have the adv. mexs decay the metal points as they use them down to a minimum amount, this way you wouldn't want to use basic extractors in your base but out in expansions to give immediate, quick metal that could potentially deny metal from your opponents if they over-run that area? And please please please make advanced pgens explode and damage nearby structures significantly.
Omg another thread on this!? Just wait for more fine tuning...... total output may be changed and metal near spawn will probably change to....... otherwise search the thousand posts on t2 metal and people's feelings
I was thinking the same thing. Now the system in TA where in order to place an Advanced Extractor required you to reclaim your basic extractor even before you could queue up the Advanced Extractor if I recall correctly. That's micro intensive. Mike
I agree, but wouldn't it be reasonable to reduce the actions required to upgrade by making an "upgrade mex" area command? It would be like the shift+drag feature of other buildings. This could work for basic mexes too!
+1 I also think that advanced mexes and the fact that they are so much better than basic mexes are necessary. Without them expanding is the only way to boost your eco, which is bad for a player that starts at a metal disadvantage. Assuming nobody makes a mistake the player that has more mexes close to his starting position would always win the expansion race, have more metal to spend and therefore ultimately win the game. Advanced mexes allow a player with less map control to boost his eco, to stay in the game longer. Due to them the game is not just a rush for metal spots. In addition, loosing a basic mex becomes less crucial if you have multiple well guarded advanced mexes, the relative hit your eco takes is not that severe. Which is great cos it's way harder to protect your eco in PA than it is in SupCom FAF or even TA. It's not just due to the lack of defensive structures like shields and anti missiles, it's also because we now play on a sphere and therefor don't have the same overview as we have on a flat map. Reaction times are longer and unless you are constantly rotating the planet around chances are that you won't notice some attacks in time even if you have perfect radar coverage. I'm totally fine with how mexes currently work, they shouldn't change at all.
Why have it at all then? Just suck it up and go with an upgrade system. It's busy work, that's the problem. There's no interesting decisions to be made there. Micro is not a boolean. That player will either be dead already, or have equalised things by the point advanced MEX exist. Not to mention that starting position balancing is due to be worked on. And why would the guy with more metal be less likely to build the advanced MEX? Surely it would put this low metal player at an even bigger disadvantage because the high metal player has more spots they can upgrade, further increasing their lead. Energy to metal converters allow a player with little map control to keep up, advanced MEX do not. Incidentally, this is not me saying we should have converters, God no.
Wait, what? Just because I don't tend to think of that as micro doesn't mean it doesn't serve a purpose - you still need to make the decision to allocate fabbers to go build up those spots further. How does that suddenly become "Well f it, just put in an upgrade system", which.. I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure has been stated repeatedly something we don't want. How does a unit that builds on an existing unit (if it is there) == upgrade system? I'm not being facetious. If I'm missing something, please detail it out. By your definition (needing to build something appears to be busy work), then everything in the game is just busy work. Why not just allow you to spawn whatever units as quickly as you want and whoever uses em best wins? Yes, I took it to ludicrous speed, but that's kind of how that response comes across.
Just because it's not 'micro' doesn't mean it's not tedious. And Garat, it is an upgrade. T2 Mexes are straight up better than T1 Mexes in every conceivable way, including getting a health boost over the same cost in T1 Mexes; it's x4 the cost sure, but it also has x4 the output, takes up x4 less space and allows you to gain x4 the economic power within a given area, Oh... and it's x5 as tough too. That fits most people's definition of an upgrade. The fact that you can build it over a pre-existing T1 structure is just icing on the upgrade cake.
I admit that micro was a poor choice of word. The reason those other elements are not busy work is because they involve thought and planning. Which direction do I expand in? Do I scout ahead or go straight for the MEX cluster? Do I place a turret or go for rapid expansion? The tier 2 MEX doesn't really have that. More metal means more stuff, and more stuff means win. You have already secured and defended locations so there's little thought in placement, you start at the centre and work your way outwards. That's the issue for me, it feels like an obligatory task rather than something involving any thought on my part. It doesn't feel like the advanced MEX adds anything to the game, it just lets me pump out more units without expanding the field of battle, which I consider a negative. I'd much prefer that expansion drive increased unit production and the units be balanced around there only existing a single MEX type.
Most of your actions in PA are obligatory and doesn't require any thought on your part : Building mexes, building energy, building tanks, .... Upgrading to T2 is not one of them : it's not obligatory (you can expand more, even on a different planet), and it requires thoughts : is it the right time for doing it? Can you spend that much mass into the upgrade now? Can you hold your ground with potentially less tanks (cost of the upgrade)? Isn't a better idea to expand more temporary, and spend that extra mass on the upgrade? Or expand less but defend better without doing that upgrade? You don't seem to see the complexity of that kind of decision, but it's there (or potentially there, the balance of PA isn't right enough to judge that yet).
I already explained the difference. We're not talking about upgrading to tier 2. The advanced MEX is not the beginning and end of tier 2.
I think the current numbers of adv mex is the real problem here. If they instead costed x5 of a normal mex but only produced around x2 the mass, then you'd be better off expanding to other metal spots. When expanding no longer is an option, then you can start thinking about sinking mass in to adv mex. I don't think expanding should be the only way of boosting your eco, but I do agree that it should be encouraged. We are supposed to fight across several planets after all. For example, I'm still having troouble imagining what would make me want to build an energy-producing gas-giant sattelite, because when I get to that stage I could probably just mass up on pgens, no? I may have missed a lot of discussion on that subject though.
Instead of starting up these balance threads... I am much more interested in the rest of the unit roster Uber has planned. There's no point in talking this subject to death until we know what else Uber has in store for us. I would be happier to see even incomplete models, but playable units. At least we could begin to help balance the release roster of the game. Until then, we're just hamsters spinning in our wheels without actually going anywhere.
