Let's Talk About Energy

Energy is one of Planetary Annihilation's greatest problems. There are many reasons for this, among them the cost of pgens, the inefficiency of fabbers, and how it is consumed.

First of all:
A factory uses 675 energy per second and a pgen produces 600 energy per second. This means that factories cost 40% or so more than what it says on the tin. PGen's high cost and low production means that expansion is curbed due to lack of energy to use it and results in the current turtle in your base while building deathballs of dox meta that's so boring to play. For fabbers the situation is even worse. Each fabber uses the energy of about two pgens, making fabbers total cost be roughly 300% more than what it says they are. This is another contributor to the current meta as your fabbers' insanely high energy usage means that the long term benefits of more metal are offset by the short term cons of insufficient energy to power your factories. Coupled with the rampancy of raiding dox that render your expansion useless this results in a lack of expansion. If fabbers were made a bit more efficient (800 might be enough to do the trick even) then expansion would at least be a bit more viable.

Another problem though is the energy system itself. If you're low of metal then you use less metal, making it easier for the problem to be corrected. In energy, however, the more you try to fix your deficit by building more pgens the greater the deficit and the slower the pgens build. If energy usage was lowered when energy was low this would be less of a problem. This is also a significant part of why reclaim was never viable.
I think I explained the energy situation pretty succinctly back in November:

If these problems are fixed then the meta will be more about expanding than it is at present, although fixing the energy system alone cannot fix all of the problem; undoing the tank buffs of way back when and nerfing dox speed to 15 at the max are required to cull all symptoms of the issue.

Round the numbers of power generation, none of this 75 extra business, then see where we at.

Id rather not we make 50 changes all at once, as that always has unintended consequences.

What would the effect on the meta be if the rations were flipped? So that a factory needed about two power plants but a fabricator could make do with one.

Then making multiple factories would be useless, which is bad.

Your right. I didn't think about that. You'd end up with a pile of fabricators assisting a single factory, and that's boring. So the factories need an efficiency advantage. How big does the advantage need to be? With the big advantage factories have now it makes it so much more advantageous to build factories over fabricators leading to all these single fabricator builds.

It's worth noting that there are a variety of methods for energy generation; solar sats which can be mass-produced from orbital factories, gas giant collectors, and the massive boost of T2 pgens. While none of these address the basic math problem of T1 power and T1 factories, it might explain why it hasn't gotten much attention: a percieved set of existing solutions.

It is worth asking, however, if the game actually does benefit from this curb to expansion... once dox are nerfed.

I think fabbers could certainly stand to use less energy. I'm really not sure what the best solution is, but there is definitely an issue, as discussed in this thread 'https://forums.uberent.com/threads/expansion-is-dead.65117/' - expansion is dead, fabbers use so much energy that expansion is very difficult early game.

The 'dox rush meta' has been discussed elsewhere in many places and imho, definitely needs to be addressed, along with the timing viability of t2, as discussed here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/t2-timing-viability.64447/ - I really miss using T2 in small 1v1 games.

Anyway, yes, energy is a big part of the game and the balance of it has a large effect, so whilst I don't fully understand @stuart98's entire post, I think I get what he is driving at. Arguably t1 energy is too weak in contrast to t2, and t2 is expensive to get to so you're stuck with weak t1 for a long time. Expansion is hard due to the sudden increased energy consumption of extra fabbers.

I'm really hoping for balance to be addressed in a big way. I've been playing the game a lot recently and it definitely feels like something needs to be done.

I don't believe the game benefits at all - to me it feels like the game's scope is so potentially large, but due to the current balance of the game, you barely get to scrape the surface of it cos you're forced to churn dox out and stay with t1.

The problem with having fabbers use less power, is that crappy fabbers take ages to do anything.

Instead, make fabbers slightly more expensive, but make their metal efficiency better, along with giving them more HP.

So a new fabber is like 2-3 old ones, but with the same energy draw.

I wouldn't mind flipping it around honestly. Factories consume 600 power, pgens produce 675. That way, that extra lee-way is in the right place. You are rewarded a bit of surplus per extra pgen. That itself would reduce how many you need to a reasonable number.

I just wouldn't mess with fabbers because some fabbers consume just enough, having a minimum of 2 fabbers worth of use per fabber means every fabber overconsumes even though they do build more desireably.

Fabber energy consumption hasn't changed in a long time (ever?)

The cause for this meta was raiding is so much more powerful and harder to defend against.

Traditionally rushing does counter booming (Eco and tech booming, not boom bots).

And then early game turtling would counter rush.

Leaving booming to counter early game turtles.


But yeah, early game turtles cant even with the current state of turrets, leaving people to rush or be rushed to survive.

you mean more?

Anyway I fully agree. The current energy/metal balance makes metal rather unimportant and makes expansion and even economic growth a very hard thing to do. If I could I'd just reduce the energy usage of fabbers by 50% and maybe add in a hidden factor like FA had to reduce general support efficiency to prevent the "a thousand engineers around a factory" problem.
FA worked fine that way. WYSIWYG my ***, the attempts to make PA's economy "easier" ended up making it not only harder to balance out but screwed over a lot of expansion play.

WYSIWYG technically is a fan creation.

I'd take TA / FA's construction units / factories with build power that is not directly tied to metal usage rate any day of the week.

Edit (I know this is slightly off topic)

The whole reason for what PA did was to make it easier to keep track of the eco, but with hundreds of fabbers and factories over multiple planets it still usually takes me a while to figure out what is eating my eco. This is compounded by team play because even with a team of friends using voice (I have no idea how random people play shared armies together), it's hard to keep track of everyone's builders and factories. I would much rather have a resource usage heat map overlay that would show areas of high and low resource usage to track down what is eating my eco.

You mean diminishing returns regarding fabbers assisting a factory? I've been meaning to check the math behind fabbers assisting factories for a while now.

*Looks at title*
Power gens suck...so what? i miss the solar arrays where 1 would fix all power problems

I support this as a way to encourage expansion.

But - maybe it'll be easier to make them cheaper, I dunno. I've been experimenting with commander storage and regen for past 48 hours. Maybe I'll be able to come up with something more concrete.

No a fixed factor. "Fabbers only support with 50% of their normal build speed in general" Low enough to make "more factories" the better thing to have.

I think this idea can be tried first, since it introduces less change, and with that, a reduced chance for unintended side effects, if it doesn't fix the problem try a little more tweeking.