Let's Talk About Energy

I think this particular change is far too small to address the current energy balance issue.

It is however, worth the attempt.

Making it so that factories consume 600 energy, and power plants generate 675 energy (per second)... is just a tiny tiny difference, so actually i have to disagree. Making fabbers consume 50% less energy than they do right now, that'd be a big change. Or making power gens generate 50%, maybe even 100% more than they do right now.

T2 pgens give 5000 energy/s, so a t1 pgen generating about a thousand isn't that big a change, arguably.

Plus your proposed change, @igncom1, only addresses the power relationship for factories. What about fabbers?

Iteration has power.

Making big changes is what Uber does, and is what most of their balance is based on, a balance that most people dislike.

And besides, I think fabbers are fine, I like rounded numbers anyway, so either keep them as they are, or have them only drain as much as a single powerplant, 600 or your proposed 1000.

I agree, I'm all about iteration! That is how I write my code anyway.

And I agree that changes need to be small and frequent (to balance), instead of large and infrequent, which seems to be what we have had so far. But at least we can mod balance changes.

I really do think fabbers could stand to use less power because at the moment you can't expand quickly. More than three fabbers at the start of the game and you power stalls. If i build three fabbers at the start of the game now, one of them does nothing but build pgens.

Im not in the competitive circuit so, yeah.

Expanding is hard, agreeably. And power generation is a hard cap early game, with late game power being full on or full off in most cases.

*shrugs*

Cheaper power might be nice, but I do love having to build up some real infrastructure, giving players a whole base to defend rather then a few pylons.

Personally, make power easier to get, but make powerplants larger, not taller but wider so they take up more room and so require space to build a lot of them.

One of the things that see wrong is three t1 fabbers cost the energy of two t1 pgens.

At t2 we see this almost reversed with one t2 pgens power two t2 fabbers, and we see how quick a t2 economy explodes.

Edit: *ahem* Missing most the content here, try that again

I reckon we should double t1 pgens. This would allow for significantly earlier switches into different build strategies, such as a heavier air game and better early air and ground defences

Yeah, doubling t1 p-gens output is probably a good thing. Maybe 50%. But it seems awfully low right now relative to t1 fabber consumption.

Double t1 p-gen output or half t1 fabber consumption?

Or some mixture of the two.

half t1 fabber consumption. That only buffs expansion. Double energy production would also buff unit productions

If you half the t1 fabber energy consumption it ends up more efficient than the factories and you end up with the single factory assisted by a swarm of fabs situation. In order to keep factories as the clearly preferable alternative to assisting you pretty much have to fiddle with both, you can't get away with only making the t1 fabber more efficient.

I agree on that, my longer idea is here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/expansion-is-dead.65117/page-2#post-1018404

Sounds good, except it would make the jump to t2 even steeper.

I've not though about t1 -> t2 a lot, dunno how it works right now. .... Actually you just build dox I think, those are t1.
I'd hope that once players have most of the map they can tech up. If not the prices of t2 would need to be altered, but I'd say first fix the t1 stage to be about more than "1 engineer, 1 pgen, dox, dox, dox, end"

Not really - the reduced energy costs would mean that you'd have to spend less to get the same amount of active T1 fabber buildpower working on a T2 factory (due to needing about 2/3 of the energy plants to support that buildpower).

All in all, I definitely like Colin's idea.

Where have you been the last month?!
Dox have been fixed long ago and a just playing perfectly like they should right now!