Mass conversion

Please please Please tell me that converting your energy resources into your primary metal/mass resource will NOT be included in this game. This idea really put supreme commander 2 down. Dont get me wrong supreme commander 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, but u got a little tired of people who just rushed to get mass conversion and than spammed energy generators in one little part of the map.

The mass converters work very differently in supcom 2 compared to supcom 1 or TA, I recommend you give one of those games a try (or even balanced annihilation in the spring engine) to see how they work, it should address your concerns.

I tries to get NOTA to work today actually. Unfortunately I have a Mac and it just quits for no reason. One thing I'd did like In supcom 2 was the expense of mass extractors. Making them expensive and take a long time to pay off really made building one a risk on its own

In supcom1 mass fabs were expensive, reasonably large (you could only fit about 4 under a standard shield) and continuously produce rather small amounts of mass while consuming massive amounts of power. Eg: a T3 mass fab consumes 3500 energy a second, while only producing 12 mass a second.

good link: http://supcom.wikia.com/wiki/Mass_fabricator

12 mass per second is no small amount. How much does a t3 mass extractor cost?

Using the entire output of a fusion means that they are only ever used very late in huge games. You are always better off building more mexes or upgrading existing mexes rather than building mass fabs if you have a choice.

This is in FA. Vanilla supcom 1 messed that up, mass farms were the norm.

Of course, mass fabs were far from the worst problem with supcom 2...

On a pro level this was one of the hardest things to pull off (apart from in ffa's) and made the game a lot more interesting (including ffa's). Not only this but "pgen spamming/cancer" required vast amount of skill to pull off "well" and led to vast amounts of tactics but I guess its not everyone's cup of tea.

In supreme commander 2??? Are you saying that in supreme commander two it took skill to use mass cOnversion????

Admittedly it does take skill, because noone thought about being able to just turn them on and leave them on, instead you have to spam them every now and then.

Are you saying that it takes skill to not build a single mass extractor, spam energy stations and research stations, sit in a small area of the map not building any units except for experimentals and engineers, and occasionally select all your mass converters and convert energy??? Cuz thats what I'm talking about. And it takes a lot less skill than you'd think.

Exactly, they could have designed it so that not as many clicks are needed.

Taking even less skill?

How many times do you have to click on your mass fabs in supcom1? none, they just work. If they run out of power then they turn off temporarily and then turn on again. Simple. I don't have to click on my mexes to tell them to extract another chunk of mass. I don't have to click on my power generators to release a pulse of power.
It's a little more time to spend on things you should be spending it on. Like attacking, building units, building more buildings.

You know something has gone very wrong if one of the most basic economic structures (well, 3rd most basic in supcom2) has to be micromanaged.

I think you're arguing about something completely different than me

Metal makers started from TotalA, and found themselves in supcom2. In theory, their purpose was primarily to handle excess energy to give a bit of extra metal. In practice, players saw a never ending exponential economy.

In TotalA, fabs were a poor source of resources. The small version was nearly a complete waste to build, and the large version demanded expensive and explosive fusion plants. The game didn't have shields, so a metal maker economy was incredibly fragile against air raids and artillery. It was worth using, but it quickly turns your base into a gigantic bomb.

In SC:FA, fabs were kind of strange. On their own they were fairly useless, having a much worse payoff time than TotalA. With adjacency they became quite useful, even after FA nerfed them by over 75%. It was only viable to build mass fabs in a grid-like form, creating a gigantic base bomb that could chain react and ruin the player. Shields mitigated this hazard by absorbing artillery, enemy raids, and stifling the reaction. For the most part it was better to capture mass points on the field, so mass fabs only mattered in novice turtling games.

Makers were a hazard in both games. They encouraged high risk play by putting bombs in your base and sacrificing far more efficient field deposits. Smart mods took care of the energy management issues.

Supcom2 took all the hazards and downsides of mass conversion, and casually disregarded them. Generators stopped being a liability, and did not chain react as they did in older games. They were easy to build, easy to stack up, and there was no fear of having your energy stall at all. The only real restriction is how many you can build. Free money was a matter of clicking the converters and hitting the button every once in a while. Plus, if you didn't rush the topic then your strategy was in complete jeopardy. It was kind of dumb.

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There's no telling what the purpose of metal makers will be in PA. This really comes down to the design of the game's economic model(Not just where resources come from, but how much, how expensive, and when). There are places it can work very well. I have outlined in other posts that they can be very interesting as a way to replace a planet's dying economy without dominating as a resource. But that's for another thread.

I'm not sure if it's really possible to balance fab growth against expansion and war, especially if the economy is directly copied into PA. Metal fabs will always be a source of exponential economy, and will become even more amazing due to players having entire planets of real estate at their disposal. It's a dangerous recipe for fabs dominating the scene, and that alone may justify their not being in the game. At the very least, a very big change either to fabs or the game's economic model is going to be needed for the game to not turn into fab wars.

Also:

I seriously hope you guys don't do this. It's kind of embarrassing to hold an e-peen contest over such a... small thing.

Fair enough, back to my original point:

This is a non issue because the problems you describe are supcom2-specific and don't occur in other TA-style games/are a lot easier to balance in other TA-style games.

That's why I brought te topic up, I'm hoping they don't bring that problem from supcom 2. But they're mainly basing this game off of TA I'm sure it won't be a problem

Honestly I never really liked the Mass Fabricators in FA either. Yes it made your base a giant bomb, but you could still make giant unlimited resource arrays.

I know PA won't have shields, but you could still hide a mass fab array on a distant planet asteroid hidden out in the middle of nowhere.

Clicking does not equal skill

I know it doesn't equal skill . although I am quite skilled in clicking. The way he said it made me think he thought clicking was skill.

If you had a mass fab array it really wouldn't be had to penetrate it and deal massive damage. The other balancing factor of mass fabs in FA is that they are physically huge and take up tons of space. You cant possibly protect a sufficiently large base equally. Especially since one mass fab destroyed is a big hole punched in your defences.

Also, clicking is wasted effort, not skill.