Mass conversion

In talking about supcom 2

I don't know if it's been mentioned in this thread yet, but if we have a localised economy, then fabs/makers won't be so potentially game-breaking.

How about you don't hate on me for asking about the game and not tell me if I should make threads or post threads. I am not worried about this anymore because productive people on this forum have convinced me that this will not be a problem. And unfortunately I won't be playing any forged alliance anytime soon as my computer is a Mac and is slow already.
And I have supcom 2 on xbox. (it's a joke compared to the pc version believe me I know)

Not hate. There's no shame in being a noob... we were all noobs once.

What makes him a noob. He asked a question, and accepted the opinions of others within the first couple of posts. That is better than 99% of everyone else on these forums.

Yeah, but that opens up a can of worms all its own.

A purely isolated world economy means that every world needs enough resources to do its own fighting. Old worlds get cluttered up with infinite junk simply to keep spending money, and frontier worlds have to suffer yet another slow buildup before any interesting fighting happens. If you want to invade an old world, the only advantage can come from overwhelming numbers, which is unlikely as the old world keeps filling up with defenders.

If you want those old planets to be strategically useful, they have to deliver their resources to the front. Otherwise there's no point to capturing a second world. No matter how those resources are delivered, the fab economy will always give a huge advantage. If it's in the form of units, then your supermap is cluttered with hundreds of units endlessly streaming across the cosmos. That's a lot of user bandwidth and UI clutter.

Linked resources have their own issues. They have the advantage of being very easy to redistribute, for strategic flanks and incredibly lethal fronts. They have a gameplay advantage of forcing tough decisions on where they're spent. However they are notoriously difficult to unravel, as every single fortress is only protecting a very small segment of the empire's total resources. There's no way to cause any single economy to shut down other than aiming straight for the heart, which does not exist due to the natural spread of metal resources. Fabs won't change this, because every world is a candidate for massive fab economies. Every battle has to be ground out to the bitter end.

There are good reasons to have linked economies, and good reasons to have independent economies. Mass fabs don't really play into it. Their purpose is to establish a late game economy, which differs from the early game economy by being much harder to build and defend. If they can't do this, then they really aren't needed in the game.

You could steal an idea from a turn based game that required you to have one specific building to hook all the planets in a solar system to the global resource levels. Basically whenever you take a planet you start with building some sort of uplink and only when its done does the planet (or asteroid) gain access to your global resource production.

That gives you a heart to strike at when it comes to economy without having to purge an entire planet.

And it could simply be the first building that pops down on a planet when you travel there so that there's no long, slow buildup.

Not true. An established world will solve the problem with redundancy, by simply building multiple facilities. Hostile forces get screwed because they can not bring an economy with their invasion, yet must somehow invest in a single point of failure.

No, unit limits won't cut it. "Limit XX unit" may have been possible in TotalA, but is not in the spirit of PA's predecessors. The only true unit limit is the unique commander you start with.

A softer solution is already available by making energy a local resource. It directly controls a planet's capabilities and provides a real point of failure, while metal remains unaffected as a galactic resource. As long as engies can seed the first generator, infrastructure is expensive but easy to set up.

Far reaching economic ideas are probably best suited for another thread. There's a 30+page thing around somewhere, that pretty much beats everything to death.

No clicking does not equal skill u just have completely missed the skill requirement in pgen spamming. Its all macro based such as deciding which tech paths to take in order to counter ur opponent and also making sure that u can counter any sort of rush that comes ur way (however some are impossible to counter). Furthermore controlling 70 engineers building things at once is hard (u would be impressed if u saw a pro pgen spammer covering the entire map of setons in less then 15 mins as well as surviving onslaughts of counters that are thrown at u)

Viable mass conversion is vital to intensive economy, when shorter defence line is traded off with higher inner base vulnerability. Since any defence player tries to keep defence line as short as possible to concentrate firepower, I consider mass fabrication/conversion a high importance feature. However, I don't know how to make it work without shields, since artillery and bomber spam is not going to be counterable, and massfab/pgen farm will be insanely hard to keep safe.

I honestly don't mind conversion, it opens way to new tactics, honestly they seemed fine to me, I don't know why they shouldn't be included.

It was usefull when you had always extra energy but needed metal.

IMO, the way Zero-K does it is more interesting. You can use energy to create more mass, but you still need mexes for that, and each mex has diminishing returns.
So a dedicated mass converter isn't needed, as the mex does the job, but if you wants to overdrive it you still need fragile powerfarms. And map control is still capital.

IIRC, if they did that, and you pecked at that stuff with just a bit of pressure, then it sets them into an ecomonic depression that gives you an easily winnable advantage.

For instance, they aren't getting a really great mass production going without energy. Messing with their energy in any way periodically means you are eating their metal. It is cheaper for you to eat their energy and thus metal, than it is for them to spend the cost to stop you.

That, and if you let them set such a scenario up, and then not do anything about them building these until they are already riding it to victory, then you messed up on a more fundamental level. I'd say non-agressive turtling. You gotta at least invade them occasionally or peck at them with a few shots. Can't camp one end of the map yourself, unless you plan on using conversion yourself.