I also feel like balance will become a topic for even greater debate once we can play on size 10 planets, hell maybe that is what will be in the next patch.
I am sure they can bring the amount of RAM needed to render a planet down by a lot. But a scale 10 planet probably can't be rendered by most PC's.
Thanks Knight, Bullet and Spazz. I like all of your thought out responses and appreciate them. I am all for metal storage as it gives you time to replenish some supply if you notice it draining. I usually build 4 metal storage (like a n00b lol) and 4 energy storage at the beginning. While it takes more energy, while I am building up the storage can build up in times of lower demand to fill the storage for then I need it. I guess (imo) I see having an economy in excess moves me away from ever having an issue with demand as I will never have a need for storage. When I am talking excess I mean +500-1000 metal, and +100k-200k energy. Its more than enough to build up armies fast, and concentrate on orbital quickly. I do agree though, this is not the best way to do it in the beginning where I'm usually about -30k for a long time but that's me being a n00b There are some awesome (and correct) examples using figures by all of you which do make a lot of sense and help me understand what you are trying to say about it. I guess for the first 10 - 20 mins it's important to have a good economy but after that, the more resource the better. Later in game I will not have to ever look at my resources as I will know they are always in excess. Hope makes sense. Steve
This +1. I have had this happen too many flipping times to count. In team games a LARGE amount of storage keeps everyone balanced and keeps people from killing everyone's constructions because they rushed a nuke or something like that.
Wow. This thread could have been lifted from an FA forum a few years back. EXACTLY the same debate and arguments being put forward, with the exception of adjacency. I'm with Zaphod on this, I was a pretty high end FA player and, trust me, in a streaming economy, in a competitive game, stored resources are wasted resources ESPECIALLY if you had to pay extra to store them! I personally think that each metal extractor should increase storage a little, 900 feels a bit arbitrary and some scaling would be good, but the idea of paying MONEY for it, money that could be spent on tanks...nah, sorry. Back in FA you could tell if somebody wasn't much good because their mass/metal waste after the game was higher than 3. (you always wasted 3 mass at the start regardless). And that's not 300 or 3000, that's 3. Don't get me wrong, I'm SOOO not there yet with PA, but in principle, that's it. Welcome to competitive play. P.S. The Teamplay factor is the only interesting or new point being made here. Dual commanders..hmm. I haven't played this mode yet so can't comment.
Let's just keep Forged Alliance out of this please. It's most certainly true that there are similarities between the two games. But just saying "I didn't waste any metal in FA" doesn't give any information about why you didn't waste any metal, and how this translates to Planetary Annihilation. What's even worse is that there's not even a link to that old thread that was discussing "exactly" the same debate and arguments. It is of little relevance when we can't even read it.
The problem stems from the resource design. Energy is a streaming resource & metal is a stored resource. By that I mean you pay the cost of the building in metal once and pay for it's usage in energy every second. Because energy is steaming, stored energy has value in the form of time. Metal on the other hand only gains it's value once it's spent, until then it sits vulnerable to attack in storage. I suggested this in the backers forums but decided to post the idea here as well. The idea is to give a small Pre-Production bonus to the metal bandwidth when you are building something that you have enough metal stored up to out right pay for. This would encourage players to keep a pool of metal in their store to increase build speed. The higher the cost of what they are trying to build, the more metal they need to have saved up in order to gain the bonus. A T1 vehicle engineer builds at a rate of 10 metal a sec. Say it was building something that cost 1000 metal and you had a stockpile of 1000+ metal the engineer would build it at a rate of 12 metal a sec or 120% metal bandwidth. Once your metal stockpiled dropped below 1000, the engineer would go back to it's normal rate. This bonus would only effect things that have a total cost less than the amount of metal you have stored up.
@ZaphodX I'm Ok, say your economy is perfect. +0 metal right now. Bam, I just nuked your metal extractors. Now you're at -74. You need to get those wreckages reclaimed and those advanced metal extractors rebuilt. But....after about 20 seconds your metal runs dry. Now you spend 2 minutes stalling metal as you struggle to get your metal income back up. You make tanks slower during this time -- the tanks you would have made would have won you the game, but you didn't, so you lost. Now, consider if you'd built some storage beforehand. You would have never gone rock bottom with metal. Your production wouldn't have been stalled. You'd have the storage to make use of the wreckages from the nuclear blast. And you'd have the metal to rebuild the extractors before you ran out of metal again. Now you're back on your feet, and though you ran a metal defecit, you had enough metal to never actually stall in metal. Not building metal storage is like not getting car insurance. Even if you're literally 100% perfect 100% of the time, what if the enemy does something you don't expect? What if your metal planet suddenly blows up? Thus, storage is VERY important. I would even go so far as to say that it should be an integral part of any true pro player's build. And going no-storage is a choice too -- a risk/reward choice. You run the risk of stalling metal when your plans go sour, but your reward is not having to invest in the economy to build the storage buildings.
Problem 1, If they had a perfect +0 metal economy & metal storage, then they wouldn't have any metal stored up. Problem 2, the metal that would have been stored up has all ready been spent to build, lets say tanks. The player you just nuked would have all ready build said tanks and sent them out in an attempt to prevent you from nuking them.
I'm in agreeance, It would be nice if each extractor added a bit to the available storage. That way, your "basic" storage would scale with the number of extractors you have. I feel that a single metal storage early game is nice when things are slow and the economy fluctuates a bit. By the time your mid game, you should pretty much be consuming at least 110 - 120% of your metal production. However, there can be a case made in the following scenario. You're producing tanks from three different area's with 5-8 factories a piece. Your metal usage is 120% of your production. All of a sudden, you're hit with an attack you didn't see coming. You're able to stop the attack, but you lose 8 of your factories and the engineers that were in the area. The starting 900 storage buffers begin to fill as your usage is now 80% of your production. If you have a modest 300 metal/tick and 20% is unused, it will take 15 seconds to fill that 900 metal buffer. You've sent engineers in the direction of the attack to rebuild, but they're 30 seconds away. What's better, building a metal storage for 150, or wasting 900 for the 15 seconds your storage is full and the engineers are traveling? What if you're in the process of microing a counter attack that will do a lot of damage, but ultimately fail and can't address the rebuilding process within that 15 second window?
TBH, i think every game needs a noobtube, and if the metal storage is PA's noobtube, so be it. I think it's a great feature for new players, a good "plug the hole" for intermediate players and a good marker to show that you grasp the economy (when you don't need any).
Problem 1- They had full metal. If it makes you feel better, it's +1. Point is they have perfect metal economy. Don't nitpick like that. Problem 2- I would argue that the tank production gained from not building storage is trivial enough that it wouldn't matter. This is up for debate though -- however, it only takes one bot fabricator queued up mid-game with metal storage to save the player that got nuked. I don't think that not having one bot fabricator building storage 30 minutes into a game is enough to make that much of a difference compared to that which was lost by the nuked player being at -74 metal and stalling for two minutes.
More than that, it's an active choice. No one will ever have things go exactly as planned, and some pro players will find themselves investing in insurance even when they are confident in their econ.
The point I was making was that metal has no value until it's spent unlike energy. If someone store up metal than that is unused offensive potential. It's not so much about the cost of storage, but about how much metal is setting in storage unspent. With a full metal store, it cost's you're offense 450 for the storage building & 1500 to fill it. That is 8 tanks per full storage you could have built, sooner than waiting to be nuked, & sent them out to harass and slowdown your opponent.
Back to topic. I like the ideas where storage influences something, like build time, reclaim or what have you. But i just wanted to share a story from TA with you young'ns. Back in m day we used the metal storage in the Big Bertha (long range artillery cannon) duels that were rampant in TA. There were walls in the game, a low and a high one, but the high one was too low to protect against incoming shells and the metal storage was tall and bulky enough to do the trick. It got blown up in seconds but we'd mostly do nanoshielding anyway, with cons standing by so we could click out new ones. And other cons to sheild the cons. and... Ah the carnage
The way to get round this is to do to metal, like they did to energy, make it so it's very inefficient to go in the red, a penalty if you will. That would change alot of things, and make metal storage worth having. Of course alot of players will whine about that, but it would be a balancing act.
It would be possible to pull out a double nuke with single nuke launcher if the metal storage was cheaper or could store more metal. Reduce the cost of metal storage or increase the storage capacity at least twice to make it actually cheaper than building second silo. You would however need the build power to assist the nuke launcher to launch the second nuke before the enemy can repair his commander. I really can't think of any other use of the metal storage.
You really don't want a silo with that much capacity. Metal is the limited resource meant to throttle the speed at which things can be produced. Increasing the limit to an amount at which you can produce a nuke would very easily make a silo something that can be used to negate all the wasted metal during a game. In other words, it discourages players to correct their own mistakes and lowers the emphasis on skillful economy management.
I get it, skilled players don't need any storage buildings because of their perfect economy management. But we can't honestly be suggesting that we only cater to the gameplay experience of the best players right? That is a black hole from which community's like LOL are spawned.....dark places where everyone better then you has no life, and anyone worse is a noob....*shudder*
You misinterpreted what I wrote. Making a metal storage purely based on capacity is going to be of very limited use to the best players, while it encourages casual players to waste metal. It isn't about trying to cater to casual players or competitive players. It's about balancing a metal storage in such a way that it's a clear and interesting choice to make for everyone. I often wonder "Shall I build a metal deposit?" and currently while I feel it has some limited uses, it's often more like "Meh I'll build a dozen because I'm lazy and I don't want to manage my economy so intensively" when I reach the late game. But I've never really had the feeling that building a metal deposit early on would really help me.
