There comes a point at which having 1-2 metal storages is good. You may have your metal stored at zero 95% of the time, but when several big projects stall for a moment(like many engineers building something finish it and start moving to the next project) you will get temporary spikes. During these spikes, you can lose metal. You can obviously avoid it by going more into the red with your econ, but this will slow down everything you build and is thus unoptimal. Not to mention you need to overinvest into engineers to do that. A metal storage allows you to stay closer to the border, invest less into excess engineers and avoid wasting metal while your engineers transfer from one project to another. Also, metal storages will become more important once you have more stuff to reclaim. At this point reclaim doesn't yet play that huge of a role. That said, the building doesn't really become effective for quite a while, it's more for the lategame.
It does not slow things down, it just makes it so that how quickly something builds depends on the build power building it. There is nothing negative about being negative in metal. Also, im not sure whether i posted it in here (pretty sure i did), but i stated that the current direction with how uber are going with reclaim. If they dont prevent direct fire weapons from hitting wreckage, then reclaim will act more as a blockage mechanic than an actual reclaim mechanic.
It does not change the fact that you will have to heavily overspend on engineers to be constantly in such metal deficit that you literally never spike up. This delays your other stuff like teching and getting an army out. All in all it has quite some drawbacks. Making a metal storage or two is much cheaper. And we'll see about reclaim. Have there been any Uber employee posts where they state they want to make reclaim irrelevant? If that has not been so then there's quite a chance that metal storages will become very very useful.
That was actually the way it was in TA, salvage blocked weapons fire. Was a pretty nifty thing actually, as you chocked points and they couldn't get through.
I have nothing against this way of using wreckage. It just throws other things into the fire, such as metal storage and reclamation. Reclaiming is literally on the opposite direction to TA in this regard. I think i would prefer wreckage to work like it did in supcom, but im not all that bothered with which they decide. The only things that matter to me are the implications of them doing either.
The problem is there are 3 states of metal. Metal that is wasted, metal that is stored, and metal that is spent. Wasted metal helps you in no way & costs you the time & resources it took to get it. Stored metal hold potential value at the cost of being vulnerable to attack, but has no current value. Spent metal has the value of what you spent it on. This causes the problem of Wasted < Stored < Spent (No value < Potential Value < Real Value). What we need is Wasted < Stored = Spent. The hard part is figuring out a way of giving value to stored metal without breaking gameplay.
I actually disagree with you a bit here. Spent metal is not necessarily better than stored metal. Just because you spent your metal on AA bots does not mean you are better off in a situation UNLESS the enemy has only air. Storing metal transitions the use of metal to relying on time rather than only metal. Storing up metal to react to something that you haven't seen or scouted is better than just guessing and building something (unless you get lucky, of course) given that you have the capability to spend that metal quickly on proper things once you do know what you need. Also, I think that with the addition of interplanetary transports that can carry many units (ie fabbers) to a new planet would necessitated large amounts of stored metal and energy to build up a base as quickly as possible on said new planet. I also don't see why metal storage needs to be changed.
Any decent player will scout his enemy and respond accordingly. If the player is good enough to not waste any metal, then I'm absolutely certain that player will be able to build the correct response as well. If you need to respond to something you haven't seen or scouted, chances are that it doesn't really matter how much metal you've got stored. You will take losses anyways. Wouldn't a better response be to just build a lot of avengers instead of trying to build a new base quickly? One orbital laser is enough to ruin that plan to expand quickly.
Again with the "the player should be skilled enough to avoid this". Great. This player doesn't need metal storage. So this player doesn't need to use it. Problem = solved. Also, there are plenty of situations where you DON'T always know what the enemy is doing; no matter how 'good' you are, the enemy can do something that you don't see. That should only be the case where there is a large skill gap between the players. Equal footing should mean that each player can avoid detection or else the information warfare part of the game is poorly designed. Yes, well there is a difference between losing everything from spending your metal on useless things vs some things from having a slightly delayed response. I have used this exact thing personally to avoid a loss because I was not "skilled" enough to scout out every one of my enemies while being right in the middle of all 3 of them in a 4 player free for all. One of them went straight bombers and rushed my com. Since I had a ton of metal stored up, I was able to pump out enough AA as soon as I saw what was going on and ended up surviving. Note that I was also dealing with my other 2 friendly neighbors and preparing a push when this happened, so I had plenty of "spent metal" which you skilled players seem to think is completely better than stored metal. Why would you try to argue this with a completely arbitrary situation? Sometimes people want to go to new planets and quickly build a base for many reasons. Dropping on a planet and competing for it with an enemy? Making a secret base on a planet that is already mostly occupied? Metal storage would help with this. Please keep your "skilled players don't need this" attitude out because it is irrelevant. EDIT: some clarifications and grammar corrections.
People always get so worked up when there's any mention of skill level. That wasn't the point. The point is that firstly, metal storage should have a function that makes it viable to build no matter what skill level you have. Secondly even if you wanted to prepare on the unexpected, mass storages don't offer nearly enough storage to compensate for when you actually start wasting tons of metal, which is the mid and late game. You don't need to be skilled to scout, just build a few scouts and send them out on waypoints throughout the entire planet. FFA's are always like that, you always feel like you're in the middle of everyone, that however doesn't diminish the importance of scouting one bit, it can litterally cost you the game if you don't. It's more a matter of remembering to do it rather than having to learn an extensive bit of knowledge and practice or A.K.A skills in order to do it consistently. That's why I used the word "decent" and not "skilled", an inexperienced player with the proper attitude to learn and who can concentrate on the task can still be a very decent player. I'm not entirely certain how you can even call this arbitrary when it's actually essential. If you want to settle on a planet, you need to be able to make sure that you don't spend a ton of metal on a base that ends up getting destroyed by something like Orbital lasers. You may want to quickly build a new base, but it's all for nothing if an orbital laser starts shooting down on key buildings in your base, or even worse your commander if you don't watch out. Especially now, with the umbrella not yet functioning like it should, avengers are the only way to get some protection from orbital lasers. Now how does that fit into the whole picture of metal storages you may ask? The reality is this, when you're at the stage at which you can hold orbital dominance as well as settling on new planets. You either have metal and energy to spare in such high numbers that it's unlikely that you will even need storages. Or you're most likely stalling so bad that those storages will be drained anyways, because obviously they don't store nearly enough to play with a running economy at that point. Now let's say you go crazy and build dozens and dozens of storages, the area control you need for that is enormous, so you'd need to have captured the entire planet already, or the enemy will most likely raid it. But at the point where you've captured an entire planet, then I can pretty much guarantee you that your economy will be at the point where you wouldn't need those storages to begin with. So as a closure I'd like to say that this doesn't mean I think the metal capacity should be buffed too much. But we should atleast agree that metal storages right aren't all that functional. Many of the people here simply want the structure to be more functional, you wouldn't mind it either if it were I think.
I am not getting worked up, just pointing out that it has no place to be a sole justification for changes. I will agree with you that you need a larger number of storage buildings as the game progresses, but that should be expected, no? I understand this, and am not suggesting anything differently. I was simply arguing that saying "you should have scouted it in the first place" is not a valid response against someone saying "metal allows for more efficient response". I know how to scout, and I know that scouting is very important for anyone above the most basic level players. So why are you arguing with me about this? I never said differently... This is exactly why I said it was arbitrary. Of course avengers are the best defense against orbital lasers... but why mention that? When did I say anything about orbital lasers? I said quickly make a base on a new planet. What part of that asked for a response about why avengers are better than mass storage in that situation? How do avengers make the base go up quicker? I just don't understand what the point of that retort was. Of course you would send avengers with your transport into a planet that the enemy already controls (or maybe doesn't yet) but how was that relevant to the situation I described? Yes, I agree with you here and you are correct in saying that I wouldn't have a problem with changing capacity. However, I was never arguing against that in the first place. Most of my arguments were pointed at proving that metal storage DOES have a use...
Ideally, no. I try to keep it around 90% when I actually build up a large storage (this is only in some situations, of course).
Here's an idea. When your metal storage maxes out, your Mexes stop extracting. Give them a "warmup" time before they'll start again and suddenly having some metal storage might, occasionally, be a good thing. Alternatively I am in favor of storage either incrementally increasing production of all metal extractors, or giving a boost to those near it. Option 2 is out because Uber have already said that adjacency bonus is not going to feature and that is fine. Option 1 is interesting because it gives you a boost in metal income as well as extra storage and, because it gives you a boost, it becomes a very lucrative target for raids/bombers/bots/TMLs/Slaves from Crusader. Apply a simple law of diminishing returns to the bonus and, hey presto, useful metal storage.
This is an incredibly bad suggestion. Punishing people by stalling their economy as soon as they have too much? No thank you.
So you fill up your storage, metal extractors stop extracting. The metal used to sustain a running economy is immediately drained from the storages, and then there's a "warm-up" time to get them started up again. How is that not stalling? The thing about combo-storage and emergency missile defence pods? I don't really understand the thought process behind that. Both ideas basically take an existing building, and add a metal storage capacity to it. It doesn't present anything new.
You're over exaggerating. The metal wouldn't drain "immediately" and you know that. But here is another idea: What if we dump metal storage and have Mass Capacitors? They work just like metal storage except that they are a much smaller capacity. Couple these with a smaller initial capacity so that you need to build these in order to operate without wasting metal all the time. Edit: It seems like metal storage is indeed useless since most of these suggestions are referring to something like "Metal storage + some other function" where the other function has nothing to do with storage itself.
I'm afraid I'm not a fan of either of these options. The former doesn't really change anything (though i think energy storage is possibly more useful, as flatlining on energy is FAR more problematic than flatlining on metal.), effectively gettting rid of metal storage as a building. As for the second, that kinda falls in to the category of "units doing weird and very specific s**t." Both suggestions put the storage element in to a secondary position and give the building a new, completely different role. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Obviously I'm in favor of my own (second) suggestion. Metal storage causes a small increase in global Mex output, with diminishing returns, as well as storing. So, if you hit his storage, he loses storage AND some (possibly quite a lot) of income. It makes the building useful, keeps it in its economic role and makes it a target, to encourage aggressive gameplay. All good, I think. If you made the incremental increase reasonably small than people would be encouraged to build them only after a fair bit of normal expansion (because it wouldn't be worth it until then)
