Go ahead, build a base upto the point where you can support orbital and have a few dozen factories producing. Then instantly delete all of your metal extractors. Let's see how long you last without those. Because that's what would happen. It's an artificial way of forcing metal storages on you without it having any advantage to gameplay whatsoever. So you're saying that instead of metal capacitors being a choice, you want them to be an obligatory building in the early game(slowing down the early game even more)? Then when you finally get to the mid game, the capacitors will be entirely invalidated. I really don't see how this fixes anything.
Well, It should be balanced so that you don't need it early game but also be useful when you do get to building them. Part of that is a lower cost due to the lower capacity.
A lower cost coupled with a lower capacity just makes it so that for example: instead of building 1 building for 400 metal, you end up building 4 buildings for 100 metal. It just increases the amount of clicking you need to do. The important part is how you want to make it useful without making it obligatory.
Worth a shot I suppose, not everything can be made new when its been done already. But to be honest I don't think there IS a way of making the metal storage better without introducing something that puts it into a secondary position because......well if people did want it in the primary position the current metal storage would be fine as it is.
Being in a deficit of metal is bad. Being in a surplus is much worse. Obviously it's easier to not waste mass by staying in a deficit. If you are just building attacking units, deficit is ok but chances are you are building Eco/expanding. Everything builds slower. You may think you are not wasting metal but you are more than likely wasting much more than everyone else. As the seconds longer it takes for the metal extractor to get built are multiplied 7 or 28 respectively. Same applies to energy.
for me personally, metal storage works like this: you use your positive income when it needs to be built. you dip into the reserves if it needs to be built quicker. you make you reserves bigger for that special time when it needs to be built NOW. what i mean by this, is that i build a few metal storage units as a precaution. that way, when i need to, say, build a crap-ton of turrets and barriers on my left flank to stave off the oncoming tank blobs that JUST appeared on my radar, i can dip into my reserves to accelerate construction without actually putting myself in the hole, thus causing trouble for everything else my factories are building. this is especially true with energy and energy storage IMO, because there are those times when you need to get it done faster. having a reserve of energy allows you to pull off quick builds without forcing your eco to suffer the full brunt of the loss. but all in all, storage in general isn't really about guarding against a negative balance per-say, but is rather to guard against human error, unforseen events, and other instances of economic and battlefield setbacks. so that when you trip, it's a little easier to get back up.
I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. By spent metal I'm talking about the metal you spent during the entire game. By metal stored I'm talking about the metal that hasn't been spent or wasted. Metal you have stored when the game ends for you hasn't helped you win and has cost you time and resources to stalk pile. You could have unlimited metal stored up (Potential Value), but it wouldn't help you win the game unless you spent it (converted it from potential value to real value). That is why, Wasted < Stored < Spent (No Value < Potential Value < Real Value). Choice of tactics, "what if" scenarios, & pro's vs casual players, has nothing to do with this problem. It's economic design we should be talking about.
Yes & no. It can't have the same value as metal but it can have a different kind of value. (Like energy powers you units and building while stored energy buys you time.) Back on page 3 I suggested a limited way of using stored metal to increase metal bandwidth. In this way stored metal has the value of increasing build speed as a Pre-Production bonus. It doesn't hinder a player who runs at +0 metal while giving a strategic option for storing metal.
I'm not quite sure I understand this properly, but I presume that you want to automate stored metal in such a way that it is automatically spent on extra build speed? Because you can basically do the same thing manually by eliminating the surplus by putting more engineers to work, and pulling them off again as soon as you're done draining your storage. It's an idea that leads to less micro, but does it really solve the issue here? The idea behind metal storages is to reduce the hard to predict spikes in your economy. Are you saying that the metal storage should just be a building that buffs building speed? Because it won't really hold well if the metal is constantly being spent towards building faster.
If you have metal storage and an opponent destroys your factories and fabs you won't waste metal if your economy becomes unbalanced.
Objective = no wasting The metal storages have one purpose, avoiding wasting metal. They do it by extending the amount of metal we can store by a fix value. A bigger stock gives a bigger buffer to manage metal, and there is the problem, skilled player doesn’t need a large buffer, so they found the building useless (even worst as a waste of metal), and the less skilled player can be fooled by this “fake good” building. Conclusion of the introduction, the metal storages don’t do the job very well. EDIT: Bonus/Malus I read that bonus stuff is not something that uber wants. And i have to agree with that. Bonus (or malus), don't belong to TA background. New Mechanism The metal storage building has a new feature. When the stock is full, the building use the extra metal produced to build a wreck unit. This cost energy. The metal storage building has a limit of fabrication like the other factories; let’s say 10 metal / 1000 energy. Example : If your metal is +35/-20 (so you have benefit of +15), when your stock will be full, the metal storage building will start (or continue) to build the wreck unit, your new metal balance will be +35/-30 (you are still wasting metal but fewer). If your metal is +50/-75 (so you have deficit of -25), when your stock will be empty, the metal storage building will reclaim the wreck unit, your new metal balance will be +60/-75 (you still have a metal deficit, but it’s a bit better). Impact This system virtually extends your storage capacity to the infinite. You can build several metal storage (or assist ?) to increase the speed of creating/reclaiming the wreck unit. Perspective The wreck unit could be movable like the others units. It could be possible to send it in another planet, it will act as a movable living metal storage. Concept art of the wreck unit :
The objective is not to prevent wasting, but to add functionality to a building that only stores metal. If you hit max metal storage, metal SHOULD be wasted, and that in my mind is not the problem with metal storage. This idea further pushes the idea of storing more metal so that you dont waste, and im under the impression that it needs a functionality that goes in a different direction. Such as increasing build power in an area, or increasing metal income from extractors. Maybe even decreasing metal consumption for an area (although this might prove a problem, and i dont really like the idea). Its a nice idea, but i dont think its the solution we are looking for =/
My first post on this topic was about a build power bonus, but i read that Uber is against bonus/malus system, and after thinking about i agree that bonus/mauls don't belong to TA gameplay. (i edited my post).
Your idea is pretty cool I must say. I feel like lowering the storage capacities will make this more of an incentive to build storages to begin with. The issue is that the initial capacity is enough of a buffer to start with. Perhaps the storage buildings should not even add capacity and just poop out these wreck units whenever you hit the buffer. EDIT: OH OH! What if you can send these wreck units to other factories to speed up production of half built units...
Not quite. There isn't really a point to pumping your metal stalk pile unlike energy. The reason it's useful for energy is because you economy can start to stalls of you're at +0. You can "burst" build if you have metal stalk piled but it requires you to have extra engineers sitting around doing nothing. That begs the question why do you have idle engineers & a surplus of metal? What I was suggesting would be to give stored metal value by making it useful when a player has too few engineers to spend their metal. (Link when you send your commander to a new planet and your old base gets destroyed.) You should never have a hard to predict spike in your metal economy because it's not a streaming resource like energy. What I mean by this is that a Radar cost you 150 metal once & 300 energy a second * the usage/life of the Radar. The problem isn't the metal storage building itself but the risk / reward for storing metal.
Having idle fabricators around is bad practice, but the fabricators don't have to be idle, you could very easily pull a few fabricators from another build queue. What I don't understand is that we've already discussed some of these points before. I've mentioned in earlier threads that metal storage right now doesn't fulfill the role of providing enough metal to burst build. Yet buffing the capacity on it's own would be preventing people from wasting anything at all, which is also a bad thing. I think orbital shouldn't be encouraged as a method to flee from your enemy, because that only extends the gameplay into a delayed loss. If you have no economy to back you up then you've pretty much lost against that person already. As he will be outproducing you so much that the chances of you recovering are slim. Well, I'm no math genius and I have trouble with multitasking too many things. Economy calculation may not be hard on it's own, but when you're also busy maintaining map control and outwitting your opponent, economy calculation suddenly becomes very hard when the number of different queue's start to stack up. Perhaps not quite how I'd describe the issue myself, but I guess I could agree.
I think we can all agree that players like me like them, and have uses for them even if inefficient. What we need to do is provide a use for the more 'min/max' players.
I guess that theoretically, metal storages could be used to rush certain buildings/units in response to imminent threats, via a mobile force of engineers. Right now, by my calculations, you could use 10 metal storages, 30 energy storages, and 500 T1 air fabbers to rush an anti-nuke in 6 seconds. Whether this kind of situation-response functionality is useful enough to justify their existence is another matter.
I think you should have to build metal storage to enable reclaiming. Not a hard limit mind you - it isn't "You have to build at least 1 metal storage to enable reclaim for Fabbers," it's more like "Reclaiming brings in so much metal so quickly that you will be wasting metal unless you have storages." What if, once a Fabber started reclaiming a unit, the unit's wreck starts to melt into a puddle of nanobots. If the Engineer doesn't "pick up" all the nanobots in a certain amount of time, dissolve into the ground. That way engineers can't stagger their reclaim, they HAVE to get it done in a certain amount of time. If your metal storage can't support that reclaim, then sucks to your economy.
