Need energy to make metal?

There is no need for extractors to cost energy.

Firstly, the main effect of having extractors cost energy is the possibility of a "hard stall" where the player has no energy, no metal, and no resources with which to construct them. This is punishing to the players newest to the game, and really adds nothing to the game once players realize that they should never hard stall.

Secondly, it has no functional effect apart from increasing the energy cost of production. If you think production should cost more energy, it would be simpler to just increase energy costs directly rather than double tax on metal extraction and production.

And lastly, energy costs for metal extraction simply don't add any real choice to the game. Metal extraction must be highly prioritized anyway. It would never make sense to intentionally cut metal extraction, because it makes no sense to try to spend energy to produce using metal you don't have.

For the T1 level there isn't much point, as ledarsi has already pointed out. Energy use can be pushed to construction workers, and the high priority of metal surpasses even the worst stalls.

A 1-5K energy use for T2 extractors might(?) be able to accomplish something, though I couldn't exactly say what. There's the obvious "expensive for 1st one, cheap to replace" that is inherent for any energy user, but other effects are difficult to predict. It's a wash at the current rate, because construction uses so much energy that it drowns out anything else.

Advanced mexes with high yield, but with high energy costs would be a huge improvement over the current system where the upfront cost is the only downside to the advanced mex. A continuous, high energy drain makes it an interesting decision (somewhat) about whether to use basic or advanced mexes.

However, the core problem of the high-yield mex remains. Once you can afford one, it becomes easier to afford the next one, making it still easier to afford another one, and so on. A flat cost for a flat yield means that, for mexes, the higher yield will almost always trump due to limited metal spots. Even if the advanced mex was less efficient (and it MUST be changed so it is less efficient) than the basic mex, it would still be a colossal improvement.

To fix the core problem of the high-yield mex, I think Zero-K has come up with the best solution. There is only one type of metal extractor. However, that extractor's yield increases when you pump excess energy into it. But its yield increases with diminishing returns. Therefore, it is more efficient to have more mexes to spread your energy across more mexes.

First of all am not a noob, its just hard to find things in the search funktion!
And my opinion is just that you dont really lose that much on energy stalling when you get the same amount from you extractors all the time.. But someone said that this hole concept already was in the game, is that true?

Forgot one thing! The commander gives you metal and energy so you can never go totally bankrupt.

It's not actually a choice because both extractors stack. The T1 extractor baseline would still exist and be unaffected by energy.

A high energy demand makes high end metal more dangerous and volatile. That's about as close to the metal maker idea of "expensive energy for expensive metal" as an exponential economy can safely get.

It is a clever idea, I'll admit that. But it's also logarithmic diminishing return. Those sort of curves don't belong in a game where players need a full understanding of their economy.

Yes, it does shut down production.

During a metal stall, when you are earning 30% of the metal that you are spending, you can still spend the full amount of metal that you are earning. I.e. if you are earning 300 metal, but trying to spend 1000, you still spend 300 metal.

Let's say you want to prioritise the building of metal extractors. You get 100 fabbers to assist metal extractors. You build rate would now be 15%, you are earning 300 metal, and you are spending 2000.

However, 50% of your build-power will be on metal, which means that you are spending 150 of your metal on metal extractors.

During an energy stall, that isn't true. Let's say you're earning 300 metal, spending 1000 metal. You have 20 Vehicle factories (spending 300 metal) and 70 bot fabricators (spending 700 metal)

So your energy spending is 83500, your energy income is 25200. The energy stall is therefore 30.2%.

Firstly, you are in a 30.2% energy stall. So the way the system handles that is you are only allowed to spend 30.2% of the metal you are trying to spend. In this case, the UI will tell you that you are earning 300 metal and spending 302 metal (in practice it will tell you that you are spending -2 metal, so in reality you will be spending 300 metal)

You add 100 fabbers to build energy.

You are now earning 25200 energy, and spending 183500. That's an energy stall of 13.7%

That means that you are earning 300 metal, you are trying to spend 2000 metal, but you are only allowed to spend 274.7 metal.


Do you understand what I am telling you?

In a metal stall, the first thing you should do is select all your idle fabbers and tell them to build metal. You should only drag fabbers off other projects if you feel that progress isn't happening fast enough.

In an energy stall, you should never ever select all your idle fabbers and get them to build energy, because you're just making your situation much worse than it has to be. Instead you should select fabbers that are already fabricating and tell them to build energy (or you should select your idle fabbers, tell them build energy, and turn an equivalent number of fabbers already fabricating off). Then, if it isn't happening fast enough, you should turn power consumption on other projects off.


If you do not think that power is a worthwhile target to attack, you need to mod power gens so that they build in a sphere, make a sandbox game with the AI as economy 0, make sure all your power is in one centralised place, run your fabbers away, nuke your power, and try and rebuild.

Power is a much more important target to attack than metal is.

The issue with the UI is that it does not make this clear.

With metal, if you are trying to spend 1000 metal but only earning 300, it tells you that your net metal income is -700.

With energy, if you are trying to spend 1000 metal, only earning 300, and only have the energy generation to spend 300 metal, it will tell you that you are earning 300 metal and spending 300 metal, even though you have enough fabbers to spend 1000.

Likewise, when you earning 300 but only allowed to spend 274, it will tell you that your net metal income is +26.

Yes, it is true. As explained above.

Greger, ignore people telling you to search plx noob. The economy is blooming hard to understand, and the more threads we have explaining it, the easier it will be for people to find the results they are searching for.

I use an economy button mod for this. It has 4 buttons, idk what the 4th does but the top 3 control power to commander, fabbers, and factories. In an energy stall, I temporarily shut down factories to build power if I must, or if fabbers are just building fortifications I might opt to turn them off and build power using fabbers I manually turned on.

Group zero shuts down power to anything you have added to group zero.

E.g. select a particular group of fabbers.

ctrl+0.

Later on you can shut down only those fabbers, not all of them.

How to use Overdrive in Zero-K is a simple concept though. Link up the mexes in your energy grid and produce more energy to increase your income although doing this in the scale of PA games might be a bit more tedious.

Players already have to learn about exponential economy in PA. Logarithmic diminishing returns isn't that far from it.
Both can be summed up pretty easily. Always keep building more fabbers, more factories and more energy so that you can spend all your metal vs overdriving more mexes give more metal for the energy spent than overdriving a few mexes.

Overdrive integrated the two resources so seamlessly and gave such perfect energy management that the whole "yellow bar" thing was kind of pointless. The hard crunching may have been done behind the scenes, but the end result was metal storage and a different shade of metal storage.

There's nothing wrong with running a hard metal cap and developing each resource as its own thing. Besides, energy consuming units can always drive up the desire for absurd amounts of energy.

Actually, overdrive is much simpler on large scales than having two tiers of mexes. However, linking energy and mexes might be tedious at large scales.

Instead, a simple overdrive system that does not require linking could work in PA. Your excess energy would be evenly divided between your mexes, increasing their yield. If you spend some of that excess energy, your amount of excess drops, which has an economic impact but is not a stall. It also means that it is advantageous to have excess energy, instead of incentivizing a "perfect" energy equilibrium of matching income and expenditure exactly.

It is completely false that allowing overdrive reduces the game to some silly one-resource nonsense. Metal requires metal spots, and energy can be constructed anywhere, for a higher cost. You need both to build anything. Overdrive does not destroy the distinction between the two resources any more than metal makers do.

I don't think real-time management of energy have been that deep in TA, SupCom and in PA currently. There are few choices, mostly trivial optimization and prioritization have been tedious and microintensive.
Usually it is a matter of planning and if you have enough energy or not to do what you want to do currently.
Metal makers and overdrive ties energy usage with a potential loss of metal income which arguably adds depth although energy usage have typically been too low to actually be considered a real loss of metal compared to converting the energy to metal.

I don't say it is wrong. I am just exploring the alternative.

Overdrive was a lot of micro-clicking to convert one economy to another and balance your economy so you don't waste them.

One could just as easily just make sure to get a feel for how many pgens per mex, right now it's about 2, 2-3 if you use them as heavily as I.

I am unsure what you mean by "overdrive" trophy. Overdrive is new to ZK, and is completely automatic.

It also makes no sense to talk about "how many pgens per mex" for overdrive. All excess energy is beneficial, out to an arbitrarily large amount. But overdriving the same number of mexes using more and more energy becomes less and less efficient. In order to efficiently overdrive using more energy, you need more mexes.


I think you are talking about metal makers in TA which required some manual toggling to manage your energy, which was tedious micromanagement. It also had other serious problems, like completely destroying territory control since metal makers and energy can both be constructed anywhere, potentially making your entire economy independent of mex spots with enough investment.

Overdrive is not micro intensive, in fact it requires far less micro than even building advanced mexes.

For every extra source of power, your vulnerability to losing energy becomes less and less significant. The free metal on the side is just that- free.

I'd say that losing some energy isn't that big of a deal anyway. You should be building additional power plants anyway because of the growing economy and sudden energy spikes from production and weapon usage.
Smaller energy deficits can be countered with micromanagement to keep only prioritized systems and production online which reduces energy as a strategical target mostly to a target of opportunity with a simple cost-benefit analysis of the attacker as power plants can easily be rebuilt unless the attacker can reduce the energy to a fraction of what it were before the attack.
Yes, with Overdrive or Metal Makers players have more incentive to build additional power plants but a loss of power is also a real loss of metal with those systems in place.