Of investments, energy, metal and reclaiming

Two basic lessons from supcom, fa and related mods:

1. more expensive expansion and teching only takes resources away from low tech, leading to turtle fests

2. more expensive production forces a player to focus down only a few important projects, leading to mono-strategies

these seem to be the basic issues at play here, in fewer words

the only true way to resolve T1 not being used that I can see, is to make sure that T1 can hurt a T2 turtler before it is too late, that forces them to divert resources away from T2 to defend or counter attack, slowing the adoption of T2. This mostly comes into effect on smaller maps or planets. If T1 is too powerful you end up with the opposite situation where there is never a reason to tech up as you said

Other thoughts:
Reduce general production costs, but increase T1 economy costs. This will prefer building T1 armies early game, and give those armies enough time to fight the enemy before they are able to tech up. It will also slow the ability to tech up in general, without diverting resources away from unit production. It will increase the importance of taking and holding territory early on.
Nerf T1 again, with the above changes, they can be weak enough to not end the game easily, forcing an eventual teching up to gain the advantage, without letting players just sit in their base building only T2.

We don't have issues with players sitting in their base doing t2?
This:

is basically what we have right now. To the extended that building up any sort of economy is plain bad compared to spamming a lot of t1 units to rush hard based on a little base with no expansions.

You said that was the problem before the current changes. And that the problem now is opposite.

And you also said that the main problem with T1 now is that its powerful enough to end the game before even hitting T2, so T2 is no longer bothered with.

In my experience with the current balance mexes are basically free, and pgens are not very expensive for how much they give off. A small line of pgens will last almost all game, after which a small line of T2 gens will last the rest.

What I said is not what we have now.
What I said was weak and cheap T1, and powerful T2 with a moderate cost to get, and a high cost to maintain. And a high cost to expand. This necessitates expansion and upgrading, but forces you to use T1 to do it.

mex are indeed basically free and that is good, however pgens on t1 are horribly expensive if you compare their production with the energy requirement of engineers.

I agree, actually I missed the part on "high cost to expand" that part I disagree with. If expansion is too expensive you get people rush with the startup resources all the time.

I don't think free mexes are good. First, it encourages just spamming them on the front line, rather than protecting them and securing them. And second, it makes expansion very fast, quickly getting your eco to a point where you can build T2, which will negate T1 very early in the game.

So have t1 mex weak and t2 stuff so expensive that you need a considerable area of the map under your control.
Spamming mex is impossible as you can only build them on mex spots

You can build them without thinking if it'll be destroyed because you can quickly rebuild at low cost. So you can build a lot of them at once very quickly, or just rebuild on contested areas over and over instead of winning the fight. I'd call that spamming.

If the T2 mex is expensive it doesn't matter because you already have T2 then. That's a stage of the game that needs to be balanced in an entirely different way. Honestly, I'd take it out of the game completely, but that's just me. Because honestly, right now it is kind of balanced in that way. So you upgrade the spots you really control first, and it only really comes into play when you own a planet, which makes it a rich-get-richer snowball machine.

Rushing on the starting resources isn't a big issue if T1 is weak enough to be beat back by a com easily.

Having t2 mex is not equal to having t2 armies. Also even before you get t2 mex you should need to make as many t1 mex as you can before that to even pay to get to a point of being able to build t2 mex.
Though I am less sure of the t2 balance stuff, my point of interest mainly so far is the balance of t1 level and getting it to a point where players expand, are limited by metal and can profit from wrecks.
Yes you can constantly try to build mex in a contested area. You need to hold a mex for 21 seconds before it pays back. Though you also need an engineers to build it first, which takes some additional time and engineers are rather fragile.
I don't think there is an issue with that. Mex in secured areas should be taken as soon as possible anyway.

If you have a T2 fabber, it means you can afford to run it, which means you can afford to run the factory too. Getting the T2 mex doesn't make your economy weaker either. If you're at a point where you can build one, you are essentially in T2.

You can't be limited by metal if it is easy to get early on, that is the point of making them more expensive, so that even in secured areas it takes some time to build it up. This overall slows the economy growth in addition to everything else, postponing T2 and making T1 useful without having to buff T1 to ridiculous levels. There is a point of balance to be made though, as you still want it to be cheap enough that focusing it down on an empty planet can get you into space rapidly. This is where forcing T1 to be useful by allowing it time to attack a turtler comes into play, as it doesn't allow you to focus it down. It all works out that way.

The price between running a t2 fabber and building a t2 army can be quite different for sure.
Yes you can be limited by metal, since metal spots are limited and you need to walk around to take them and then defend them from raids. Look at FA for that. FA has even cheaper t1 mex than PA.

Since the cost of running the factory and the fabber is about equal you can build a T2 army right then and there. It will not be a huge army but it will be more powerful than anything T1, in addition to the T1 you already have. So from a gameplay perspective you have gained the T2 advantage.

PA has 12~25 metal spots for every one mass spot in supcom, so those situations are not really comparable. Supcom is not perfect either. And one of the most major problems with that game was useless T1, not in small part due to the cheap and fast expansion favoring teching up on all but the smallest maps. Making T1 eco expensive is actually a concept I came up with for supcom. It only works on the assumption that T2 is supposed to be a powerful advantage.

Numerically they are cheaper, but you also gain 4-5 times as many resources in PA per point, the actual FA stat is that 1 extractor gives you enough resource to run about a third of a factory give or take, and takes 30+ seconds to make its own cost back. If that's cheap then what is PA's 0.5 factory and 20 seconds? In addition to the crazy abundance of metal spots, resources are far easier to gain.

Well I dunno about t2. With my current thoughts/suggested changes it ends up as "one factory heavily supported" and I am playing around with the idea of making the t2 units more expensive then i.e. the t2 mex.

If PA has too many mex then change the map or reduce the metalincome per mex. In fact I do reduce the income to 5 instead of 7 in my experiment with the mod I made. At least in some quick vs AI games I easily end up heavily limited by metal now. Maybe even too much.
Useless t1 in SupCom:FA? I have no idea... are you from a parallel universe? t1 was damn important in FA. I dunno about current FAF balance, but I doubt that changed. Just for reference: Talking about 1vs1 on a max size of 20x20

A mex in PA needs 21 seconds to pay back. A mex in FA takes ... memory... 18 seconds? It cost 36 metal and produced 2 metal. In PA it is 150 metal for 7 metal income. Generally numbers in PA economy are just bigger that's all. Running a t1 factory to spam mantis cost... oh don't pin me on it but I think 4 metal/s. In PA you need 15 metal/s

Yes, sorry you are right it was the T2 extractor that took a whopping 2 minutes to pay itself back. It still does not change the point that T1 was too cheap, just like in PA.

T1 in FA was basically invalidated by T2. It was useful early game, until the first T2 tank rolled off the ramp. Which could be a very short amount of time if the map was any larger than 5-10km, which was most maps. T1 being in range of the enemy changed the game so that you had to divide yourself between fighting with T1 and teching up. This is the basis of my theory, that if you slow T1 expansion you extend the range of T1, making it more useful, without having to make it more powerful.

I simply disagree with that. t1 was the basis of everything in FA. Even on bigger maps the first foundations to controlling an area usually was t1.
My theory is based on the idea that currently t1 expansion in PA is so weak and expensive that it has no place all and dies hard vs any sort of dox spam.

That's simply false, you can build a T3 bot by the time it takes a T1 army to get anywhere significant. And because T2 units were so powerful even a small amount could wipe the floor with almost any size T1 force. So if you have a large area to yourself its better to tech up fast.

T1 is useful, but only for five minutes in most cases, which is nothing. And zero minutes in others. Only in the tightest maps was T1 central to the game.

Even T2 was only ever a stopgap measure to T3, while it lasted longer it wasn't by much. This meant that 80% of the games units were never really in play for significant periods of time. The tech race over actual fighting is one of the biggest complaints I've heard about the game. I don't know what you've heard.

Did you ever play serious 1vs1? Or only teamgames? I really can't understand that idea you have of FA.

I don't know what a "serious 1v1" is supposed to mean. I've played 1v1's.

hmm. No idea then. My memory of FA is a different one then.

So test games so far seem to indicate that my changes indeed favor expansions and at least a proxy base or two. Dox are ofc still quite powerful raiders, so one needs to be careful. Maybe really good dox players still can break expansions at a very regular rate. Needs more testing, but the direction seems to be good: Expansions were possible, in the games I won I did end up with "mapcontrol" that really took as many mex as possible while in the game I lost I died only after I lost my mapcontrol.
The economy is limited by metal, though making energy at the right time still is not trivial, but reclaiming wrecks did do quite some good to my metal starved economy in many situations.
No idea yet about t2, the games ended before that. I guess to reach t2 it will need a very balanced game on a radius 700+ map, I didn't have many of those handy. Also t2 will definitely see a single heavy supported factory so far.

Though I only played 3 testgames vs 2 different opponents, losing 1 game and winning 2.
Nothing really proven, it just doesn't seem to be completely wrong at least.
Needs more tests

Seems to me that the changes to make factory-first viable went too far. Would there be any benefit in tweaking the commander's starting income (and possibly storage, but I'm less sure of that) to make it less viable to make two factories straight off the bat?