Pgen technologies and possible diversifications

Their effectiveness is limited by placement already and made even worse by diminished returns, and to be honest: I don't see why there should be an actually random fluctuation on top of it. The rotation of the planet with solar pgens is something you can account for.

It does not right now. But that's actually an issue because it means that the T2 pgen would supersede every other tech. Hence the proposal to make it only a more efficient version of the metal burner with volatile effect added, and to reserve the really efficient (efficient as in no resources needed for operation) pgens for the orbital layer.

Sounds similar and uses the same system, but actually works the other way around so the implications (which make the metal-maker so dangerous and I fully agree on) don't apply at all. Thats like mounting the canon on the Leveler (T2 tank with fixed canon) backwards, the unit suddenly changes completely.

http://totalannihilation.wikia.com/wiki/Solar_Collector

THIS WAS AWESOME. Particularly the Arm's one. Armoured buildings, particularly generators that have a habit of exploding everywhere (giggity) make sense.
As a kid I'd revel at watching enemy bots come at my solar farms, only for the metal flaps to go up like "Noop" and then have my tanks go in and watch the debris bounce off my frickin armoured solar pyramids hell yes!

I'm just going to go down with... I didn't like the SupCom Power Gens. They made the previous tech utterly obsolete, which isn't what Uber is doing with techs anyway, so why not look to the spirit of TA and take solar/wind/geothermic/tidal/every possible expensive game model we can think of and just turn the game into an economy sim?

I know it's harder than just making two power gens, and I'd still want fusion to be the 'ultimate' volatile power generator, but can't we have a more diverse way of getting lower-tier power, particularly considering how awesome and diverse these planets are? I mean wouldn't it be cool to perch a geo-thermic power-plant in a lava sea?

I don't like operating costs, I think it gets in the way of explosions.

I do think that with all the innovations PA is making, it should show off its day/night cycle and massive array of environments by being more imaginative about its power gens than SupCom.

Yes, the current model doesn't really encourage you to explore different types of planets except for metal and gas. Furthermore if lava planets turn out to be increasingly dangerous planets to inhabit, you won't EVER expand into one without some kind of high reward.

However I don't think that complicated realistic weather simulation for wind and tidal is really going to be worth the time and money it takes to make such systems, although I would totally love to see such systems in a game. So here's a rework of my original post on how I think the different gens should work.

Land/Orbital - solar panels for base energy income, with those nasty night downtimes. Will work on all planets. Plus side for making day/night cycle become a core game aspect to consider, rather than just a nice graphical gimmick. The system for units to spot whether they are on the night side is already there, since they turn on their headlights. Possibly higher income when built on orbit? Small sized, basic tech.
Wind - for planets with an atmosphere. Steady, a little lower than solar power income around the clock. Possibly higher income on high ground. Small size, basic tech.
Tidal(?) - Oceanic worlds. Steady, same(ish) income as wind, but the gen is underwater. Small size, basic tech.
Geothermal - Lava worlds. High income. Possibly able to be built on lava oceans? Factory sized, advanced tech.
Fusion or something - Gas planets. Very high income. Large, advanced tech.
Ridiculous solar powwwwaaaah(?) - a very expensive and large solar panel orbiting a sun. Covers all your power needs. Possibly lasts only for a set amount of time? Very large, advanced tech.
Metal burners(?) - Still not convinced this is needed, but wouldn't mind having around if it's balanced right. Burns metal for power at a steady rate, same income rate with solar? Small sized, advanced(?) tech.

All of this seems like unnecessary complexity.

I agree - the lava planets look awesome and players should be motivated to stick around and risk getting burned.

I also agree on weather simulation etc, I think it's madness that can be handled by modders. It over-complicates the game and is time consuming and expensive. (The only exception for me is tsunamis, but whatever, fluid's evil to simulate.)

We do not need a fully functioning weather system in order to have these power sources:

• - Solar dependent on day and night (I like the TA pyramids as I've said , orbital is another kettle of fish entirely so let's steer clear of stuff like the "gas giant guzzler").

• - Tidal/Geothermal (Built in liquid) must be built in 'deep' ocean; not shorelines. Rationale: Greater waves/hotter lava out at sea.
• - OR Hydroelectric/Geothermal (Built on coasts) Rationale: Convenience! Or any combination of these two.

• - Wind must be built high up, on top of mesas or cliffs, (unless we have a 'windy' biome planned...). Terrain elevation requirement would help make these planets' height more meaningful, and allow different strategies in different environments.
  • In TA we had tanks rolling up and down valleys, and guns/wind power atop steep hills. Height was an integral part of gameplay that has been lost, reduced to little undulations or outright base-sized 'platforms' that just separate one part of a map from another - this system wasn't so prevalent in TA with its contour-line stratus layers. Besides which, these base 'platforms' won't work with PA's spawns and organic planet generation.
  • Height should be about more than forcing your opponent into artificial-looking bottlenecks ( - not that I have anything against bottlenecks (giggity), just the artificial-looking ones. (Giggity.) These can be seen in Starcraft & WCIII, and even in SupCom (Back slot of Seton's...)).

• - Fusion/Nuclear reactor - Volatile; more difficult to just spam, higher-value target, greater output.

Make energy interesting, and potentially a struggle/risk to gain a game-altering supply of in the form of a fusion generator. We have environments ranging from lava planets, to ice worlds and red deserts and cratered moons. There shouldn't be a 'one size fits all' approach.

I dislike the idea for metal burners. My fireplace is made out of metal.

It's true that having a more complex energy economy means shifting the focus away from fighting, but if done right, I don't see non magic power economy being any harder to use than what we currently have. Solar on land or orbit, wind on land in atmosphere, tidal in ocean, geothermal on lava.

UI wise it requires the player to choose (optimally) from two gens, solar and biome specific. The game can decide which biome you are currently on. If biome specific gens work at a fixed income rate without a possibility of optimal placement, the player doesn't need to worry himself with that.

*Fantasises about felling a windfarm, like cutting grass with laserbeams...*

How do you think does a nuclear power plant work?
Yeah sure, there is only a tiny amount of radioactive material in the core and it seems to last forever, but even this tiny amount is extremely expensive. On average, the ore contains only mere 0,028% of uranium, and from these 0,028% only ~0,7% is the desired U-235, everything else is waste. Nuclear power is very effective and there are large deposits, but it's not cheap or even for free, a giant economy is required to feed the reactor in the first place.

The current pgens in TA are just pure "magic". Yet there is a need for a pgen type which does not require wide spread land control as the environmental and the solar pgens do, otherwise you force every player into aggressive expansion to secure optimal pgen spots which takes away a lot of freedom of choice. (Opposite sides of the planet for solar, and the environment specific ones are even worse in these terms.)
However, such a pgen must not operate free of charge, or it invalidates every other pgen tech as it has the significant advantage of free placement and is therefor much more likely to pay off as you only have to pay the cost ONCE (contrary to the techs which require area control, since they are likely to be sniped frequently). Assigning an operation cost ensures that it never "pays off", it's more like an insurance plan. You agree on paying a constant fee, rather than risking to loose the generator during an unpredictable enemy raid.

Otherwise:
Say hello to that one heavily fortified turtle base which includes every part of the economy including the mexes, and which manages to operate artillery, base defenses and all that technically energy regulated stuff with ease despite being almost cut of from resources (only having unrestricted access to the mexes inside the base).

Yes, it encourages turteling if there is no link between one part of the economy and map control. That part of the economy is therefor no longer suited to be used as a regulating factor since it suffers from inflation. Just remember how long a turtle in SupCom could hold out when you were foolish enough to allow your enemy to turtle in the first place. You lacked any chance to starve him out while he could still use all energy consuming weapon systems without limitations, he didn't need any more mass to sustain (except for nuke construction) while you had all the losses.

Don't you have aggressive expansion anyway to get metal deposits and space for factorys?

What are you saying? The Metal Points are not nuclear fuel... I agree on having Nuclear, I just don't see it a small scale item. I see it as Fission Generators; high end - expensive to set up, volatile and a good return - as your OP suggested about the Paragon.

• We have to fight over metal points for land anyway... And I personally think having solar, tidal, wind, geothermal and Fission makes for a greater "freedom of choice". You'd adapt your play style to your environment, rather than just making 'magic' generators. Your environment wouldn't just be aesthetic.
• Tidal power in particular means you don't need widespread land control as you suggest. Even holding a mountainous region with a load of wind turbines in it would mean you didn't need to hold a huge amount of land to generate electricity. And due to limited space in mountain ranges, it would be harder to turtle effectively.
• Besides all of which, it's a war game. Control of space is what war is about. Making allowances in the economy for those who don't control the area immediately around their spawn when they spawn is a bit absurd. You have enough time and space to start your economy up.
• Balancing metal burners as an early game power-source would be difficult, imo.

• Metal extractors would need to put out a lot more to compensate, and then what would happen when you got to the next level and got rid of your metal burners? A huge influx of metal.
• The amount of metal burned would have to be so negligible as to make the burning pointless, or else you'd have a system where you got a more efficient form of power and had to deal with having a tonne more metal. It'd just likely mean metal burners would go unused, as people would rather invest in a more efficient generator and use the metal to build units.
• Using building materials to power your buildings is a paradox, and will slow expansion early game when it is most important.
• Your argument for metal burners to reduce turtles relies ultimately upon fighting over metal. Why not just fight over key power spots/open space?

​

This could be resolved by solar power being less efficient, and also by the fact that it's inoperative at night.
This is not an economy sim. I don't want my economy to put a constant drain on my economy. I want to build a generator, get power and build some units.

What is the point of building a generator that never makes a return on your investment?
How would the economy ever get past zero?
In order for the generator to be a generator, it has to be in the + numbers and will therefore slowly make a return on your investment, regardless of operating costs.
E.g.
Gen costs -2000P to Build
Gen produces +250P
Operating costs -200P
Generates +50P.

Anything that costs more power to maintain than it does generate power is not a generator. Your 'Insurance Policy' is Storage.

1. Shields aren't included, so arty that sucka.
   
2. Asteroids. Metal planets. Orbital bombardment. Unit Cannons. Did you see the Kickstarter trailer?
   
3. Night/Day cycle. Assuming your opponent is using solar, then you attack at night when your opponent won't be able to fire off the big guns so easily. Major weapons/Units are already planned to drain the economy through their use.

I agree. So why not do solar and tidal as your base gens, wind and geothermal as mid-level, and volatile nuclear fission as your big non-orbital gens?

• Tidal and Solar would provide low return and take up space (which you'd have to fight for anyway).
• Geothermal and Wind are dependent on holding key areas which can (as you want) be contested more easily and sniped.
• Nuclear Fission Generators are volatile and explode, so good luck planting that in the middle of your turtle.
• Defences would simply need to be balanced so that you couldn't spam arty/PDs and power them all with just solar or tidal power. The Day-Night Cycle would also make this less viable.
• No shields. And all the stuff in the Kickstarter trailer that I pointed out earlier. Turtling is not going to be easy on a solar battlefield in which you can be assaulted on all sides, even from above.

TL;DR: All in all, I agree with you on the diversification of power, but disagree with your suggestion that the solution to turtles is some form of constant drain on the economy, from the economy.
I also dislike the idea of metal burners; mass fabricators were never that great in SC, and I want metal for tanks. Metal and Power should remain largely separate. Besides, as I've argued above, they will create problems with expansion, and mid-game metal booms as you gain better energy sources. All of this inconvenience, simply to exploit the fact that people fight over metal points. Why not have them fight over power points and open spaces?

• I believe construction costs and returns should be balanced to prevent solar/tidal farms being viable for turtling - forcing Wind/Geothermal areas to be contested - and high-value Fission Generators should be volatile. (To clarify - Wind/Geo don't have 'mex' zones; they just depend upon high mountains/deep oceans/hot lava/coasts, and can therefore be built more or less freely depending upon the planet you are on.)
  
• I also believe that restrictions such as the day/night cycle, lack of land/cost space/altitude/heat will force players to come out and fight over energy, instead of it becoming something (like in SC) that you wait for an infinite supply of.
  
• The attack methods shown in the Kickstarter further negate the need for putting a maintenance drain on the economy in order to prevent turtles; an asteroid is a pretty decent economy drain.

How is an asteroid an economy drain?

I'm serious about that question. It's a threat for the defending player, but the drain is behalf of the attacking player as heed needs to power it up in order to weaponize it. Unless you only go asteroid-hopping for the metal spots on them, in that case it actually ads a surplus to your economy. There is only a single weapon known so far which will work against turtles without limitations, and that is the catapult (and maybe some of the large battleships).

The measurement is in power production for metal invested, not power for power invested. Second one is always positive and pays of within seconds, otherwise it wouldn't work at all. For the vulnerable techs, the total energy produced dwarfs the metal cost at some point, it converges towards perfect efficiency. For pgens with upkeep, that ratio converges towards a constant.

It is also never efficient to go for metal burners if you plan on expanding at any future point, because the metal invested is permanently lost. The efficiency of the metal burner exceeds the efficiency of other techs only for a few minutes of game time and drops below if the pgen is used for longer than expected (either because it wasn't destroyed or because the game lasted longer than expected). In either case, the efficiency of a classic pgen which was built at the same time now had exceeded the efficiency of the metal burner.

It's really just simple math: Blue line visualizes ratio of total power produced to metal investment for regular pgens as a function of runtime, red line is metal burning type. As you can see, with these numbers the metal burner would be more efficient for the first 8 minutes, but would be a waste of metal if used for an extended period of time.

If you plan on playing longer than 8 minutes and you are not in desperate need for energy, go for the regular type, right from the start.

Though you also have a constant drain on your economy from any of the pgens with fixed build spots, since they are going to be destroyed frequently. And even if not themselves, so at least the units and structures used to defend that spot. But you can't just say "you loose" (what being denied from energy essentially means) just when you can't manage to get control over these spots again, so there is an actual need for basic, alternative tech which allows to regain energy by other means.

Also, solar and low space requirement? Solar isn't exactly an effective way to gain power. The panels are cheap to produce, but you need to cover large area. It's only unique in such terms, as that is not bound to a specific location so that it is spamable and that you can achieve permanent production with only 2 opposing spots on the planet. Also perfect efficiency when, but only when, you manage to hold both positions without losses.

Every single one of the basic techs is meant to be an equal choice, despite the different mechanics used. That's perfectly possible, it's even possible to balance them against each other because there is a suitable lever on each single one, in case of the advanced techs, there is even more than just one lever required and provided.

I'm just going to jump in here because I remember a lot of these style of discussions both on TA Spring and Infinity Universe.

I couldn't agree more. While I'm new to the PA alpha (I actually just found out that it'd been released without me knowing) I already have some economics mod ideas. Perhaps some of my ideas are best suited for mods rather than core gameplay, but I'm going to throw down anyways.

One thing I always hated about TA was how easy it was to get energy. After I built my first fusion plant, I could spam fabricators and more fusion, and economics reigned as I spammed air. In SupCom, this was still a viable strategy. As a player, I liked the long games; build an infrastructure while my opponent and I skirmished on the fronts; to me the combat wasn't as exiting right up until those two giant armies clashed. I can already tell that this strategy won't work in PA.

One rule I've always had: Production trumps storage. I don't care how much energy you can store, if you can't fill it up fast enough, you will lose. Okay, great, but what does that mean? Gigglesnort as I spam solars & fusion generators? Pah. High risk, high reward is where I want to see PA Pgen go.

Perhaps the biggest problem with energy (as I see it right now) is there is no grid. Power is produced, stored and consumed with nary a thought to how its distributed. Now, I'm certainly not suggesting the energy grid system gets an overhaul, but perhaps we can create a faux one.

Power Generator Concepts

Nexus: Multi-structure Power Gen
Lets say you have a generator. On its own, this does nothing, or maybe creates a trickle of energy. But as you build a series of supporting generators around it, the efficiency goes up, as does the Energy/sec. High risk, because if your central generator gets destroyed, or the support generators get destroyed, you have a lump of metal. Good for the center of your well defended base.

Orbital Solar Wind Turbines
I'm not completely up to speed on how orbital structures work so I won't make any assumptions; I also know that there is no space-combat planned, so I won't postulate that such a structure could be attacked. But I like economic diversity, so this is one I'm rather attached to. As you may know, solar winds are plasma based comprised of protons & electrons. So it makes sense that a generator close enough to the sun could (in game theory) generate power from the solar winds. This energy would fluctuate (like real solar winds do) possibly dependant on orbit or other solar details. High cost would have to account for their perceived invulnerability, or perhaps new units/buildings capable of targetting them, or other game mechanics (such as collisions).

Kinetic Generators
Yup. Basically a giant engine. I think they would be a low output/high efficiency alternative to lawlsolarspam at a slightly higher cost.

Anti-matter Reactor
Weeeeeee anti-matter collision generators! High output, high efficiency, high world-ending changes to explode if damaged.


Efficiency Boosting Buildings

This is something that hasn't been discussed yet; instead of brainstorming new generators, what about complimentary buildings that boost the efficiency of power gens. I separate these into three different types:

• Adjacent Boosters
• Localized Boosters
• Global Boosters

These don't have to be buildings; they could be units as well (though unlikely). It might be cool to see a mobile energy boosting bot that compliments the energy efficiency as needed in a regional context. If someone commander-bombs my base and I'm left with one solar plant and a few buildings, I'll need all the help I can get.

Adjacent
Pretty self-explanitory; they would need to be placed directly next to their generator. To keep the building count down (or high depending on which you prefer) they would need to be generic to fit all pgen types, or focused, such as a Thermal Bleed Capture Plant for your geothermal generator.

Localized
This mechanic would be similar to radar; it would increase the efficiency within a range.

Global
Yup, a planetary/stellar efficiency booster.

ATM all these concepts are just theory-craft, and that's the easy part. But I would definitely like to see a lot more diversity in the economic paths for energy, not to mention its consumption.

Oh god no, the Solar, Wind and Tidal power generators in TA made no sense, because Solar, Wind and Tidal could never supply enough energy IRL without massive numbers, hundreds of wind gens to equal one geothermal gen,thousands to equal one fusion gen.
Wind mite work on a gas giant, solar mite work in vast satellite farms or on a planet like mercury
As for antimatter, it takes more energy to make and hold antimatter than the antimatter matter reaction releases. Antimatter is good for weapons because of how small a mass you need 0.25g of antimatter reacting with 0.25g of matter is equal to 10kt of tnt, little boy was 13kt-18kt and had a had aWeight of9,700 pounds (4,400 kg).
Go with fusion generators hydrogen is quite common.

This is no place to talk about 'real life'.

I liked geothermal vents in TA, they became a key early-mid game fighting point. Hope to see them in this game to. Hopefully with upgradable tiers, like metal extractors in supcom.

Oh no you didn't!

I... I don't even....

I just don't even...

Is this the bit where you ask if I read the previous posts and I say I don't, or did I do some PA specific faux pas?

I like upgrades!

It's been talked about before and I think the devs are aiming for a system without upgrades.