Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

Honestly I think the current (unfinished?) way of econ just means you have to make sure you have enough mexes and pgens to support your factories and fabbers. You just simply can't go crazy on fact/fabs and have to balance the production of both. Maybe it's just my way of looking at the game (see my thread/spreadsheet), but I view each structure/unit as having a prerequisite number of mexes/pgens, and tend to build factories after I have the infrastructure to support them. I definitely tend to be a plan ahead type person. Which is prolly why the econ doesn't bother me as it currently stands, and why someone hitting my econ would surely screw me up royally :lol:

Example:

One of the reasons I put the build times into the spreadsheet was to be able to figure out how to best build both the user and provider as simultaneously as possible, since logically that would be the best.

Basically it goes something like:

1. Build econ for commander
2. Build factory
3. Build fabbers
4. Use commander to build power, fabbers to build mexes and factories

Unfortunately I have not gotten my head quite around expanding the number of users beyond what amounts to one thread. My current hypothesis is something akin to "let the the econ get ahead of what factories can use then produce another set of fabbers to make mex/pgen/factories". It should tree out at that point, where every X factories produced in a given production thread, the econ would be ahead enough to produce another thread of fabbers. So the commander/fabber initial thread would spawn an offshoot, then X factories later spawn another, with the offshoot doing the same. 1 -> 2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> to infinity and beyond!

I understand that. I just think it is weird that having more workers at work can be a disadvantage. That is counter intuitive in my eyes.

Going back to this:

Are you using the 10 to build 1 thing, or build 10 different projects. Based on "delete 9 and you build faster", I assume 10.

The reason I ask this is because no matter what, you have 17 metal/s (assuming commander+1mex, commander idle) going into either 1 project, or 1.7 going into each of 10 different ones. Also, you could have 10, 20, or even 100 fabbers working on 1 factory, and it would build at 17 metal/s.

Total metal incoming acts as a "build power cap". You can never put more metal into projects than you have coming in, no matter how many workers you have. I don't remember SupCom or FA being any different in this respect, except for maybe using less energy, but if you've crashed energy as well as metal....... :shock: Using less energy when you tank metal should not even be an issue IMO/E. Energy is one of those things that you should never be going massively negative. And having a surplus is not really a bad thing, especially with artillery using energy/shot now, and I'm sure other things will do the same. Metal is what builds things and can really be "wasted" since units have only a metal cost to build, and energy is simply an fabber only factor. I guess you could argue that energy costs metal, and should be run like metal so as to not waste the metal used to produce the energy, but energy gets essentially cheaper with time.

The only way I can see the kind of system where no matter what, more fabbers = more production, actually working, is one where all fabbers are like the commander, and produce resources, having a set minimum build power.

example: say you have 10 commanders building 10 projects and one mex producing 7m/s. Your commanders produce 10m/s each, so your total income is 107m/s. divided up amongst the 10 projects: 10.7m/s. Or basically min 10m/s + mex income split 10 ways.

Or not even having mex/pgens/resources at all, just build times for each thing a factory or fabber can produce. Assisting would basically be the sum of all the fabbers build times divided by the number of fabbers involved.

Meaning no offence, but I simply am just not getting your issue, and getting it less and less the more I think about it.......

You assume wrong. I actually tested this. I had 10 enginee + the acu with one mex and one pgen. I was building one pgen. Since my energy was stalling pretty hard I had only like 2 or 3 mass income. Not 17. So by deleting most of my workers (all would have been best) I reduced my energy stall therefore increasing my mass income, speeding up construction.

From what you write you seem not to understand that your metal income will drop once you are energy stalled.

That is true for FA, but not for PA.
In PA you will have less and less metal income the more excess engineers you add, as your energy stall gets worse and worse. So you can get into the odd situation where adding more engineers to your projects slows them down. In FA adding more engineers is never that harmful and the project you are adding engineers to will never slow down. In PA you can slow down a project by adding more engineers to it.

In FA as long as you are stalling on mass adding more engineers will not hurt your energy economy at all. It will only shift priorities to the project you are adding engineers to. So part of the problem surely is that I am used to adding excess engineers to important things to give them priority. Doing this in PA will slow everything down, which is kinda problematic.

The issue is that more fabbers can mean less production. if more fabbers would mean the same production everything would be fine in my eyes.

I have to agree. One would assume that the programming would put the economy first as opposed to last. Though this could be a throw back to TA. I've been replaying it the last several days and I've noticed a similar trend. Put too many builders to work and nothing gets done. On the other hand if we go with the Everything is already the best philosophy that they've been talking about then it would make sense that building more fabbers wouldn't slow production but instead merely not make it go any faster. After all someone would have to have hit this issue during development and done something to address it before everyone died.

If I can resume the issue, tell me if I did it right:

PA: 10 Engineers building, not enough energy, leading in less mass income, but energy drain stays the same. Slower building rate.

SupCOM /FA: 10 engineers building, not enough energy, leading in less mass income, this again leads to less energy drain, which then increases mass income again (nearly to its full value). Not as slow building rate.

Right?

Yep

ok, imo the best solution would be educing energy drain of engineers depending on % of the mass rate they get.

But does that not then present the problem that fixing metal eco = breaking energy eco?

E.g.

-12m | -1000e

1 mex gets completed, construction on another starts

-5m | -1500e

1 mex gets completed, construction on another starts

2m | -2000e

Under the current system, with the same conditions as in your post, your energy eco breaks whether your metal economy is fixed or not.
-12 m | -2000e
-5 m | -2000e
2 m | -2000e

Yes, I agree it stalls harder overall under the current system. The point I was making was that trying to fix your metal eco would then break your energy eco. Perhaps it would be better illustrated as:

-12 m | +500e
-5 m | 0e
2 m | -500e

You see that building mexes suddenly takes your energy eco from 'healthy' to 'oops', unexpectedly and without any real warning signs.

Double post

For whatever reason i thought you were talking about metal stalling. I sorta get were you'e coming from now. Energy stall = cut metal, metal stall = full energy. More fabbers = more energy deficit, so lower overall build power. I guess what i really don't get now is exactly what happens in fa on an energy stall, step by step. As far as i can tell you want energy stalls to not affect metal income. I might just have to boot up fa and play around with it again.

Now that i'm on the right page, ya, the energy conserve mode would solve this a bit.

Finally!!!!! I thought this problem would take longer to appear (although I this was before we were able to play).

I don't think it's possible to add penalties for stalling energy without also adding tedious micromanagement. If a penalty exists it can be worked around by pausing energy consuming tasks just before the stall occurs.

@cwarner7264
In terms of the underlying economy system and the game state (as in the thing which players interact with via the UI) it is always good to have more income. As in if everything else is equal it is better to have a greater income, of any resource. So with this in mind if an increase in income causes a problem for players actually playing the game (with their attention limitations) then there is a problem with the UI.

You can even use this idea on buildpower as it makes sense to treat it like a resource. When you add a constructor to a project you gain flexibility in how you spend your resources. This economy is strictly better than the one which lacked the constructor. There should be no unwanted side effects of adding constructors, these side effects are artifacts of the UI.

Agreed - so the mentality of building more mex would be to ensure greater income, as you rightly point out.

However, in the scenario highlighted above, building a mex can actually have a negative effect on your economy (through dramatically increased energy usage), which is a bit topsy-turvy IMO.

My solution would be to remove the energy-dependence of mexes, so that energy stalls don't cripple metal as well.

Why is an increase in energy usage a bad thing? Simply pause construction such that you don't stall energy. Some UI tool could automatically do this.

It's just the logic of it that doesn't check out for me. The idea that building an eco building could harm your eco makes me a bit uneasy.

Oh for goodness sake... again googlefrog? You're talking about Economy Automation again?

I agree that automation is not an option. But a priority system might help. If you have no energy, you could set, that metal extractors have highest priority for getting energy.

What exactly happens to an engineer, that has enough metal, but no energy at all? (or only 10%, 20%, x % of energy)

... That is automation... you're just using the word "priority system" instead.