Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

Really? You don't think its stupid that your entire economy collapses because you run low on a little energy?

You feel its better that your whole economy should turn off because of a -1 energy drain?

If you are desperately trying to recover from an energy stall you have either metal in storage or you are turning off production to recover which will cause your metal to end up in storage. 1 or 2 metal extractors coming online wouldn't matter as you have already turned down your production to recover from the initial stall.

Also if you have played TA or SupCom you should be used to such scenarios. The scenario you just described can only happen if you are stalling on metal while building up metal production. The simple way to deal with the creeping energy stall is to make more powergenerators and/or turning off production. In TA and SupCom it can in many cases be harder to manage as the same construction units can have different energy and metal drain depending on what project they are assisting.
Not to mention that metal makers/mass fabs can stall your economy pretty badly.

Edit:In TA the full energy drain would be displayed even if you stalled on metal so it is pretty transparent there.

if metal extractors energy yield is 0, why not let them produce metal totally independently of energy? meaning, if there is no energy or there is, metal extractors dont care?

Nanolathe I rarely try to convince the devs directly and I will also discuss things just for the sake of discussing them. I get to see what people think and see how they react to what I think. My language was a bit strong earlier (using the word 'problem') but the alternative is to construct a hypothetical game and that takes more work.

I've never thought in terms of the devs breaking their word so this idea is interesting to me. I expect them to do what they said they will do in very broad terms (for example there will be multiple planets) but for smaller things I would prefer them to be flexible. If something obviously doesn't work then I would rather they 'break their word' than stick with the broken system.

@cwarner7264
With good economy management you would not have significantly more constructors (and the energy to support) them than your metal income can sustain. Building many constructors and power generators before you need them is a waste of resources and you're likely to lose. In this sort of game the tightness of your economy is very important, especially early in the game.

To be completely honest with you, I can't think of any scenarios where this would be truly crippling. That's not really the point of my argument - it's more of a subjective "this mechanic makes the economy less transparent" thing.

googlefrog, I can understand where you're coming from, believe me. Sorry for my reaction earlier too.

For what it's worth WrongCat, I agree that the system is obfuscated in a slightly counter-intuitive way. Fixed build power for units is, I think, a step in the right direction, however it definitely still needs tweaking to give the player more feedback on their actions.

I think that losing metal production during an energy stall is the greatest offender here.
The transparency issues that come from reducing energy usage of fabbers and factories according to how big the metal stall is, is non-existent for me as I am used to TA and SupCom. Although now you never have to ask yourself how much potential energy usage you have or how much you are actually using during a metal stall which could be the case in SupCom and TA. Although I think the price of that transparency comes at a cost of tedious micro.
The current system increases the need for economical micromanagement, especially early game, as it requires you to pause production during a metal stall in order to avoid wasting energy if you want to be as effective as possible.

Agreed.

Seconded.

100% agree

Alright, your metal incoming does in fact drop based on your energy stall. Built a mex, then a bunch of energy storage to energy stall. Metal incoming was 17 (com+mex), but went to 11 on energy stall. Stall was 1000 incoming, 1500 outgoing because just commander. 17*(1000/1500) = ~11, so mexes/metal income in general are being affected by energy stalls :? :? :? :? :?

Either way tho, I believe the way it is supposed to work is that your fabbers build based on the energy stall. So in the above stall, even with enough mexes to cover the 30 metal output by the commander (minus the 10 he produces), the commander would only build at 20, no matter what.

now, if I added a bot fabber to the mix (10m|1000e used to fab) that would make the stall 1000/2500. The commander would build at 12 [30*(1000/2500)] and the fabber would build at 4 [10*(1000/2500)], for a total of 16.

if you had the mexes to cover the 20 from the commander, that the commander doesn't cover, and the 10 from the fabber, which would be 5 for example, the 35 metal produced, reduced for the 1000/2500 stall would be 14.

So mexes are a problem, but I don't think they're the entire problem. If you add fabbers to a project, you still get less production, even if mexes produced full metal all the time.

Someone mentioned how FA handled it better. How does FA handle it better? Throw math/steps at me!

Fa just straight up perfect, set debit for a set place and time, if you stalled it changed nothing. period.

it just meant you didn't have the money for it and there' no credit in this world so you just wait for the money to come in and it all builds slower at a speed relative to stall but the distribution stayed the same.

Essentially FA was fun compared to vanilla SupCom and it's crappy economy that straight up just had a cascade of fail.

FA and TA didn't handle it better in the case you displayed.
In TA and SupCom/FA mexes drain energy and subsequently produce less metal during an energy stall.

The part where TA and SupCom handled it better, in my opinion, was when you metal stalled because then your energy drain from construction would decrease as well.
Currently in PA your fabbers and factories will use 100% of their energy cost even though only using 10% of their metal output due to a big metal stall for example.

FAs' economy is definitely not perfect. Here is an example of that. During a mass stall, mass extractors would use metal that just disappeared. It is fixed now in Forged Alliance Forever but it was anything but transparent and has been present for the biggest part of SupComs lifetime.

Ah. Interesting. Thing is, I can't see less energy use being an issue unless you're stalling everything.

I can see it being an issue if you are in the middle of some massive construction project and then all of your energy hungry base defense guns suddenly start firing in response to a raid.

For that matter should it be possible to prioritize energy allocation when there isn't enough power to run everything at once? Like AAA first, land defenses second, construction third or whatever? Or even make the energy priority groups user definable so you can control what units/buildings are in which group?

I think we should have some priority system like that. ColaColin seems to be in on that as well.
If enough people agree maybe we could persuade Neutrino and Uber and then if we are lucky we could even persuade Nanolathe.

It would indeed make sense, even though imho going back to the TA/FA Style reduced energy usage on metal stall is even more important.
Also I think it is given that they plan something like a priority system, there is this conserve energy option in the UI after all. Currently it is not doing anything, but I doubt they put that in just to remove it later.

Going from a conserve energy button (which looks mightily like an on/off switch) to an automatic priority system is a mighty leap.


If you're in the middle of a massive energy consuming project and
1. didn't build enough storage to power your defenses
2. overrelied on energy consuming defenses
3. didn't have enough spare power plants

And thus my harass attackes drained your power reserves to zero you deserve to take the economy and defensive hit.

There's no need to soften up that blow against you as there were plenty of ways to avoid it.

Thus: No priority system needed.

If it were just on on/off switch it would be called on/off or probably simply pause. But "conserver" sounds pretty fancy to me. Also I think Uber was aware of this problem and they have probably their own ideas of how to improve the system.

The problem here is that a quick player will be able to do tons of micro and manage the energy flow to fix it all. A not so quick but technical knowledgable player will use a mod that does the same. So why not put that function directly into the game in the first place?
I am not a total fan of heavy automation, but this is something that is so stupid simple that there really no reason to make the player do it by hand.