Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

A quick player will also be able to micro their bots around your tanks all day. Doesn't mean that we should automate bot behaviour.

Or: Building mexes is so stupid simple there's no reason the player should do it by hand.

Also: Its not said that such mods will be allowed in the standard game in the future as crossing the line to cheating will be very easy when simple automation through mods are possible.

Finally: Quick reactions to unexpected situation is a staple of RTS games. Having to deal with problems created by enemy behaviour is a good thing, automating the reaction is bad.

Indeed.

There are threads for your examples (automatic dodge micro and automatic mexing). I'm just bringing up their existence to make the point that you're not going to garner support by likening economy automation to these examples. You're making a slippery slope argument when there are plenty of people around who want to slide down this slope. (I hope this doesn't go off topic)

Slide

So...... Just don't energy stall? Or stall in general?
That maybe creating 10 fabbers out of your first factory with only 4 mexes and a couple of gens is a bad idea?

I always queue up 50-100 fabbers in my first factory. That is my dedicated fabber factory. Additionally the first things to leave my second and third factory is usually also fabbers.
But yeah, stalling is very bad in the current economy. Avoiding it is easier said than done though.

For me, the biggest annoyance is the constant fluctuation caused by the long roll-out times It can be quite hard to read exactly how healthy your economy really is!

I love those roll out times for various spam related issues that it is gallantly solving to some extent, but I agree that it makes knowing and predicting exactly what your economy is going to do on a second-by-second basis... difficult.

Its because people have no imagination and the easy answer to micromanagement issues is to automate it instead of adapting the design or enhancing the ui. A quick pause construction area command to free up energy needed for other uses handily avoids all micro and doesn't need automation.

As for the slippery slope, if you want to know where it ends just look at Master of Orion 3. :shock: :mrgreen:

Either way, decided to add the "energy stall affects mex output" bug to the tracker. http://pa.lennardf1989.com/Tracker/inde ... sk_id=1902

This reminds me. Box selection is alright if you don't want to select factories ever, or even fabbers for the most part........

Isnt this currently intended behavior?

It isn't mentioned in the OP.

How is an area pause command any different from selecting units in a box and ordering them to pause?
If a task or decision can be easily automated I just consider it busywork and I'd rather be allowed to focus on other more important decisions.
Setting a priority for economy management is the important decision. Pausing stuff manually is just busywork IMO.

That's a turnbased game. Does it even have simulated physics? Pff... Dismissed.

So I guess an area command pausing all construction in an area could be useful but how do you disable that?
Mm... do you have to select the units inside the area and enable them manually or can you just disable some first entity order constituting the area pause command?

First order area command entities... Do want!!!

Im pretty sure that garat or neutrino said that mexes aren't suppose to currently use energy, and I imagine that would mean lacking energy shouldn't affect their operation.

Also, in the OP here it only mentions that builders will use less metal on an energy stall, nothing mentioned about mexes being affected.

He said this in this very thread. Haven't you read all 72 pages???!!!
I don't blame you.
He were only saying this so he could avoid making a priority system.
But...
But...
Neutrino.
We can have both mexes decoupled from energy and a priority system! *

*Or better yet IMHO. Heavy energy drain on mexes and a priority system to manage your economy.

I have actually. There are just a growing number of stickies, ex-stickies, and repeat threads I've tended to lose track of WHERE things were said. Either way, it is a bug, or at least that's my take on it based on what I've bolded above. Sure they take 0 energy, but you still lose metal income if you lack energy. So right now you lose metal, building, and defence.

I dont get how you can discuss this so long, if good solutions have been posted. Uber has just to choose

Some solutions are:

• reduce energy drain of engineers that dont get full metal (easy explainable: engineers need energy to convert metal to any form of building, less metal means less energy
• make metal extractors totally independent on energy
• change nothing and let energy stall be a fatal mistake
• add some priority system

those 4 solutions are ordered after my preference^^

I have a question about build queues and resources. In TA, if you queued up another unit, or a hundred, there was no direct, instantaneous cost associated with it. All that mattered was the build production rate of the current unit under construction, and how much that drained per unit time. Is that still the case in PA?

yes

People want the system they want, It's not just about showing a solution, it's about explaining why it's the best one. Otherwise we wouldn't really be discussing it, just stating things.