[Poll] (with pretty pictures): Halving the Metal Given by T2 Metal Pumps

TL;DR:
If a T1 Pump with one Pump gives 7 Metal, then a T2 Pump with two pumps should give 14.
This will encourage people to fight over territory, reclaim, and will make turtling and rushing game-enders much more difficult.

Hello guys

I'm going to keep this brief and say that I feel Metal is too easy to get in PA at the moment, largely because of T2 Metal Pumps giving 28 Metal apiece, plus the 7 Metal given by T1 pumps.
Making T2 harder to access is not the answer to this - it will only delay the effects of having so much metal that you don't need to worry over who has more map control.

This means people don't need to fight over resources and territory as much, or reclaim as much. These are things which the economy should be encouraging as they force us to make armies and get out of our bases.

Here are some screens from a (Sandbox) Start-up I ran. Obviously the demands of a half dozen T1 Bot Factories aren't integrated, but when you can reach T2 within 07:30 minutes, who cares whether that other guy has an army of Doxen? You can start making Snipers and go get his Commander!




Our T1 Metal Pump has one pump, and gives 7 Metal.



Our T2 Metal Pump has 2 Pumps and gives... 28 Metal?


Even before T2 Eco went up, I had a lots of Metal, despite claiming only a small part of the planet. However that's absolutely fine. No problem here - we need this early/mid game to get the ball rolling.

The trouble is, mid-game ceases to exist when it's a race for the exponential economic benefits T2 Eco brings, even if you have a small territory. It's about getting to T2, getting those T2 Pumps out and then making Nukes.



Metal is so abundant that Energy - you know, that thing which we can build anywhere - is the limiting factor (and even then, it doesn't exactly slow me down for long).


Check out the Eco-Bars. T2 Metal and Energy going up simultaneously and it's the Metal that's in vast abundance, despite it being the resource we're supposed to be fighting over.
(Note I have just three T2 Metal Pumps in the above picture, and turned the Advanced Radar (4500 Energy) off. Even with -42 Metal (14x3), I would still have a lot of metal.)

My suggestion is to be consistent with the Metal pumps.
If a T1 Pump with one Pump gives 7 Metal, then a T2 Pump with two pumps should give 14.
This way you still get 21 Metal from a T1+2 Metal Mex, rather than 35.
This will encourage people to fight over territory, reclaim, and will make turtling and Nuke-rushing much more difficult.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want metal to be so scarce people can't build. I just want it to be scarce enough that it's worth fighting over, and high-cost things like armies of Assisted Snipers and Nukes require more map-control.

The Metal economy should not run away and become near-limitless once somebody has an entire planet, as this is a fairly common occurrence and contributes to stalemates late-game.

Thoughts?

I agree.

The entire game is all about getting to T2 eco before your opponent.

I find that binary and boring.

Advanced Metal Extractors should produce 7 or 14 metal per second. I'm leaning towards 7 metal per second and the advanced metal extractors cost more than basic metal extractors. That means it's always beneficial to expand rather than turtle.

What about no t2 mex?

For the doofus, what are the current rates and costs, and how much of a nerf are you proposing?

In my OP darling 28 Metal for current T2 Metal Extractors, and 7 for current T1 Metal Extractors.

Yeah. I think closing the gap so T2 is only double the metal, and not quadruple(!) the metal would be a big step in the right direction. It's all very well saying T2 should be a reward, but the game should still function once we've opened our presents...

After that if metal were still too abundant, tweaks to individual pumps; down to 6 and 12 (18), or even 5 and 10 (15) might be needed.
Though of course Metal spots offering different amounts of metal would be good too. a 5-7 spread would be ideal I think.

Why 7? When the T1 is producing 7, it makes no sense that T2 is also producing 7.

And Kestrels. Never forget Kestrels. And...Peregrines...and...you know...Nukes.

Don't forget you'd be building on top of an already present T1 Pump, not replacing it, so you'd get 14 streaming in.

Solution to Kestrels and Peregrines:

Get rid of them.

See what I did there?

That's the easiest solution, but one of the least desirable.

Burrito, you hit the nail on the head. Again.

My apologies!

However, I think 7 is far too low.

Reasons:

1. The cost for the T2 is more.
2. If you don't build it on top of a T1 Extractor (completely possible, and sometimes useful if you don't want to spend the time doing it), you're not getting any more Metal in this scenario.
3. The risk is higher. You're losing more Metal at once if it gets harass-destroyed, which naturally means the payout should be higher (to compensate for the risk).​

I'm not saying the current rates are perfect, but I don't think 7 (+ 7) is the way to go.

Neither do I - as per my OP I'm for 7+14. Just roughly agreeing with Brian on the fact that some sort of reduction is needed.

I am actually going to have to disagree with this analysis.

The match you played is in a Vacuum, an uncontested planet where there is little need to get an army. Playing this way makes you think that its to fast. Is 7 minutes really that bad of a speed for T2 units to start pumping out? should it be longer? Its hard to try and balance this when structures can be built independent of a set time. The reason the T2 factory costs 4x more is because it comes out significantly later. Which is a good thing. That is what is solved with 4x cost. Does it create other issues? yes, since playing with one balance lever moves 8 random ones.

I have steam rolled AI bases with just 8 T1 factories before 10 minutes. Rushing to T2 is very risky and leaves you open to flanking and harassment if you don't have the right units.

I personally like the "economic scale" of T2 metal with T2 value. I think a leveler is 2100 metal in the PTE build as of now, and an ant is 150. No matter how many levelers one gets, their effective value isn't the same as a T1 army, but actually more specialist because of their high costs. I do think the costs and resource collection are a little inflated, but that is due to the economic scale and pacing then actual proper resource balance.

To prevent nuke rushing and turtling; increase the cost of a nuclear missiles and defenses. Those buildings will then add risk to their value which effects the decision to build a cheaper army or devote resources into a singular strike/ defense.

I'll try this out with bots soon too. If Metal weren't so abundant in T2, T2 Factories and units could be (somewhat) cheaper, thus closing the widening gap between T1 and T2. I don't think 7 minutes is a good point in the game for people to have a massive economic boon - yes it's around a good time for the first units of T2. I just think the economy should be more closely reliant on expanding map control. Metal should be scarce enough to make fighting over every cluster of it a necessity.

Increasing the cost of Nukes has already occurred on multiple occasions. The Nuke 'Factories' need to be un-assisted in my opinion, end of. Otherwise that singular, devastating strike is always going to be worth rushing out.

Not unless they put in some sort of metal maker, which I think the devs want to avoid. People seemed to hate the mass fab farms of SupCom which is why they were nerfed in Forged Alliance. PA instead has T2 Mexes that are fairly powerful compared to the moho metal mines of TA and the T3 mass extractors of SupCom / FA. This makes up for the lack of metal makers / mass fabs.

While power is pretty much unlimited except by build space (and even so not really since you can build Solar Arrays) metal is limited to how many metal spots on on a planet. Right now it's fairly easy to spend enough that you are using the metal output of an entire planet. PA is meant to eventually have HUGE armies even compared to TA / Supcom. Where you might see hundreds of units in those games we hope to see thousands or tens of thousands in PA. Nerfing metal production is going to make supporting these huge armies too difficult, you simply won't have the eco to build that many units.

If you are really worried about rushing game enders, make them more expensive.

I get where you're coming from - our Pumps need to make up for the fact that there are no Metal Makers/Generators or high-tech T3 Extractors. Equally, metal spots in PA are far more prevalent than in TA or SupCom, and having no metal banked doesn't grind your economy to the kind of absolute standstill it did in those games. Furthermore, Metal makers kind of destabilised SupCom and TA, as the controlling element (Metal) which was supposed to be about map control and expansion became meaningless if you had enough time.

Currently, we have high numbers of metal spots and high amounts of metal.
This can go one of two ways if we want some control mid-late game over expansion in the economy:
Fewer metal spots.
Less metal from each spot.

I prefer the latter, as fewer metal spots are easier to secure, and this leads to turtling. It's also easier to balance - metal doesn't suddenly become 4x more abundant at T2 (adding 28 with every metal spot) - it's a slower cumulative increase that you really need many metal spots to have a big boon from.
Furthermore, if the latter happens, it won't be up to the players to have to try and retrospectively balance the game's economy by changing metal distributions. This should obviously still be a feature, but a metal-rich planet currently provides practically limitless resources on small areas. We should be able to have metal-rich planets and yet still need to expand. That means lower metal from each mex.

I disagree with your assessment that the metal nerf I am suggesting wouldn't result in huge armies. Currently we have so much metal that we have a great big surplus that our Power struggles to keep up with. Metal should be a controlling factor in growth where Power is not (but again, could have been if UBER had gone down the solar/geothermal/tidal/wind route). T1 armies in particular are cheap as chips - the suggestions I'm making only reduce a T1+T2 Metal spot by 14 metal apiece (35 to 21).

seems that most everyone wants a nerf to metal output and general availability...

Wait, are we talking about the balance of the extractor (That I agree with you all) or how the extractor has two pumps and therefore should produce twice as much as a single pump extractor?

Because the asphetic of a building should reflect it's stats, not the other way around.

I agree.
I only used the aesthetic to illuminate how illogical the quadruple increase in metal production is between the T1 Pump and the T2 Dual Pumps. I suggest elsewhere that this may not be enough, and rates of 5-7 per pump could be considered as further reductions.

The reasons we need this reduction are to increase the need for map control, thus lengthening the mid-game expansion period and preventing the battle to acquire resources becoming a race for the huge boon Tier 2 currently grants.

Metal is the control factor - it confers the advantage if you have a wider territory, caps growth rates and build times, and forces us to leave our bases and duke it out with our bots and tanks.

Having too much metal means we run rampant in our separate corners of the world, rushing to get a massive T2 Metal boon from our nearby clusters and then dump all that into Snipers/Vanguard drops/Nukes when in fact we should be spending metal throughout the game on armies, trying to secure more territory and more metal - not going straight for the expensive end-game micro-intensive strategies.

Ow believe me, I am more then aware buddy.

But tanks for the brief anyway!

I know you are pfft. I wanted to make clear my brain hadn't entirely dissolved beyond the confines of its corn-flour wrapping .