Why on earth would I want to open with pgen with a commander's energy income that high? If I get out several Power storages for the same metal cost and ration my early energy with just one bot factory, suddenly the energy is there for multiple fabbers to get an advanced factory. And a single T2 engineer assisting a vehicle factory = tank and inferno spam. Has anyone tried to work a strategy like this yet? Obviously you can do anything to the computer you want, but I'm just noticing how much those storages hold. One metal storage is actually worth it if you've got the metal income at 20x the storage of the commander. Pstorage... is only about 10x, so you need more of em.
A lot of people use early energy storage to capture the commander's early energy. IMO, storage buildings are undervalued buildings.
Using a double energy storage fac mex mex adv fac build sounds interesting. Won't work, but still sounds interesting.
Why would you want to open with a Pgen? It was boring when we first had to build eco before a factory. And I would not go for a t2 factory that fast because any somewhat offensive player is going to walk over you. What are you going to do with it anyway as T2 sctructures also cost a load of resources to get up. By the time you get youre eco back into the green, the enemy already has the rest of the map. The only reason I build storrage after a factory is in shared games because you loose more energy there with multiple commanders.
Where do you think I'm getting the resources from? The storages. You don't seem to realize how much power gets wasted by not going Pstorage first. What else am I going to do with it? I'm going to spam T1 vehicles from a proxy base using an advanced fabber to assist a vehicle factory. Did you read my post? I actually said what I was going to do with a T2 factory and that's make an advanced fabber to assist a T1 vehicle factory.
You save about 70k power if you build estorage first. 1 estorage = 1 pgen metal wise. To gain that much power with a pgen, you would need to leave it running for about 2 minutes, and since games generally go for longer than 2 minutes, people also tend to build pgens isntead of estorages. This isn't to say you should be building pgen first though, that is worse choice than estorage at that point. It's to say that building pgens when you need them and in anticipation of when you need them is better than estorage. If you build estorage first, you are missing out on ~1 factory worth of production, which can tend to snowball against you as you miss air and unit timings.
Storage primary purpose is to smooth out times of little consumptions agaisnt times of peak consumption. The commander storage capacity is quite honestly abysmal. SupCom somewhat goaded us to make more storage via the "storage near source = more income" mechanic. SupCom 2 abolished the Storage capacity totally. Currently the first build should always be a factory. You simply need to start out with those first. You need the extra buildpwoer from fabricators to fuel your expansion. Those expansion constructors do indeed have long phases of 0 resource use, with short bouts of high use. So feeding them more of storage then generators is surprisingly interesting. With the Rolloff time even facotires are consuming in phases (of course the idle times are a lot lower). So much it could actually have an effect on metal throughput. But overall those have a much more constant drain. While storages can be quite usefull during the early and certain late game phases, overall they do not replace a p-gen. As you get more advanced quite a bunch of continous power drains will appear - radars, radar-sats, factories of all kinds and shapes, artillery (wich needs effectively continous power while having a target). The goal is ultimatively to not waste any metal or power (with power being slightly more "wasteable" between the two). How usefull the Storage is mostly depends on how much resources you have in the first place. The less income you have, the more important is it to capture those unused parts that happen while a factory is in rolloff or a Engineer is en-route. Early game or in low-metal income situations they can be what makes you make or break. A few certainly belong into every larger base. And one of either kind can capture quite a bit of reosurces early game.
I always go factory first, but I make one of each storage with my comm right after it. Beyond making use of your commanders production early on, if you put storage in multiple locations, your economy has a nice big buffer if someone say, wipes out your jig farm. I've lost all my jigs in a game and recovered my economy planetside without ever dropping below 100% efficiency because I had so much metal and energy stored. By the same token, if I can't find their commander while I'm in their base with an army, I'll make a beeline to their storage.
If you can have one of each, then its better to have 2 factorys. Factorys are the exact opposite of metal storage. They suck metal out of the system opposed to storage which allow more to be stored. If you are on top of your game, you should not be storing metal.
Storage allows you to do burst spending to get more expensive things before you have the economy to do so on a surplus. Or, to put it another way, storage lets you have a bigger economy for brief periods. That's pretty powerful when you need to build big stuff like T2/Orbital factories or even Halleys and Nukes.
I see some people are getting at what I was thinking with opening with a Pstorage. What I'd like to try in its place now is see if I can't fuel two factories with assistance from commander on both by keeping him in the middle of the two buildings and having him on patrol point so he assists both factories. On a one planet 1v1 I think that's the current build anyone does... I'll see how that feels then try Pstorage first and factory second with Pgens afterwards. Though, I'm a bit spoiled by the computer because it doesn't seem to understand it has enough for a factory first...
