PTE Build 76412-pte now live (updated with new build 12/16/14)

I agree. Air should be no match for naval units. It currently ruins the naval play with air beating naval. It's all about units not being too versatile. Naval should be slow and tanky (high health and firepower), with air being fast and fragile. There should however be anti-naval land units/structures that can be built along the coastline to protect against naval bombardment (if you choose not to build naval units yourself to counter, there should be land alternative for defense).

There is. Overkill on Pelters.

They outrange naval T1.

Or cats. Those are even better, but against T2 naval there is nothing.

Ooh! More dox changes! Maybe we won't be able to micro them so well now!

?

EDIT: Oh, catapults. NVM.

I think this one is going to be problematic

But the rest are great!! Love the changes, they are all heading in the right direction.

Thought that one was self explanatory. Ground AA is now better at killing the thing which kills it, and Air AA is better at killing stuff that kill it.

Hmm trying the energy auto management on fabbers seems broken?
I made 5 fabbers and a factory, had the factory build stuff and the fabbers build stuff. I put the fabbers on "auto" and build stuff. Once I reached -3k energy they just stopped working and never started again, even after I started to waste energy. They should pause/unpause multiple times a second and while we're at it we need the same for metal stalls as well. Actually especially for metal stalls, as currently fabbers just waste energy not actually doing anything.

Another peak at the -imho- broken energy mechanics:

fabbers vs factories in energy costs:

laser turret
350 metal
35000 energy if build by t1 fabbers

that equals:
7,78 dox that cost 15750 energy (t1 factory)
2,33 bolo that cost 15750 energy (t1 factory)

to produce those extra 19250 energy you need to run a t1 pgen (which costs 450 metal, so 45000 energy if build by t1 fabbers) for 32 seconds.

Energy wise a t1 pgen also btw takes 75 seconds to pay back it's energy price (if build by t1 fabbers) before you gain anything from it.

During the 75 seconds it takes before I have any advantage from a newly build t1 pgen my opponent could use the same energy to build like 15 dox (energy wise, metal wise 10) and attack me with them, given a planet size of less than 700 or so he probably will have the 15 fox at my door step raiding me somehow once my pgen has yielded the first actual energy win.

Now a single such pgen doesn't even produce enough energy to run a single fabber. For that I need close to 2 t1 pgens. YeY! I can run a fabber and you can throw like 30 dox on it to raid. Guess who'll win.

And now imagine you have 50 fighters, your opponent has 30 fighters and 20 bombers coming in to snipe your commander. Your fighters will take care of his fighters and his bombers will take care of your commander.

Guys this might sound stupid but how do I build you unit cannon? I have the right PTE as all the other changes are there, but I can't find it in the menu, even though I built t2 fabbers.

It doesn't have an icon yet, it will appear as a broken image box.

I didn't see any broken Image box, I thought that might be the case so I tried clicking on all the blank spaces in the menu but nothing came up.

...And your comm will shoot at his bombers instead.

I've discovered that Air snipes are not nearly as effective as they used to be in the PTE. It's not a coincidence, methinks

I am doubtful you want your commander to only shoot back once the bombers are in range, in some snipes it won't be able to shoot them down by itself. Basically to protect from snipes with this you will need ground aa units, even if you have a lot of fighters.

Not sure if good or bad really. Interesting for sure.

Edit: Picture didn't save the first time...

And this is the tricky part I told you. It really depends on the situation what is the best strategy to pick the primary target. (You can not escape this. If you prioritize bombers, you can "tank" fighters with bombers to gain air supremacy)

Let's face it, in the light of this, the strategy to pick what ever can kill you first seems reasonable, even if it does not fit all cases well.

criz.

I don't see that square on mine. The Pelter cost was 900 and there were secondary colors, the unit cannon just isn't there. I tried to upload a picture but I said I had to many whitelisted links or something.

I'm not doing PA stuff right now, but do you think you could compare how snipes turn out with set amounts of bombers in the PTE and stable, with and without fighter cover?

It's nice that it considers metal!
However I don't think that logic is going to help a lot. The turn off condition I agree on, stop once the storage is empty. But the turn on condition is waaaay too careful. It creates lots of situations where my "low priority" engineers basically do nothing even though my storage is filling. Having a full storage is really bad, as resources should be forged into tanks, not stored in a bank, thus the auto economy system should not consider a "full storage" as a condition like that.


I would've thought it is more like this:

excess_energy_storage = CurrentStorage.energy >= MaxStorage.energy * 0.8
excess_metal_storage = CurrentStorage.metal >= MaxStorage.metal * 0.8
not_empty_energy_storage = CurrentStorage.energy >= MaxStorage.energy * 0.05
not_empty_metal_storage = CurrentStorage.metal >= MaxStorage.metal * 0.05
excess_energy_income = Produced.energy >= Demand.energy // ignore how it will look like after the turn on happened!
excess_metal_income = Produced.metal >= Demand.metal // ignore how it will look like after the turn on happened!
// turn on if our storage is close to overflowing or turn on if we have more than 5% stored on metal and energy each and our economy is positive before the turn on happend.
TurnOnAutoEconomy = (excess_energy_storage AND excess_metal_storage) OR (not_empty_energy_storage AND not_empty_metal_storage AND excess_energy_income AND excess_metal_income)

And I'd hope this code runs at least once per second, or better once per tick.

So turn on once the storage is filling and above 5% filled. Ignore how much resources will be used afterwards.
Why?
1) If the player puts more stuff into auto he gets into a situation where the auto demand is so big you never have "excess income", even though your storage is filling in a rapid way.

2) It's horribly inefficient to wait until the storage has filled before starting to build again. I am quite sure that in many games, especially at higher skill level, players rarely fill their whole storage. So a unit that has turned of off in auto economy will very likely not turn on again any time soon.

So instead I expected it to do switch on again once the economy balance before turning it on is positive and there is a little resources in storage. It then builds for a short period of time and then turns off again. This way it doesn't take away resources from the important stuff, but it works together with a player that tries not to fill their storage, which is normal behavior for good players.

I think with that "active on X% of storage with an X below 10 it'll be a very powerful and helpful mechanic.

Now I can see the disadvantage of this is that the economy will jump around between the 2 states.
Personally I am perfectly fine with that, but I think there actually is something you can do to make it easier to manage even for people that actually look at their resources while playing and ask themselfves "why?":

That AutoEconomyDemand.energy and AutoEconomyDemand.metal value. Give it to the UI. Show to the player as part of the resources.
So the player knows "currently I have that low priority tasks worth that much, so my economy may jump around by that margin".
This also allows players to consider the cost of how much low priority stuff they have. Otherwise players might "forget" about the resource usage of turned of low priority things as they never get turned on again. It's probably also a good idea to directly show if the "low prio" stuff currently is turned on or of in the economy info for the players. So the player knows if how much worth of low priority builders he has and if they currently are doing anything.

Rather than introducing auto-economy, we need a management panel like I have mentioned in previous posts. We need a better way to manage our economy manually.

If you introduce a time machine ability so players have the time to think about it while playing