Rethinking the Resources - Energy

In light of the thread onstandardizing engineer resource usage, I believe it's worthwhile to challenge some of the assumptions about energy as a resource.

I believe Energy should be used only to make things go. It should be a true power source, not a secondary build resource. Energy should be what makes your factories run, your engineers build, and your base defenses fire. Supcom / TA did this with a few things, but due to the massive fluctuation in energy usage to build things, the effect was obscured and energy becomes simply a second build resource to manage. Energy has always been a secondary concern - as long as you had enough it didn't really matter if you wasted some. Lets make it a primary concern and shift its role away from production!


This would have several benefits: it would simplify the task of balancing units, make it easier for new players to understand construction costs, and would tie energy usage much closer to what you're doing with your units.

Rather than having a variable energy usage that changes with every unit in a factory that gets built, you would be able to know ahead of time what your maximum energy usage would be for your base, and plan accordingly. With a good interface you'd be able to see at a glance how much power your base generates, how much it could potentially use, and how long you can fire your weapons if you're not making enough energy.

It would make it worthwhile to engage defenses across a wide front, and if the balance was done right it could make it possible to have a dynamic where a concerted long running battle would drain a players storage until the attacker was victorious.

In TA, very late game, energy as was probably used more for weapons than it was used for building units. A Vulcan or Buzzsaw could eat almost 10k energy per second, nukes ate 1k energy per second per silo, and the Radar Targeting Facility ate 1k/second.

I had the same thought myself. The only question is, if factories drain energy to run then isn't that effectively imposing an energy cost on building things?

Someones forgetting about metal makers

As I said, there was a mixture of the two ideas in TA / Supcom. However, the very fact that the 'late game' was where you saw energy drain from weapons large enough to have an impact on your energy illustrates how energy is treated 99% of the time as a simple 'second resource'.

TA also had the issue where you could never 'charge' weapons - if you didn't have enough stored, you couldn't shoot. This was purely due to the global economy system where units could not have their own internal buffer of energy to shoot with.

The main difference is that you disassociate the cost of the unit from the cost of running the factory. In previous games, it was pretty much impossible to predict what your energy expense was going to be, and units with a high energy cost could suddenly and unpredictably make your energy nose dive. This was glossed over by the fact that you'd almost always have a surplus of energy anyways, but it doesn't make it less of a design flaw.

Metal makers are perfectly possible in my proposal. You'd even be able to manage them more effectively because your energy usage no longer fluctuates based on what you're building, but rather who is doing the building.

I think this would take a lot of the skill out of running an economy efficiently. I understand why you want to simplify the economy, but I don't think its worth doing at the expense of high level play.

This would have quite similar effects to tying build time to cost. It shares the same major downside of removing a balance lever - remember the change to assisting nuke silos between supcom and FA? They multiplied both the build power of the silo and the build time of the missile by a large number. The result was that the silo built nukes on its own at exactly the same rate as before, but the far higher build time reduced the effect of assistance dramatically. Stuff like that can't be done if each type of builder has a fixed build rate no matter what it's building.

Please define what sort of high level play you're talking about. Turning mass fabs on and off? . Skill is making sure you have no wasted mass, and that you produce things as fast as possible with as little waste as possible. How does changing the role of energy affect any of this?

I could use your same argument to claim that we should add 'precious metals' and maybe 'research points' to the resource pool, since it will add balance levers! The goal isn't balance levers, it's balance.

Your example also illustrates perfectly why people have a hard time understanding flow economies. There are too many arbitrary variables that are poorly communicated to the player, and that change from unit to unit.

All that being said, by making Energy a first class citizen with a distinct and unique role separate from Mass you will actually be ADDING options to balance units by making their energy usage relevant.

Building excess energy plants counts as wasted mass.

Not in an environment with mass fabs.

Unless you build the perfect amount of mass fabs at the right time, yes you do.

I support this idea. Always good to make every mechanic more distinct. They should at least make an alpha build with this feature to see how well it works.

I'm for having a clever use of energy to balance things.
Firing with laser should use energy. Just a little for small weapons, a lot for big ones.

I would go further and say that, if there is any exeperimental units, they should have an energy upkeep.
It would give incensitive to only have a few in your army.

Since this was originally my proposal to Pawz, I should probably chime in.

The idea is that energy runs things, like Pawz said. But consider the energy usage of a factory building something in the current TA/Supcom model. Units under construction would consume energy very quickly if they were expensive, and slowly if they were cheap units. The energy consumption was a function of the energy cost of the unit, the build time of the unit, and the amount of construction assisting going on. In the proposed model, the energy usage would be constant per factory regardless of what you are building. And if you want to assign construction assisting units to the task, each of them would consume a fixed amount of energy during the construction as well. It would be MUCH more intuitive how much you can afford to operate because E would be an operating expense, rather than a building resource. You'd never have that situation where you have a factory queue which switched to an expensive unit and suddenly your E usage would spike way up. That simply would not happen. But your Metal usage would indeed spike. That's ok because Metal is for building, where Energy would be for operating. That's the distinction. Incidentally, factory E usage could very well be moderate to low compared to things like energy weapons.

Once this model is established, you could THEN balance the game around the new purpose of Energy. Because its for running things, E has a very singular purpose. You build enough E gens to operate your equipment. No worries about suddenly running out because of your build queue. Your weapons would function properly if you made sure that you balanced your E production and storage with your units which consume the stuff. It would bring a MUCH more stable arrangement to the game.

Additionally, there could be a concept of units requiring energy to actually move. Not sure how well this would be received, but consider the idea of charging up your units if they are inside your territory (or a certain distance from energy storage structures) and each unit would have an internal battery. If the units strayed outside of your home territory, they would have a limited amount of time before the energy ran dry. This would radically alter the combat dynamics of raiding parties, and give a strategic home-field advantage that would be quite interesting if properly balanced. You could even make mobile energy storage units that could accompany armies far from home so that they could fight longer than usual without having to return to recharge. There's a lot of possibilities with this.

One thing I would love to see gotten rid of is the idea that combat units had energy and especially metal storage that contributed to the entire pool. I always thought it was ridiculous in TA that you could have jet planes out there flying around and fighting, that stored energy which could instantly be used back at your base to construct something. I'd much rather see unit batteries only able to help that specific unit out, unless its a designated energy storage unit, in which case it could help other units.

Overall, I'd encourage everybody to really consider the role of Energy in the game. I do think it would be best to switch its role as an operating expense and not associate it at all with unit cost.

Oh god, you want to give everything fuel?

Probably only in a mod, to be honest. I doubt a main vanilla version of a game should have that concept.

But such a concept isn't as scary as it sounds, really. There's lots of ways to automate this so that its transparent to the player but still has a strategic impact. Things such as auto charging when in range of friendly storage structures. Clearly it'd require a lot of careful balancing. The idea isn't to add micromanagement as much as its to give an operations range to your units. Something where they perform better when near support units, and worse when they are far away from support for extended times.

Mostly here I'd rather focus on Energy itself being an operating resource rather than a cost of building a unit.

It'd basically be a huge buff to turtling, I find aggressive games with lots of raiding and constant back-and-forth struggle much more exciting.

To be honest I'm not a huge fan of the overall energy idea either. As I pointed out earlier the main effect would be very similar to the other big economic change suggestion of locking 1 metal = 1 energy = 1 build power like zero-k. Yes is simplifies economic management, but I think economic management is a big part of the challenge of TA/supcom style games. It means you don't have to think about where your engineers should be, you can always pump all your build power into what ever you want instead of having the big important stuff (ACU repairs, high end factories, top of the line power plants, experimentals) chew through your reserves if you overcommit.

I agree that it can be fun to give energy a strategic role.

I think base defence is a good candidate, in Dune 2000 for example you needed power to fire your missile turrets and operate factories at full speed. But cannon turrets would fire without power and factories would run at half speed.

In SupCom & FA when power reserves went down you lost shields, artillery, T4 lasers and radar but the turrets kept on firing. I think this was because it was too much of a downer to lose everything to an invader because of power fluctuation. So I dint think its true that energy did not have a critical role in that game.

Another idea which cropped up in a different thread on resource localisation was the idea that energy could be used to transfer mass to distant builds eg on an asteroid.

I support the idea that there should be units and structures that drain a lot of energy. I suggested this a couple of days ago in the mass fab thread.

Energy allocation should be a strategic decision and a limiting factor on certain decisions right through to the late game. Should you turn your excess energy into metal, spend it on shields, support another antinuke laser, or use it to run a force of cloaking stealth tanks?

I would be interested in seeing units that would become stronger when more excess energy was available, for example faster shield recharge or maybe activatable special abilities that use a one time large amount of energy.

Definitely don't want units to have fuel though, don't know where that came from.

The "energy as fuel" idea is more of an illustration that energy can have more uses than as a construction resource. Again to repeat myself, I'm not suggesting that PA employ this in the stock version. Might be an interesting mod feature but no, don't get distracted by this.

The main point here is that I'm trying to help you all understand the concept of removing energy as part of a unit's cost in its blueprint. It would totally not be there. But instead, the factory would have an "energy operating cost", which is a very different concept. Its not just semantics. It would smooth out the energy consumption model a lot, and solidify energy's purpose in the game. With energy out of the picture in terms of a major construction ingredient, you could balance all the energy producers and storage units such that they provide means for all your stuff to run. Shields, weapons, etc. And when you attack someone's energy grid, it could have a big impact on their ability to fight. That's a good thing, and it forces a person to protect their energy grid sufficiently.

This is more than simply making more weapons that use lots of energy. Its streamlining energy's purpose and fine tuning its balance around operation rather than production. Hope that's making more sense.