I dunno, its a lot batter then having to build 20 engineers early game or lose, the cap is much better in my opinion, makes you control you economy more.
well about energy, you need to overmake it a bit... Metal is the limiting factor and its is used only on making more units Energy in other hand is used from fabrication to radar, defences, and other things that will help you survive Try to play some games on maps w/ less metal... why because there you will see how you can balance metal w/ energy like if you have 1 mexes you don't need a Pgens , but if you have N Mexes you will need M Pgens
The amount of energy you are limited to is limited the amount of energy generators which is limited to the amount of metal you have....so....
Right....which is limited by the size of your metal income. For any amount of energy you can only build X energy generators using Y energy where X is the total amount of metal (well actually it's probably 400x or whatever the metal cost for pgens are)you can pump into it and Y is the amount of build power that metal would require per second to facilitate maximum energy production. The amount of energy available for Y will constantly grow by constantly producing power gens, however X will not, thus limited by metal.
No I have so much metal that I cannot run enough workers to convert it into pgens at the early to mid stage of the game. So the amount of new pgens I can make is limited by my energy. So my overall growth is limited by how fast I can make pgens, not by how many mex I can take around the map.
Decreasing energy drain from engineers seems easier to balance than mega charging all the pgens. (not to mention makes losing even one pgen even more problematic.)