To me they seem to give too little power and you need an absurd amount of them to run anything decent early game.
I like it, adds a real need to build up sufficient infrastructure to keep things going. Makes build space a resource to be managed, thus making territory important.
Expand more. They build pretty fast if your eco is not in the red. Build more factories when your economy is not suffering.
I agree. They should produce more energy. The Realm Balance mod has T1 pgens producing 650 energy and it works a lot better.
To be fair, there's a lot more that RCBM does. Our Fabricator numbers are normalised and predictable (and in easy multiples of 2 & 5), not to mention that we use energy a lot more with the Ammo system, meaning that you still require an energy farm from time to time, but it doesn't kick in as a major restrictive factor until you begin large-scale army maneuvers. In the early game however, it's a lot less punishing and you have more options as to what you wish to build. The gated flat balance also means that you're less likely to pick up a duck while you build too.
Yeah, I do like how the Realm balance mod lets up on power per pgen, but then gives you tons of toys to opt to use to spend tons of power, which are great toys but also present a vulnerability, and other tools to manage your power in case you lack it and still need combat force.
This issue arises from a fundamental design choice in the economy system (energy usage is fixed). - Fixed energy use forces mobile constructors to be less efficient than factories by necessity. - The game starts without a base. - Bases HAVE to be built from mobile constructors. - Therefore, the earliest stages of the game demand the most energy (relative to any other stage). There's no way to change this without changing the entire economy system. The only reasonable option is to patch the issue by giving the Commander a good enough construction power to help the early game. But then again, anyone could have figured THAT out. A slightly less invasive fix is to make stationary construction different from factory construction in some way. The least invasive choice here is to make structures universally build faster, or have factory assisting universally be slower. That way mobile constructors stay effective at building structures, without overshadowing factories. Alternatively, a more skilled dev could realize that the huge surge of early energy demand peters out as production moves to factories. This frees up energy for more advanced units to use.
One thing I'd like to see- generators becoming much easier to build / cheaper for production- but make them Volatile. It will make them very tempting bombing targets and will discourage people clumping them up so much...
Honestly given the way Energy is and what it's used for it should already BE a tempting target IMO. Mike
Tempting? TEMPTING? I'm always looking for a way to drop a large army inside my enemies energy farm with little resistance. It's like the golden egg of a 1v1 - you take down their energy, suddenly their growth is cut in half or fourths.