The Advanced Metal Extractor Specialisation ideas

I like the turret idea, I don't think the AMEX as it is needs to be nerfed. At that point in the game it is very easy for the enemy to snipe it with bombers, so it's a valuable structure that is going to require resources to protect in any long game.

It pays for itself in exactly the same time frame as a basic Mex (43 seconds), and then gives you x4 the economic advantage for no extra cost. AND it has a bonus to its health, making it tankyer than 4 basic Mexes.

It's not any 'easier' to snipe than any other structure and the fact that it's giving you a crap-tonne of free Metal after just a 45 second investment is ridiculous.

I'll bite.

The issue with allowing players to consolidate their economy instead of expand it is that games like this (SC, SC:FA, TA, TA:Spring, PA) make consolidation ridiculously easy. IRL, consoldiation usually isn't even improving your production assets, it's securing them or building more of them. Consolidation in "Annihilation" games is, by default, easier than expansion and results in the same, if not greater monetary gain.

This needs to stop. This kind of consolidation rarely ever happens in a realistic economic model. Hell, I wouldn't even call this consolidation; it's upward expansion.

And I wrote an entire post justifying this and then the internet ate it. Okay, I'll just sum it up;

+Consolidation and expansion are two heads of the same coin; logistical functions that increase your metal income
+Expansion is limited by the amount of metal points you possess AND enemy aggression. Your enemy has AGENCY and is capable of limiting your expansion.
+Consolidation is limited by the amount of metal points you own and your tech level, and NOTHING ELSE. Your enemy has NO AGENCY, unless he makes an all-or-nothing push on your base, you can consolidate freely.
+Consolidation often has greater, more predictably positive returns than expansion, and to this end, it is much easier and safer to invest in consolidation; past a certain point, you can just stop expanding entirely and consolidate.
+This reduces and discourages conflict, active engagement and fluid gameplay. To this end, consolidation as we know it has to be either REMOVED (no AMEXes at all), or REWORKED (super-fragile, high-risk AMEXes that are extremely hard to defend even in a fortress-like base).

Not only that, but you have to reduce the 'bonus' you get from an AMex from the x4 that it is now to something more reasonable... like a +3m/s bonus or something. Not a multiplication of the standard Mex, just a small static improvement.

That's if you want to keep the 'upgrade' style of Economy though... which clearly many of us do not want.

Honestly, for me it's a complete non-issue. Both mexes still have their place. and its nicer than endlessly managing a research tree.

Both mexes have their 'place'. It's just that one is made obsolete by the other. That's wasteful and unimaginative.

That's what we have a problem with. It's wasted potential.

I would like a t2 mex that can:
-Screw you if you build it, like how upgrading t1 mexes to t2 would make sense if the cost put you negative for minutes after built so if you are hit hard right in the middle of upgrading a lot it might cost you game.
-Plausible strategy to never upgrade, as in it's upgrade is never required to continue thriving
-Strategy is required to decide where and if to upgrade, where will it provide benefit or not provide benefit.

Upgrading it's health to make it durable but not it's income, or increasing cost to make it a sinkhole of metal before it ever benefits you, or making mex upgrades be a choice of boosts for it with one choosing which ones by where the mex is located, are all examples of that.

A t2 mex that survives 2 raids that would have killed a t1 mex, produces 4x metal, and after first establishing t2 can be placed absolutely everywhere in no time, is what everyone aims to get as fast as possible, with higher priority only going to obtaining the most metal spots on the planet in the first place (and that is only because more metal spots obtained = more t2 mexes later).

Semi-related hijack:
From your signature ("The Zaphod Limit")....

As phrased, the Zaphod Limit really depends on the competing players. Two competing newbies can reach the Zaphod Limit not because they max out their economies but because they are both equally terrible at it and therefore their strategic decisions actually determine the game.

The real definition should probably be "The point where players can no longer improve on build orders or economy". So two newbies can be competing strategically but really they both have a long way to go on economy before their strategy matters against top players -- they are not at the Zaphod Limit despite their strategic gameplay against each other.


The point (and relevance, and general agreement with the bulk of your post) being that T2 mexes raise the Zaphod Limit significantly. I crush a lot of players now purely because my economy crushes theirs. I rushed T2; they didn't. I rushed advanced mexes and advanced energy; they didn't. Now their strategy hardly matters. There's little or nothing they can do to win when my metal income is rapidly going to be over 4x greater than theirs (the first few T2 mex placed creates an immediate and huge gulf between that player and anyone who isn't doing the same thing).

Granted the whole TA genre has largely been a game of explosive economic expansion but we'd increase the importance of strategy if we decreased the importance of the T2 economy.

What a lot of people don't realise is that TA, for all the good it did in creating (effectively) its own subgenre of RTS, had problems. T2 economy was one of those problems.

Who cares about noobs Who can't manup.

The question is whether or not "manning up" represents an interesting strategic choice or is just routine.

Claiming new metal spots = strategic choice. It can seem routine against a passive opponent but an opponent that's properly raiding will turn all metal collection into a part of your strategic game.

Upgrading metal spots to T2 = routine. There's no decision here. You just do it. There's nothing interesting about this choice and therefore it's not a good gameplay feature.

Wrong.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/get-rid-of-the-tier-2-3-mex.53542/page-3#post-819945

The only matter of contention is how much T2 mexes cost. It's either 1200 or 4500 depending on the wiki. I haven't checked the data file.

Either way, do you often find that you run around building mex that you expect to lose in under 200 seconds but more than 30 seconds? Because that's roughly the window where it makes sense to build T1 instead of T2. "I think I'm going to lose this spot in exactly 2 minutes. I know! I'll build T1 mexes here! Ohh thepilot, you are so genius!", said nobody, ever.

Add to this the present situation of defenses, where 1 pelter and a couple of missile towers and a couple of wall pieces can hold off pretty large numbers of Ants and Doxes and you're looking at a situation where there's pretty much no reason not to rush to T2 and start upgrading all the mexes. Your extra 10 tanks will do exactly nothing for you while my new T2 mex and assorted other T2 benefits start paying me off very rapidly.

Errr.. You've never played a 1v1 competitively right?

Are we still talking about PA? I've been discussing PA. Are you aware you are in the PA forums? Did you mean to be in the forums for some other game?

I love how you can overquote in this forum if you're too lazy to edit the quote.

I'm not sure about the origin of the words, but -
Newb - Noun - A player who has just started to the play the game. Lacks experience, but may have a wide range of intelligences, intuitions and opinions. Shortening of "Newbie," an old English word.

Noob - Noun - A player who is resistant to learning and adapting - one of the few times it is politically correct to describe a person as "retarded," as that is the functional definition of the word. "Scrubs" are a subcategory of Noobs that deliberately refuse to adapt and grow. May also be spelled "n00b." Shortening of the word "nobody," I think. May just be a perversion of Newb.

Anyways, to my point - A Newb is an excellent example of the Zaphod Limit. In fact, two almost-equivalent newbies going at it is a more pure example; at extreme high levels of play, the game can be decided by missing the movement of a single unit, if a bomber mis-drops, or if a player forgets about an expansion. The game is decided by bugs, inconsistencies and natural human limitations, instead of the intersection of two strategies.

And economy is indeed something that heavily affects the Limit, which needs to be rectified. Two fun facts you may not know:

The Moho Metal Maker in TA actually was more efficient, convenient, and a safer investment than the Mono Mine, which made metal spots useless lategame as players built up farms of these things.

In SupCom, once early-game territories are decided in the initial engagement, because of how effective defensive tactics are in that game, it is more efficient to BUILD METAL STORAGES to buff your T2 Extractors than it is to attempt to take even a few spots for T1 Mexes. This is only true in 10+km^2 or more maps though, and usually only in team games; 1v1s were the only example of varied, strategically dynamic games in SupCom.

Edit: Before he tells me, this was rectified in Ze_Pilot's FAForever, but as usual I don't care about FAF.

Idk, I admit in this game, like I said before, that the only thing that can beat a t2 consolidated economy is a very aggressive t1 rush for land ownership, getting more metal points early on, raids to gimmick on the enemy economy, and then ultimately your multiple t1 metal points keeps up with their t2 economy while your t2 economy doubles what their maxed t2 economy can do because you have twice the t2 mexes up. The only sad thing about this is that it shouldn't end up being this way time after time, and the rushing nukes and nukes being so solidly good in this game don't help because even a weak but early t2 can get to nukes before a wider-spread t1 can get to t2 and nukes.

Generally, the biggest problem is 4 to 1 for advanced mex to basic mex. I can't believe it is even passed as reasonable argument to say that it is fine. 2 to 1 is what I would test with if I were Uber. That is generous enough. The health is reasonable to encourage using it to "fortify" as much as "increase economy".

I mean, in my opinion of enjoyable balance, they have several options on the table. The ones that just require number balance, are either: decrease the income of advanced mex so their isn't such a massive gap between a t2 and t1 economy, increase the cost to make upgrading "volatile" as it leaves your economy temporarily crippled and vunerable to attack and the enemy can exploit this so it would be a gambit while still retaining it's massive edge, or weaken it's health so with the extra income comes extra sniping and extra need for defence and thus is also a gambit.

They could always just make it an optional upgrade though by making it some useful niche bonus, which if you buy everywhere all the time it wastes metal uselessly, so you would by default always go t1 mex unless you need the t2 mex's niche so badly your willing to pay for it.

I kept reading this and wondering what this had to do with my American Express card

Which is why you call it t2 mex.

The entire RTS genre is a game of economic expansion. There are very few RTS games which don't depend on management of your economy. There are very few RTS games where you win by not having a stronger economy than your opponent.

You need to scout your opponent, you need to find out what he's doing, and you need to be able to be in a position to start rushing T2 or a nuke in return. If you're going to devote all your resources into a large amount of T1, you need to be able to do enough damage to the opponent to do lots of damage to his economy, and you need to immediately get on making your economy top notch. If you don't get rushed you have to assume that your opponent is booming his economy. If you get rushed you have to defend the rush while also booming your economy, possibly in another direction.

Every RTS game has the issue of economy. It's not new. The Zaphod limit didn't change. Instead of building offensive units, you built up your economy so you could boom and shine late game.