Turtling with t2 mex trumps map control and expansion

It's been suggested before. I'd be fine with a nerf. We'll see though.

The top ranked players keep on expanding, even when they get Advanced Economy. Just sayin

What your asking for is just not possible. When the game gets more devoloped like "40 player games" metal will not be abundant enough to give every player a fair chance at a fair game.

T2 extractor is only a t1 extractor with higher output. So let me ask you this, are you willing to handicap your own eco because there are too many people on one planet fighting to expand? Or would you like to have a t2 mex so you can stay in the fight.

How much ground in a large game can you effectivly control? Im all for expanding, but im against any rts that makes you struggle to fund your war effort. Nerfing the mex is not needed.

It's very unusual to come across a game where someone is suffering from too many resources. But PA is basing all of its eco growth on an exponential system. Resources can't start good without ending up insanely high. Welcome to the magic of exponents.

Could the T2 extractor be toned down a bit? Probably. Would it hurt anything? Not really. Could the T2 function in some other, unique way? So far nothing good has come up.

My initial reaction right now is just get rid of the damn thing. MOHO was originally for low-metal situations, but that doesn't apply. Anything that can be spammed in one situation can be spammed in another.

If you want some sort of cost for upgrading income at least don't make it so over powered. A good starting point that is intuitive would be double the basic extractor. But even that is a lot, if you have 200 metal that becomes 400 metal which is infinitely much more. I'd say maybe 150% is a better value.

The 7 metal income on the base extractor is already ludicrous as it is.

upgrading mass points. problem solved. instead of building on a mass point *twice* you'd just build once and your economy would follow suit.

this, however would also require the use of power consumption on mass point on a general basis, otherwise you can afford to take them all to tech 2 for "free".

At 200 metal income, you can do a bunch of stuff.


At 800 metal income, I can do everything you are doing three times. And I still have 200 metal to do what I please with.

At that point. .. there's no advantage to turtling. I win the war of attrition. Any battle I technically lose, I win, because I can afford those losses and you can't.

It's really that simple.

You go for double nuke snipe? I have 2 nukes, two anti nukes protecting my commander. And 4 other nukes.

The cool thing about current t2 is that a small well established base can become a thorn in your side because it is very difficult to just steamroll.

A simple solution to tone down metal income by 20% would be to make it so to metal can't be built on top of t1.

Edit: sniped

T2 mexs are over powered Yes but in major or games with a lot it is not enough but on a 1v1 i see were you are going

The problem is that this isn't just a straight numbers game, nor is economy just an equation of "my metal income > your metal income :. I win"

at 200+ metal, build time becomes a significantly more limiting resource and a significant metal income advantage takes time to actually build up advantageous dividends. The issue isn't that a player can turtle with 200 metal and become an unbreakable bastion. It's that a player doesn't need to expand beyond 200 (this is just an arbitrary number, by the way) to win, and that expanding beyond that point doesn't actually offer any tangible or significant gameplay advantage. If you have 800 metal income, then you'd need enough build power to make that metal income matter, which means your factories would need to build lots of engineers (time that could otherwise be spent building combat units), your engineers would need to build more factories, and your power usage would expand exponentially to support that increased buildpower. All those things require metal, which means now suddenly the difference in our income isn't so large anymore, except that you've taken the extra build time, extra build power and extra macro focus (which is also a significant resource) to accomplish that, while I've sat pretty on my small cluster of T2 mexes and maintained my focus on producing and applying combat units. And after all that build up of yours is said and done, your economic advantage will be entirely negated if you lose a few power gens (no longer have the energy income to support the buildpower) or lose a few engineers. Your macro focus, and combat units will also be spread thinner, attempting to protect a much larger territory of expansion mexes.

Very few people could actually optimize for a 800+ metal income while also managing all of the significant macro and micro aspects of combat

T2 is fine that it allows a slight advantage. It doesn't have to be a raw number's game.

The real problem is what 25 t2 mexes produce. Nearly unusable amounts of resources.

I played a game last night, an AI nuked me down to a pocket of 12 mexes. It was a lot of metal still, but I was able to consume it with a very high production cap.

That 12 should probably be what 30 t2 mexes produce. Because with work, one can get ahold of that many metal points.

That being said, I turtle, but I turtle expansively and widely, and I think I could survive if t2 mexes were lowered that much.

Really, this is beta though. They haven't changed the numbers from alpha yet (except number of metal points). They haven't attempted a new number at all, you are complaining about a placeholder number.

If you think betas will be entirely complete, your guna have a bad time...

Major problem is still how random metal spots are, sometimes you spawn with 3-5 and thats ALL, unless you go miles, then other people spawn with 10-20 thus you already lost the game, based on that.

Its a shame you cant like use energy to search for an uncover more metal spots. Or that you could boost metal extracting at the cost of energy or something.

I'd like to say two things. I have been in games where people turtle and rush to bombers and win games. Or turtle and rush to nukes and win games. Doesn't work all the time, but its far from a losing strategy. Not everyone can pull of a strategy to the same degree of success. So I sort of agree with the original poster, it is possible.

2nd thing I would like to say, is that I would like t2 metal extractors if possible to be needed only when you run out of room to expand. I would like t1 extractors to be more cost efficient than t2 extractors. Only reason u would build t2 extractors is because you no longer have room to expand. But it is possible if u can expand to match a t2 extractor economy. That is the aspect that I feel is missing. Its impossible to beat a t2 economy with a t1 economy. Its also very difficult to run t2 buildings and produce t2 units with a t1 economy, as you really need 4 times as mexes.

Also one other problem, usually not enough space on a planet to build everything u could build, with a maxed out t2 economy. I have no idea how to balance this. That is what I would like to see.

Part of the point of being able to choose where to spawn is that you can choose the best spot on an otherwise random map. The current choices aren't much of a choice.

I say if there's two players it should each give you one entire half of the planet to choose from, with maybe a no mans land inbetween to avoid spawning right next to each other by chance.

200 metal income is 6 t2 metal extractors, which was the number someone quoted.

You forget how many fabbers 1 factory on infinite build gets you. However, going wide is mildly harder - you have to go tall first, then go wide, or else you can't protect your main base.

I utterly disagree. I have played against people in FFAs with that strategy, and used it against people in team games. Note that I am by no means good.

I still find that energy is a much greater limiting factor than metal. I've been using the entire game to build the extra stuff I need (more factories, more power, etc.). I've used long build queues and forgotten about them. My combat units aren't spread thinner. My expansion mexes are utterly expendable. It gets to the point where people drop nukes on my power and my energy drops from 105% to 98%. I had one big push against me, which just fizzled out because they had to march the entire width of a power field. The wider you are, the more attrition your enemy has to take.


That's the point entirely. If I do a big attack on you that does 200 metal per second worth of damage, you need to spend 100% of your income fixing it. If you do a big attack on me that does 200 metal worth of damage, I can spend 600 metal per second fixing it in 1/3 of the time it takes you, and I can keep on matching everything you are doing.


If you go "tall", sure, you can put more focus on not building engineers and instead building combat units. But because I'm wide, I can take losses. That's the point. Any losses wide players take reduce their economic advantage. But they're still ahead. Any losses tall players take increase their economic disadvantage.

Because of the long queue function, I can place an equal focus on applying combat units.


Essentially, if you go wide, you rely on the Russian Winter and attrition to defeat invaders into your territory. The amount of territory you control turns into an early warning system and concentrated attacks become less useful because they start doing damage against stuff that is redundant. If you go tall, you *have* to protect everything you have, and one nuke/one attack that breaks through your defences can be absolutely devastating.

The problem is energy is a bigger bottleneck than metal right now, you don't HAVE to control the map to be massively overpowering the enemy.

Expanding feels like a waste of player attention right now. Maybe if metal points were more spread out and not so clustered so you actualy had to pay attention to them rather than just grabbing the two dozen closest to your base and putting T2mex on them before focusing on endless T2 pgens which are the real constraint on your economy.

Then once you force the enemy off planet, you drop T2mex on every point on the entire planet and forget about metal for the rest of the game, simply building more power. You could in theory build more factories and more units to use more metal faster, but then you'd just cause lag, and at that point in the game the difference between having 1,000 and 10,000 units is much less important than the difference between 10 and 100 units.

I get that you guys want to preach against turtling. But you don't even need full map control to break a turtle. Just a slightly larger base with the metal you have being spent more efficiently. If you want people to be fighting over the entire map, make Metal worth something.

I feel like the core of the argument is that:

A. harassing an opponent who controls a decent amount of metal spots (with core ones being T2) has little to no effect (or at least feels this way for the harasser).
B. Once T2 is reached, expansion becomes less incentivised. Sure you can gain a LOT more with little gain now, but you are already pumping out T2 bombers every 0.5 seconds, so what's the point?
C. Efficiency of economy just doesn't feel 'right' in its current state. Everyones trying to play a numbers game in this thread if i have 300 metal i should beat your 100 metal, but in game units are also a commodity and the amount of resources you spend expanding, as well as time taken to expand, need to also be taken into consideration. Metal isn't the only stat in the game. Everyone want's metal to be more valuable than it is currently (i guess?).
D. By the time someone has enough eco and forces to break defenses and go after their opponents eco, they can just kill the comm. (in my experience anyway)

Other than simply number tweaks on how much a T2 metal extractor gives you, i propose a different approach altogether. Get rid of T2 and have only T1 metal that slowly upgrades itself over time. Every X mins. This both incentives aggression and expansion, as well as turtling and defending your mexes. It adds another layer of skill to the game. This may also break stalemates. A turtler who never grabs extra mexes is forced to try raiding an aggressive expander or lose the economy war eventually. By the same vein, an expander has to try and crack the shell of a turtler to prevent a possibly infinite climb in eco. Suddenly getting just 1 T2 bomber through that AA line and bombing a single mex of a turtler is HUGE. It's no longer 'oh i'll rebuild it in 2 seconds and have the eco back' its all the TIME investment as well. As well as it being vastly more important for an expander to attempt to defend their expansions so that they stay ahead.

Not sure how viable it would be in PA, maybe a different playmode? or mod at launch?

Welcome to all opinions, as well as any problems people can see with it.

extractors that level up literally ruined supcom2 more than the game itself initially ruined supcomfa

Ahh - not preaching against turtling. Just 400 metal income is small.

There gets to a point where energy isn't actually important. It becomes priority war. See comments below.

I disagree with this disrespect for numbers game.

If I have 300 metal, I can reduce my energy efficiency to 33%.***

The most important resource in this game is time.

After I have reduced by build efficiency to 33% due to energy, I can still do *exactly* the same stuff my opponent is doing, in exactly the same amount of time. Plus 2/3rds worth of other stuff. Energy isn't as limiting a factor as is claimed.

***Essentially due to the way the numbers work, you can reduce your build efficiency to *ridiculously small values*. Provided that you aren't speaking about an urgent period of time, but a longer period of time, reduced build efficiency is actually better than full build efficiency.

E.g. Someone is building pounders out of 1 factory. Other person is building pounders out of 3. Both have the energy eco to support 1 factory. Person A has 15 metal, Person B has 45. *For sake of example*

Person A: Pounders take 10 seconds to build, 5 seconds to roll off.

Person B: 3 pounders take 30 seconds to build, 5 seconds to roll off.

So after 35 seconds, when person B has 3 pounders roll off together, person A is 5 seconds away from their 3rd pounder completing, and a further 5 seconds away from it rolling off. So they are 10 seconds behind.

Note that every power gen that person B builds speeds up their production on everything. Including more powergens.

Person B doesn't even need to use his whole eco. He can just have a lot of redundant metal income. Which of course means that losses to the metal income aren't important. It's the same basic answer to defense from nukes in your energy - spread your energy out.



Personally, even from a "oh, I expanded but never used the mex" perspective, turtling doesn't give you the advantages in intel and redundant economy that map control/expansion does, and it's not a significant time sink to send spare fabbers off on expeditions.

Is that not a matter for concern? That there is no balance between expansion and consolidation?

I don't see how they ruined the game? i like that mechanic. I didn't even think of that until you brought it up. But i would like more opinions than 'it ruined the game' that's a toxic statement, if you told me why it did in your opinion then it would be more constructive towards warping the idea into something better for PA.

Anyway, this would be different in that it wouldn't require any more economic investment other than building it in the first place.

As for Stormking, that's my point exactly. Time is really the major factor when it comes to eco. It's currently the most valuable resource in the game, however the extreme amount of metal T2 mexes give mean that you can put so much eco into 1 building that the only lost time is the rolloff, if player A also has 45 metal and inputs in 3X buildpower via engies, then its 3.3 second build time and 5 seconds rolloff.