Unlimited Assisting, Game-Ending Weapons and Factory Redundancy

No, I was just being dumb.

Overall economic efficiency doesn't come into it when it's a race to get a game-ender. Penny-pinching won't save you from a nuke.
I agree people should have flexibility - that's why I want Assisting to stay.

This would be an interesting experiment.

#misquote

A nuke.

You should never be bested by a singular, unless it's an asteroid and you have nowhere left to run.

And while squeezing a few extra tanks out of two factorys over one assisted one doesn't seem to be worth it overall, it's the bigger picture.

The non-assister gets a advantage from the get go, so the net gain only get larger once you get past the first two.

The same with the nuke, past the first two launchers the advantage will eventually reveal it's self, when the non-assisters eco bonus nets them additional nukes over the assister.

That is the power of a eco bonus, it gets you more stuff, for the same amount of money and time....hopefully.

While asteroids are another story, that might be harder to tackle, but I do feel like the advantages of both sides, or even a mix of the two should be rather evident.

That specific example, is that 200 fabricators building nukes means the cost of nukes is too fast to build, the metal is too readily available to aquire nukes near-instantly, and that the armies should be more cost efficient. The problem is 200 fabbers have ample metal, your metal should be used up at 100 at most, or preferably less.

Also, as far as factories go, they are already fairly cheap, you could run one with 1/10th what you put into a nuke, considering each factory for high production only needs 6 fabbers most plus the factory, any more suffers from rolloff time, which is good because rolloff time also limits assisting factories because you want no more than 6 per factory. Nukes could use setup time, where it takes 30 seconds to start building and 30 seconds to start each nuke after last one launched. Then you want more silos and less assistants.

I'm rarely bested by a singular to be fair. We have anti-nukes.
I'm bested by the dude who can make several nukes a minute - who can put his entire economy into Nuke-production, turtle and nuke anything that threatens said production.

I agree with you that overall economic efficiency does have an important role in long games, of course. My point was that games with Assisted game-enders aren't long, hard marathons. They're sprints.

Past the first two Nuke launchers, who cares? I've got nukes in the sky. Long-term incremental economic gains won't come in to it.

I still want Assisting and channelling economy for Rushed projects to be in-game.
I just think it needs some sort of cap to encourage expansion of the means of production which isn't reliant on Metal scarcity.

If I have Storage, Metal scarcity as a control mechanism goes out of the window. Unless it's so scarce I can barely build an army to play with I can just charge my Storage up and then out pops another Nuke. That's pretty much how it functions now unless we have an entire planet's economy to ourselves.

I don't think that Factories are imbalanced or too expensive. They could build a little faster independently.

Also to call Nuke-assisting with many Fabricators a 'specific example' is to ignore the fact that it's the dominant mode of play for anybody worth their salt. We saw it in the Battle of the Beasts, when unlimited Assisting wasn't being used to rush Snipers/Vanguards for micro.
Nor do I want to have metal-rich games dominated by Nuke-rushing tactics. Metal rich games should mean more armies first and foremost. But that means putting armies forth as the primary strategy, not Nukes.

Yes, SC2 is not a good example, since using more than 3 engies per factory did not make anysense...

I don't mind assisting at all, but it was also ridiculous in FA, have hundreds of T1 engies assisting a single T3 airfactory.

PA does not have differences of buildpower as seen with other factions in FA... but I would also like to build more factories rather than insane amounts of fabbers supporting it.

Keep in mind that the roll-off time from the factory is an important part in PA, you still need to build lots of factories.

Simple and true. If a unit takes 15 seconds to build and 5 seconds to roll off, you can only ever quadruple the speed.

And the stinger. And the skitter (vision). And the combat fabber. And the Sun Fish (vision). And the firefly (arguably, yes as fodder mixed in with peregrines).

That's not a bad idea on the face of it. To get the most build power to do X, build the specialist builders for X, aka factories. Say we have factories 1.5x as efficient (per metal cost) than fabbers, and costs roughly the same as now. Then we get:

In that scenario, quadrupling the T2 eco output and T2 unit costs seems reasonable.

To summarise, this is sort of metal limiting build power. And we already have energy limiting build rate. Sounds reasonable.

I do feel like nukes reuire quite the overhall to kill it's current binary nature.

So you might be more inclined to use barrages of 10+ nukes at a time to devastate entire continents that have been softened by other means.

This would still be a possibility in the system I propose.
In fact it would be more likely, as the Nukes would take longer to build and you'd need many Factories in order to have that many on-demand (as opposed to churning them out with Fabbers from one Factory). By the time you'd set that all up, you'd have had to been playing (and hopefully softening up) with quick-built armies.

one radical way would be turning energyconsumtion on fabbers into a constant drain even when not actively fabricting ... this obviously could raise a number of issues on requiring more energygenerators and more micro ...

This would also make the beginning of the game unbearably slow.

that i dont think so ... it would require a different energy output and drainrate of gens and fabs .. that i imgaine would be rather tough to ballance though ...

There have been other economic penalties as a means of restricting Assisting suggested, such as Assisting getting exponentially expensive. I prefer fixes which don't rely on the Economy getting hammered, because I still want my tanks to carry on being built.
Also economic penalties are mitigated by the fact that one simply builds more eco. And 'moar eco' shouldn't be the focus of the game in my opinion.
In any case you eventually arrive at the same state of affairs; the eco-penalties/resource scarcity only delay that point when you can build a nuke in under a minute.

Unless you also make the commander have a much larger Power Generation so you can run a few fabbers at the beginning.

commander would simply constantly producing an ammount of energy rather than draining it when building

For me, I'd like to see what happens if assisting fabbers only provide 30-50% of their metal rate (I'm not sure what the optimal amount would be), while still using the same amount of energy. The result would not only mean that more fabbers are needed to get the same assist rate - it would mean that heavy use of assist would require a truly massive amount of T2 pgens, to the point where you HAVE to spread them out, leaving some vulnerable.

As a result, an assist-based economy would still have to spread out, rather that being able to do all they want from the safety of a compact base.

If the original builder leaves the project, does one of the assistants become the primary builder?
And how do you distinguish the builder from the assistants.