Would you like Metal Makers in PA...?

POLLOPTIONS! I refuse to vote.

No metal makes means simpler games/less strategies. We can always mod them in, and if enough people accept the change maybe patch it in.

Metal makers reward a player for having excessive amounts of energy. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

It may be worth waiting to see how the gameplay turns out before adding in any sort of second economy. It will get players on the field directly contesting resources, which is where you want the balance testing to be done. If there's a point in the game where players go "the game stalls because I have no metal!", then it's worth looking into.

Still not sure how we are expected to spend the resources of a gas giant without metal makers.

The main problem is IMHO whether it's possible to have a metal maker that is balanced such that you can use it for turtling or bootstrapping a tight starting economy, and at the same time not be required in addition to expansion to be most competitive. I'm not sure it actually is.

Or in fact, if building a fab is cheap enough for early game usage in metal tight spots, why isn't it cheap enough to just spam at the higher levels? It probably is. Can you even balance this in a way that makes sense?

The suggestion that turtling is not a valid strategy however, is ridiculous. Why would you limit the playstyles in such a way?

Turtling is going to exist no matter what. It is a natural consequence of having poor intel and a generally poor ability to play RTS games. At a higher level, turtling happens because players don't have any potential moves to make. That's a terrible thing to have.

Metal makers shouldn't be concerned about issues with turtling. Rather, they should be concerned about problems where players don't have enough resources to fight. We currently don't know when it will happen or even IF such a problem exists. But if it does become a problem, then we will need something more than extractors to fix it.

It doesn't look like much of anything is going to happen on a gas giant. Around a gas giant is a different matter entirely. There are potential moons and platforms to build bases, but there are three problems with that. If space is tight you won't have any room to place generators, if metal is tight you won't be able to afford them, and you might need lots of energy to fight between moons. He3 energy fixes all of these problems by providing lots of energy, without hogging land space, and for cheap.

Personally, I like any option that makes a player think about grabbing territory and holding it. Metal makers seem to wreck the incentive to hold territory and establish forward bases. In TA and SupCom I pretty much have to fall back to pairing power plants with metal makers. Kinda sucks to have mex be an early game strategy that you can easily abandon later.

Why not give the metal fabs a diminishing return? Have check to keep track of how many you have an say for each one over X number start globally reducing how much they produce for the player.

This way they cap out at a point that may let you keep your fight over normal extraction points going (or maybe secretly arming that asteroid if your the games underdog in free for alls) but wouldn't significantly contribute to the over the top super economies you see in other games.

Arbitrary game balance features are the devil.

Why is my 11th Metal Maker worse than the first 10?

"Because Game Balance."
What a terrible answer.

Why metal makers are for turtling only ?

I still play TA with a small group of friends.
We definitively love having big big armies crushing together.

When playing we are not specially turtling but if you want big armies you definitively requires metal makers (except of course for metal planets).

(with have a 1500 units limit and sometimes it's reached)

I think it's just necessary on really big maps.

Of course, if you do not like exponential development gameplay, you'd like to forbid it.

I don't know wether someone already said this.

But maybe metal fabricators or makers could work if they could only be built in certain biomes. This would mean that endgame both players would need to fight for these biomes for example: metal biomes or gas planets. So the one with more aggression could claim those areas early on, but after that you can turtle up some more.

As long as Mexico the ideal sources of metal then metal makers would be ok as a last resort to fight back at at some one with a stronger metal economy

I think metal makers are so that on large maps with sparse resources can still have large metal economies dependent on energy instead of extractors.

Indeed.. I hope PA will never have these kinds of "solutions"

I think extractors with terrain that yields different rates of extraction is better than metal makers. To keep it simple you could have a base extraction yield and for all terrain and some areas that give a slightly larger yield. I would not put in any low yield areas. Just normal and normal+ (slightly higher than normal). It could be grey rock that is normal+. Not all planets have grey rock so not every map would enjoy this. Makes it more fun.

Rebuilt.

Every map being a metal map would not be fun. Areas with a high output simply encourages spamming a ton of extractors in that area. So it's better to have very small areas or fixed points where only one or two extractors would fit. Or where a larger extractor would fit.

A very general low output in some areas would be interesting, essentially the equivalent of fabricators. High mass input to build all the extractors to get anything useful out of it. High energy cost to run all the extractors.

I think that could work, and not every area needs to have this low output. Some could have none. Like, desert could have nothing, volcanic could have some etc.

I think you may have misunderstood what I said. Building an energy collector satellite/platform at a gas giant is not something anyone will be doing right off the bat. Basically, when you get to the point where you can afford that, you should have a fairly balanced economy. Once you set it up, you will have a massive influx of energy, but what will you do with it? Your energy needs will be either met or at a surplus in order for you to even defend yourself well enough to take the gas giant. Without metal makers, you would either be wasting massive amounts of energy, or have to have already taken a large number of metal nodes without the energy to sustain them for this all to balance out.

I see the metal makers as an energy wasteful (within reason) way to take advantage of massive energy sources like gas giants. I don't think that they should be viable independent of these energy windfalls however. In my opinion, metal makers may need to operate like they did in TA. Leave the increase in their energy penalty to alpha or beta testing to see if it is even needed.

Gas giants and thermally active planets should be highly sought after. Metal makers let them be capitalized on in a realistic sense.

All I can say is that lategame escalation is the worst use for fabricators.

You could balance them like they did in Forged Alliance. Make them the least efficient way of increasing econ. That way, you're always better off upgrading an extractor or simply claiming more extractor points, rather than "wasting" energy on creating mass out of nothing.

And yet Forged Alliance was even worse at dissuading the "Turtling to T4" strategy than ever before.