Energy costing unit and building weapons

Remember in TA how units and defenses would cost power to fire their powerful energy weapons and shells?

I loved the idea of taking down an opponents defenses and artillery by hitting their power plants, and feel like it has been reduced in SC1-2.

And I loved the idea that with enough power my defenses could rapid fire, thus promoting a great power economy (At the cost of more power plants being harder to defend).

Is this a good idea, bad idea, other suggestions?

Thanks for taking the time to read this, have a great day.

This is a perfect example of how limitations, not abilities, create gameplay.

Basically this exact line of thinking is behind all the arguments about logistics, including fuel and ammunition. Energy-consuming weapons can be shut down by taking out the enemy's power generators. If power is localized, then this can be done by taking out their nearby power generators. I am not recommending this as a model, but that is the theory. Introducing more limitations of this kind introduces more approaches to tackling a particular problem, more variables to consider, and more tradeoffs and decisions to make.

Energy consuming weapons is one possible way we might create limitations for powerful assets that create tradeoffs to using them. I would be in favor of a more robust system than a mild drain on universal, or planet-local energy reserves, but it is a simple system with definite advantages.

Indeed, and thanks for taking the time to reply.

Damn ledarsi, you were clearly shown, across many threads that very few people think fuel and ammo is a good idea. Why do you insist on turning every thread you reply in into your personal soapbox.

This thread isn't about fuel or ammo, it isn't about local/global economy, there's threads for those already. It's about energy using units.

About that, I think its a good idea for some units. Such as defensive structure and artillery.

I don't see a big reason not to have this. It's cool and not every weapon that uses energy has to use loads of it.

Now, transporting units between planets having a good energy cost is another idea.

Hoverboard don't work on WATER unless you have POWER. Er, I mean everyone knows you can't fire a bertha without some power!

Indeed, but I also refer to things like the GAAT Gun/Sentinel Heavy laser towers and the Dooms Day Machine/Annihilator super laser defenses.

High economy drain, but high defensive power.

Also, Its awesome that you replied to my fist topic, love ya buddy.

It's all a matter of scale isn't it? A high amount of power is still relative to the size of your economy. How much power does it take to move an asteroid around anyway?

Units requiring energy to fire is a logistical consideration. Especially for large weapons that use significant enough amounts of energy that you should build more than you would otherwise use.

I fail to see how I am turning this thread into a soapbox.

So just a quick note on catching players off guard.

Lets say you have 100 anti air turrets around your base (SC1 turtle game I've seen it). They all cost 20 power to fire. Now your economy is chugging along just fine when someone flies a T3 scout plane over your base triggering all 100 turrets. Suddenly you see "OH NOES! Down 2000 power! WTF just happened?"

Now imagine you have 100 anti air turrets that take a constant 20 power to be on. They still take up 2000 power but the player is more aware of it because as the turrets go up one by one they see their stream of incoming power go down and build reactors to compensate.

Both mechanics are more or less similar but with a constant power consumption people won't be caught off guard as much.

Also if units had a power consumption this could tackle some of the unit spam complaints I have seen. You wouldn't build a zillion experimentals if they all took 5,000 power apiece. And the "problem units", submarines and bombers, could have a higher power consumption.

What I would do is give everything in the game two sets of stats: a low power state, and a fully powered state. As long as your power stream is positive everything is in the high power state. But run out of power and things start going into the the low power state. Radar could shut off, rate of fire and speed would go down, special powers turn off, units with more than one gun could lose the use of one of them, artillery could lose range, etc.

Yes but this just makes energy storage a useful thing, your average power draw may be low with occasional spikes of high power usage which makes determining whether you want more output or storage actually an interesting exercise.

This was a useful post.

There might be resource storage. How about power storage, in the case that base defences and/or artillery can in fact be overclocked with a higher power consumption?

I think it would add a lot to the game to have a higher power setting for artillery/base defences. As well as an Energy Storage Building. You could choose the weapon's bare minimum power requirements and save you the power plant resources, you could build enough power to keep the weapon in high power mode, or you could build an energy storage structure and use it when you want to use your weapons on high only for a few moments (fire a massive burst or repel a massive army, then lower their power to recharge)

And don't say micro, because these things could easily be given a setting to always run low, always run high, and have a 1 click overclock button to consume "stored" power and run high until "stored" power is empty to run low again.

This would actually also cut down on micro. When power is brought down, the game should have a smart way to "decide" what to do with the power it does have. It should prioritize what it cuts off in order to restore power to the rest of the base. It should not power the thing you just built to exceed power until it can first be powered. It should kill late game unnecesary buildings first. It should attempt to thin out base defences, powering them from center outward and powering down stronger ones first. It should power down artillery before the defences probably. OF COURSE, the player should be able to manually change it by manually powering off buildings and manually powering back on others, or powering on the building and once the power is tripped the game knows to force something else off beyond the order.

No these mechanics are not "more or less similar". It's much more interesting to have stuff drain energy only on use, so their drain is proportional to their usefulness, and yeah it can potentially be abused by enemy which is a Good thing - people should be caught off guard once in a while if they do stupid things.

So yeah if you build a ton of **** with potential huge energy drain, make more storage to anticipate that.

I don't agree with basic defences costing energy to fire, because in a position where enemy tanks are swarming through your base killing power gens the last thing you want for an enjoyable game experience is for your turrets to stop working.

I'm all for artillery using power to fire, but if basic turrets used power it would be a slippery-slope mechanic too far.

If your opponents tanks are swarming through your base you've already lost. Also, the fact that he's targeting your power SPECIFICALLY so that your defenses no longer work efficiently is just good strategy. It's a small piece of the supply line topic.

I like this idea. What about adding it to factories? Though the high power state would have to be several times more draining than the normal state to be balanced.

In TA only the energy defenses drained power significant enough to drain the economy, normal laser towers and most other defenses generated their own power requirements thus meaning that only specific defenses would be economy driven.

I always loved how units used power to fire. This was especially telling when you started building multiple Bertha's to mass bombard the enemy. It just felt right to have these monsters put a heavy strain on your energy economy when in use.

I wouldn't want it any other way.

If you played TA at all, it really wasn't. Even your most basic turret, the LLT used power. You had to figure on building extra solar panels just to power your turrets if you planned on using many of them. This helped to limit turret spamming a bit which wasn't really a bad thing. If you did want to spam turrets and turtle, it was still very possible, you just needed to plan on building extra power to make that happen.

I am all for turrets and weapons costing energy to fire. It was a big feature of TA, was pretty key in FA (especially crashing a player's economy to turn off radar and shields), and it makes energy storage important for running your crazy-*** artillery batteries. If it could work in TA, I really don't think it would present any problems in PA.

I would like to add the important point that, if the game is using planet-to-planet mass/unit/kaboom cannons, the energy cost should be variable, as it costs a lot more energy to fire units up through a planet's atmosphere and up a gravity well. It won't need to be an accurate calculation of that energy cost - but it will be necessary to make sure that it's easier to throw rocks downwards from the moon than it is to shoot rocks up at it from the planet's surface. Particularly with unit cannons. Possibly the game can make a simple calculation based on the fired unit's max hp, the cannon's location class (gas giant, in orbit, regular planet, moon/asteroid, atmosphere/no atmosphere) and its destination.

If firing things has no energy cost, we might end up in the situation where planets can shoot units at the moon, or other planets, for free. Which would leave me wondering: why bother going to the moon? Planets are much easier to mine...

Well, aside from everything that has already been said. Particularly about resource storage. Power in particular...

Most large weapons of significant energy consumption would be built in a hold fire stance and only when the player commanded would fire. Weapons with ammo would also be set to hold fire stance because of the cost of ammo and build time.

Weapons that only use power when firing (or using special abilities for that matter) are the obvious choice for efficiency. And on a galactic scale this is going to be an even more important word. Not using power when you aren't fighting means you are either able to store that power or utilise it elsewhere. Sure having a fighting force that constantly consumes energy so you can budget for it is neat, but it's not a) realistic, or b) resource efficient. All those power generators you built that are cluttering up your bases powering idle units are just a waste of space. Furthermore, if you can't power your defences because you didn't do the maths with the power generators then that is YOUR FAULT. Not because the game is badly designed.