Internal Playtest Recap – Commander Changes, Metal Extractors, & More – 1/27

I think it may help. As it'd require more steps.

I think simply making advanced metal extractors only produce as much as a basic metal extractor (7 per second) or maybe a little more, like 14 per second, would be a great way to balance. Compared to the 28 per second that adv metal extractors produce now.

More steps = more micro.

a "little more" is a 100% increase? (which means 300% total under the prereq that it is built on a basic). If anything, adv extractors should add 4 metal per second. (only worth building on well defended grounds)

Advanced is still an upgrade, and I remember being told that advanced will never be an upgrade to basic by the devs.

Thanks to area commands there would be no micro. It'd remain the same as how they are now.

"Fabricators, go." And bam, they do everything for you.

Basic Mex - Cheap but very fragile. Vulnerable to raids and targeted strikes.
Adv Mex - Armoured, can withstand some fire. Produces only slightly more than basic, but isn't especially cheap.

So the incentive to upgrade is still there, however it doesn't overshadow expansion as the primary method of expanding your metal economy and acts more as a consolidation mechanic than economy expansion. You would only consolidate later, as the increased cost outweighs the economic benefit (vs building more basic extractors), with the main advantage being the increased durability.

Yeah, even if nothing else changes, I'd like to see a reduction in output along those lines. At 14 mps, it would pay for itself in under 90 secs assuming the cost of the extractor wasn't changed, and produce half the metal that a matching investment in basic extractors would bring (1/4 the metal output of the proposed cheaper basic mexes).

I bet the devs are really kicking themselves in the *** for saying that too.

Not at all, I believe that is still their goal - look at the evolution of Levelers; they started out a strictly better Ants, and now have a distinct place. It's an iterative process.

How about if the T2 mexes have built in anti air and land defenses with additional armor.

Uber has certainly done a very good job of it IMO, but people still keep hounding them about it. They got themselves into a bit of trouble by talking about the game in absolute terms early on, and they've had to deal with a fair amount nagging because of it.

Well, the advanced mex rather obviously has placeholder values right now. It costs 4x as much and yields exactly 4x as much, which is ridiculous. It literally pays for itself just as quickly as a basic mex does.

In order to even be in the ballpark of reasonable, it needs to be vastly less efficient because of its higher yield. Equally efficient is a tremendous upgrade due to the higher yield on the same number of mex spots.

If PA advanced mexes cost 10,000 metal and yield 14 metal, they would approximately parallel the Total Annihilation moho mexes (which were 1,500 metal and yielded about double, or 2-6 metal). But even in TA the moho mex exhibited the same behavior, it was just slower due to the higher cost. For PA, this could be implemented by making the advanced mex alone yield +7, since the basic mex underneath can work at the same time for an additional +7, for the cost of 10,000 metal or more. Still, I prefer it being a shell with improved armor only, and no increased yield whatsoever.

If advanced extractors are going to be included, they need to be at least as inefficient as TA moho mines. Ideally, they should be less efficient. They're just not a dynamic game feature. Marginalizing them could work, but it would be simpler just to say there is exactly one method to get metal, with one cost and one efficiency, and the basic mex is that method.

Just copy pasting the balance from TA only makes sense if we assume that:

1. Total Annihilation had perfect balance
2. The units in PA can be matched to TA counterparts and scaled appropriately

Personally, I don't think either of those things are true, and I don't think that Uber should be locked into trying to emulate everything that TA did.

Am i the only one being unhappy with the way Aircrafts move ? They move like land units.
Bombers move so much more realistically with nice curves.

I've been in situations where the sim was slowing down to 4FPS with tons of units on a single planet. So while many people believe Graphic engine and network bandwidth are the major root cause of low FPS in late games, it seems to me the one thread / on planet can quickly become the bottleneck, especially on large radius planet and with a balance in favor of quick and large expansion. So knowing optimizations are in progress on the server side is good to know.

There are many many optimizations yet to be made both to client and server side.

Really looking forward to it.

I'm currently working on building 10k Doxen. I'll give a full report on what happened in a bit. As a spoiler though, it did pretty well up until about 4k units.

That's awesome!

I love stress tests like that.

Be sure to post pics and video if possible!

Uber is working hard on stability.

Here's a quote from Uber Meta on how they improve stability.

So with each and every patch the servers become more stable.

Alright, first the summary report.

PA Stats Info

Finishing Client FPS 3-6
Server/Sim FPS: .5
Time Running: 11hr 28min 58sec
Planets:
1 x Size 2 Moon
1x Size 4 Moon
Units on the field: 10041
10k x Dox
20 x Bot Fact
6 x Pgen
5 x Bot Fabs
4 x MEx
2 x Met Stor
2 Teleporters
1 x Hum Com
1 x AI Com

RAM used by PA.exe: 7.9GB

Pic for confirmation, with a video to follow tomorrow:

Holy cow dude...

I like to call this: "Dedication"