The Mexes must be upgradbles.

So this is being brought up again...

Using the word "must" in your title is a bit... demanding.

Because no, they don't *have* to be that way.

I strongly strongly disagree with the idea that metal extractors can upgrade themselves.

I very much like having it so only fabrication units can build. No other buildings in the game can upgrade themselves, so why can metal extractors?

It makes much more sense on several levels to have it so only advanced fabricators can build advanced metal extractors.

First off, this makes the step up to advanced all the more critical and strategic. If you don't need an advanced factory to build advanced metal extractors, then there's much less importance in when you should build that factory. This GREATLY increases the level of strategy involved in Planetary Annihilation. Why should I build an Advanced Factory when I can just have an advanced metal extractor as the second building I ever build?

Second. If metal extractors can upgrade themselves, why can't energy plants? Or factories? Or radar? Or anything else? It doesn't make sense that one building type can upgrade itself and other buildings cannot. It makes much more sense this way from a consistency and lore standpoint.

Also. Having it so fabricators must go around the map upgrading means there's yet more strategy involved. You must protect your fabricators and attack your opponent's fabricators.

I like the idea. It makes the game easier and reduces micro by a lot.

Overdrive has been tested in complete annihilation and works very well.

I don't know much about Overdrive but it seems like if you manage to destoy a lot of you're enemies pgens he will lose the economical battle completely. Since the planets are round flanking is easier. (You can't build you pgens in a corner on a sphere.)

Mavor is heavily against upgrades.

I don't want anything to upgrade, really. Advanced units are not supposed to be an upgrade from Basic units. As has oft been repeated on these forums, Advanced units should be specialised for specific situations, whereas Basic units should be general purpose.

I would extend this principle to metal extractors too. Assuming the Basic mex remains the same, I can think of any number of possibilities that would make an Advanced mex follow this principle:

• Higher metal income, but very fragile.
• Lower metal income, but reinforced and/or with some means of fighting back / punishing raiders
• Same metal income, but has energy-draining stealth equipment hiding it from radar and possibly even cloaking it from sight until units are right on top of it.
• Having a metal extracting range, same income per-deposit - e.g. 4 metal spots nearby, build one building in the middle and it extracts from all 4 spots. Makes it more efficient to build this in high-metal-density areas, also more fragile.

I don't think that this game should force players to 'tech up' at all. Having Advanced metal extractors being 'simply better in every way' than Basic metal extractors, in my opinion, completely goes against this principle.

I've been thinking about it and I don't really like Overdrive because it doesn't really make the player want to expand. In fact it makes them want to turtle.

Think about it, because you can make one mex spot do the work of several with enough power, why would you want those extra mex spots? You have a few right here inside of your base, safe and sound, and they provide just as much metal when you've got enough power.

And then you want to protect all your precious power, so that makes energy even more important than it is now, which I think just exacerbates the problem of people not wanting to expand and instead turtling in their base to protect their more-important power and the metal they do have.

With the current advanced metal extractors yes you can get more metal out of an already-secured spot, but only once. You upgrade it and then it's done forever, unless it gets destroyed. You want more metal? You have to go out and take it from the map or another player. It drives interaction.

Another problem I see with Overdrive is it sort of turns the game into a version of Starcraft 2 heavily dependent on knowing the inner workings of the game. "Okay, you build this many factories, and then this much power, and you don't build any more factories until you have this much power because you'll screw up your overdrive bonus"

Overdrive has poor granularity which results in strategically uninteresting maps. Killing a T2 mex is significant. Killing a mex that's being overdriven isn't because the load is spread across all of a player's mexxes. It also encourages spreading out power meaning maps turn into a giant homogenous mess of mexxes and pgens with no points of strategic importance. Given that PA already has a problem with map homogeneity, this is clearly not an improvement.

The issues you have with overdrive is to do with balance. In Zero K it is always better to build a new metal extractor then it is to build more power. Building extra power generation only does a little to boost your metal income. And each new power generator will increase your metal income less and less to the point where you don't notice it.

If you kill an advanced metal extractor when you have 5, it will be a big dent in your economy. If the same happens when you have 50, I doubt anyone would notice the difference.

You overestimate the power of overdrive. Yes all the other extractors get a little more energy, but the amount that adds up to is insignificant compared to the out put of the original metal extractor.

Also how does it turn the planet into a mess of mexxes and pgens with no points of strategic importance? The only change would be a few more power generators and a larger surplus of energy.

And if you kill an overdriven metal extractor when you have 5 it means nothing since you can just overdrive one of your others. If you have 50 T2 mexxes, the game should have ended a long time ago and you should probably start actually trying to win.

And no T2 mexxes. Which means no centralised economy and no high value targets.

To be honest, when your eco is up to 50 t2 mexes you won't go for a single mex but a dozen if not the whole planet.

Did you read what I said? You will have significantly more metal income with 5 metal extractors compared to 4 with the same energy income. If balanced properly (as it has in zero k) then my statement is true.

As for your second point, its irrelevant. 50 advanced metal extractors on a scale 2 planet will mean you have won. 50 on a scale 5 planet doesn't mean anything.

If your only building advance metal extractors in your main base then your doing it wrong. They are as cheap as basic metal extractors (4*hp, 4*metal cost, 4*metal income). You start building them at your safest point and keep building them until you win/lose.

You might get lazy because it is insignificant and it looks like you will win. But if you are playing to win then you will try to claim every metal spot right up to when there commander goes boom.

The reason overdrive/metal makers are needed in TA is because each map only has a limited amount of metal spots. On some of the most played maps if you didn't convert your energy to metal you would be stuck on +9 metal income until you build a t2 factory.

That's the equivalent of having +38 in pa when going t2. I don't know how this game is going to progress with mex counts or map styles but in its current state I don't see the need for energy to mass converters etc.

I also think the upgrading of Mexes is perfect the way it is. Less micro too than the op mentions.

I'm pretty surprised. Somehow ledarsi managed to talk about overdrive without defining it and then have a reasonable conversation. I still think that I should define overdrive.

In general I would define overdrive as a system which turns your excess energy into metal without the requirement of extra infrastructure. I think everyone in this thread has been talking about overdrive as it applies to ZK or CA (the systems have a few differences). These overdrive systems are set up to reward expansion.

Basic Overdrive (without grid, for those that know) works as follows:

1. Every economy tick you excess an amount of energy which I will denote E. This energy will be used for overdrive.
   
2. If you have n metal extractors then each extractor is allocated e=E/n energy.
3. The metal income of each extractor is multiplied by sqrt(1+e/4)) for that economy tick.

I have left out a few details. If you have metal extractors which variable base metal income then it is simple enough to solve a PDE which maximizes the metal gained from overdrive for each tick. The equation in step 3 can be changed but it is important for it to have diminishing returns.

The effect of this particular equation is that if you pump 12 energy into a mex you will double its income. If you pump 36 energy into a mex you will triple its income. If you have a lot of energy income then constructing extra mexes is very profitable. The returns increase for each mex produced. This makes raiding and expansion very important throughout the game. Small differences in mex count can be quite powerful. This effect prompted the grid system to be added to ZK which effectively restricts overdrive to mexes which are at least somewhat secure.

I am not arguing for or expecting overdrive to be included in PA. I am interested to see what Uber does and they seem very adverse to adding mechanics which are not directly implemented by a unit. Although I do think they should do something which isn't the default TA system. The economy currently in PA seems very much like a 'default option', something which is implemented with not too much thought put into it. But I suppose this is also complicated by the question of how much of a TA remake is PA supposed to be?

Overdrive is a bit opaque to reason with but you never actually need to. It gives players a good and simple heuristis for economy construction. It is easy to understand the effects at a basic level and that is all you need most of the time. To use it really well requires experience but this seems to be true of any economy system. At least implementing decisions with this one isn't a chore.



I think the TA and PA economy have a massive amount of micro and calculation compared to the number of decisions made. I think any sort of metal-maker/overdrive/mex-upgrading system boils down to a single decision:

How much should I invest on increasing the income from my current territory?​

This question fights with many other decisions such as "how much should I spend on expanding" and "how much should I spent on raiding". But once you actually decide to invest a certain amount on base economy then everything else is micromanagement and calculation. Increasing your metal income from the confines of your own base is often very simple. There may be a distinction between "I want a bit more income soon" and "I want a lot more income later" but because income feeds into itself there is often little difference.

The TA economy look simple at the level of its individual parts, the structures. You have some structure, it costs X resources and makes Y resources. The structures themselves are simple but they can result in a very complicated economy in terms of calculating when to do what. This calculation leads to a lot of micromanagement as players have to remember how to implement their single basic economic decision. People probably end up making no decisions at all because the background knowledge required to do so is too large, it may be simpler for them to just memorize one reasonably good way to make an economy and run with it every game.

I've noticed that people like to suggest ways to make the economy more complicated at the structure level. Things like factory complexes and mex upgrades. Maybe these provide some sense of progression as you work your way up increasingly efficient ways to do the same thing. Unless they are very well designed I think more options will mostly lead to more wrong "choices" and tougher calculations. I am not against escalation but I think it should be done in a way transparent to players.

In short, what I want from the economy is a transparent mapping between my decisions about the economy and the actions I should take in order to implement those decisions. I think there are many ways to achieve this, overdrive is just one of them.

Why would you only have four left though? If you're just switching to T2 you'll have 20 mexxes at least, all equally valuable. Lose one and your income drops by less than 5%. If you have T2 mexxes and you're just switching to T2 you have 19 T2 mexxes and 1 T2 mex. Lose the T2 and your income drops by 20% which is far more significant. How is this such a difficult concept to grasp?

It only takes 3 Halleys to win a game. You don't need 50 T2 mexxes to make 3 Halleys regardless of the size of planet you're playing on.

The word you're looking for is "you're", not "your". They teach this stuff to primary school students. And your point isn't a point. At some point in the game your economy is centralised with T2 mexxes. It is never centralised with overdrive.

The difference is that the overdriven mexes exist all over your territory while your first T2 mex will be in the middle of your base and practically unassailable. With overdrive the first mex you lose will reduce your income by the most so it is the most important. This mex could be anywhere.

He might be talking about overdrive with grid, the system which ZK has had for a few years. But even without a grid your economy will be centralized in the form of energy and factories.

If the game is well balanced, there's no such thing as "practically unassailable" to someone who can attack in an unexpected way.

Factories are a poor target for raiding due to their high HP and ability to produce units to defend themselves. Energy is also a poor target for raiding with overdrive because it incentivises overproduction of energy, so losing energy hurts proportionally less than losing metal.

Daam no one have understood what i want to explain

We can have this without overdrive and with TA's metal makers.

The point of metal makers is they are tied to both your current metal income [as they aren't free] and they are also tied to your energy income, which is tied to your metal income, which is tied to how well you've expanded or how long you can defend or just be ignored. They are also a massive waste if the enemy can destroy them quickly.

IIRC a T1 Metal Maker took 60 power per tick, and a Solar Power Plant would make up to 22 power. It would take 3 solars [sometimes 4] to satisfy a single metal maker.

So, for TA, a metal maker would take 3 T1 power plants with some excess, ergo requiring 1500 energy.

The point of the metal maker is that it is less efficient than just expanding [ergo grabbing more mexes]. It's also more buildings that have to be defended. I'd also approve of building an advanced metal maker right on top of a normal metal maker.

Either way I don't quite like the idea of overdrive because it sounds like it will do things behind the player's eyes, especially the enemy player's.

Energy is an excellent target for raiding or surgical strikes. In fact, in ZK it arguably is the most important target for surgical strikes.

This is because energy infrastructure is expensive and difficult to replace. And destroying energy infrastructure has a huge impact on the other player's economy; you are affecting their metal income as well as energy expenditures like construction and heavy weapons.

This is completely wrong.

Overdrive makes expansion far more important than using advanced mexes. You cannot sit on just a few mexes and overdrive them to make up the difference because your overdrive will be extremely inefficient. Capping more mexes will spread out your overdrive over more mexes. Consequently, each mex will produce marginally less, but you will have more of them for a much higher total metal income.

Advanced mexes have the effect of making a player want to turtle, because they allow a higher metal investment on a smaller number of spots to produce a higher yield. Spending 4800 on four advanced mexes to yield 112 metal is better than spending 4800 on sixteen basic mexes, which also yield 112 metal.

Metal makers are also a flat exchange rate with a variable economy, like advanced mexes. Having more energy+MM's increases your metal income linearly, which makes it increasingly easier to afford the next fusion+MM combo and increase your economy still further.

However metal makers are much worse because they can be constructed anywhere and do not care about mex spots at all, just like your energy infrastructure. At least advanced mexes must be built on mex spots, which means after you have made advanced mexes on all your spots, you must expand. They just require fewer spots than basic mexes, and so care about territory less, and allow a much denser infrastructure investment than basic mexes. But metal makers enable a singularity-like density of investment; your energy and maker economy can be constructed all in the same place.

The MM system makes turtling on a small space viable, as long as you have a certain amount of "seed money" gained through expansion to start the process. And after you start macroing on pure fusion+MM, absolutely no map control is required. You simply no longer care about mexes at all.