How Would You Feel About Advanced Mexes?

the more mods the merrier =)

I'd ask how this interacts with overdrive. Can I turn a 2 m/s mex into a 6 m/s mex? A 6 m/s mex with 0 overdrive will pay the investment of a fusion reactor back in less than 3 minutes. I think a regular geothermal plant will pay back in less than 1.8 minutes.

I'm against advanced metal extractors. It would shift the gameplay towards staying back and being passive, which is already a phenomenon that makes large team matches problematic. To the contrary, I would rather have mexes slowly degrade their metal production since they are taken, so fighting for mexes becomes even more important.

Advanced mexes add a significant amount of fiddle for very few decisions. Economic decisions mostly involve deciding how much to spend on increasing your income. Having a lot of "options" for growing your economy barely impacts the decision making, since once you decide how much to spend you should just do the best thing. There are some decisions to make made in trading off different payoff rates, and whether to invest in your base or out in a more dangerous area. Zero-K already covers these by the choice of when to make the Fusion/Singu jump, and when to "upgrade" field mexes by adding Solars. But overdrive operates on one axis - energy income - so it isn't too hard to optimise.

Once you add upgradeable mexes, the economic options split into two axes, where how well you're optimising your income depends on the product of your overdrive and mex upgrades. See BAR for the result, or even better, see Ashes of the Singularity.

Redoing overdrive would help as well. In larger TAW its easy to be stuck with under 15m/s for majority of the match. People play passive a bit I think also due to this because losing units can be a disaster as it takes forever to replace the army lost.


Advanced mexes just seem like it would be a easier way to get metal to the team instead of spamming huge amounts of E. Then OD can just be another layer after.

One could look at the problem of metal starvation in huge TAW games as stemming from inappropriate map choices for the player count. It comes at the same time as other "problems" that stem from this, such as highly constrained and spammy battlefronts (some see this as more fun though so I guess it's a matter of taste, however, it is often a divergence from the way the map is designed to be enjoyed).


An alternate solution to the metal starvation problems in big TAW games could be to push TAW into more suitable maps for player size, or, if it's already the case in some way like big maps showing up more in the vote, to be more restrictive in ranges.

Each map could have a tag of "suitable for X to Y playercount"

The 4vote random map selection could stay within those ranges.



This would require the most upfront work, but ultra-ideally the range tagging could have multiple priority layers, which could lead to less "you have to fix this" work in the future:

Zero-K Admin Assigned > Map file itself (by map author) > Placeholder auto-tagging based on a formula that takes into account mex income and to a much smaller extent geo spots.


Admin Assigned Ranges being an option that could be turned on and off on a lobby basis.


Then again, right now, the lobby is ultimately responsible for re-voting until a suitable map is found, and it mostly works according the sensibility of the lobby, I think? So, ultimately perhaps something that would be strange to prioritize doing something about. Maybe we can verbally push players more to choose appropriate maps in TAW. And if maps just aren't suitable for 16v16... well...

Metal multiplier can help with starvation issues. I think advanced mexes could be fun as a mod, especially if they did something more weird than just make more metal, but against it for base game.

ZK eco already scales well enough to late game on overdrive alone.

Do we want denser late game unit clusters? That'd incentivize artillery, nukes and no-mans land between two sides that race to get a superweapon.

More units in play also means more performance issues.

Perhaps we can just have a test lobby with a advanced mex that grants a 2x multiplier and just see how it affects gameplay.

To me upgradable mexes just opens the door to a new hellish experience in which "eco" players drag the team down by attempting to simultaneously rush e buildings that are too expensive early on combined with income reduction for the whole team as mexes shut down during the upgrade process.


If you're tried of games in which all the fronts die while singus are built only for said singus to explode before they make cost in OD, you don't want to add even more opportunities for players to screw the team over.