Hiya! This the mod thread for the Stiofan Eco refumble Github Repo, a part of the Refumble mod.

This mod is an experiment to try and get a little more interesting play and decisionmaking out of the overdrive system.

Solar, Wind and Pylon

Core idea is that gridding usually happens at a time when it is already very safe to do so and alot of possibly interesting play of risk reward gets lost from that.
And so I want to shift things to make earlier gridding easier/more accessible/more attractive, by allowing you to stretch the existing needed Energy structures out into a grid.

Solar

• Cost: 70 -> 50
• E production: 2 -> 1.5
• Cost per E efficency: 35 -> 33.3 (so slightly more efficent)

This results in more Solars needed than normal, allowing for them to be used for grid more easily.
Another benefit is that Solar walls are more affordable too, and have a good bit higher hp/cost efficency.

Wind

• Gridrange 63 -> 89

This results in existing winds one would want to make being much more useable for gridding. The increase about matches the increase in gridding efficency solar gets from its price drop (if my math is right o,o").

Pylon

• Cost 200 -> 300
• Health 1000 -> 1500

Pylon is sort of the least intersting way to grid, so I want to disincetivise it a little.Pylon is most interesting in the role of a costly lynchpin that the larger defences or contested supermex rely on, and so I want to move it in that direction.

Geo, Fusion and Singu

Another 'easy' incentive to give to gridding, especially over minigrids which were buffed by cheaper solars, is to make large central powerplants stronger. And so they are.

• Geo, Adv Geo, Fusion, Singu E production +20%

Caveats!

This is a blanket buff to solar minigridding, which runs counter the idea of larger grids being stronger.
Changing solar cost messes with peoples memory and feel of things.
Windfarms can be a lot more spread out, and less vunerable to chainexplosion.
Better big powerplants may not be necessary at all, but I'm curious how it would shift things.
More expensive pylon may be a trap and messes with peoples memory and feel of things.
And of course theres more that I may have forgotten or missed.

Adjusting the overdrive formula would also be something, but feels like something a little more delicate that i'd want to touch last if necessary.

Feel free to tack on related thoughts, feedback n ideas.

Yes, you mention the things in the caveats section of the post above :o

I am aware of I think most faults, but still think the ideas are worth entertaining. It's not a "this must be fixed!!" it's a consideration to eek out a lil more interesting interactions out of the systems we have in place.
And if we don't mess around, how will we find out?

The end goal is to let you grid a little more cheaply and earlier if you so choose, and enable tradeoffs for gridding that happens earlier and in a more unstable mapstate. And keeping the low tier E producers as good gridding options for a little longer.

The way solars are spaced is already really good so I don't want to touch that.
They are a slight obstruction but not a usually a too annoying one, they contribute well to the feeling of a base you need to play around/build op. In that sense preserving that feel and expanding it with more available solars is more important to me than the raw stats. A little extra grid on solar wouldnt be too bad either, some obstruction does still happen but its usually rare.

Solar walls, especially NOT for mex, are something interesting that I think would be worth encouraging more.
It came as a side consideration at first. I've observed and tried using it, and it would make for a seperate a unique tool to terraform walling. Its house walling in AoE2 or like most of the walling done in the starcrafts.
I found its use is effectively limited by how many solars you want to make, which is "as few as possible" or "as few as possibel to grid" most often.
And so the thought of more Solars being available/affordable to make came about, both for walling and gridding.
I doubt more solar walls would break something or change the pace of play too drastically or in an undesirable way.

1 solar or rather 1 wind per mex is still the most effective way to minigrid even with these changes, and arguably stronger with cheaper solars than before. I agree the feels are off for the easy 1 solar per mex on most maps though, but thats not too too too bad. Zk is very flexible with things like this.


Wind clustering still being a thing is the intention, being able to pack them very tightly is a very good feature with interesting tradeoffs.
Its encouragin the alternative or expanded use of Wind as cheaper more fragile gridding between mex clusters that is the goal here.
Wind can already do this, but its held by being just a little too obstructive to be comfortable. Units getting stuck in them depending on how they are spaced is a little meh, so it would be nice to move it past the threshold of having to ask your teammate to eat a wind so your big units can make it through the fence between to mex clusters.


The big E buff is a "may aswell try the simple option" type test.
Minigridding is currently probably the best way to use overdrive. Thats not necessarily bad, but pushes gridding into the phase of the game where it's a less interesting and interactive decision. More E in powerplants puts you past the threshold of "okay now its better to big grid" faster and earlier. Maybe this alone would be enough to encourage considering gridding from the start and using the available solars for it more? But the budget on how many solars you want is so tight...
I also wouldnt think this or the other changes lead to a faster exit to raiderphase. Fusions and such are usually around after the prime raiding has passed atm, do correct if I am wrong.


Touching Pylon range is iffy, since I assume at least some campaign missions rely on the pylon range being what it is. Solars changing E prod has this issue too, but I think it may be less pronounced, because few maps are built around it.
Outside of that its hard to touch anything on pylon outside of health and cost. I don't think pylon is in a particularly bad spot or would need changing, but its also not necessarily too interesting either.
There was an interesting idea thrown about in making pylons moveable via morph to a unit, or maybe sort of deploying on standstill, though transport could also be something.

Does this clear things up or pose more questions? :o

Interesting.

These to me feel like fairly minor changes.

On the topic of Solar walls, I think they aren't widely used because of how quickly they get outscaled.

A Scalpel will one-shot a Solar Collector. An Impaler will one-shot a Solar Collector from three map gridcells away. Five Ducks will burst the Solar Collector before it closes. Half a dozen Glaives or a pair of Reavers, controlled to open fire simultaneously, kill a Solar Collector in about two seconds. In short, most things that are worth the expense of walling out can quickly break through the wall anyway.

To be fair, some armies that can burst a Solar Collector down would need to be ordered to attack the wreck for another couple of seconds in order to actually pass the wall, and this requires attention, but heavy or even medium units just crush it in passing. And the Solar Collector can buy a bit more time if micro'd to close as the units approach instead of waiting to take damage.

Double thickness Solar Collector walls do considerably better because the enemy must usually clear out multiple Solar Collectors in the front row to focus fire one in the second row, and the first row's death explosions close the second row. But a double thickness Solar Collector wall gets expensive enough that you could be spamming Faradays instead.

I think if you want Solar walls to be viable, even with the cost reduction, you should give them about 20% more health.

Solar walls are interesting.
Cheaper solars with the same HP, become more interesting and useful to use as walls.
I do sometimes put solar walls near the middle of the map depending on the match-up.

If there's any ambition to build a fully connected solar grid on a map like Titan Duel, it uses all the solars I'd want to build, particularly since the point of having the connections in the first place is to use higher efficiency sources for overdrive. Just gridding the 6 metal spots in Titan Duel's home quadrant requires (I think) 17 Solar Collectors, enough to use base extraction metal from the rest of the quadrant and also have basic overdrive. No budget for walls here.

What if the walls are part of the grid? In order to get the walls tight, at least half of them won't be providing any useful grid-span.

What about if it's at a mex that won't get connected to the grid for a while? Then it becomes reasonable to make a mini-wall of maybe up to four solars connected to the mex, or seven for the merged walls of the mex-pairs, so that the mex gets moderate overdrive when the high efficiency generation comes online.

So I'd consider large solar walls (at least on maps with spread metal like Titan Duel) to be a commitment to greatly delay any big efficient generators. Either there is little energy to spare for overdrive, in which case the broader grid configuration doesn't matter, or I intend to have a stage where I'm overdriving hard with even more Solar Collectors to get the grid into a shape where the big generators have a reasonable payback. And making the big generators even more efficient makes me less inclined to do this.


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Meanwhile, some unrelated experimentation has shown that small solar walls can't reliably block generic choke points because their slope tolerance is less than the vehicle movement limit, so it's often possible to go around the wall through unbuildable terrain. If you want solar walls to be more useful this'd be a good variable to poke.