Extreme fix for the OD sharing problem: Remove energy.

Seriously, metal is what's important. The energy bar is, at best, a distraction.

Now, this doesn't mean remove OD, or using energy-structures to support heavy defenses.

Just remove the energy resource (income/expenditure), and the web. Every energy building supplies its full energy output to every nearby energy consumer. A solar adjascent to 2 mexes? Puts 2 OD into each mex. No web, no "only your excess energy", the OD isn't even evenly divided between the mexes. Just "yay, 2 in each".

Boom. We lose the ambiguity of "which energy structure is providing which overdrive". We lose the ambiguity of sharing E vs. putting it into the OD economy. We lose the inconsistency between OD and web-requirements.

And you get people building E at the front, because if you want to get that DDM up and running, you need a goddamned fusion up there (drop the grid requirement to 20 so we can put DDMs on our Geos).

Cloak? Free. Shield charge? Free. Rez? Free. Adjust unit-costs and charge/rez rates accordingly.

There are probably glaring flaws in this plan, not the least of which is that placement of energy-buildnigs would have to be obsessively perfect to make sure it perfectly touches the nearby mexes (this was the problem with the 500M OD pylon), and that a lot of Geos would be worthlessly located.

But it would fix a lot too, and simplify away something the game doesn't really need. The implicit would become explicit - a user could see exactly how much metal his fusion is generating.

You could apply the mex payback logic to E buildings and have it behave coherently.

No, I don't expect anybody to like this idea, I'm just throwing it out there as a drastic solution to the problem that popped into my head.

My point is that players don't have any clue of the cost/benefit ratio provided by each energy structure. That's exacerbated by the sharing system and the 50% private (proportion of M-out defined by E-in). Removing the grid and making the full E-output of each E-building go into local mexes would eliminate all ambiguity... but doing that would be incompatible with the energy resource.

grid is good because it prevents players from just building solar/wind lines along the mapedge. It makes stuff more attackable which is fun.
I don't think with grid removed from wind/solar there would be fusions at front because just overdriving the 3x3 startmexes on most maps would be plenty already.

However, energy/eco IS weird.
One goal of ca/zk used to be "streamlined eco", imo instead it got more complex and confusing.
Though nothing too radical will pass anyway so I will only bother with some small ideas :p

/*Energy works as a pop-cap early game, preventing you from doing even more ridiculous all-in rushes then we already got.*/
In zk Ecost and Mcost are same, so it does not prevent rushing that much.
Compared to xta where aircraft have higher energycost, meaning they are harder to rush. (you need alot more e-buildings)

Imo cloak should not drain energy. (actually until some time I thought it was that way)
Either you have so much energy that the dran does not matter or they randomly decloak and it is just annoying instead of adding anything worthwhile to game.
Mobile units could have some "mana cloak" like in starcraft. (it recharges and the unit stays cloaked until it runs out)
The jammer/cloak tower could run on energy though.

Also the "power" requirement by some weapons (ddm, anni etc) is a bit meh and inconsistent with everything else.
I have no idea how many winds or whatever it would need to power one such thing.
And why do only these weapons require power? Behemoth requires power but the even bigger Big Bertha and Buzzsaw do not?
Also it is weird that they must be connected to an energy grid but do not actually use up any energy when they fire.

I love the idea. It's probably gonna end up a bit too extreme, but personally I wouldn't oppose giving it a try, some weeks or months. The concept of energy cost is nice for some special things. I was even thinking about suggesting E cost for dguns, but know that everybody would want my head cut off. Anyway! :)

The really really big PRO for this suggestion is the decrease in clutter (E cost for all electronic warfare things: cloak, radar, etc that players have to remember) without decreasing the complexity of the game (which is something I like). The clutter decrease is similar to the different damage types and energy-build-costs that CA got rid of for us.

The only CON is the shield stuff.. I really like how damaging shields means that you leech energy that your enemy would otherwise use for overdrive. This feature would be lost. I hate how all shields got different energy cost per recharged hp though - loosing a good and bad thing at the same time is fair though.

Removing energy is technically very challenging.

Metal only economy also would not be simpler. Key feature of OD is diminishing returns and dependency on mexes in grid.

Without those game would turn into BA style mm exponential.
And with diminishing returns the return IS variable.


Somewhere in the repo there is a widget that calculates return time on investment into mex, energy etc..
Based on estimated future OD. This should be integrated into tooltip to make it easier to see.

One resource would also not solve the sharing of resource.
There exists relatively elegant solution to that in the other thread just needs someone to code it.

Tbh simplification to one resource is interesting.
I always wanted to get rid of E storage (keep E as "minimum for operation" of various systems).

This sounds even simpler.
Though having the rule "must touch destination" could be a bit rough, it could work if some sources have greater range.

I would like to keep energy need for defenses.

How about a compromise?

Every pylon has the capacity to make 10 energy global available - if you have another pylon at the destination.
* 13e local->global
* OR 13e global->local
* 4*13 = 52, enough for anni, ddm...

Pylons should also have a very small grid, because they are too expensive to make big link lines (about the current solar)

Singu can have like the current fusion, or 80% of it - cause you can't link the front with 4000m chain reacting stuff.

Defense like anni, behe, ddm can get a bit radius - 2 times the solar?
Otherwise they would suffer from pylons dead-AOE.

Well, getting 2 energy to be able to spend each of your mex incomes cost 45-70 metal. So you're looking at increasing the mex price to 120-145. This ignores the fact that energy is safe, in your base, while mexes are spread out and have to be replaced/defended. It would destroy that mechanic entirely, meaning losing mexes is a total loss to your real income, while gaining mexes is a total increase of real income.

Then there is reclaim. It either cuts into your overdrive E to spend the reclaim metal, or you have to make more E. This is usually fine, especially if you're overdriving, but it does reduce the strength of reclaim, particularly early. Where do we put the cost of this? Through slower reclaim speeds? That means larger con swarms, I suspect. Cut reclaim itself? Or make the logistics cost BP, not energy: The cost of BP would have to go up fairly significantly, which totally changes how the game plays, making BP a real limiting resource.

So this is really not worth it. If we really think e cost is inconsequential, bring back variable e costs, so that our heavy rush-prone units (Air and anything over 400 cost) cost twice as much E. I'd do that before I removed E.

The question is, WHY would we do this? Simplification? There are way more complex things in the game we could tackle. Increasing the ease of distribution of overdrive energy due to communism? A really weak reason. It would totally change the way the game played and it would probably take months for us to see all the impacts (Which would be hard to distinguish from metagame changes and would be totally different in 1v1, large teams, coop rush situations, etc), not worth the remote benefits.

1 This game dont need to be dumbed down, it just need to be explained better!

2 I think it will generate a big snowball effect, you team will capture more early mexes, win early fights and get the metal reclaim even more mexes and game will snowball heavy in favour of your team without having the other team a possibility to come back. Rezzing stuff for free will have even more snowballing effect.
I like the more dynamics for map control, but there needs to be a system to generate metal and make a come back or games will be over in under 10-15 minutes. maybe dynamic metal spots would be cool for that. Have metal spots have a limited amount of metal and explode when empty. A new metal spot will be generated somewhere alse where the fight for it jumps to there. I think it must be possible to implement, cause it is how chicken nests work.

3 Why does this game needs to be like other RTS games? The fun and unique thing about this game is the possibility for having massive amounts of units. and you need the metal for it to produce those.

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I would like propose a system to make energy more important in the game besides in early minutes or for OD.
Or it can be used in collaboration with the "no energy for OD idea", and making mexes upgradeable.
The general idea is that units can still use the basic stuff, shoot, walk/fly but their special needs energy. So you can really hurt the enemy if you attack/disable his energy.

- cloakbots use energy to cloak, like now but more
- jumpbots need energy to jump, sumo more then pyro
- heavy factory units need more energy to repair (like 3 times more)
- light vehicles use energy for a speedboost
- shieldbots use energy to recharge (current in game is fine)
- planes need energy to reload (faster) or even fly faster? Or even energy get a boost in attack vs (energy)buildings. So air becomes the raider of enemy eco rather than the fighter of units like the rest of the factories already do.
- spiders, need energy to stun (venom and infiltrator), crabe use energy in shielded form. Or use more energy while climbing (not sure if possible)
- gunships get a attack boost with energy (current can be the boosted form? and then a 'no energy' variant is weaker)
- amphibious use energy for submerging if the unit is able to float. Ideally all amphibious units needs a float ability.
- Big defences, DDM, behemoth and annihilator actually use energy per shot.
- ressurecting needs massive amount of energy

This idea is far from complete, but I just want to write it down for thoughts.