Saktoth on Uber forum:
"I'm fully sympathetic to Neutrino here. Zero-K has a very powerful interface, and full lua scripting so you can write an AI to play the game for you if you like. So we have to design the game to be complex, and the decisions non-trivial: IE, they simply can't be automated.
Sometimes this railroads our design. Neutrino is right: Energy drain like discussed here basically had to be removed. Turrets draining energy to fire, metal extractors (mexes) draining energy to function, etc are trivially circumvented by a reserve or priority system.
So instead, we have an energy 'grid'. Energy has to be adjacent (or linked in a chain) to metal extractors and turrets to provide power. If you break the chain, the structure can fail.
The total energy linked to a metal extractor determines its max Overdrive amount, which consumes all your excess energy to provide more metal with diminishing returns. This replaces metal makers, keeping metal extractors and thus territory important even when you have huge amounts of energy.
There are dozens of other design solutions to this but you can see how this actually makes the game more complex when your energy also has a spatial component. It is vitally important to emphasize that Zero-K is not any simpler because of it's automation. It is actually needlessly difficult in many places and I think this hurts our popularity, but all the devs are high level Spring players who have been playing for years, so sometimes we design for ourselves and fail to see this.
A good example is many of our projectiles move so slow that they can be dodged (like Quake, imagine this with 100 units!). So we have an AI (on 'attack move/fight') that jinks to dodge them automatically (less competently than a player). This is so needlessly complex it is sometimes ridiculous."
I think it is really hard to not see 0K as a game with more hardcore target audience after Saktoth posted this, and it is strange that Saktoth implied that stuffs like unit AI might make the game needless complex and harm its popularity(which I disagree) while actually want PA to have these features.
