Increase Reclaim Speed by 1.7x

Reclaim is by far the strongest source of income in the game. Increasing reclaim speed would make reclaim fields disappear much faster, so they would be contested for a much shorter time. That would likely reduce the total metal collected from them, because there would be fewer prolonged battles over those areas. Instead, reclaim fields would trigger short, intense fights where everyone rushes in to secure them before they're gone. The battles would be far more explosive, but the overall amount of reclaim harvested could actually be lower.

Reclaim is a feature in all streaming economy games I know, and has 2 key variables. 1) the amount of resource dropped by killed units and 2) the speed you can hoover it up. In OTA I don't know the wreck value, but it was a significant portion of the unitcost and it all dumped into storage at the end of the reclaim operation. In BAR, wrecks are a mixed bag storing 40-60% of a unit's cost. In Supcom, an undamaged wreck holds 81% mass value of the unit. In both BAR and Supcom, an early constructor that often spends at 3-5 m/s will be able to reclaim much much faster than that (supcom reclaims about 50 m/s). Zero-k runs differently, having a very stable 40% metal cost in wreck and 20% in shards, as well as reclaim speed equaling construction speed with 1=1=1 buildpower ratios.

Does this mean reclaim is less effective in zero-k than it's counterparts? Well, other games have economies that scale a lot more than zero-k, with metal fabricators, and players are expected to always be ramping their base incomes up over the course of the whole game, no matter how lategame it gets. Zero-k has a soft-cap on economic investment via overdrive, so by comparison collecting reclaim is more valuable in Zero-k simply because yesterminute's dead army is worth the exact same as a future army, instead of the ever escalation of troop sizes and counts in BAR and Supcom. (Further explanation: If every minute your income in Supcom is going to be 1.1x stronger, collecting a dead army built 5 minutes ago will only be worth 50% of your current minutely income even though the ticket reads 81% recoverable metal, 0.9^5 * .81 = 48%) So while zero-k has drawbacks in both key variables 1 and 2, the hidden variable of a flat tech tree works to make it strong as well.

But zero-k has more hidden variables that effect how I see it. Energy is fairly costly, and is required for spending metal. Overdrive converts excess energy into metal. If a player has about 25 metal income and 35 energy income (not uncommon in 1v1), that 10 surplus energy might be converted into metal at a rate of net +3.5 m/s (6.5 overdrive energy, 3.5 reserved energy to spend with overdrive metal). How worth it is it for a player to build like 350 metal of bonus buildpower to reclaim at 10 m/s and spend the extra income? That's not a 10 m/s bonus, that's a 6.5 m/s bonus cause you're missing out on the juiciest low-cost overdrive. Suddenly the desired cost on infrastructure supporting your reclaim operation isn't 2 spare cons, it's 3 spare cons and 5 solars, which is going to be worth it, but it interrupts your troop production. I always want to be taking advantage of extra economic objectives, but it's certainly a right-place right-time situation early and mid game if the metal field is smaller than 800. (Late game I'm just liable to forget to have spare buildpower in the right place)

There's a niche use case for incredibly early reclaim: a whole lot of energy at spawn. If you leverage a truly massive amount of energy relcaim earlygame (let's say >3,200 energy reclaim) you can kickstart your economy early by using your factory to "produce energy" in the form of reclaiming cons and leaving solar production for a little later (This runs the risk of hardstallin on e when the reclaim runs out). But a reclaiming con is more effective than a solar collector, so you get to spend more metal on raiders and mexes. Once you have your base energy income stabilized later, you free up your cons to do other stuff. This was a consideration when Adonsonia https://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/55567 was in the map pool because of the massive amount of trees and the easily accessible geothermal spot, I quite liked it.

Currently, it does take a bit of investment to hoover up a reclaim field quickly. This allows opponents to punish players by giving time to position guns firing on cons. A downside of faster reclaim is that the first person to get a single con (small investment) to the field gets a massive boost and has a smaller window to be punished. I'm already focus firing things with buildpower in the vicinity of metal wreckages, so knowing that they've sopped up 70% more metal in their active time would make me more disapointed.