Energy: efficiency

Somehow, a thousand years in the future, a power generator will be able to make more than the power that it took to build it in less than 15 seconds.
Think of your starting build. How many gens do you build? 3, maybe four. Wait till mid game, and you might need to make a couple more for mid-exps. End game, you build quite a few, and very soon you will literally have so much energy that we CANT SPEND IT ALL.
I don't see a point to this, either. You build a few dirt cheap (cheapest building in the game) gens, and really can just forget about it.While I know that GPG had the interest of easing the economic burden, I'm not sure if making energy free was what they had in mind, but they did anyway. I feel that we get way too much energy. I really don't see the reason for it being there, as all it does is force you to have to remember those couple of buildings in the beginning, then completely forget about them.
Not to mention, they're dirt cheap. Even if you were to lose all of your generators, chances are you have enough energy to make them immediately. Like I previously stated; it takes less than 15 seconds to make the resources back to make one. Or however many you built. They don't even take much time to build. They feel like nothing but filler. There is no decision making with the pgen, as they have absolutely no risk associated with them. With a mex, they are expensive, take time to get their value back, and are limited to certain spots, meaning you have to guard them well. Definitely not so with the pgen.
I propose to do one or more of the following;
1. increase the cost of the pgen
2. dramatically decrease the production of the pgen
3. Create a blast radius for the pgen, similar to the mass converter
I foresee this solving the problem of pgens having a superficial, almost pointless job, hopefully add some strategic value to the pgen, and, as I'm sure a number of people on this forum would like, it has the potential to decrease the usefulness of mass conversion.
I literally have no idea how to balance it. I'm not a person to churn out the numbers, someone else can suggest something as to how exactly it should be changed. What I have observed is that this is something that I haven't really seen mentioned, but is one of the major imbalances of the game.|||I've assumed that cheap power generation was one of the foundations of the "make it hard to crash" economy model. I like options 1 and 3 quite a bit myself, but doubt that we'll see any change in that direction; especially since the system has already been shown to work fairly well as it is now.|||Hopefully Neph. looks at this.|||I thought it'd be neat if one faction (probably cybran) had their powergenerator cost and production equivalent to about 2.5 generators (as well as being much larger and more volatile), but having the combined pgen/converter that cybran originally had once they researched conversion.|||I AM looking at this. And I do agree that you basically just have one resource - Mass. If anything, I'd probably increase Pgen cost AND decrease output...|||Make them explode like mc's. Let's see pulse try to spam those goddamn pgens again then.|||Quote:|||No way. Chain reactions ahoy!
Make people space the hell out of their bases. That will be fun.|||Correction: it might be fun for a few games while you play with the mod, but wouldn't ever work for the whole game. I would really like to have it so that pulse plays an FFA with the "balance mod" enabled though..|||I played FA all weekend and I have to admit I like the way pgens are in this one.|||I would much rather see a reduction in benefits from mass converters for a number of reasons.
To compensate:
I would also like to see Hydrocarbon (with an explosion). Yes, that means updating all the old maps with a Hydrocarbon symbol. I believe this would take a few simple days of work including the QA/QC and documentation to update the maps.
I would also like to see 1000 energy (with commander explosion) production facilities. Call them what you will.
And of course the Paragon (with nuclear explosion).
First thing I missed from TA when I came to SupCom2 was Nuclear Plants (Tier 2/3 power) and Geo-thermal Plants (Hydrocarbon).|||Bastilean|||Bastilean|||Bastilean|||Nephylim|||Make them explode as nukes. Enough of pulse harassing me by just building pgens everywhere in my base.|||I would suggest that pgens have an upfront cost increase in terms of energy investment. This would make it so it takes a few minutes for a pgen to make a profit. I think this would make them more of a target for enemy strikes. As it is now, its kind of pointless to blow them up because they rebuild so fast, are cheap and return an energy profit in 15 seconds. An increased energy cost makes them harder to rebuild so quickly(unless you are banking a lot of energy) and makes it so the person attacked would have a repressed economy in terms of energy for a few minutes.
As it is now, there is rarely a reason to attack pgens in game or bank a lot of energy before you have mass conversion in late game. Mass conversion is a different story altogether. I would like to see players start out with 3 generators automatically build in the beginning of the match so that an increase in energy cost would not effect the early game (unless they are destroyed) and that building them is kind of a no brainer decision. Right now, most everyone builds 2-4 generators right at the start anyways and then ignores power until late game.
Also, another option for rebalancing power is to change unit costs to force people to build more power when doing certain builds. For example, air is supposed to cost more energy than land except pgens are so cheap and so good that players run out of energy rarely with just their initial generators. I think producing out of multiple air factories should require more generators. I am also in favor of volitile buildings, geothermal and researchable nuclear power gens and networkable p-gens in game. However, those things would fundementally change gameplay and require a complete overhall of economy and balance across the entire game.|||ITT people are butthurt that pulse is a better player than them.|||smaller footpint and output
same cost
that way you can build more in the space you have, and makes energy harder to get|||I still think that, in SCom2, if theyre going to ditch the rate based economy they should have gone whole hog and adopted a C&C style energy system.
(ie. no energy storage, just a production vs. requirements. If you dont meet your requirement, everything shuts down.) All structures add to energy requirements, esp. shields, arty, etc.
Discrete powers like overcharge and jumpjets wont work in this model, but no biggie, make them cost mass or some other mechanic. I guess they could temporarily increase requirement which then goes back to normal over time.

Not only is the C&C model familiar and accessible, it also makes energy a lot more important a target.|||Mister_willing_to_learn