Getting back into AI war

[Echo35]

now sitting on max resources trying to find ways to spend it all

Everyone has that problem.
Discussion starts roughly here.

Good, it's not just me then. Yeah, as easy as the new power stations are to manage, I'm playing a two player game and have far more power than I'll ever use (Since you can just build on your allied planets as well) and no way to spend all my resources. Which, granted, has led to some hilariously huge defensive outposts on my part, but yeah.

[TechSY730]

Considering that the new energy collectors were balanced to about as much as you could get from a single planet without effeciency decay, I think energy balance problems were there all along, just not noticed because we almost never had them all on or had all three marks at every planet. Now that we sort of do (no reason not to get at least the base energy from a single collector), the over abundance of energy is now visible rather than hidden artificially by our drive to have only as many on as we need.

[keith.lamothe]

The actual energy amount isn't very different, no, but the fact that the first 150k is "free" in m+c terms definitely changes things.

My current guess is to reduce the collectors to 100k or even 75k, but halve the m+c costs of the converters.  But not sure yet.

[Lancefighter]

putting one of each mark on a planet also cost baout 60 metal/crystal per second.

[Hearteater]

Just came up with a "solution" to all that energy

[TechSY730]

The actual energy amount isn't very different, no, but the fact that the first 150k is "free" in m+c terms definitely changes things.

My current guess is to reduce the collectors to 100k or even 75k, but halve the m+c costs of the converters.  But not sure yet.

I'd support this. In fact, I was suggesting something like this from the first signs of energy over abundance.

[contingencyplan]

Just came up with a "solution" to all that energy

(Cross-posting from the Mantis post).

I could see this being an interesting mechanic, though it would likely be completely broken on multi-hw games (16 HW = ~40M energy, iirc).

A more general idea (though possibly very hard to implement --- I recall seeing something about energy costs being fixed) would be the ability to have a slider in the controls for "defense multiplier" or something that multiplies the attack power of (some) turrets but at a semi-exponential multiplication in energy cost --- e.g., doubling the attack power would quadruple the energy cost of a turret, 10x would require 100x the energy cost, etc. Maybe this could be folded into a support structure with a per-planet cap, similar to mod-forts?



That said, I think we are making the easy mistake of posing solutions before we've really explicitly stated what the problem is. What purpose is energy supposed to serve?

[KDR_11k]

Zero K lets you put your metal extractors into overdrive with surplus energy.

The low AIP cutoff makes me think we need to drop the mark thresholds, these days even hitting the MkII threshold before killing a HW seems rare.

[Echo35]

That said, I think we are making the easy mistake of posing solutions before we've really explicitly stated what the problem is. What purpose is energy supposed to serve?

Back in ye olden days, it was primarily a hard cap on the mount of stuff you could have, since literally everything offensive or defensive requires power, and you had to make a lot of hard choices regarding that (Do I shore up with a bunch of turrets or go light on the turrets and build more ships?) as well as a way to force expansion (I need more energy to run my fleet, so I can't just turtle here, I need to grab a planet or two) because they not only cost quite a bit of resources to run, but also lost efficiency the more of them there were on a planet. I'm not really finding this the case anymore, as I'm totally capped out on all mark levels of all ships and have at least half of my turret caps ad mines built and I still have more energy than I can possibly use, and so far between my co-op partner and I we have like, 3 or 4 planets.

[Lancefighter]

Yes... but the alternative to TA based games typically is straight metal makers (converting energy to metal through special buildings).

The problem is somewhat that there is no need for EITHER conversion atm - You have thousands and thousands of metal per second, along with a million+ spare energy.

[Echo35]

The problem is somewhat that there is no need for EITHER conversion atm - You have thousands and thousands of metal per second, along with a million+ spare energy.

Right. I'd totally be using my energy to run converters, if I even needed them in the first place.

[keith.lamothe]

It's perennially amusing to me to have some players saying that they're rolling in thousands of m+c income surplus and millions of energy, and others saying they're almost always on famine econ and take over an hour to refleet and never have enough energy to use starships and/or forts.  And everyone's got a straight face.

[Lancefighter]

I dunno. Especially if I am doing championship stuff, I have tons fo energy. I could try playing some diff 8 games without champions/fs? I'm honestly not sure what id actually spend all of my knowledge on if not turrets for fs ships.

[Echo35]

It's perennially amusing to me to have some players saying that they're rolling in thousands of m+c income surplus and millions of energy, and others saying they're almost always on famine econ and take over an hour to refleet and never have enough energy to use starships and/or forts.  And everyone's got a straight face.

We are only doing diff 7.3s, but yeah, I never had this problem before, even on 7s or 7.3s. You should do a survey and see if the players saying this are old hats who are used to it being harder

EDIT: Actually, I think I'll launch an 8 or 9 game right now and see if I have the same problems. I was wondering what to do with my spare time this weekend

[LaughingThesaurus]

I've never seen a possible way to have econ issues unless you're, say, on Broken Golems or Spirecraft Medium. Early in the game your econ sucks unless you get better harvesters, in which case it is so overwhelmingly good that you can't possibly spend all of your money barring extremely expensive bursts of building basically an entire army. But then, energy? I have absolutely never had to ever have a matter converter. This is probably because the highest I have ever gone is difficulty 7, and typically there, you can take many more planets than on other difficulties. Each planet is 150k energy, though, and that scales stupidly quickly... especially when you get enough income to get matter converters and still have income to spare.
People who are higher up need to testify as to exactly why they must be so low on energy and stuff, because I don't really understand how it happens.