Two small fixes for the next patch perhaps

[Philo]

Well, I don't think you've got many fortresses then. Cause for me the energy starts becoming a major concern only in a mid-to-late game. Prolly most because I can start to afford the fortresses in the mid game. In our current game, I have a zenith power plant so I have decent amount of energy going even with two forts but usually it's not like that. Usually I have to compromise by building and using mk1/2 reactors in the frontlines even.

Anyways, I'm tapping out of this discussion. I'm fine with the auto-magimagingy if it's just a bonus thing for the CTRLS screen. You guys duke it out.

[keith.lamothe]

Mousing over, we have:

metal 910-2296 = -1386
Crystal 1018 - 13936 = -12,918

Ok, thanks.  Yea, so maximum difference from energy management is about 10-13% difference, sounds right.

We have 17 planets between us. I have about half of that. I don't feel it's that many. I'm force fields, and a couple turrets, and maybe a third of the starships. I have some factory produced triangles. Feels normal. But if we are supposed to be taking less than this, well, if I have 16 reactors I'm not making, should we have taken 11 planets for this to be more normal?

Depending on the circumstances you may need to take more planets than you need the power from, that's fine.  17 is not really in the "too many" category (20+ can be), it sounds about right for a reasonably challenging game.

If there is no expectation, and we have reached the point where the power game is over,

It's not that the power game is over, rather that the "get enough to run what I want" part is over, you still have to keep somewhat on your toes for the "have enough to keep things running even if the AI starts ganking reactors" part. 

maybe auto-managing it would be for the best, as you seem disinterested at enforcing any penalty at this point.

I still want to fix the part where you have no significant motive _not_ to auto-build those energy reactors everywhere, and in the process remove the incentivized-micro aspect, but I don't want to do an automation that's going to be obsolete the next time we get into a phase of revisiting game structure.

[zebramatt]

I've become increasingly convinced that whilst the ability to auto-build reactors addressed one symptoms of the underlying problems (building reactors is fiddly), it actually exacerbated the problem itself!

[Cyborg]

I've become increasingly convinced that whilst the ability to auto-build reactors addressed one symptoms of the underlying problems (building reactors is fiddly), it actually exacerbated the problem itself!

How? I've been specific about the actual efficiency differential and how much difference there is between someone who plays like me and someone who doesn't bother paying attention to that. It's significant, and over 17 planets it's no doubt annoying. If anything, I have made you aware of the problem.

Unless you mean that being able to build over 30 reactors creates a more tedious optimization problem, which it does.

[keith.lamothe]

I've become increasingly convinced that whilst the ability to auto-build reactors addressed one symptoms of the underlying problems (building reactors is fiddly), it actually exacerbated the problem itself!

How? I've been specific about the actual efficiency differential and how much difference there is between someone who plays like me and someone who doesn't bother paying attention to that. It's significant, and over 17 planets it's no doubt annoying. If anything, I have made you aware of the problem.

Unless you mean that being able to build over 30 reactors creates a more tedious optimization problem, which it does.

I think zebramatt meant that it made the problem more evident (or, rather, us all more aware of it) : building reactors everywhere is almost always the optimal choice.  Before this was less evident because you had to manually build the reactors and people didn't want to spend the clicks; then we gave them the ability to not have to spend those clicks, they didn't even have to think about it after setting the global sliders.  Auto-management is the next logical step, so that they never have to think about the reactors at all unless they need to build inefficient ones, but if we were going to do that, why not simply abstract the mechanic entirely so that we don't just have this part of the game that only exists to be played by the game itself?

[zebramatt]

Precisely what I meant, Keith. Thanks 

[keith.lamothe]

This brings me back to the rolling-it-into-command-stations idea, transformed in response to earlier stated concerns about it:

(please note that I'm not trying to put this forward as what we're going to do, Chris would likely not want to go this route, but as a thought exercise...)

- Remove energy reactor I/II/III from the game.
- Relabel Energy so as to communicate the concept of "Normal Energy Production Capacity".
- Have all command stations produce their current amount of energy + 125,000 (the amount one normally gets from a I/II/III reactor trio).
- When processing one "tick" of energy/m/c consumption:
-- If your total energy bill is less than your energy production, deduct 1m and 1c from your income for every 2667 energy spent (the current efficiency of a mkII reactor).
-- If your total energy bill is greater than your energy production, pay for the "first 100%" at 1m+1c per 2667 energy, and pay for the "second 100%" at 1m+1c per 1600 energy (60% efficiency, same as the second mkII reactor on a world).
-- And so on; 1m+1c/960 for the third 100%, 1m+1c/576 for the fourth.

And that's where I notice the flaw: if we let it go on infinitely, meaning that your ff's _never_ go down due to energy brownout.  Sure, your m+c is totally tanked, but you aren't vulnerable to that energy-quick-kill that's one of relatively few ways the AI can truly threaten (in a game-over sense) a well-defended player.

But isn't that already the case now, except that you have to manually build the energy infrastructure?  If you just pick some really backwater planet that the AI will never go for until after it's taken out your homeworld, you can just pile up a billion energy reactors and if you ever have an outage you can turn on however many of them are necessary: your m+c goes down the drain, but your ff's stay up regardless of what happens.  Though you wouldn't be able to repair the ff's mid-battle (via nesting and tons of engies), which puts a definite time-limit on how long they last under fire.

Granted, building up that "infinite safety net" takes a significant amount of m+c initial investment, so it's not really free, but it seems troublesome to me that it's thus possible to prevent those quick-kills via a form of gameplay that doesn't seem particularly fun (which is the general complaint in favor auto-management: at least remove the part where the human has to implement it).

On the other hand, if we "cap" the degree to which you can take the inefficiency (say, no more power after the 1m+1c/576 tier), we get away from that invulnerability issue but probably annoy a lot of players who like being able to squeeze infinite power out of a few planets

So hmm, still thinking.

[jordot42]

How about the "startup period" we discussed earlier?  You can build as many reactors as you want and have them all in low power mode, but when you want to use any of them, it'll take maybe 15 seconds or something to come online.

This way you can have the auto management reactor function (for optimal energy use) and the AI can do its brownout kill (if it's fast enough).

There should be no delay when the reactor is first built, howerer (no need to wait 15 or so extra seconds).

[Hearteater]

I think it really breaks down into two issues:

1) What should the penalty be for not having enough energy to support your units?

2) How should energy be produced at each planet?

With respect to issue #1, I don't mind a M+C hit for going over my power budget but I feel the penalty should really be something more immediate and threatening.  That's why I originally suggested a fleet-wide damage penalty.  With that you don't want to run out of energy because you suffer immediate degradation in performance.  Which matches the current penalty in immediacy, but changes the severity from potential insta-lose regardless of defenses to potential heavy combat loses.

I think changes such as a warm-up time on reactors don't address the drastic nature of the insta-lose penalty for power failure and will force players to play with a much larger energy surplus to avoid a 15-second window of no force shields.  And even if it does happen, they'll pause the game and power down units (which as mentioned earlier just shifts the micro from 10-20 reactors to 1000s of ships) to ride out the 15-second warm-up time.

On the second issue, I like reactors, provided we are making a strategic decision on where we build them.  If I'm just building I+II+III everywhere, roll them in to Command Stations.  But if some aspect of system positioning (aka defend-ability) makes which reactors I build important, then I say keep reactors separate.

I think a nice difference to highlight between Energy and M+C is a system's M+C value is inherit to the system itself and doesn't change.  The energy value of a system should be more fluid and affected by the status of nearby systems in a strategic sense.

[keith.lamothe]

1) What should the penalty be for not having enough energy to support your units?

A mild shortfall should stall your ship production (that is, production of anything that requires energy to run), a major shortfall should shut down your forcefields (and various other things).

With respect to issue #1, I don't mind a M+C hit for going over my power budget but I feel the penalty should really be something more immediate and threatening.  That's why I originally suggested a fleet-wide damage penalty.  With that you don't want to run out of energy because you suffer immediate degradation in performance.  Which matches the current penalty in immediacy, but changes the severity from potential insta-lose regardless of defenses to potential heavy combat loses.

I think changes such as a warm-up time on reactors don't address the drastic nature of the insta-lose penalty for power failure and will force players to play with a much larger energy surplus to avoid a 15-second window of no force shields.  And even if it does happen, they'll pause the game and power down units (which as mentioned earlier just shifts the micro from 10-20 reactors to 1000s of ships) to ride out the 15-second warm-up time.

Yea, I actually really want to keep the chance of near-insta-lose, it's one of the few chinks in the armor of a well-defended player.  It's avoidable, but allows for situations that rapidly go from under control to bleep-bleep-bleep (that's the warning siren, of course).

[Echo35]

1) What should the penalty be for not having enough energy to support your units?

A mild shortfall should stall your ship production (that is, production of anything that requires energy to run), a major shortfall should shut down your forcefields (and various other things).

I lost a game that way once. I decided once I captured a Zenith Power Generator that I didn't need my other power plants. Then the AI showed up and destroyed my Zenith Power Generator. I didn't live long after that.

[keith.lamothe]

1) What should the penalty be for not having enough energy to support your units?

A mild shortfall should stall your ship production (that is, production of anything that requires energy to run), a major shortfall should shut down your forcefields (and various other things).

I lost a game that way once. I decided once I captured a Zenith Power Generator that I didn't need my other power plants. Then the AI showed up and destroyed my Zenith Power Generator. I didn't live long after that.

Yep, score another one for the AI

[Cyborg]

1) What should the penalty be for not having enough energy to support your units?

A mild shortfall should stall your ship production (that is, production of anything that requires energy to run), a major shortfall should shut down your forcefields (and various other things).

I lost a game that way once. I decided once I captured a Zenith Power Generator that I didn't need my other power plants. Then the AI showed up and destroyed my Zenith Power Generator. I didn't live long after that.

Yep, score another one for the AI

I haven't lost to a power outage since... I don't know when. It's really not that hard to stack power supplies, and definitely turn off the inefficient ones. It's one of those things that the AI will pull over on you maybe once or twice, but I think that a human player learns quickly what the penalty is for having no power. Barring that, only a slight variation on echo's scenario, you just have to hit the pause button as fast as you can and start twiddling.

It's not really a scenario you will ever encounter after you start getting used to this game, as is easily guarded against and worse case scenario start putting things in low power or scrapping. Or put all of your engineers into building power supplies. In my save game that I was quoting earlier, I was able to get them up in about 5-10 seconds.

Rephrased, how many times are you going to get away with a 2-move checkmate in chess?

I need to crunch the earlier numbers and consider a few data points that you gave as a hypothetical Keith, but you might want to consider that folks which create infinite power supply scenarios should not be rewarded.

[Nalgas]

you just have to hit the pause button as fast as you can and start twiddling.

Pausing in single player is one thing, but it's so disruptive/annoying in multiplayer that we never, ever do it, with the accidental exception of someone unintentionally hitting whatever key they have it mapped to.  Even if someone has to go to the bathroom or deal with their kids, we just live with the handicap and leave the game running.  If it's more than a few minutes we'll disable them, but otherwise we just suffer through it.  Heh.

That does tend to make things a bit more...interesting.  It precludes doing some of the obvious "best" things to do when you can't pause whenever you want and run around adjusting everything to be perfect and have to just make do with what you can keep up with in real time.  I think that's probably part of why I've gotten used to keeping a higher safety margin for energy, which carries over even to single player for me out of habit.

[Cyborg]

you just have to hit the pause button as fast as you can and start twiddling.

Pausing in single player is one thing, but it's so disruptive/annoying in multiplayer that we never, ever do it, with the accidental exception of someone unintentionally hitting whatever key they have it mapped to.  Even if someone has to go to the bathroom or deal with their kids, we just live with the handicap and leave the game running.  If it's more than a few minutes we'll disable them, but otherwise we just suffer through it.  Heh.

That does tend to make things a bit more...interesting.  It precludes doing some of the obvious "best" things to do when you can't pause whenever you want and run around adjusting everything to be perfect and have to just make do with what you can keep up with in real time.  I think that's probably part of why I've gotten used to keeping a higher safety margin for energy, which carries over even to single player for me out of habit.

That's great that you handicap your team out of a sense of spirit or fairplay or something. Self-handicapping doesn't sound that appealing to me, though. Goes back to the question, if you don't like automation, don't turn it on but support folks who do want to play that way.