@valki said in Invitation to comment and speculate on the Energy resource in this game:
@ftxcommando said in Invitation to comment and speculate on the Energy resource in this game:
Mass is intended to give value to map control, it is the bottleneck that determines “scale” in macro.
Energy is what decides the “type” of usage of mass. Certain things are high energy per mass, certain things aren’t. It’s what stops you from simply being able to transition from one thing into another haphazardly in the game.
There’s certainly a lot more to it and the game decisions are much more complicated than this, but that’s the impulse 30 second analysis for me.
A UEF interceptor costs 50 mass and 2250 energy, a UEF Tank costs 56 mass and 266 energy. That is a difference of roughly 2000 energy.
The same transition dynamic could be accomplished if the UEF interceptor simply cost 2000 energy, and the tank 0 energy. You still need just as many additional power plants to build interceptors then.
So why does the tank cost energy at all?
I just thought this up, no dev input or lore.
Since we are 3d printer we can look at what we have in today's world. I can 3d print you something for a little bit of plastic (mass) and a couple hundred watts to power the printer (energy)
But let's take this deeper, we are not extracting plastic with a mex or printing with it, and you can't take the trees that have been reclaimed straight into a tank. So what we are really doing it extracting some resource and splitting it down to atoms and recreating it into a different material. Steel is a rather 'cheap' material since Fe is lower down the periodic table so it takes less atoms and less power to create steel, further the t1 tank is just amour, cpu, gun, and tracks, all simple components to create and print.
Now a aircraft has to be light and also built correctly. Just take a look at the cost and materials on our current jets. So the engies are making a lot of aluminum and titanium, which requires more energy to split and reform, also more mass than a tank since Al and Ti are father down the chart (I think) even though the intie will weigh less than the tank. The build quality on aircraft has to be top notch, so just energy consumed from just moving the printer will be more. Makes me wonder if you would make stands then break them off later like 3d printing now.
Every unit built has a power generator and a printer on board to produce propulsion and ammo, aircraft has tons more power required. Ww2 I think the tanks were 1000hp and the fighter plans around 5,000. We can already see the costs of power in supcom.
T2 tanks have more special amour, with different alloys and layers, just like today, to increase the cost of the unit.
