@jip Also, maybe a dumb question, but is ringing t3 mass fabs with storages even efficient? Cause with some very basic back of the envelope math it seems like building another t3 fab is just straight up better.
From testing:
- Mass Cost of a t3 fab: 4000 mass (m)
- Energy upkeep of a t3 fab: 1500 energy upkeep (eu)
- Mass generation of a un-caped t3 fab: 16 mass per second (mps)
- mass cost of a mass storage: 200 m
- energy upkeep of a mass storage: 0 eu (obviously)
- Nr. of storages required for full adjacency: 12
- Mass generation of a caped t3 fab: 21.5 mps
A simple model for energy upkeep to mass cost is to use the conversion: 2500 eu = 3240 m, because that's the price and production of a t3 pgen.
Hence 1 e upkeep = 1.3m.
(Note that this is the highest cost energy can conceivably have in the t3 stage, i.e. the best possible case for capping with storages.
In a real game, energy is probably a bit cheaper in the lategame, due to pgen adjacency and stuff like RAS, SACUs, you pausing your (air-)facs and teammate overflow often giving you more energy than you need 'by accident')
Putting the above together:
- Efficiency of an un-caped T3 fab:
16mps / (4000m + 1500eu)
= 16mps / (4000m + 1950m)
= 2.7e-3 mps/m
- Efficiency of a caped T3 fab:
21.5mps / (4000m + 1500eu + 12*(200m + 0eu))
= 21.5mps / (4000m + 1950m + 2400m)
= 2.6e-3 mps/m
Result:
Even in the best possible case, capping a t3 mass fab is slightly less efficient than just building a new one.
If you value energy less than what I assumed here, and imo you probably should, the case for capping gets even worse.
If my assumptions and calculations are correct, I think we shouldn't add a t3 mass fab cap command to the game add all. It would just incentivize bad play.