Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods

Wouldn't be the first time: the ringing feature for extractors is not far off.

I mean like: we're here to wage strategic battles. Not to worry about fabricators. In a lot of my games I typically don't use them because they are so volatile to your economy. But if we'd automate them by default in some sense, in a way that doesn't harm performance, then it is a nice new feature to the game. The capability of being able to do something with all that excess energy, instead of spilling it to your allies πŸ™‚ .

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Even without this mod, the idea of brutus sounds pretty good

(3) We provide an alternative, like Brutus mentioned. One that discourages enabling / disabling them in quick succession

Sorry for my English. I use translator

@marcspector thats not option 4. Option 4 I think is saying it is automatically part of FAF (presumably with an option in settings to turn it off) the way building storage around a mex is integrated.
(Edit: posted pre your edit!)

If it’s made a SIM mod (which I presume is what is meant by banning it-ie ban mods featuring this unless they are SIM mods) and Jips ideas for making it hard for most people to use are implemented I dont see an issue with this not being fullproof. Not being able to stop 1% of cases shouldnt mean giving up entirely.

Yep, either (3) or (4) with the ability to toggle it off seems the most sane option to me.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@skrat You already using an embedded auto-clicker called "Spread attack". Including UI Party and other related UI mods

@jip said in [Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods]

  • (4) We integrate the mod into FAF, instead of through a UI mod. That way everyone has it.

When thinking about it, being able to use fabricators to get rid of excess power seems like a reasonable purpose for the units in question. To 'soften up' the times when there is no reclaim.

The mod has several different features, some of which are arguably undesirable for integration IMO. I'd rather FAF specifically add/integrate the ability to auto toggle the player's choice of mass fabs/radars/shields. That seems like a useful functionality that should be in the game, it would be fair, it would decrease tediousness, and it wouldn't increase the moderation burden.

pfp credit to gieb

The issue is mod not only toggle fabs but also prevents from E stalling by any means. If i am not mistaken you even can choose in what priority to cut off E spending. In my opinion eco managing is the core part of the game and it should not be simplified too much.

It would be good to have more or less strict rules what mod types are considered as illegal. And any exceptional case should be also stated within the corresponding thread. In general EcoManager works as auto clicker but for some reason considered as legal mod and used by many players.

You guys must try this mod before complaining about it. It is not that good, as others describes it.

What about the FAF rules?

We will list what sort of UI mods are not allowed here. This includes:

All reclaim macros
All autoclickers

Ban thy ecomanager

FAF Website Developer

What about eco managers option to queue up mex upgrades by assisting with engineers. That's a nice feature, or is that integrated in FAF now?

@archsimkat said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

am a little confused at how it is still allowed to be used.

I guess it how it end up being historically, EcoManager appeared at GPG times and developers being AFK there was not one to make a desigion to ban something.

feels a little bit late to try to ban it, also i don't see best players using eco manager
afaik it is not even considered to be good for 1v1 (the throttle part of it)

The only "criminal" part of ecomanager is power and mass throttle and automated mass sharing. (automated resource sharing is pretty OP and idk why nobody mentioned it, tho i am not sure how it really works, only seen some videos from TA4Life like 10 years ago)

Everything else i'd keep or even integrate into the game, i am totally fine with automated massfabs, mex upgraide on right click, mex overlay

TA4Life: "At the very least we are not slaves to the UI" | http://www.youtube.com/user/dimatularus | http://www.twitch.tv/zlo_rd

I use this mod primarily for the right click to upgrade mass extractor as a time saver, and have become accustomed to how that behaves. the mod frequently conflicted with another mod and caused issues that i can't recall, so i simply stripped out all the extra functions, and it literally only can be used to upgrade the mass extractors for me now. The teamshare mod takes care of nuke overlays for me now.

So if the option to right click mass extractors to upgrade existed in base game and works the same way here,, i wouldn't even need the mod as it exists now.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JJUNAbRUvRKI2KkmeVbtqD2OLfU9pXT9/view?usp=sharing

for anyone who just wants the mex click function only

Eco manager not only manages your mass fabs, but can entirely prevent shield stalls when your power gets sniped if it finds enough other things to turn off. This can be a pretty substantial advantage.
In my opinion any UI mod that automatically pauses units for you should be banned. We could still integrate automatic toggling of mass fabs or other elements that we find too tedious to manually do, but I think that it is important that we discuss what kind of automation we accept, integrate that and ban additional automations. Ideally we would prevent UI mods from being able to pause units entirely, but I am not sure if that is possible.
The arguments that you can't ban UI mods are not really convincing to me, as we have banned UI mods that automate reclaim and unit movements in the past. We don't have floods of reuploads or reports about them and even if we can't 100% prevent their use it is important to have these rules to communicate what we deem acceptable and what we consider cheating. In tournaments and select high level games we can actually enforce these rules and the same rules should apply to all players.

And in real life no sane person unironically argues for the abolition of all speed limits because you can't catch every speeder as well.

Wasn't the general problem that e-dependent buildings continue to use 100% e even when they are not working because of a stall? Which is completely different from how mass works?

Would it be possible to disable a building when it stalls and start a timer, so after like 5 seconds it tries to turn itself on again (and you cannot turn it on sooner)? This would still punish you for uncontrolled e stall, but it would punish continued stall less than before and it would make mass-fabs auto-balanced by getting deactivated randomly.

First off as already mentioned EcoManager has many features such as showing smd percent (for teammates as well), mass extractor overlay, and nuke sub overlay. I use this all in every game however i never use the auto pause shit. I would hate to see such a useful mod banned for its worst feature.

With that said I think that pausing fabs is a huge pain right now. If you select all your fabs and u have some paused u must turn all of them on, wait a second, then shut them off. This means that when selecting fabs to turn off u need to make sure u don't select any that are already off, if u even select one u will need to take a good few seconds to turn them off. The solution i propose is 2 hotkeys, "Turn off Selected Fabs" and "Turn on Selected Fabs". This way without using much of any apm you can quickly prevent stalls without needing any ui mod. I think that this way would be more efficient for competent players than auto fab and would keep people from abusing it and not learning how to eco. So many phantom games i have wished for auto fab, but it just seems so boring, With better hotkeys fabs could be both more fun and more efficient.
As a side note having a dedicated fab on/off key would allow u to quickly select a bunch of structures without fearing that u will shut off a mass extractor along with your fabs. This would further make operating fabs less apm heavy.

I've decided to give (3) of this post a go. An initial implementation is available on FAF Develop.

It changes the behavior accordingly:

  • A disabled fabricator remains disabled, this allows you to fill storage for overcharge or respond to an economic trend in advance where the automated system is too slow. For example: when you expect reclaim.
  • The production of an enabled fabricator is toggled on / off according to your economic trend. If you have less than 40% energy storage and a negative trend (more expense than income) then fabricators start to toggle off one by one. If you have more than 60% energy storage and a positive trend (more income than expense) that can support a fabricator then they are turned back on, one by one.

Only one fabricator is turned on / off per tick. This is intentional:"

  • it allows players with more APM to disable fabricators manually to have an advantage over those who do not
  • This reduces the stress on the simulation that eco manager could cause, where it could easily toggle dozens of fabricators each tick.

I can highly recommend everyone to give it a go πŸ™‚ .

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

making mass fabs self-toggle to avoid power stalls seems like a great addition to the base game,
after all mexes, pgens and ras never have this problem, so fabs have this unique disadvantage.

i would like to make a distinction between t2 and t3 fabs however, since t2 are usually just used for eco production, whereas t3 can also have significant use for the adjacency discounts, however this is only in effect when they are running, so having a toggle between priority for these would be useful !

Also I use Ecomanager mainly for the mex and silo overlays, and the right click on mex, and only the fab manager portion for the 'eco' side of it, which i tweaked to prioritise t2 fabs.

So if the change to the base game comes in and the economy-wide toggling is removed, which i support since it acts as a brake on newer players learning to manage their economy and also seems to give an unfair advantage in some lategame situations, then having a stripped down version with the parts players use and like should be available.

i vote keep the mod.because it reduces meaningless apm.To make it fair to players,we should let everyone knows it.Not ban it.Reduce micro let us focus on big pictures.

@black_wriggler said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

i would like to make a distinction between t2 and t3 fabs however, since t2 are usually just used for eco production, whereas t3 can also have significant use for the adjacency discounts, however this is only in effect when they are running, so having a toggle between priority for these would be useful !

You can do this manually by disabling the fabricators that you do not want to use. A prioritization system is a bit much, and difficult if not impossible to make compatible with unmaintained mods.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned