@exselsior said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 2 (ACU Billy Nuke Upgrade):
There’s no such thing as mass per tick it’s per second. A tick is how often the game engine updates the game state and processes new inputs and has nothing to do with the economy. Economy is mass and energy per second.
You are describing your own simplified mental model of the game, not the game itself.
Ticks are not just for taking input from players. The game state is updated every tick. (And there's a 5-tick delay between giving a command and when the command is executed.)
Moving units move forward every tick.
Collisions are checked every tick.
Weapons can be fired every tick (if there is a target and they're not still on cooldown).
Weapons cooldown every tick until they're done cooling down.
Mass is delivered every tick, not just once per second.
Mass is spent every tick, not just once per second.
Mass is actually tracked by the game in units of 0.1 mass each. Let's call these units "atoms" because they are indivisible. So if a mantis costs 56 mass, it costs 560 "atoms" (indivisible mass units) that are each worth 0.1 mass.
A T1 mex that gives, over time, 2 mass/second, is actually delivering 2 atoms per tick.
Does all of this matter? It depends. If you're just trying to play the game, it's probably smarter to use a mental model that only updates once per second. If you're trying to make blueprints for a new unit or tweak the balance, then this tick-by-tick stuff actually matters.