(A)RAS: reduce nearby building consumption to zero

I suggest that RAS will reduce the mass consumption costs of nearby buildings to zero. ARAS reduces mass and energy consumption of nearby buildings to zero. Units and in particular engineers derive no benefit. SCU's provide a 50% reduction instead of a 100% reduction.

The radius should be pretty small, so that at most 4 medium or large buildings can benefit from its effect. This would yield a benefit of 64 mass income from mass fabricators, 84 free mass with T3 factories, or at most (I think) 160 free mass with 4 strategic missile launchers. This is significantly more than now, but, it requires your commander to be in a specific place, don't do much at all, and a specific arrangement of buildings.

The most interesting benefit of this form of RAS is that it renders nearby buildings immune to mass stalls, and in case of ARAS also power stalls. An ARAS commander will never suffer shields going offline. After your eco is wrecked a RAS commander can allow mexes and other buildings to upgrade for free.

However, there is more counterplay as well. All benefit are situational. When you are chasing the enemy commander away, RAS does nothing anymore and the eco might in fact stall right away once the buildings start drawing real mass again. The "free" shield cluster will also not operate if it is destroyed by an intruder.

I'm by no means a FAF or balance expert, but thought this might be an interesting idea. I cannot really defend or speak on its impact on balance or the metagame.

Make ARAS

Stand ACU near shield and t3 air fac

Have 100 hives

Produce 1 asf or strat every .3 seconds for free and be impossible to break unless enemy gets 2 mavors up

Also make nukes/antinukes in like half the time

@FtXCommando said in (A)RAS: reduce nearby building consumption to zero:

Make ARAS

Stand ACU near shield and t3 air fac

Have 100 hives

I always thought hives produce drones, but no, they indeed draw mass themselves. Hives would need to be exempted from benefitting from (A)RAS then.

(Your combo would require an Aeon/Seraphim player acquiring UEF/Cybran tech but this is indeed trivial) .

Needing to introduce exceptions into a feature should be a red flag that it’s not a viable idea.

In order to make such an upgrade not broken it would require like quintupling the current cost of RAS and then probably only making it apply to the specific thing an ACU is assisting. Even then, it would absolutely break teamgames where you could have up to 8 ACUs doing this and effectively destroying the whole point of the game (mass/e/bp management).

Wow ftx you totally smashed the idea.

I on the other hand think its a cool idea, basically a 100% adjecancy bonus, maybe on acu support. That's kinda cool! Would yield at best 40 mass (nuke), or like 32 (strat??) And render acu useless in the process. I think Its a fun idea, but wouldnt really promote exciting gameplay (have acu in base supporting a single thing - lame and reduces choices)

We should have an environment here that rewards people for having ideas and sharing them with us, if they are new and somewhat thought out. Not talk it into the ground with a somewhat condescending tone! Not what a councillor should behave like!

Jk I still love you but its still meh behaviour.

@FtXCommando If you coded this as an adjacency bonus then hive assist and other assist, would not cause this problem.

This is what I assumed he meant, when he said reducing mass consumption of the building, and not everything assisting it. I'm not even sure how you'd code reducing assist cost, because you'd need to physically alter the unit cost stats, at base. Which doesn't sound sensible.

Anyway, I don't think this would promote healthy gameplay, as Ras is already very mass efficient as it is, and this just buffs it unecessarily, making it dominant again, because you'll be saving 800-1500 power on your ASF build as air meaning first RAS is always the way to go, as you can poop more ASf as you can assist it harder, due to the savings.

Also could you imagine the Strat bomber rush shenanigans?

I'll try to stay out of this stuff in the future, during these lockdowns I don't need additional drama.

What inspired me are 3 things

1. the name: "Resource Allocation System", implies more about allocation than generation
2. mass & power stalls can be fatal, an ACU upgrade that helps you deal with this can be fun
3. RAS is boring and dumb as a 700 rated 1v1 player and Gyle-watcher at least.

If (2) works out, then having an anti-stall RAS upgrade available at T1 might make it a popular option for beginning players, and pro players that see their opponent preparing massive eco harassment. I will not comment on how it could work, sorry..