History of payback times for Mass Options and theoretical balance

HotCheeseInRear

Paybacktime = Mass Cost-Energy upkeep * 1.3 /Mass Income. This is imperfect and not taking into account energy cost, build time, tech level or volatile.

How would the game change with more viable mass fabs? Back in SC Vanilla t1 mass fabs had 0:52 payback time and T3 Mass Fabs had 1:55. Additionally T3 Mexs were only 12M/S for 1800M.

Included are the old vanilla, Steam and FAF values. Along with a few hybrids splitting the difference between the two.

This is not a balance suggestion this is a discussion!

Namely if one can use the energy and the SACU w/o upgrades is reasonably costed, it seems RAS bois dominate T3 Mass Fabs (yes quantum gate cost and build times mess with this equation).

Image attached incase one doesn't want to look at google sheet.

ZLO

i remember "high level" 2v2 fields of isis game in vanilla SupCom.
At least 80% of unit cap were t1+t3 massfabs and t3 generators (the rest was probably t2 pds/t2arty/t3engies/sacus/aa)
good player would have to build 400 t1 massfabs
and after that people would just build t3 arty
i don't think there were other reliable attacking methods (at least not on isis, and no GC was not good with its 240k HP and 25k DPS, it would die to t1 pds afaik)
supcom 1 balance was not great, and t1 massfabs costing 1 mass 1000 energy didn't help much.
t2 mexes were only slightly better than t1 massfab farms in supcom 1

if you make diagonal lines of 1massfab + 2pgen then it will give 1 mass per 151 mass invested and give some energy too cause of adjacency
so it is more like 151 seconds of payback time? ofc it gets better if you use hydro or t2/t3 pgens
But t2 mex is like 1 mass per 225 mass invested.

i am not super strongly against massfab buffs, it is just i want to say that massfabs were broken-overpowered in supcom 1.
air was kinda weak, so bombing massfabs was not super easy. and you could always just spread them around more

FtXCommando

Map control is centered around the efficiency of mexes for scaling, make mass fabs comparable to mexes and map control loses the majority of the reason it matters. Now the game is massively more passive and less interactive.

HotCheeseInRear

@ZLO Yes In no sense would going anywhere close to vanilla be good or fun. But perhaps there is a discussion to make T3 mass fabs slightly more viable than T2mass fabs or SACU RAS

waffelzNoob

T3 mass fabs are already more viable than RAS sACUS
Compared to T2 mass fabs, T3 mass fabs are much more space efficient and easier to work with
I think they're fine as they are

Nomander

@CheeseBerry's FAF eco compendium compares fab templates, fab adjacency bonuses, and in general has a lot of work on the math of eco.

T3 fabs beat T2 fabs economically using adjacency and defensively by density/hp.

The SACU part of RAS SACU is not very useful for the cost so it always gets added to the cost of RAS SACU, which makes them an extremely inefficient eco option. You'd clean up all the reclaim on the map by the time you have a good number of RAS SACU, and the in-base buildpower or survivability aren't good enough compared to T3 engi spam and shield assist. In my opinion their mass cost could be buffed a little because building them is always throwing the game since you can build game enders before the SACU pay off instead.

Saver

@Nomander
Hi, quick question. In which area is the neighborhood influence controlled?

Nomander

@Saver I don't know much about AI, so I can't answer that question. Also this is the wrong thread for this, you should ask in the help section of the forum or on discord.

Saver

@Nomander Thanks, and please excuse me, I phrased my question incorrectly.

I wasn't asking about AI influence, but rather where the values are displayed when an artillery piece is surrounded by power plants.

But you're absolutely right, I can ask that question separately