86% mass discount
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I think it is the most efficient mass per second to make air scouts from the air factory and reclaim them. Yolo- Mega Crusher told me about it years ago. Still not practical.
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@zlo They require too much energy
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@zlo if you make strats or continentals, the system becomes 55% more efficient
so what?
that only amounts to about 25-30 mass/second which is still not big enough to be worth doing
I would want to see something like a single factory generating 100-200 mass/second to justify the investment in power, mass fabs, and APM
It's true you could scale up to 200 mass/second if you had 8 air facs doing this, that would be 200 mass/second and it wouldn't take much more APM than for a single factory
But that means building 32 t3 mass fabs and enough power generation to support them
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@melanol said in 86% mass discount:
@zlo They require too much energy
I disagree.
Each of the 4 mass fabs require 1500 energy/second, that's 6k total, not counting the t2 mass fabs.
The air factory needs 1800 energy/second for a strat or 1200 energy/second for a Continental
So the ratio of energy cost compared to the amount of mass generated is actually worse for T3 mass fabs without pgen adjacency (16/s, 1500 e/s), than it is for spamming continentals without pgen adjacency from a factory surrounded by mass fabs (25/s, 1200 e/s)
it's true you could get some savings by adding pgen adjacency to your mass fabs (obviously you can't get it for your air factory), but if you can afford to run 4 T3 mass fabs, it's not much more expensive from an energy standpoint to have a factory making continentals on infinite repeat.
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D Deribus moved this topic from Balance Discussion on
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Moved to General Discussion
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@melanol I think to understand this more you should make a graph of total Percival count. One player makes Percivals as fast as possible, the other builds this mighty mass discount grid. By the time the grid is complete and the first Percival rolls off the assembly line, how many will the player who was just building Percivals the whole time have?
@Rezy-Noob Yeah, I tried it on dual gap reborn and it worked great!
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Check out how useful the 80% discount is on DualGap: https://replay.faforever.com/18287108. I produce a lot of bricks while constantly overflowing and donating everything to eco (and you are supposed to to win late-game on DualGap). So, basically, when a factory discount goes a bit beyond 20% (T3 fab gives 20%, T3 mex gives 12.5%), I don't stop production, as it becomes mass generation and I can reclaim if needed. In the end, I have around 15 factories producing bricks.
I also build T3 pgens far away, because you only need factories, fabs and shields there (maybe UEF SACUs with 50k projected shields could help save space instead of structure shields).
So, it feels like this strategy work best on bigger maps, as it takes time to build the infrastructure and on smaller maps, you need to somehow survive early experimentals.
P. S. Bricks aren't total crap underwater due to their HP, discount, and immunity to battleship ground-fire.
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@melanol said in 86% mass discount:
DualGap
How useful is it on any other map? At this stage of the game mass is not important anymore, but time and BP.
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@magge If you want build power, you can just build 1 T3 factory with 80% discount and never stop producing engies that you can reclaim if needed.
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Engs are never going to cut it, hives are crucial. Maybe this works for <1k ELO games with passive enemies, but after a certain ELO threshold you will see a complete different meta.
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@magge I am now talking about non-DualGap maps, and you don't always have engstations.
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I want to see a army of bricks under water take out a good sized navy
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I think this would be usefull on setons to spam t3 maa if air is lost lategame or to spam hoverflak
Massfabs absolutley are worth it on setons, the payback time is not that long for t2 fabs -
It's useful in any scenario you wanna keep on spamming armies and scaling eco. Are there other ways to do it? Sure there are. It's just one of them that might be efficient as hell mass wise but lacking in other parts like base cohesion or just BT requirements.
So just like always, it's a game of what suits your needs at the moment.
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Surrounding a t3 factory with t3 fabs is a terrible waste of their adjacency potential, even if you are getting effectively 'free' units late game you have much easier eco options such as mass fab templates or especially RAS com spam which doesn't require destroying and reclaiming your own units!
Using a grid to make units is efficient but once multiple t4s are on the field then t3 armies start to struggle.
A much more interesting use of t3 fabs would be early in the t3 phase to scale your unit production harder, using the opposite layout with a single fab surrounded by factories. Making percies or bricks the fab would save nearly 20 mass total a second, in addition to the generated 16 you are net 36 mass, which is two t3 mex upgrades!
Admittedly you need to power the fab and it probly wants a t2 shield if your team doesn't have air. So need an early t3 pgen - or possibly ACU RAS could work.
You can even get funky and include mex adjaceny:
Here you are effectively getting three t3 units for the price of two. It is pretty rare to get a layout for four mexes, but three is pretty common and you can do two with any single mex.
Four storages would give 3 mass but here are they are saving nearly 10. Again this relies on you constantly building units to get the benefit, but it is not true that assisting the factory will reduce the adjacency - you will still be saving the same mass per tick than you would unassisted, it is just that you get more units in the time and so the mass saved per each one is less.
What will kill your efficiency is stalling mass, if you are the kind of player who stalls for half their total income at this point in the game you are going to lose a third of your adjacency bonus, and should probably just build the storages and t3 mexes instead
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@black_wriggler said in 86% mass discount:
but it is not true that assisting the factory will reduce the adjacency
It is true, if you say you get a 80% reduction in unit cost.
because once you assist your factory the finished unit will have cost more than 20% of it's cost.
But yeah the mass saving per second stays the same. -
@nex said in 86% mass discount:
@black_wriggler said in 86% mass discount:
but it is not true that assisting the factory will reduce the adjacency
It is true, if you say you get a 80% reduction in unit cost.
because once you assist your factory the finished unit will have cost more than 20% of it's cost.
But yeah the mass saving per second stays the same.well probly the wording could have been better, but at least for mexes you are comparing factory adjacency with the alternative, which is generally the bonus income from storage.
so assisting the factory doesn't affect the same mass per tic saving you get from the mex, so doesn't reduce the adjacency :), roll off time will be greater however
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@black_wriggler The thread's name is "86% mass discount", which is not true once you start assisting the factory. And if you intend to reclaim the build units to get the saved mass as actual mass, you also get less if you assist the factory.
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@nex said in 86% mass discount:
@black_wriggler The thread's name is "86% mass discount", which is not true once you start assisting the factory. And if you intend to reclaim the build units to get the saved mass as actual mass, you also get less if you assist the factory.
Well maybe you should reply to my post and not the thread title then? I already mentioned how using this setup to build highly discounted units and reclaim them is a very poor use of your APM late game when other options are readily available.
Yes if you assist the factory in this setup then the mass percent discount is lower, but a better way to look at it is you are capped at a 'free' 25.8 mass/sec from the fully ringed factory making a strat. Assisting doesn't change this amount, you just get units faster. Of course you have spent 16.8 k mass in fabs to get here (not counting the energy to run them...) so this is really why it is such an inefficient choice ! And why you want to surround the fab with factories and not vice-versa.
(actually wreck reclaim is 81% of this, so only 21.7 mass / sec !)however if you are using adjacency for its intended purpose, discounted production of stuff you will use and not simply reclaim, then feel free to assist any adjacent factories since this will not affect the bonus they are providing to your overall eco - just don't stall hard
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@black_wriggler I'm not saying you are wrong or that it's a remotely smart idea to make units just to reclaim them. I'm just saying, that your statement
@nex said in 86% mass discount:
it is not true that assisting the factory will reduce the adjacency
depends on your view on the gains of adjacency (per unit/per time) and is misleading in the context of this thread.
