86% mass discount

I want to see a army of bricks under water take out a good sized navy

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.

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:

adj.jpg

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 🙂

@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

@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.

@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 🙂

@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.

@nex said in 86% mass discount:

@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.

Actually it is clarifying, since the headline number number "86% discount" is misleading itself - 86% of what?

If the percentage discount is reduced, but it is a smaller percentage of a bigger production number, then overall mass balance is the same

Edit - in this particular case i forgot again about the mass loss from the wreck, because of this any additional mass you put in from assistance will not be reclaimed in full, so the efficiency will be less