86% mass discount

Did you know that if you surround a factory with 4 T3 mass fabricators and 4 T2 mass fabricators, you get around 86% mass discount? It not only makes T3 spam super cheap compared to experimentals, it also, according to my calculations, is more profitable than T2 mass fabricators if you produce percivals/bricks and reclaim them.

Did you know if you’re making a mass fab grid it’s min 30 and I’ve either got 800 mass being dumped into t4s or a mavor.

And if I’m making 800 mass a second, I do not care whatsoever about the 300 mass profit or whatever that I get every 50 seconds I make a percy.

@melanol said in 86% mass discount:

Did you know that if you surround a factory with 4 T3 mass fabricators and 4 T2 mass fabricators, you get around 86% mass discount? It not only makes T3 spam super cheap compared to experimentals, it also, according to my calculations, is more profitable than T2 mass fabricators if you produce percivals/bricks and reclaim them.

Thanks, this advice will be very helpful when I'm playing no-paragon games with a 50-minute no-rush timer

Would you guys say the same crap if it was 99%? Or what is your threshold?

It's simply not anything useful, might make for a funny information tidbit but that's about it.
Otherwise it's useless for any type of normal pvp game.

Mass Fabs are almost never worth it in most circumstances. That sounds like a juicy target for strat bombers though

@melanol said in 86% mass discount:

Would you guys say the same crap if it was 99%? Or what is your threshold?

It's a fair question. The answer is "yes," we would say the same thing.

What you're talking about is not particularly practical:

• It has high cost to get it set up (including power needs)
• it takes time to pay back the cost to build it in the first place (you always need to consider this when you're doing something purely for economic benefit)
• it's highly explosive and can chain react if attacked (if your stuff blows up, it stops generating profits for you)

So as FtX says, he has plenty of ways to punish you for it before you even break even on your investment.

But more importantly, the actual payout is not huge. Assuming that, with the discount, it costs 192 mass to make a brick every 54 seconds, and you can reclaim the dead brick for 1037 mass, that's a profit of 845 mass every 54 seconds. This translates to approximately 16 mass/second, not counting the mass generated by the fabs themselves.

(It's 54 seconds because it takes 53 seconds in the factory plus about 1 second of "roll-off time" to get out of the factory so the next one can start building. You can't assist the factory to get bricks out faster because assistance doesn't get the adjacency bonus.)

16 mass/second is less than what you get from making 2 RAS SACUs.

Even if it was 100% efficient (0 mass cost per brick) that would mean:

Every 54 seconds, you get 1037 mass, which is just above 19 mass/second.

It's less than what you'd get from making a single T3 mass fab surrounded by mass storages, or making 2 RAS SACUs. It's less than what you get from the 4 T3 mass fabs surrounding the factory.

I'm not going to do the math on this, but it's probably cheaper just to make your mass fabs adjacent to T3 pgens. This gives you an adjacency bonus in the form of needing less power to run your fabs. Which means you need to build fewer T3 pgens. So if you're spending 16 mass/second less on making T3 pgens, that's the same kind of payout you get from this brick-recycling setup.

I like your creativity and I don't mind your questions.

You guys are completely ignoring that these units can be used as units, not reclaim. Cheap land antiair and a counter to experimentals. Do you people ever play land roles, like in Dual Gap? And I am not even saying about massing this. Also, there is no chain reaction, only big damage. But you do build generators and nuke launchers that explode, right? And everyone builds air factories with T3 generators, this explodes as well.

Got a feeling you play too much dual gap.

Nothing you said applies to real games because by the time you make any sort of relevant mass fab land fac grid you already have absurd eco where your 4-5 hyper efficient land facs literally do not matter because I produce a GC every 50 seconds and you produce 5 percies every 50 seconds.

Doesn’t matter how epic your savings are, you lose. Focused on the pennies and losing the pounds.

I think you should remake your calculations using t3 air factory and continental or strat bombers in case of non UEF.

Then you take total cost of all massfabs and factory and power generators to run factory and massfabs and how much mass you get from that and then compare that to t2 massfabs + ras sacus.

@zeldafanboy said in 86% mass discount:

Mass Fabs are almost never worth it in most circumstances. That sounds like a juicy target for strat bombers though

I think SCU RAS causes this, it is safer option. I think either SCU RAS should cost more or make Fabs cheaper and use less power.

do you guys try this outside dg before posting ?
has any of you used that and felt like it was someting impactful ?

I think the key thing people are ignoring is the roll off time. With adjacency bonus you can't assist the factory. So you have the time it takes to build the mass fabs + the roll off time giving your opponent plenty of time to gain an advantage.

@angelofd347h said in 86% mass discount:

I think the key thing people are ignoring is the roll off time. With adjacency bonus you can't assist the factory. So you have the time it takes to build the mass fabs + the roll off time giving your opponent plenty of time to gain an advantage.

i think more importantly people are missing that land facory only is consuming about 20 mass or so while air factory making strats is consuming 32 for continental and 30 for strats so since it is better to use air fac rolloff is not that big of an issue

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.

@zlo They require too much energy

@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

@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.

Moved to General Discussion

@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!