Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods

HollowSubmarine

The issue is mod not only toggle fabs but also prevents from E stalling by any means. If i am not mistaken you even can choose in what priority to cut off E spending. In my opinion eco managing is the core part of the game and it should not be simplified too much.

It would be good to have more or less strict rules what mod types are considered as illegal. And any exceptional case should be also stated within the corresponding thread. In general EcoManager works as auto clicker but for some reason considered as legal mod and used by many players.

Eternal-

You guys must try this mod before complaining about it. It is not that good, as others describes it.

MarcSpector

What about the FAF rules?

We will list what sort of UI mods are not allowed here. This includes:

All reclaim macros
All autoclickers

Femboy

Ban thy ecomanager

Reckless_Charger

What about eco managers option to queue up mex upgrades by assisting with engineers. That's a nice feature, or is that integrated in FAF now?

ZLO

@archsimkat said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

am a little confused at how it is still allowed to be used.

I guess it how it end up being historically, EcoManager appeared at GPG times and developers being AFK there was not one to make a desigion to ban something.

feels a little bit late to try to ban it, also i don't see best players using eco manager
afaik it is not even considered to be good for 1v1 (the throttle part of it)

The only "criminal" part of ecomanager is power and mass throttle and automated mass sharing. (automated resource sharing is pretty OP and idk why nobody mentioned it, tho i am not sure how it really works, only seen some videos from TA4Life like 10 years ago)

Everything else i'd keep or even integrate into the game, i am totally fine with automated massfabs, mex upgraide on right click, mex overlay

macdeffy

I use this mod primarily for the right click to upgrade mass extractor as a time saver, and have become accustomed to how that behaves. the mod frequently conflicted with another mod and caused issues that i can't recall, so i simply stripped out all the extra functions, and it literally only can be used to upgrade the mass extractors for me now. The teamshare mod takes care of nuke overlays for me now.

So if the option to right click mass extractors to upgrade existed in base game and works the same way here,, i wouldn't even need the mod as it exists now.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JJUNAbRUvRKI2KkmeVbtqD2OLfU9pXT9/view?usp=sharing

for anyone who just wants the mex click function only

BlackYps

Eco manager not only manages your mass fabs, but can entirely prevent shield stalls when your power gets sniped if it finds enough other things to turn off. This can be a pretty substantial advantage.
In my opinion any UI mod that automatically pauses units for you should be banned. We could still integrate automatic toggling of mass fabs or other elements that we find too tedious to manually do, but I think that it is important that we discuss what kind of automation we accept, integrate that and ban additional automations. Ideally we would prevent UI mods from being able to pause units entirely, but I am not sure if that is possible.
The arguments that you can't ban UI mods are not really convincing to me, as we have banned UI mods that automate reclaim and unit movements in the past. We don't have floods of reuploads or reports about them and even if we can't 100% prevent their use it is important to have these rules to communicate what we deem acceptable and what we consider cheating. In tournaments and select high level games we can actually enforce these rules and the same rules should apply to all players.

And in real life no sane person unironically argues for the abolition of all speed limits because you can't catch every speeder as well.

Katharsas

Wasn't the general problem that e-dependent buildings continue to use 100% e even when they are not working because of a stall? Which is completely different from how mass works?

Would it be possible to disable a building when it stalls and start a timer, so after like 5 seconds it tries to turn itself on again (and you cannot turn it on sooner)? This would still punish you for uncontrolled e stall, but it would punish continued stall less than before and it would make mass-fabs auto-balanced by getting deactivated randomly.

SpikeyNoob

First off as already mentioned EcoManager has many features such as showing smd percent (for teammates as well), mass extractor overlay, and nuke sub overlay. I use this all in every game however i never use the auto pause shit. I would hate to see such a useful mod banned for its worst feature.

With that said I think that pausing fabs is a huge pain right now. If you select all your fabs and u have some paused u must turn all of them on, wait a second, then shut them off. This means that when selecting fabs to turn off u need to make sure u don't select any that are already off, if u even select one u will need to take a good few seconds to turn them off. The solution i propose is 2 hotkeys, "Turn off Selected Fabs" and "Turn on Selected Fabs". This way without using much of any apm you can quickly prevent stalls without needing any ui mod. I think that this way would be more efficient for competent players than auto fab and would keep people from abusing it and not learning how to eco. So many phantom games i have wished for auto fab, but it just seems so boring, With better hotkeys fabs could be both more fun and more efficient.
As a side note having a dedicated fab on/off key would allow u to quickly select a bunch of structures without fearing that u will shut off a mass extractor along with your fabs. This would further make operating fabs less apm heavy.

Jip

I've decided to give (3) of this post a go. An initial implementation is available on FAF Develop.

It changes the behavior accordingly:

A disabled fabricator remains disabled, this allows you to fill storage for overcharge or respond to an economic trend in advance where the automated system is too slow. For example: when you expect reclaim.
The production of an enabled fabricator is toggled on / off according to your economic trend. If you have less than 40% energy storage and a negative trend (more expense than income) then fabricators start to toggle off one by one. If you have more than 60% energy storage and a positive trend (more income than expense) that can support a fabricator then they are turned back on, one by one.

Only one fabricator is turned on / off per tick. This is intentional:"

it allows players with more APM to disable fabricators manually to have an advantage over those who do not
This reduces the stress on the simulation that eco manager could cause, where it could easily toggle dozens of fabricators each tick.

I can highly recommend everyone to give it a go .

Blade_Walker

making mass fabs self-toggle to avoid power stalls seems like a great addition to the base game,
after all mexes, pgens and ras never have this problem, so fabs have this unique disadvantage.

i would like to make a distinction between t2 and t3 fabs however, since t2 are usually just used for eco production, whereas t3 can also have significant use for the adjacency discounts, however this is only in effect when they are running, so having a toggle between priority for these would be useful !

Also I use Ecomanager mainly for the mex and silo overlays, and the right click on mex, and only the fab manager portion for the 'eco' side of it, which i tweaked to prioritise t2 fabs.

So if the change to the base game comes in and the economy-wide toggling is removed, which i support since it acts as a brake on newer players learning to manage their economy and also seems to give an unfair advantage in some lategame situations, then having a stripped down version with the parts players use and like should be available.

Warlorzd

i vote keep the mod.because it reduces meaningless apm.To make it fair to players,we should let everyone knows it.Not ban it.Reduce micro let us focus on big pictures.

Jip

@black_wriggler said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

i would like to make a distinction between t2 and t3 fabs however, since t2 are usually just used for eco production, whereas t3 can also have significant use for the adjacency discounts, however this is only in effect when they are running, so having a toggle between priority for these would be useful !

You can do this manually by disabling the fabricators that you do not want to use. A prioritization system is a bit much, and difficult if not impossible to make compatible with unmaintained mods.

M0rPh3u5

I am barely new to FAF but an old SupCom player.
Was digging in the vault mod few days ago, and saw this mod.
First react was "WTF it's an insane advantage for my oponent if he use it but i don't!"
And then "Nah, this seems to be a cheat, it is probably not allowed in ranked so i won't use it"

And now i see this thread and i am on my butt that it is an "authorized" mod

what is next? press S on a factory to auto spread attack so engeneers reclaim 120km² with only one press?

Nah, i think this is a part of the brainload you have to worry about in this game, if you wanna play "this style".
Ecomanager should not be allowed, just like autoclicker & same stuff

My 2cts

CheeseBerry

My main gripe with ecomanager is not that it's op, but that it gives you a type of advantage that new players are not even aware of being possible.

While I can't speak for the 2.5k gods among us, at my semi competitive level of ~2k setons there are only two actually useful, hard to replace, automation features of ecomanager:

Making sure shields and omni never turn off in the lategame by throttling fabs, (air-)factories and construction.
Allowing your mass fabs to run on your allies' power overflow without fear.

Integrating the second feature into the main repo would be a nice QOL change imo, but for the first one I don't really have a good idea.

In a perfect world all parts of ecomanager would be unnecessary, e.g. adding the fab throttling into the base game, banned by an easy to enforce rule, like reclaim auto-clickers, or just explicitly allowed.

Sadly, all three solutions have problems.

For one, I'm pretty certain there is no way to integrate throttling of non-fabs to always keep your shields up in a sensible way.
Having your construction pause automatically will loose you lots of games unless you know exactly how the automated logic works, and/or you being able to edit said logic directly. But automatic throttling like this is a must if you want to ensure your base doesn't die to your shields flickering from a random influx of mass while you micro your army on the other side of the map.

Banning it is also a bad idea imo. Not only would enforcement be costly and avoidance trivial (just make sure the pausing looks human enough and you have plausible deniability), I can already imagine the endless arguments about some 1k dude on dual gap having used, or not having used, ecomanager to pause their hives..

As a result, even if you want ecomanager gone (and I kinda do), I think it's not big enough of a problem for the ban route to be worth pursuing. None of the actually good players use ecomanager in tournaments after all.

As such, I think just explicitly allowing the type of automation ecomanager uses (selection, pausing and unpausing), while keeping mods that give unit movement/reclaim/attack orders banned is the least bad solution.

It's the "least bad" solution because for maps where ecomanager is useful, keeping it allowed also keeps the weird meta-skill of having to learn ecomanager, if you want to get the most out of your t3/t4 arty wars which is useful nowhere else in faf.

But having selection, pausing and unpausing explicitly allowed avoids the problems that ban or integration have, while, as a side effect, also clears up the grey zone that mods like selection prioritizer, split/disperse move and the auto-repeat feature of UI party are in.

If we combine this with having mass fab throttling as an option in the main game, now every new player also knows that something like ecomanager is possible which should significantly reduce the information gap between them and long term players.

CheeseBerry

Note that ecomanager has of course a lot more features than the two I mentioned (automatic mex upgrades, auto share of resources, etc.), but all of them are easily, and usually much better, done yourself.
E.g. sending mass to allies or upgrading a mex is just a single click and both should always be a conscious decision if you want to win.

Can those features still give you an advantage if you are inexperienced (or lazy) enough? Of course, but for me they rank similarly to overly intricate templates: It's far from optimal, so why not let people have fun with them if they want.

Blade_Walker

@Jip
Did you mean manually enabling the fabs you want ? Because manually disabling would defeat the purpose of having this automated by the base game.

Simply prioritizing t2 fabs first to be turned off before t3 would not be difficult and would also provide a finer granularity of power consumption adjustment once you fall below the storage limit allowance.

Jip

I highly recommend you to try out the behavior yourself by playing a sandboxed game on FAF Develop:

It is difficult to describe it without repeating myself. I'll try again tonight.

MediaMix1

@archsimkat said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

I propose we ban mods that automatically throttle energy and mass spenders (mass fabs, engineers, factories, etc.) to prevent stalls such as, but not limited to, EcoManager and UI Mass Fab Manager - Auto Fab Manager.

The way EcoManager in particular works is that it will throttle energy users when your mass/energy in storage falls below a certain threshold. It provides a huge gameplay advantage, preventing shields from going down, without any input from the user since it just plays the game for you.

Here is a recent example of it being used. You can see the streamer lilSidlil add 14 hives to a t3 pgen, which crashes his power to -30k. The mod immediately reacts to pause all mass fabs and other engineers to save as much power as possible.

https://youtu.be/vbKlS3k-LRE?t=8032

EcoManager has some features that are acceptable, such as the Mex overlay and the Nuke overlay (displaying mex tech level/number of missiles loaded) that don't need to be banned, but those non-cheat should be bundled into a new mod or the cheat features removed from the current one.

In my opinion this mod far surpasses the threshold for a cheat mod, and honestly am a little confused at how it is still allowed to be used. It should be straightforward to just remove it from the vault and ban people that still use it, since it's pretty obvious when it is being used. What are your thoughts on the issue?

Why don't we just implement some of the features of these mods into the core game so everyone is on the same level? A mod that helps lighten the load on your APM, in my honest opinion, should be welcomed - not shunned. Not everyone is capable of high APM, and mods like these can help make the game more accessible without excluding people who have faster APM. To put it bluntly, I think mods like these are good (albeit flawed).

Heck, now that I talk about it, I think I'll try and see what I can do to help be the change I want to see - to make the game more accessible to lower-APM players without excluding people that have near perfect muscle memory, etc.