Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods
-
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.
-
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.
-
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. -
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
. -
J Jip referenced this topic on
-
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.
-
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.
-
@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.
-
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 stuffMy 2cts
-
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.
-
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.
-
@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.
-
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.
-
@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.
-
@MediaMix1 see a previous post for an implementation to make it more widely available, ready on FAF Develop.
-
J Jip referenced this topic on
-
@jip Ty for letting me know.
-
@mediamix1 said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:
@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.
Why don't we just let AI play for us?
Unless you're 1500+ (and that's lowballing it), the game already has a very low APM requirement compared to other popular RTSs. I have a hard time seeing APM as a reason for the game not being accessible.
Further, a large part of getting good at this game is eco management. If we just automate that, you're taking away a large portion of what the game is even about. The mod should be banned, not integrated. Make it as hard to get/install as reasonably possible. Obviously most cheats/mods cannot be 100% eliminated, but luckily in this case the mod tends to hamper you as a player more than it helps so that isn't really a problem if the odd player here or there ends up using it.
-
@snagglefox said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:
Further, a large part of getting good at this game is eco management.
A significant part, yes: especially with regards to grabbing reclaim, building power and choosing when to upgrade mexes. Flipping a few mass-fabs on/off is nothing compared to that.
Anyway, a still larger part of the game is unit control: raiding and defending.
I support Jip's decision to try merging limited mass-fab automation into FAF.
-
I can see adding a button that disables/enables all fabs, but I can't support any sort of automated control. Balancing your eco to avoid power stalls is a big part of eco management, and contributes to fights considering you risk losing shields or radar.
Having some automated control avoiding power stalls for you is IMO akin to cheating. That should remain manual, otherwise you're just letting the game deal with your gameplay mistakes. It is not hard to select some fabs and disable them yourself. If we automate things just because they're minor APM-wise, then we may as well just start automating a ton of other things and let the game play itself besides us just giving movement or attack orders.
-
@snagglefox said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:
Why don't we just let AI play for us?
This argument is used quite often when anything related to automation comes into play. With it, we should remove:
- the extractor capping feature (we are letting the game place storage / fabriactors / power gens for us)
- the attack priority feature (we are letting the game determine what units my units should attack for us)
- the spread attack feature (we are letting the game manages our commands for us)
- the ability to see your allies resources (we are letting the game estimate our allies economy for us, even their storage!)
- (1) the ability to repeat-apply the queue of your factories (we are letting the game requeue units for us)
- (1) the ability to auto pickup and drop off units with transports (we are letting the game automate unit transportation for us)
And we should also ban:
- Additional camera stuff (we are letting the game gauge the engineer reclaim radius for us)
- Disperse move (not sure what this does, but the game manages our commands for us)
- Better reclaim view (we are letting the game highlight relevant wrecks for us)
- Advanced target priorities (we are letting the game determine what units my units should attack for us, at great precision)
- Any strategic icon mod, especially that of Eternal as it also highlights the tech level of the engineer.
This list is not exhaustive. All of these automate parts of the game. I'm quite confident that everyone that opposes these changes use some of these features and some of these mods. After all, the mods are recommended by Blackheart in his UI mods topic.
Back to mass fabricator automation. At the moment fabricators are extremely unfriendly to a casual player - they are very volatile to your economy. I'd even argue that new players see no purpose for the unit the moment they understand that you can also upgrade extractors. With that, in the average game they have no real meaning. And that is what eco manager brings to the table - a reason for you to have fabricators without you having to worry about crashing your economy because of them. But it takes it to the extreme, where even the performance of the game can take a hit.
In my opinion a good game feature is friendly to a casual player, but it allows you to have a competitive edge when you take manual control. Fabricators are, without eco manager, not friendly to the casual player. With the change I am suggestion they become friendly to the casual player. They react slow: only one mass fabricator can be turned off or on each tick. It would take 10 seconds to turn off 100 fabricators. Meaning, if you have a low reclaim burst and some storage then you will likely not stall. But if you have no storage and a high reclaim burst or a sudden burst of energy usage in general then it won't respond fast enough and a casual player will stall. A competitive player can use their hotkeys to turn them all off before they stall - that is where the competitive advantage is.
That makes it a 'easy to use, difficult to master' feature. Exactly the type of features that are interesting to a game as it allows casual players to play the game and it allows competitive players to have distinct advantage over casual players.
Another example is the rotation of the weaponry of units. Take for example a Mantis. If you move the unit to the left while the target is moving to its right then the Mantis won't fire: the rotational momentum of the turret is roughly equal to that if the unit rotating as a whole. This is a tiny detail that, on the average fight, is irrelevant. But competitive players can make use of this to have an advantage over their opponents. Another 'easy to use, difficult to master' feature that I am quite fond of.
(1) This was a feature that were well received by critics and reviews during the launch of Supreme Commander:
Paragraph of a review from IGN: https://www.ign.com/articles/2007/02/16/supreme-commander-review-2
Effectively controlling the battlefield is achieved chiefly through the all-powerful Shift key. By pressing and holding, players can queue up unit movements, build orders, patrol waypoints, and combine move and attack orders. Should you decide to change movement patterns or build locations while the action is already underway, hitting shift again brings up an interface where you can drag around the waypoints as you see fit. Every unit construction factory can be given build order while it's still being built. Even after telling it to upgrade to the next technology level, you'll be presented with the next set of build options so you don't have to keep checking back in. Different types and amounts of units can be queued in the same construction facility, and a repeat build order function lets you move on to something else once you're happy with a factory's production pattern. Since you'll find a significant amount of water and hilly terrain across the game's many maps, there's an unusual emphasis on air transports. Thankfully these units can be set along ferry routes, where they'll automatically scoop up waiting units and drop them off wherever you so designate. If you set a factory waypoint to the starting point of the ferry route, units will automatically be ferried as soon as they roll or crawl off the production line.
The entire paragraph (and the article) is a good read, as all these features were magical in the 2006 / 2007 era. The game was praised because it took away a lot of manual bullshit that you don't really want to think about. We want to think about the grand scheme, the bigger picture. And automating the mass fabricators in such a manner that the average player can forget about them seems to fit right into that if you ask me.
And for those that do not read the article, it ends with:
The strategic zoom and base automation are so intuitive and helpful, it makes many other RTS games seem confining and simplistic.
-
APM should naturally arise from the breadth and pace of decisionmaking opportunities. Any action that does not amount to making a choice between at least two relevant alternatives tends to feel unnecessary and superfluous, and imo is a cheap way to make the game "harder".
As an easy example in early sc2 betas (iirc, don't quote me) many players complained that the game was too easy. The developers ended up adding some additional mechanics to artificially raise the skillcap. One of these mechanics was larva inject. Zerg players need to periodically use the "inject larva" ability with their queens in order to spawn larva that can be used to construct units. Without larva you can't make units. There are some edge cases where players skip injecting larva to save queen energy, but in the vast majority of cases injecting does not include a choice from the player and is just a mechanical task that players have to perform periodically. Furthermore the few edge cases where you'd skip injecting are only relevant for high level players and as such have no effect on how an averge player perceives the game.
In my view, pausing massfabs is an entirely mechanical task as there's no situation where you wouldn't want to pause your massfabs when running low on energy. That's why automating massfab pause is fine (as long as everyone has access to it). For the same reason automating pausing buildpower is not fine -- there's compelling decisionmaking in which engis to pause etc.
