Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods

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.

had a look at the implementation on faf-dev and it is nice and responsive, seems at least equal to the mod versions I have tried in the past. I wonder if with a little adjustment it could turn off multiple fabs in one go rather than over the course of several ticks, which would have a similar overall affect on sim speed and help prevent an actual e-stall.

currently any mass fabs that are switched off won't be paused though which seems somewhat unintuitive - you can see which ones are running if you enable the eco consumption overlay but i doubt most players have this turned on for their games

as i suspected also there is no priority for tiers of fabs, when energy bar gets filled a bunch of t2 fabs got turned on when i would prefer the t3 fab that is next to my t3 land facs...

Has anyone ever built mass fabs in a competitive match?

@jip Thanks for the long winded reply, you actually convinced me. I can get behind the implementation as you've described it.

@black_wriggler said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

as i suspected also there is no priority for tiers of fabs, when energy bar gets filled a bunch of t2 fabs got turned on when i would prefer the t3 fab that is next to my t3 land facs...

This is intended. The system needs to be as light weight as possible, keeping track of the more 'relevant' fabricators requires some form of sorting to remain backwards compatible with mods.

At the moment the fabricator that is enabled or disabled to produce is chosen at random. It depends on the order in memory. If you want certain fabricators enabled then you either:

• make sure you have sufficient power to run all your fabricators
• you manually disable some fabricators to ensure the fabricators you prefer can be enabled again. You can set up hotkeys to easily select the t2 fabricators and disable those accordingly, for example

The latter feels more involved. Again, that is intended: the automated solution should not be optimal. It should be reasonable, where reasonable means that it helps you to prevent a stall. It doesn't help you activate the most relevant fabricators. That allows a competitive edge when you take manual control.

@black_wriggler said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

currently any mass fabs that are switched off won't be paused though which seems somewhat unintuitive - you can see which ones are running if you enable the eco consumption overlay but i doubt most players have this turned on for their games

I agree, I have not figured out a solution to this yet . I'd argue that giving them the pause symbol is equally confusing.

@black_wriggler said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

I wonder if with a little adjustment it could turn off multiple fabs in one go rather than over the course of several ticks, which would have a similar overall affect on sim speed and help prevent an actual e-stall.

We can tweak the parameters (perhaps they start disabling at 60% of your storage instead of at 40% of your storage), but you can also create more energy storages .

@snagglefox said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

Thanks for the long winded reply, you actually convinced me. I can get behind the implementation as you've described it.

Glad to hear the appreciation - it took me 40 minutes to write.

@snagglefox said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

@jip Thanks for the long winded reply, you actually convinced me. I can get behind the implementation as you've described it.

Same for me.
But the main point now is, if it's allowed then it MUST be active by default in all games and for everyone.
Again, I am new to FAF, and there is lot of stuff to deal with to reach the best experience in the game.
It's like an AirSim, you need 1hour reading the manual just to launch the engine.

@jip said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

This is intended. The system needs to be as light weight as possible, keeping track of the more 'relevant' fabricators requires some form of sorting to remain backwards compatible with mods.
At the moment the fabricator that is enabled or disabled to produce is chosen at random. It depends on the order in memory. If you want certain fabricators enabled then you either...

I see how more book keeping is undesirable, but perhaps instead a toggle in options to just choose at random amongst t2 fabs only (also t3 only if this has a use case?), rather than all fabs, would prevent any tracking, and would require the player to ensure they have enough built of the correct type to not stall. You could even have a disable option for those hardcore players who want to do it all themselves

We can tweak the parameters (perhaps they start disabling at 60% of your storage instead of at 40% of your storage), but you can also create more energy storages

I was thinking more along the lines of once you hit the lower limit, then enuff fabs are turned off to change you from energy deficit to energy positive, is turning off a dozen fabs in 1 tic much different to twelve over consecutive ticks ? Having more storages is kinda mandatory at this point in the game yeah, and the prior fab managers would not prevent hard stalls without them.

Please don’t make it an option. Either include it or don’t.

Slippery slope argument

Obviously both extremes of no automation or full automation are undesireable. The best game is a game with the right amount of automation and people draw the line differently here. So I don't see how people using some automation is a compelling argument that we should have more of it or the other way around.

@Jip said

At the moment fabricators are extremely unfriendly to a casual player - they are very volatile to your economy.

They are not more volatile than any other eco structure, they have constant input and output. What is volatile is your energy consumption/production and you need to adapt to that which is one of the core gameplay loops.

I'd even argue that new players see no purpose for the unit the moment they understand that you can also upgrade extractors.

People realizing that it's better to upgrade mexes than to build mass fabs is already dictated by the efficiency. Even fully managed they will only have a presence in the late game.

The important decision here is if we see the mass fab as a unit that burns your excess energy and automatically detects how much excess there is, thus requiring no micro like the rest of the eco structures, or as unit that works like all other energy consumers and needs the player to make a decision if there isn't enough energy. Obviously you would rather pause your mass fabs over any other energy consuming structure, so there isn't an interesting choice to make here. But this applies to a lot of micro in the game. There is no meaningful choice between having hoplites shooting at max range or having them close so they die*. It's one of the inbuilt drawbacks of the unit that it needs some attention to work properly and we have to decide if the mass fab should be one of these units.

Until now it was, and people resorted to mods because managing your mass fabs is very cumbersome. I think there are two viable alternatives:

1. Have the game turn the mass fabs on and off automatically
2. Leave the management to the player, but give him the tools to actually do it conveniently

Option 2 could mean to have four hotkeys: activate one mass fab, activate 10 mass fabs and the same for deactivation, without losing your current unit selection. This would make it easy to adjust how much energy your fabs should burn.

• The choice becomes more meaningful when you frame it as "where do I spend my attention". If this is a desireable choice to make as a player is up to debate of course.

@black_wriggler said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

I wonder if with a little adjustment it could turn off multiple fabs in one go rather than over the course of several ticks, which would have a similar overall affect on sim speed and help prevent an actual e-stall.

@Jip
I like this idea. I imagine setting it to be able to toggle something like 3 fabs per tick would make sense.

Also, it might be a good idea to do smth like add a 3rd case to the mass fab toggle, where the 3 cases would be:

1. Automanage (uses your new system) - this would be the default
2. Disabled (does not use your new system)
3. Enabled (does not use your new system)

The code can not be customized via options. Where the UI is not in sync and callbacks to the simulation are synced up, the simulation is always in sync. It can not access the game options as those are different for everyone, and those options are not synced between players. They are on your local disk. At best it can access the lobby options where you can turn it on or off for all players.

Any suggestion to sync preference files is undesirable as we have no authentication in-game. It would allow anyone to change your settings.

As Ftx mentions, I'd rather just turn it on by default or not have the feature at all.

@penguin_ said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

I imagine setting it to be able to toggle something like 3 fabs per tick would make sense.

The reason it is as low as it is is to:

• (1) Give players that take manual control a serious competitive advantage
• (2) Make the creation of t3 mass fabricators more favorable over t2 as one fabricator is toggled on or off, regardless of tech or consumption.

(1) is important to make the feature easy to use, difficult to master. Casual players can compensate the slow rate by having more energy storage or by only building t3 fabricators.
(2) is a win-win from a performance perspective: we both reduce the automated toggling of fabricators and we slightly change the meta to prefer t3 fabricators over t2 fabricators for casual games.

At the moment it is not unusual to see players make hundreds of t2 fabricators. All these add to the sim, and they're only made in such numbers because of eco-manager allowing them to be responsive.

One t3 fabricator is worth up to 16 t2 fabricators production wise, and about 30 if you compare the construction costs. That is 16x to 30x the performance hit, as individual units count up towards the simulation!

I think people overstate the usefulness of the eco management, except for maybe the mass fab parts + prevent stall to keep shields up late game.

Maybe integrate some of the UI features and if/when mass fab management is in the base game the mod can be removed from the vault. I haven't been maintaining it for years anyway.

New UI options available for all players and better performance by providing sim-side data:

• Mex overlay for level / upgrade status
• Build status% of your teammates nukes / anti
• Mex upgrade: One click / right click assist start mex upgrade

Features which already moved into FAF:

• Upgrade shields multiple levels at once
• Queue up acu/scu enhancements with shift
• Auto build mex storage rings

Features that can be removed:

• Autoshare

Only shares resources with other ecomanager players. Had a use in the RAS air builds @ setons but now useless, replaced by one click share in the UI.

Only nice thing is when the ACU dies it instantly dumps all units / mass / energy to the rest of the team instead of 5+ second delay

• Energy throttle

Basically only useful for mass fabs and somewhat prevent shield stall late game. Otherwise mess up more than it helps

• Mass throttle

Not very efficient and cannot compete with someone semi-competent manually upgrading mexes.

Currently working on mods ecosystem and I want mention here some of them, replacing functions of Eco manager:

• TeamInfo share: shares data with teammates about nukes/smds and exps completions
• Idle Engineers light: shows idle engineers/ factories and upgrading mexes (all of it is toggable through UI mods options)
• Eco Ui tools: stolen reworked UI party mex panel

Just put all the non-controversial options of eco manager into a new mod and upload that. Then we can blacklist eco manager in peace

How many successful competitive games have you seen with optional per-player mods? It's not gaming here, it's gaming + coding. UI mods should not be allowed in ranked and tournaments.

@melanol said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

How many successful competitive games have you seen with optional per-player mods?

Gonna go with 100% of them

@melanol said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

UI mods should not be allowed in ranked and tournaments.

Even assuming we wanted to implement it, how would you enforce that?

Gonna go with 100% of them

What universe are you from?

Even assuming we wanted to implement it, how would you enforce that?

How am I supposed to know?

Oh I see you meant "competitive games" as in DOTA and CS:GO, I thought you meant in the context of FAF games, in which case I can't think of a single tournament that banned UI mods.

As soon as you personally finance all our touraments to happen at lan events in your 3rd mansion we can ban all ui mods from events.

@ftxcommando said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:

As soon as you personally finance all our touraments to happen at lan events in your 3rd mansion we can ban all ui mods from events.

Nope, i would implement a game option to disable ALL UI mods, and anchor those functions inside the sim-state of the game so you can't bypass it.
Problem solved