<![CDATA[MassFabs AutoOff feature impact on economy]]>Hello,

There is a relatively new feature that turns MassFabs off when energy drops. While the idea behind it is a good one, the implementation might need readjustment.

This is the way it works at the moment:
Massfabs work fine when the energy bar is full. They start to turn off gradually as the energy bar lowers under approx 80% of total bar incl. storages.

The problem:
Massfabs are turned off regardless of the amount of energy you have, just as long as it falls under 80% (~78% to be more specific). This results in massive mass loss while in actuality you never had an energy problem.

When this happens:

  1. You build more energy storages - until the bar is full again your massfabs are off. Not desirable and just plain wrong.
  2. You have a temporary mass influx due to reclaim for instance or teammate donating - You use more energy while building - energy drops (taken from the storage) - massfabs are off.
  3. You have mass in storages and you start building something using this mass up fast.
  4. During you eco scaling up - constant energy fluctuations which are normal and expected - again some or all massfabs can be off.
  5. Upgrading RAS
  6. Overall any situation where you have an energy expenditure which makes the total energy bar lower than 80%.

The verdict:

  • Energy bar fluctuations are totally normal and frequent - no reason to lose so much mass over it.

Suggestions:

  1. As an immediate fix - either let the player enable/disable this feature in settings or revert to the way it was previously.
  2. More to the point of making this feature viable:
    Massfabs turning off should initialize under different conditions.

  • Approx x2 of the energy needed to sustain all massfabs. So if the require 10k - start turning them off gradually when the bar is under 20k. Imho you do not need more than that, but maybe a subject for testing.

  • Also probably needs to be a fixed minimum to account for situations where the energy bar is small due to little or no storages built.

  • Again I think the feature should be an option to be turned on or off coz some players may prefer not to use it.

Update:
So it was brought to my attention and also confirmed by Nomander below that the Overcharge is taken into consideration here. Max OC is 90k energy. So I tested and can confirm what Nomander said regrading bigger energy bar by using 16 storages. In this case you can use more of your storage before fabs are turned off.
Imho it should absolutely not be so unless this is under player's control. At this later stage OC is rarely used but the game reserves 90k energy for that by disabling Fabs.

]]>https://forum.faforever.com/topic/9993/massfabs-autooff-feature-impact-on-economyRSS for NodeWed, 03 Jun 2026 23:50:38 GMTMon, 23 Mar 2026 06:15:05 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to MassFabs AutoOff feature impact on economy on Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:49:03 GMT]]>Introduce a new approach to automatically disable maintenance of units #5822: This is an energy throttle order that you can issue to units to make them turn on/off based on energy. It would give pause icons to fabs and give players full control over throttling. Unfortunately it was left unfinished with Jip working on many projects, then leaving the game team, and nobody picking it back up.

There were also some changes concerning stored energy. Fabs still toggle off at 80% and on at 90% storage but now there is a 105k storage limit above which fabs wont turn off, and a 108k storage limit where fabs are forced to turn on. It's mainly for overcharge but if people know about this they can cope with fab behavior by building a pgen-storage 2x2 for 16 storages and rather efficient energy.
There were also some logic changes to make fabs aggressively use energy overflow from allies when on lower max storage.

I disagree with @deribus's eco analyses. The problem players have with fabs is that they can never use up their storage. For example, if you have 100k storage and try to up RAS (only 175k energy) you lose out on a few seconds of a few fabs instead of using up storage. Basically you're forced to float energy with the fab behavior.
This is due to the assumption that you need to store energy for OC combined with no existing implementation of adjusting your energy throttle parameters (which goes into my next point).

Desyncs aren't a reason you can't have user-adjustable or permanently saved settings for fab throttling. To implement that it's as simple as writing a sim callback that sets the parameter for your army's ai brain, which is no different from toggle resource sharing or adjusting diplomatic status or toggling auto OC and so on for nearly every UI feature we have. The only difficulties I foresee is if you're playing with union control then you have to determine permissions for adjusting throttling, and writing the UI to show how much energy youre throttling and syncing it between players switching armies or on the same army.

]]>https://forum.faforever.com/post/72344https://forum.faforever.com/post/72344Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:49:03 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to MassFabs AutoOff feature impact on economy on Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:47:59 GMT]]>Here's the discussion topic from when this feature was being introduced https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3944/auto-mass-fab-feedback-discussion/

When this happens

I would say your energy economy is far from typical for a multitude of reasons.

You build more energy storages - until the bar is full again your massfabs are off. Not desirable and just plain wrong.

It's rare to have enough energy storage to run mass fabricators for any appreciable length of time. I don't see any reason to do that instead of just building more power generators.

You have a temporary mass influx due to reclaim for instance or teammate donating - You use more energy while building - energy drops (taken from the storage) - massfabs are off.

This would mean your economy is only balanced by your mass stall, and a correction of your mass stall would result in an energy stall. That means you have far too many mass fabricators for your energy income, and the auto-off feature is keeping your shields and radar from shutting off.

During you eco scaling up - constant energy fluctuations which are normal and expected - again some or all massfabs can be off.

No, if you're building mass fabs you are well into T3 pgen territory, and at that point your energy is generally going to be completely full 100% of the time. Having fluctuating energy that late in the game is abnormal and unexpected.

Upgrading RAS

You should absolutely not be upgrading RAS off of stored energy.

Suggestions

The auto-off functionality cannot be toggled on a per-player basis for technical reasons that are discussed in the post I linked. And personally I struggle to imagine a situation where I want my mass fabs to be dipping into my energy storage.

]]>https://forum.faforever.com/post/72343https://forum.faforever.com/post/72343Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:47:59 GMT