The suggested design for Cybran unit is ugly. I'm against that change as long as FAF gets proper unit design.
Also this IS adding new unit regardless of how FtXCommando calls it "moving" from faction to faction.
I believe there must be a community vote for this specific change.
@tomma
Neither energy storage placed separatly gives you any eco. You don't build it so you could get extra energy out of t2 pgen, are you?
Mass storage surely doesnt give you any eco, but why should it do so in general? I mean i'm not against that mechanic, but right now Mass storage is generally used as "MEX UPGRADE" and not as "STORAGE".
Right now engies and factories provide you just enough storage to never bother about it if you keep balance of your eco. But if you suddenly had to reclaim field of two dead armies, you would want to have it. Without storage in engineers and factories you'd be limited by ACU storage of 600 mass, which is very little. Meanwhile enemy who lost his army gets a counterplay on you - he can destroy your storage(s) (assuming most of the time you would put your first 4 storages around mex). That would either deny you from filling up your storage or destroy stored mass.
If you take a close look at storages, you'd see that they show how much is your storage filled so it is logical to lose the mass inside of that storage. That makes the storage an alternative target compared to mex.
This is an EQ concept and it was tested and played.
Right now the mass storage only works as mex upgrade. Mostly as a t2 mex upgrade before transitioning it to t3.
Pretty much there is no way competent player would put a mass storage alone somewhere not around mex or a mass fab. On other hand you would see energy storage placed somewhere far from energy.
So why don't players build storage for STORING mass?
Reasons for it:
Here's quick browse on top players' games. I've been watching only the eco development. Here's some chart how much extra storage do players get from their units:
There were games where players never built a single storage because they never needed them: factories and engineers gave enough storage for them to store reclaim so they never needed to build a separate building.
In fact if storage didn't give adjacency boost we would barely see this unit as engineers and factories provide enough storage.
This reminds the early FAF balance change when energy storage was removed from engineers and factories exactly so players built separate structure and to provide enemy a counterplay to snipe a dedicated building.
My suggestion to remove the storage from engineers and factories. Also remove energy storage from Sparky as it wasn't done with other engineers. Here's PR https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5824
Further suggestions: