why storages shall be blamed in teamgames. example: ========= 2vs2 team agree on a plan: player A is Air planning to take back mexes, eco, rush fusion, then support with owl/thunderbird or something player B is Cloakbots does not build any energy planning to heavily rush a stinger for center supermex, afterwards push with cloaked zeus. so stinger rush worked, even killed lets say 3 reavers on the way taking that supermex, your team is in some really good advantage now. using this advantage to successfully get up fusion by Player A, iris and some zeus by Player B. eco is good although Player B has zero own energy income. by the time this cloaked zeus army stacks up at stinger, Player A builds storages. most energy will now flow into Player A's storages, iris soon stops working, player B can no more even use his metal because he lacks energy. Player B resigned. Giving all units to Player A timings is a big point at this. in bigger team games the effect increases having multiple players spamming storages at the same time also to keep in mind is if you stored some thousand metals, it means theres some thousands metals not are not on the battlefield right now you might underestimate heavily.
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No, That's why people gift energy buildings
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   shrimpy you must demonstrate that storage spamming is significantly worse than any other ways to make bad plays. In your examples player A could just as easily do the following:
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Make an area cloaker for his own base.
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Start building a Starlight.
This would stall Player B just as hard. The fact of the matter is that the energy income of Player A goes to his projects first, only being sent off to the team as his storage fills. If he spends the energy or makes storage then he is the one that gets to use it. The alternative to this system is one where you build a Singu and have it drained by an ally spamming area cloakers in their own base with no energy structures of their own. Now, there was a more complex situation in which a player making storages would temporarily 'drain' more of the shared team energy than a player that merely spams cloakers. This met the criteria for storage being significantly worse than other ways to make bad plays, so I fixed it. If you think there are still issues then you'll have to try harder to demonstrate it, and ideally make an example replay with some NullAIs.
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quote:
This would stall Player B just as hard.
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not as hard, much less, and also he would have built something useful not just destroyed teammates eco by just wasting into storage quote:
shrimpy you must demonstrate that storage spamming is significantly worse than any other ways to make bad plays.
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i just did explain why its bad.
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quote:
not as hard, much less, and also he would have built something useful
not just destroyed teammates eco by just wasting into storage |
I feel like we're not being sufficiently precise in the setup. Write out an explicit situation or make an example replay. There are probably some hidden assumptions that need to be dug up. Here is my claim:
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Player A has no energy structures of their own and Player B has some energy structures.
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If Player A wants to reduce the energy income of Player B, then constructing and running area cloakers is at least as effective as constructing storages.
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How quickly would you need to keep building storages to continuously stall your teammate as well? Build enough area cloakers and your ally gets stalled indefinitely, but with storage you have to keep building. At 100 metal cost and 500 storage space, you can stall indefinitely until you have 5x the energy income as you have build power into the storage. In your example, let's put some hypothetical numbers. Player B's assault went well, let's say they are looking at 30m/s income. That's 15 each, and for energy let's suppose B built 2 solars and A has 4 solars and a fusion (B:4e/s, A:43e/s). Suppose further that player A has a caretaker for his airfac that is still building units, and has a single con adding on storages. Player A uses 15e/s building, so he's excessing 28e/s that B is free to use. Player A is spending 3m/s (5bp/25bp * 15m/s) on storages, meaning every 33 seconds a storage completes and begins sucking up the 28e/s that he was excessing. It will take roughly 18 seconds to fill the storage, so the remaining 15 seconds player B still gets the full 28e/s. Over long periods of time, this averages to 12e/s that player B is still getting from A. With 16e/s average, this covers the 15m/s that player B is getting. Yes, player B is unable to make use of reclaimed metal, but it's far from the complete energy stall you're portraying. Storage loses this game for other reasons--player A has dumped metal into a structure that provides no benefits to the team.
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storage and stored metal is actually extremely useful: in most situations you don't know what your enemy is planning, this means spending al your metal is a risk. lets say in this example you spam zeus, go to attack, and your enemy spent the last 5 minutes making 4 lances bweeeeeem 5 zeus dead so you retreat if you have 500m in storage you can rush sniper and counter the lance push in 15 seconds if you have 0 metal in storage you cant rush anything for ~40 seconds in that time you lost 8 more zeus GG
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In your example the stored metal is useful, but a storage would not be (base storage is 500). I'd be interested to know a case where putting more than 300 metal into storages is beneficial.
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Situations where it is useful (as in, favours the team's wincondition) to build more than one storage are very rare. Situations where it is useful to build more than 2-3 storages are almost nonexistent. That being said, the players who spam storages in inappropriate situations and numbers are not suddenly going to become strong team contributors if their ability to make storage is taken away. They will just find some different way to suck instead.
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I think storages should be removed entirely. Any excess team metal should be stored in an abstract infinite storage and shared between all players on team as space becomes available. Comm storage would instead be a static 500 per player independent of units, if a player resigns or leaves game/lags out this storage would become zero. Alternatively, the communism system could be changed to stop sharing metal to players hoarding it until all other players have caught up to their metal level. A limit of 500 would be a sensible start. Here's recent example of what storage does to the game,   MrTumnus in http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/882836A 2 year long player with 450 games played, gold rank. Makes 11 storages straight from start. All the while reclaiming rocks that could have been used by his team. His reasoning? He was rushing a big bertha so he needed full 5000 metal in storage. This is by no means an isolated incident or a unique player, many players show similar irrational behavior. I do not understand what goes on in their minds, but I know that if they didn't have access to storage they would be encouraged to spend their metal instead of hoarding it.     Aquanim they may not become contributors, but they will not be allowed to become a void that drains a portion of teams metal that may otherwise be used for trying to win.
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I can certainly understand how much that would suck, but MrTumnus should know better. it's easier for me to manage and process reclaim if i have 5000 storage rather than 500. Storages themselfs are not at fault here, ratehr, the player is. a box is not at fault if someone stuffed you inside(it's a small box).
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Why is com s storage in itself? I fail to see any real point to that. Lose com, make storage, minor inconvenience anyway. Do (test)version with no storage? You want to do a big thingie fast with stored up metal? No can do please-go-play-single-player hoarder boy, UNLESS your team helps to make that thing faster. Shared metal income, shared effort, less storage stupidity. Some good players seem to do this metal storing sometimes, its fine, they dont make 10 storages. Find yourself in a sweet reclaim field? Need storages for that so your team doesnt get metal from YOUR reclaim? Minor. I dont mind my metal overflowing to team, even with noobies getting their share. Its just the new guys(and pissed off trolls) and storages. Please fix. How long has this been going on? If metal income is shared, why should one guy be able to save up a lot of it.
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they may not become contributors, but they will not be allowed to become a void that drains a portion of teams metal that may otherwise be used for trying to win. |
There are plenty of ways to throw metal into useless places that don't help the team besides putting it in storage. I don't see any way in which storage is uniquely worse than spamming Stingers and other porc at the back of one's base, spamming area-shields or some other nonsense, or trying to rush a superweapon that's very unlikely to be finished before the end of the game, or running in with some silly com morph and donating metal to the enemy.
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Aquanim a storage has no effect on a game besides draining metal for its own cost and storing unused metal. Any of the things you listed can deal damage, protect an area or pressure an enemy. A storage is a passive building that costs value for doing literally nothing of value besides keeping value from being used. A player making storages to hoard metal will always be detrimental to his team, because he's spending metal for the sake of having more unspent metal. Once in a hundred games you might see a single turret being built faster because someone had piled up resources, that's the only practical use for stored metal. A player storing metal is actively sabotaging his team, arguably unintentionally from pure ignorance. I'm not sure how clearly I have to illustrate this point to you and it goes to show that even you do not comprehend this easily. How can you expect new players to ever learn to deal with this trap when even you can't see it for what it is?
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Storages absolutely have uses if you are planning on making aggressive porc push, in which case you will need a lot of build power and stored metal in order to push out heavy porc like Desolators, or even just Stingers. In those scenarious having storages is absolutely necessary, although there is never really reason to have excessive amount of storages to store over 2k in metal.
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You keep using that word, "always", as if there has never been a ZK game won by storages. Meanwhile i've seen several during past week.
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Inactive stinger in base is same use as storage in base. Same about shields in base. Staright rush in mid maps is also 99.9% futile. Some strider rushes work except detris of course and also mostly for funels. Singu rush is OP from new player. Trollcom morph 7k worth who is sitting base have also no more use as for storage. Dis all is sabotage anyway. However that player can do shit in other ways doesn't mean that storage spammers still throw game. Especially when they spam storages + useless building in back. He not just wasted money for useless porc but also for useless storage farm. However this article was about that player A build storage and stall energy not metal. An as we know - metal is shared but energy only when there is overflow. Of course idea is that mex will repay metal back but energy building will not. And you can spam energy endlessly but metal incoming have limited value. So if energy would be shared then there would be little value of being repay in energy back to builder because metal is more valuable. Also Zk doens't use energy for firing weapons but only use grid ar requirement for weapon working. So problem is not just storage.
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quote:
A player storing metal is actively sabotaging his team, arguably unintentionally from pure ignorance. I'm not sure how clearly I have to illustrate this point to you and it goes to show that even you do not comprehend this easily. How can you expect new players to ever learn to deal with this trap when even you can't see it for what it is? |
I get that somebody spamming storages is almost certainly not contributing to their team's win condition, as you would realise if you actually read my posts. I just also see that there are plenty of other ways to be just as useless that are even less removeable than storage, and I see very little reason to believe that doing something like removing storage will significantly reduce the amount of "not-contributing-to-team" play that occurs.
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