Musings about energy balance

I like the Singu idea.

my 2c, the mechanic of windgens gaining more income with height has always felt opaque - varies per map, and the effect of a given unit of elevation varies per map.

A simpler mechanic where eg. 4 height stratas of the map each confer a scaling fixed bonus (and this is visible when placing the windgen) would be more controllable.

The wind equation is as follows.

quote: groundMin, groundMax = max(0, Spring.GetGroundExtremes()) groundDiff = groundMax - groundMin windSlope = 1/(1 + e^(4 - groundDiff/105)) windGenminIncome = 2.5 * clamp(windSlope *(windGenHeight - groundMin)/groundDiff , 0, 1)

As far as I know it is unchanged since 2007. The most esoteric bit is windSlope. Without the windSlope factor the peak of every map would produce a constant 2.5 energy income. Flater maps have a lower groundDiff so a lower windSlope, which prevents wind being absurdly good on the little bumps of Red Comet.

Wind generation is already shown in the placement tooltip. An overlay could be possible.

Wind is probably bad for performance because every unit has some overhead.

Wind and even solar is often superior to singus, especially in games where survivability matters (FFA, stretched out team games). I think it would be interesting to offer some higher risk-reward options for these games.

For example singus could boost nearby power production, making singu clusters even more effective. This automatically comes at the cost of having everything near the first singu be at an increased risk of being killed by the blast.

As singu clusters can be equivalent to super weapons in their strength, especially in FFA games, it might be worth experimenting with their visibility as well.

truth be told new ideas for energy inside zero-k are needed. there should be more balance in the game.right working on strider warships. like leviathan, ship with legs reptile resembling iguana, and strider frog. drawings on progressyes thinking the ship with legs be a frog like strider that's a ship but can leave water and pull out legs also.


two variants i'm designing but besides that energy is needed. anyone thought of adding new way of energy ? come on you can create new math adding a dam in a river and making terraform. you put a machine structure to collect the flow of water and u generate electrity and make math to create new forms of energy. thus new forms will help you equate energy.

really there is no need to balance, it's the same thing u just repeat and repeat equations balance it but people get bored. you need something new adding new energies will give you better balance.

on a sidenote:

1) double energy production.

2)make every unit cost energy upkeep (or else they are slowed or something?)

this would give energy a totally new spin. ofcourse this would totally impact the whole game but i think this is an interesting approach.

* Is spamming wind laggy? You need 90 windgens to match a single singu... I have been in games where we literally teamkilled our own winds to fight the lag! The only reason I don't spam winds every game is because of the lag...


I like the idea of making the wind calculation less dramatic than it currently is, regardless of any other steps taken, by the way...


A few ideas to reduce wind numbers:

1. Make wind less desirable by nerfing in some way (More cost, less generation...)

2. Make winds a higher weight unit, to reduce their numbers. Double cost, Double Footprint.
a. Or even just a larger footprint. If they were the size of solars (Or had a "no build" but path-able area like factories)

3. What if winds degraded the power output of nearby winds? This allows them to continue their current early game role and balance, as well as "plop next to this mex" but makes large farms impractical and rewards taking empty land.
a. Have a wind check within some range; output_power = power/(1 + nearby_winds * .1)
or
b. Have distance between winds calculated smoothly, closer winds count much more against you than further away winds.

4. What if there were better options between wind and singu?
Wind 14m/e - 28m/e(averaged)
Solar 35m/e
Fusion 28m/e
Singu 18m/e

Wind... We have this weird situation where the cheapest unit is also the best unit. It's never worth it to make anything else until you are out of space.

Solar has a huge footprint, making them difficult to place (for their weight) and also all around suck for E production. (Cost -> 120, E -> 4??)

Fusion is in no way superior to wind unless you are out of space. Wind also gets built incrementally, making fusions never pay off VS winds - EVER. They should give some benefit for waiting to have it built, like singu does, by being more efficient than winds or solars. (E -> 42??)


Should singu be more vulnerable? Yes, but I would like to have other viable energy production options as well. One BB shouldn't trash my entire eco!
I am a fan of disallowing underwater singu's.

Adv windgens are an elegant pinpoint solution for the unit-spam issue if a solution for only that is needed.

40 for the price of 20 sounds a bit extreme though.

mojjj's thought reminded me that a while back I was thinking about a supply line mechanic where units only had a certain amount of ammunition and would need to return to cons or special arming units to retool (which would of course be vulnerable targets to intercept), but you could achieve a similar outcome in a much less fiddly way by having units costing energy to maintain.

Never mind slowing units down - have them stop firing if you run out of juice. Maybe armoured mode can also cost energy for those units which have it (likewise ALL cloaks).

A lot of balancing work would need to be done on the right e-cost for any given unit but it would certainly shake the game up in a big way. Energy buildings would need to generate more energy though. To keep the numbers as intuitive as possible, I'd suggest whole integers for the e cost (e.g. if a glaive costs 1e I know that if I have 10e, I can sustain 10 glaives). What to do with fleas and darts would be interesting though. On the other hand, e-need of artillery and berthas could be particularly high to offset the fact that they otherwise have the ability to pummel at will. Constant cost rather than per shot cost means all the time they're not shooting they're burning a lot of energy to no purpose. This might change behaviours.

My thoughts on the consequences of doing this:
The early game would be slower burning which might tilt the game too much towards porc creep vs raiders, but that relationship can be tailored by increased energy consumption from porc. The slower start might be less intimidating to newbies as well (I know I've had them rage when I've been raiding their base within a few minutes of game start).

Rushes might be discouraged as there might not be e to sustain the big boy (or if you do build the energy in advance, you increase the chance of being spotted).

Hitting eco would now directly, rather than indirectly affect your opponent's front line capabilities. If you destroy enough energy, their front line forces might be shut down entirely. Early game raiding might be a bit more awkward - but late game raiding could have a much bigger impact. This would also incentivise the use of defensible point energy sources like fusions and singus vs space inefficient wind (especially) and solar.

The mechanic could be developed such that the e cost is only taken when units are fighting (not on a per shot basis, but on whether they are engaged or not). If this were done, depending on the numbers, one might not be able to freely throw units at the enemy and have them fight at full effectiveness. If you have more troops than your economy can sustain, then you can't use them. On the other hand, storage could be weaponised as a strategic energy reserve. At a critical moment, you could use your stored energy to push reserve forces into the fray, powered for a while by stored energy to turn the tide. I think this could be a very interesting change to the flow of the game.

Oh I thought the idea was to buff singu to make it better than wind farms :|

I would want to see data about the performance impact of rotating pieces. A static windmill does not sound worth the kind of performance improvement that I expect.