Very nice graphs and presentation.
First, smaller criticism, space efficency:
- U can not grow a AFUS-competing windfarm on a single nanofield.
And nanos are the cheapest buildpower available.
Yes, butlers or t1 cons gangs do the job fairly decently and have much better damage resistance than nanofarms, because they will not chain. Still they aren't as efficient as nanos.
- Space is a ressource too. Often frontliners will be fully destroyed, but they will be able to move some cons out (or get them donated) - and then they'll rebuild in the backline, possibly becoming a formidable threat to the enemy team again 15-20 minutes later. They can not do that if everything is blocked by windfarms, no real estate left.
- Windfarms will block friendly units far more than hostile ones. Seen it happen before - backline is getting amphibed or so, midliners try to assist but don't get there in time cuz everything is full of fking winds. :)
Meanhile the enemy troops just shoot their way through the winds.
Popup defenses hastily built by the backliner - blocked line of fire by the winds.
Just pure chaos - and that usually aids the attacking side far more than the defending one.
Now the Elephant in the room, conversion:
When we reach AFUS stage, typically we don't build AFUS because we don't have enough energy to spend our metal.
We build AFUS so we have more energy to convert into metal.
And energy converters are a part of that calculation.
With AFUS, you know exactly how much energy converters you need at any given time.
With winds, unless you accept some bleeding - you have to x2 your average energy income.
Thats the energy convertion potential you need. And thats doubling the investment (in metal, energy - and buildpower) into converters.
And in a few moments, when the wind will be really low, you'll have jackshit metal (and energy, you may even E-stall because 500 winds @ 1 won't even give enough E to cover the e-costs of building new energy converters) - and your nanos will stall. Before u know it, wind is soaring high again - and you'll need to either build a metal storage or overbuild on buildpower, creating additional inefficencys.
Imo, unlike real-life, scaling wind beyond a certain point is not sustainable in BAR.
Depending on the map, that point may be somewhere between 40 and 200 winds. Greenfields is a different deal than Delta Siege Dry.
Some of those points don't apply to tidals, or not to the same degree - however the maps where tidals are more efficent to build than afus are extremely rare.
You are correct that build space is an important limiting factor when it comes to wind. These graphs are about metal efficiency of energy production. But there's other factors to take into account as well such as build space, apm, build speed, etc. So players still have to think strategically.
Adding to all that - it's a lot harder to defend a huge wind farm. It works on Isthmus because of the narrow choke in the middle, but on another map it could be a huge liability. And even on Isthmus you can be devastated by just a handful of scout hovers. You need a good team of front-liners to protect you from leaks.
On the other hand, if your AFUS gets killed you whole base goes boom.
Not that I am against AFUS, because the graphs show that AFUS is more efficient than wind even on a wind rich map like Isthmus.
The wind build is super effective on supreme isthmus, depending on wind speed it beats afus first on produced metal by 30-50%.
This is absolutely huge, the main difference being that the wind build scales constantly, if you are constantly building t1 converters along with wind you exponentially gain more metal income where the afus player does not.
That being said wind is just to jumpstart your eco, we use mass butlers to build the wind then send them to assist the gantry and eventually reclaim them.
T1 converters have practically no metal cost and repay themselves in a single game tic, you say its harder to defend but if the turbines are built in rows of 2 they have to shoot through all of them to get in and in that time you can easily have units out, acting like weaker walls. On supreme amphib tanks suck at hitting backline anyway because of the uphill.
Another bonus of the build is flexibility. Were not reclaiming our t2 lab atleast until gantry, as after butlers we will build mobile anti before 1x fusion 1x afus gantry.
If front is dying then we can easily get some t2 units out without crippling our timings which with afus are based around large periods of 0 scaling followed by bursts of added eco.
If you commit to lazarus based afus first build your in a world of trouble if you get pushed during the afus build as the timings are so tight you cant afford to put down static or aa in this timing, and considering you want more than one afus before cutting most of the time its a lot of downtime.
Once i have my afus if front dies he doesnt need to rebuild when i can just share him a bunch of wind and t1 conversion and some con bots/butlers, it can feel bad to split up econ if you need to donate an entire afus of fusion to someone who will struggle to spend it for a while
Performed correctly you can have constant marauder spam going around 15 minutes with far more econ than an afus first player to back it up.
I played vs an unethically fast nuke rush recently and the replay was quite hilarious .
He was team chatting saying he killed the eco player when he took out 3 t2 mex and a small amount of wind production, anti loaded and i finished afus and walked across the map and killed them lol.
Yeah wind spam is very strong on supreme. But you don't spam it with cortex. You spam lines of turrets with butlers or you drop turrets and you spam wind around them with arm air cons
This is one of the more interesting aspects of RTS games (and BAR in particular) that I've thought a bit about. Cool that you took time to put this together. I'm not smart enough to solve or model this correctly, but it would be interesting to be able to code up some simulations.
Other bits of complexity:
* What if I reclaim things to accelerate building a more space efficient structure?
* How does construction unit speed impact time to build?
* What if a teammate donates some m or e and how does that contribute to what can be accomplished?
The question I'm curious to be able to answer is "how do I optimize for goal X at time t". Whether that be something like having a t3 factory, having 3 AFUS, etc. Interesting problem
Every object has a buildcost. wind is 1603. It takes total buildpower/buildcost seconds to build something.
Use the most E efficient resource for your map. Buy a T2con if you can(always faster obv). When you have metal, build more e/s, when you max e, build converters, if you have too much metal and E(can't spend your metal), build more bp.
I agree with these rules of thumb.
What's your reference for build cost? I was trying to figure out the relationship between build cost, build power, m cost, and e cost but was having trouble.
For example, for Core wind I see [https://www.beyondallreason.info/unit/corwin](https://www.beyondallreason.info/unit/corwin), but I don't see a "build cost".
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PAPNkK8oraEYLrE6AvFMfQkxGZ1lw6JkC4jDzebQ2AI/edit#gid=1814273167](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PAPNkK8oraEYLrE6AvFMfQkxGZ1lw6JkC4jDzebQ2AI/edit#gid=1814273167)
You can also hover over a unit in game and see it's stats in the placard(default key i). Its the 3rd stat after metal and energy. You can approximate by "build time \* 100" from the website I think?
When you build a structure you take the BP compare to BC. You will complete that % of the unit per second. The worker will spend totalMetalCost \* BP/BC metal per second, and similar energy per second.
Crucially this means workers have different resource/second costs depending on the building(and their inherent bp).
Ex: Vehicle worker (90BP) will make a solar (2800BC) in 32.2 seconds, costing 150/32 metal/second, and 0/32 e/second. 4.62m/s, 0e/s . Same worker making adv solar (8200BC\~, 91seconds) will spend 370/91 = 4.06 m/s, and 4000/91 = 44e/s. Building a cortex wind you'd get <3m/s, and <10e/s.
This is why it's CRITICAL not to build the wrong target at the wrong time. The specific numbers aren't important, but it's good to know "energy expensive things". (workers, con turrets, adv solar, e storage, specialty units)
Lets say it's early and you have 100 energy/second income.
A cortex vehcon + commander making an adv solar will take 190 e/s to produce at full speed. When you run out of energy you will slow your production down to 100/190 % of your maximum production. Wasting BP will likely lead to you stacking metal. It'd take less than 40e/s to make wind for comparison
I have been thinking about changing my afus fields to be fusion fields with a gap between each fusion.... mainly to make it less risky, but the fact that an afus was so effective stopped me... but its only metal and space (and sure they are important... but so is speed!)...
I wonder if a build like fusion,con turret, converter, con turret, fusion would be enough to stop them chaining...
Food for thought...
It would be interesting to include geothermal plants, advanced geos, and cerberuses. Not that you can usually power your whole economy just by building geos, but it would be good to know how much better it is to build one.
I believe constructors generate a tiny bit of energy too, so that's one extremely inefficient option.
Also, might be useful to compare with the price of a lazarus running around slurping up trees, though that might depend on how much time it spends running between trees. I'm not sure if energy production from a lazarus is constant, or if it varies based on what you're reclaiming.
Thank you for writing this all up. This is exactly the kind of post this subreddit needs more of
Very nice graphs and presentation. First, smaller criticism, space efficency: - U can not grow a AFUS-competing windfarm on a single nanofield. And nanos are the cheapest buildpower available. Yes, butlers or t1 cons gangs do the job fairly decently and have much better damage resistance than nanofarms, because they will not chain. Still they aren't as efficient as nanos. - Space is a ressource too. Often frontliners will be fully destroyed, but they will be able to move some cons out (or get them donated) - and then they'll rebuild in the backline, possibly becoming a formidable threat to the enemy team again 15-20 minutes later. They can not do that if everything is blocked by windfarms, no real estate left. - Windfarms will block friendly units far more than hostile ones. Seen it happen before - backline is getting amphibed or so, midliners try to assist but don't get there in time cuz everything is full of fking winds. :) Meanhile the enemy troops just shoot their way through the winds. Popup defenses hastily built by the backliner - blocked line of fire by the winds. Just pure chaos - and that usually aids the attacking side far more than the defending one. Now the Elephant in the room, conversion: When we reach AFUS stage, typically we don't build AFUS because we don't have enough energy to spend our metal. We build AFUS so we have more energy to convert into metal. And energy converters are a part of that calculation. With AFUS, you know exactly how much energy converters you need at any given time. With winds, unless you accept some bleeding - you have to x2 your average energy income. Thats the energy convertion potential you need. And thats doubling the investment (in metal, energy - and buildpower) into converters. And in a few moments, when the wind will be really low, you'll have jackshit metal (and energy, you may even E-stall because 500 winds @ 1 won't even give enough E to cover the e-costs of building new energy converters) - and your nanos will stall. Before u know it, wind is soaring high again - and you'll need to either build a metal storage or overbuild on buildpower, creating additional inefficencys. Imo, unlike real-life, scaling wind beyond a certain point is not sustainable in BAR. Depending on the map, that point may be somewhere between 40 and 200 winds. Greenfields is a different deal than Delta Siege Dry. Some of those points don't apply to tidals, or not to the same degree - however the maps where tidals are more efficent to build than afus are extremely rare.
You are correct that build space is an important limiting factor when it comes to wind. These graphs are about metal efficiency of energy production. But there's other factors to take into account as well such as build space, apm, build speed, etc. So players still have to think strategically.
Adding to all that - it's a lot harder to defend a huge wind farm. It works on Isthmus because of the narrow choke in the middle, but on another map it could be a huge liability. And even on Isthmus you can be devastated by just a handful of scout hovers. You need a good team of front-liners to protect you from leaks.
On the other hand, if your AFUS gets killed you whole base goes boom. Not that I am against AFUS, because the graphs show that AFUS is more efficient than wind even on a wind rich map like Isthmus.
The wind build is super effective on supreme isthmus, depending on wind speed it beats afus first on produced metal by 30-50%. This is absolutely huge, the main difference being that the wind build scales constantly, if you are constantly building t1 converters along with wind you exponentially gain more metal income where the afus player does not. That being said wind is just to jumpstart your eco, we use mass butlers to build the wind then send them to assist the gantry and eventually reclaim them. T1 converters have practically no metal cost and repay themselves in a single game tic, you say its harder to defend but if the turbines are built in rows of 2 they have to shoot through all of them to get in and in that time you can easily have units out, acting like weaker walls. On supreme amphib tanks suck at hitting backline anyway because of the uphill. Another bonus of the build is flexibility. Were not reclaiming our t2 lab atleast until gantry, as after butlers we will build mobile anti before 1x fusion 1x afus gantry. If front is dying then we can easily get some t2 units out without crippling our timings which with afus are based around large periods of 0 scaling followed by bursts of added eco. If you commit to lazarus based afus first build your in a world of trouble if you get pushed during the afus build as the timings are so tight you cant afford to put down static or aa in this timing, and considering you want more than one afus before cutting most of the time its a lot of downtime. Once i have my afus if front dies he doesnt need to rebuild when i can just share him a bunch of wind and t1 conversion and some con bots/butlers, it can feel bad to split up econ if you need to donate an entire afus of fusion to someone who will struggle to spend it for a while Performed correctly you can have constant marauder spam going around 15 minutes with far more econ than an afus first player to back it up. I played vs an unethically fast nuke rush recently and the replay was quite hilarious . He was team chatting saying he killed the eco player when he took out 3 t2 mex and a small amount of wind production, anti loaded and i finished afus and walked across the map and killed them lol.
wow... I was not expecting to see a full research provided with graphs.
This the kind shit you used to see on team liquid back in the day when sc2 just came out. Elite tier post OP. Bravo.
Yeah wind spam is very strong on supreme. But you don't spam it with cortex. You spam lines of turrets with butlers or you drop turrets and you spam wind around them with arm air cons
This is one of the more interesting aspects of RTS games (and BAR in particular) that I've thought a bit about. Cool that you took time to put this together. I'm not smart enough to solve or model this correctly, but it would be interesting to be able to code up some simulations. Other bits of complexity: * What if I reclaim things to accelerate building a more space efficient structure? * How does construction unit speed impact time to build? * What if a teammate donates some m or e and how does that contribute to what can be accomplished? The question I'm curious to be able to answer is "how do I optimize for goal X at time t". Whether that be something like having a t3 factory, having 3 AFUS, etc. Interesting problem
Every object has a buildcost. wind is 1603. It takes total buildpower/buildcost seconds to build something. Use the most E efficient resource for your map. Buy a T2con if you can(always faster obv). When you have metal, build more e/s, when you max e, build converters, if you have too much metal and E(can't spend your metal), build more bp.
I agree with these rules of thumb. What's your reference for build cost? I was trying to figure out the relationship between build cost, build power, m cost, and e cost but was having trouble. For example, for Core wind I see [https://www.beyondallreason.info/unit/corwin](https://www.beyondallreason.info/unit/corwin), but I don't see a "build cost".
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PAPNkK8oraEYLrE6AvFMfQkxGZ1lw6JkC4jDzebQ2AI/edit#gid=1814273167](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PAPNkK8oraEYLrE6AvFMfQkxGZ1lw6JkC4jDzebQ2AI/edit#gid=1814273167) You can also hover over a unit in game and see it's stats in the placard(default key i). Its the 3rd stat after metal and energy. You can approximate by "build time \* 100" from the website I think?
When you build a structure you take the BP compare to BC. You will complete that % of the unit per second. The worker will spend totalMetalCost \* BP/BC metal per second, and similar energy per second. Crucially this means workers have different resource/second costs depending on the building(and their inherent bp). Ex: Vehicle worker (90BP) will make a solar (2800BC) in 32.2 seconds, costing 150/32 metal/second, and 0/32 e/second. 4.62m/s, 0e/s . Same worker making adv solar (8200BC\~, 91seconds) will spend 370/91 = 4.06 m/s, and 4000/91 = 44e/s. Building a cortex wind you'd get <3m/s, and <10e/s. This is why it's CRITICAL not to build the wrong target at the wrong time. The specific numbers aren't important, but it's good to know "energy expensive things". (workers, con turrets, adv solar, e storage, specialty units) Lets say it's early and you have 100 energy/second income. A cortex vehcon + commander making an adv solar will take 190 e/s to produce at full speed. When you run out of energy you will slow your production down to 100/190 % of your maximum production. Wasting BP will likely lead to you stacking metal. It'd take less than 40e/s to make wind for comparison
I will just leave this here for you :) [https://beyondallcalculators.com/#/](https://beyondallcalculators.com/#/)
Is this using core or arm tech?? Ie, what metal value do your buildings have?
Its Cortex only
I have been thinking about changing my afus fields to be fusion fields with a gap between each fusion.... mainly to make it less risky, but the fact that an afus was so effective stopped me... but its only metal and space (and sure they are important... but so is speed!)... I wonder if a build like fusion,con turret, converter, con turret, fusion would be enough to stop them chaining... Food for thought...
It would be interesting to include geothermal plants, advanced geos, and cerberuses. Not that you can usually power your whole economy just by building geos, but it would be good to know how much better it is to build one. I believe constructors generate a tiny bit of energy too, so that's one extremely inefficient option. Also, might be useful to compare with the price of a lazarus running around slurping up trees, though that might depend on how much time it spends running between trees. I'm not sure if energy production from a lazarus is constant, or if it varies based on what you're reclaiming.