Doubles the size, cooldown, and explosion damage of Mass Convertors, quadruples their cost and build time, expands their explosion blast radius by 50%, and lowers their output to 50 mass for 1000 energy (from 250 for 2500).
To soften the blow of these changes and reduce needed micromanagement with the longer cooldown and lower payoff, Mass Converters now have an automatic conversion mode that can be toggled off and on at will.
Requires the Mod Support Minimod v4 or later to function. It is compatible with almost all other mods, although it will override the Mass Conversion ability settings of the Community Balance Patch. As with almost all mods, all players in a multiplayer game must have the mod or a desync will occur.
Intelligent Automatic Conversion
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This is a new toggle added to Mass Converters, just below the Mass Conversion ability. While this mode is active, the Mass Conversion ability will be automatically activated as often as possible, provided that you will have more than 5000 energy or an energy:mass ratio better than 5:1 after the conversion event. This eliminates nearly all converter micromanagement without taking any control away from the player, and with no risk of running out of energy or having to pause converters to construct expensive units.
This mode starts disabled, and its icon will have a 'stop' icon overlaid in the upper-left corner when it is enabled.
Currently, the system attempts to account for multiple converters running in automatic mode at once by randomizing economy check times. However, in the case of a half-dozen or more converters running at once, it is possible for the economy check to pass for more than one converter at once due to the game's laggy ability activation, occasionally allowing your energy and energy ratio to dip below ideal levels.
This will be corrected by a re-architecture of the system in a future version, and for now it's recommended that you not activate Auto-Conversion with multiple converters selected at once, and instead enable it on each converter individually to help stagger their check times.
Why reduce mass conversion?
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The aim is to make mass conversion more of a supplementary source of income rather than something that invalidates the need for mass extractors, and thus map control. The significantly longer build time makes them much far less suitable as defensive weapons despite the increased destructive power of their death explosion-- which makes placing them safely more difficult. Their energy-efficiency is halved by further reduction of output, so that both additional converters and power generators are needed to produce the same amount of mass as before, and mass conversion income can never completely replace mass extractors.
Nerfs are never popular even when they're both justified and enforced, so I don't expect huge download counts for this mod, even with the new automatic mode. I'm releasing this as an option for those who recognize just how terribly overblown mass conversion is, and how much better the game is when you can't abandon all of your extractors 15 minutes in because you can produce more income from one 50-mass structure and a dozen 70-mass power generators than you can from more than a dozen 200-mass extractors.
Version History
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v1:
- First Release
- Further halved mass conversion output to 50 for 1000
- Changed CostStamps to the proper size (thanks liveordie)
- Reduced energy cost to 3000 from 6000 (originally 1500)
- Added explosion radius to the build preview and increased visual explosion size (thanks terau)
- Changed UEF build scaffolding to match the size of the unit
- Added Intelligent Automatic Conversion mode
- Scaled idle effects along with mesh etc
- Revamp compatibility: Scale adjusts to match Revamp when enabled
Download v4
This mod is configured for use with CerusVI's SC2 Mod Manager.
Place the mod's .scd within Steam\steamapps\common\supreme commander 2\gamedata to enable it without the mod manager.|||I haven't gotten a chance to play mutli-player games with the current toys yet, so I haven't yet tested this. I like the intent, and I look forward to try it.|||I've played a bunch of skirmish games with it now, and the build-time, cost, and footprint are great, but I think it needs something else. I'm really hesitant to increase the cost of pgens, but almost as hesitant to worsen the efficiency ratio from 1:10 when pgens only produce 5 times as much energy as mexes produce mass.
For comparison, FA's mostly-useless fabs only produced 1 mass per 150 energy at best (1 for 218 for the T3s), and FA's pgens produced 10 to 100 times as much energy as same-tech mexes produced mass. But the FA fabs were considerably more expensive for what you got, at 200 mass for 1 mass per second compared to this mod's converters at 200 mass for a max of 5 mass per second.
So the 1/10 ratio isn't that far off, especially with the mass cost of the convertors at 200. 100 for 1000 every 20 seconds means each convertor can effectively use 8 pgens to produce as much mass as 4 mexes, at max. While that does seem a little high yet, I'm not sure how to change without making mass conversion totally undesirable.|||Sounds like we still need Experimental PGens. That's not a bad thing either.
My biggest concern about skipping experimental pgens is that putting the explosion on the mass converter makes it easy to leave the converter outside your base and forget it. It's not important enough to protect unless we make it really expensive.
I see this mod as an excellent way to introduce a big explosive, expensive economy structure. Big Explosive and Expensive economic structures are missing from SupCom2, and I think it's a about time we got some. If you can fill a perceived void as well as solve a balance issue at the same time that's to your merit.
Mass Converters historically have never been expensive especially for mass, however if you want to do this right I think they should be expensive. Try say 400 mass and an explosion radius of 20 would make these things pretty super. Also, it's not very sensible to produce them unless you are serious about converting a LOT of energy. I just can't see a player going half way into mass conversion. It feeds on itself and grows exponentially.
The reason mass conversion is so hard to fight in SupCom2 is because there are no experimental structures required.
Any thoughts on the UEF Research Converter?
1. My favorite idea is to allow players to sell their research for mass rather than the other way around. However, this is right out, because in a all research unlocked game this would be horribly broken. I usually build research stations in those scenarios just as defenses. This would just be money for nothing and chicks for free.
2. Reduce the cost. Use energy?
3. Use it as an Experimental PGen after we increase the size a bit.|||Experimental economy units would make the problem WORSE, not better. We absolutely do not need more energy. In fact, the problem is that we have so much energy, there's no reason to not get mass conversion. What else do you need massive amounts of energy for? Nothing. 20 pgens (a paltry outlay of build time and resources) will easily supply enough energy for two gantries and a half-dozen factories, and probably a nuke silo or two. So why would we introduce a structure whose only purpose is to further incentivize creating endless free mass from thin air inside your massively-shielded base? No way.
The speed, size, and risk factors of converters are already well-addressed by this mod. The cost could possibly go up further, as it only takes two activations (40 seconds) to pay off a converter's mass cost, but the build speed and current cost do make each converter slow enough to build and use that the payoff of and need for pgen farming are already greatly reduced.
The blast radius cannot be increased beyond 15, or it will destroy all aircraft in the vicinity. That would severely disincentivize bomber or gunship raids on them, which is very bad. Even at 15, they already hurt most Soul Rippers or AC1000s that can hit them, which I don't really like.
This basically leaves the conversion rate. I'll try a few skirmish games with a halved rate (100 for 2000 energy) and see how that goes. I'm still finding conversion necessary in longer games on larger maps, but on some maps it's now actually a liability to rush conversion. That's a fantastic change, but it's still not far enough.
Try to remember that on most smaller maps, the game will feel 'slower' without hyper-efficient mass conversion. You won't be able to run 8 factories while filling 5 nuke silos while building LRA while fighting an experimental ground war. This is normal. This is how the game was originally balanced, because clearly GPG's playtesters had no idea how to abuse mass conversion, or it never would have passed balance testing.
There are still plenty of large maps with tons of mexes that can afford you the income level for this play style, and this can still be further supplemented by mass conversion. However, you cannot run your whole economy solely off of mass conversion with this mod, AND there will actually be a risk to using mass conversion in both time-to-payoff and potential explosion damage.
Re: Research conversion, there's nothing terribly wrong with the research converter (especially in the CBP), except maybe cooldown time. It's already more mass-efficient in the short term than one research station, although it's overtaken after about 2-3 minutes, which is a problem.
With the CBP's 100 mass per 1 research, and a cooldown time of ~10 seconds, AND nerfed mass conversion, a research converter or two could be an attractive alternative to a massive farm of research stations. It would have much better burst output, much less initial mass outlay, and would present a much more easily-defended target.|||Mithy|||100 mass for 1 RP with a 5 or 10 second cooldown is a pretty good deal for about 15 minutes. I agree that the initial mass and RP cost are a bit high, but if you make the RP it produces nearly free, or make it consume a non-trivial amount of energy instead, it will be too good. A reduction in mass cost and an increase in energy cost for the structure would make sense, as would an RP cost decrease (I hate the high RP cost of both this structure and the Protobrain; it defeats the purpose of building the structure except in a very specific situation or a very long game).
Rather than switching it to energy, I would give it a second ability. Keep the 1RP/100M @ 10 seconds, and add a second ability that does 1RP/1000E @ 10 seconds. So you can spend either resource on RP, or both side by side to increase the structure's output. The energy cost should be the same efficiency as mass conversion, simply bypassing that extra step and the cost of mass converters.
Regardless, this is something for another mod that can be run alongside this one. I might release something if I get the time, but it looks like my system is dying and won't stay stable for more than a few minutes at a time, so I probably won't be able to any time soon.
I'm do not like the idea of selling RP for mass any more than I like mass conversion. We don't need more location non-specific sources of mass income, even if they're technically the same or less efficiency than mass conversion. This is definitely not an ability that this structure should have, if any at all.|||Personally, I like Mass Conversion (I always have), but I do not think Mass Conversion should be as cost effective as Mass Extraction and opportunities to upgrade mass extractors do not compete with the energy conversion that a few mass convertors provide. Even in my mod which uses Destro's Training 5% bump to mass extraction, the benefit of going with extractors is very small compared to mass conversion.
Either the initial investment needs to be higher or the conversion needs to be higher. Otherwise, there is no valuable benefit to extraction late game, and there should be.
Your direction is obviously the former. That's ok, because it forces players to further invest in their farm operation. I am sorry I haven't gotten around to playing more. At least I have given your concept a full review now rather than a cursory glance, so I know exactly what I am driving.
The Cybrain is amazing and will make up the 10RP you spend on it in short order by doubling your research production per mass spent. Even after you make up your investment in RP it provides a veterancy benefit and combat unit that will respawn. All in all the Cybrain is worth every RP and is one of the few ways to play the entire deck so to speak.
The current Research Convertor has no redeeming value in my mind. If it converted mass back to energy, this would be much more useful in my imagination.|||Mithy SC2 uses CostStamps for Navigation changing the scale of a unit also requests the CostStamp to be changed if it using a smaller CostStamp then its footprint it can create desync's so replace the Default4x4_coststamp.lua with Default8x8_coststamp.lua in your merge will fix any problems.|||Huh, ok. How would that cause a desync? I've played a few multiplayer games with this without problems..|||Mithy|||Ah, now scaling down I could understand - you end up with overlapping coststamps, which probably creates all manner of problems with moving units around.
Went ahead and changed it, as I had a new version ready to release anyway.|||
Cost of mass convo has increased by 40 in your mod.I feel like this is partially my fault. I haven't posted any more ideas recently because I have been trying to figure what I actually want. It's not exactly obvious yet, especially after my first suggestions seemed pretty dumb, because I didn't quite understand your modification yet completely.
I think having 2 buttons would be nice. One could convert 1000 another could convert 10,000.
That's all I have for now.
PS. Mass Convo is not a balance issue. At least it's not a competitive balance issue, which makes it a playability issue in my mind. Hope that helps.|||I don't want mass converters to be efficient or fast, which is why I'm only reducing output and consumption and increasing costs. They still pay for themselves inside of 1.5 minutes (half the time of a mex) with only 4000 energy consumed, so it isn't as though there's any concern of whether or not they're worth the mass cost - they absolutely are.
However, if you try to start a massive farm with intent to overtake or replace your extractor income (each converter provides a max of 2.5 mass/s, or roughly two extractors max when powered by 7 pgens), you'll find that it takes a lot longer to pay off the cost of both the converter and the 7 dedicated pgens needed to run each one: 900 mass, or about 5 minutes.
So contrary to what you might think, you can even still mass-farm with them, but it's actually a serious risk now. Contrast this with one unmodded converter, which could be built in 30 seconds, pays for itself 5 times over with one activation, takes 42 pgens to reach max output, and can provide 25 mass/s (20 mass extractors!) and pay for the cost of every single pgen needed to run it well before most of them are even built (about 3-4 minutes).
By any reasonable standards, that is obscene and completely imbalanced. It totally invalidates any further need for ANY mass extractors. And don't tell me it doesn't affect competitive play, when just about every competitive 1v1 replay I've seen that goes for more than 15 minutes involves mass conversion completely replacing mexes, and map control becoming a complete joke as at least one player hides inside a massively-shielded base protected by ridiculous UEF/Illuminate pgens.
I don't expect most people to want mass conversion nerfed, but it's terribly naive to insinuate that isn't a complete replacement for mass extractors within minutes of its research.|||Ok... so here's what I am thinking.
1. You should understand that mass convo is referred to as 'corner wanking'. It's called that because the player going mass convo generally isn't a game changer for a while. Mass Convo is most commonly observed in FFAs and 4v4s. In 4v4s generally a single team mate going mass convo can screw a whole team.
2. I would like to discuss functionality and controls. Since Mass Convo has been introduced in SupCom2 players have complained about being required to push a button to get their mass. I would like to propose adding a repeat function similar to repeat build. It would be much easier to recommend drastic reductions in mass output of a Mass Converter if there was a repeat function similar to factories. Infact, if you introduced such a function existing mass convertors would be extremely unpopular due to the farm size required for just one.
Calculations
Assumptions:
-You can produce 1K energy per second with 5 pgens, because you have the structure energy income upgrade.
-We will use your current cost and production rate.
-Mass convo player produces mass efficiently without missing his timed button pushes.
-Drive to mass point to build an extractor takes 45 seconds.
-No cost reduction upgrades or training
Mass Convo
200|6000|120
Pgen
70|100|24
Mass Extractor
200|500|25
Mass Extractor takes 25 + 45 seconds to build time = 70sec
Mass Extractor costs 200mass
Mass Extractor costs 500energy
Time to recuperate investment of mass extractor = 200mass / (1.2mass/sec) +70sec = 237sec
Mass Convo takes 120sec to build. We will assume there are enough engineers to build the extra pgens while the Mass Convo goes up, so build time 120sec. We will also assume the commander builds the Mass Convos so build time = 60sec under very good conditions.
Mass Convo costs 70x5+200 = 550mass
Mass Convo costs 100x5+6000 = 6500energy (large jump start in energy cost... equivalent to 325 mass through conversion)
Time to recuperate investment of mass convo = 550mass / (50mass/20sec) + 60sec = 220sec
or
Time to recuperate investment of mass convo = 875mass / (50mass/20sec) + 60sec = 350sec
I think my calculations agree with your assessment mostly. You might consider meeting half way at 75mass per 1000energy. I think in practice would agree with you much more if we had a repeat que. I don't have the patience to babysit my mass convertors.
Also, repeat que massive convertors might be massively popular. I think the first one to suggest them is Admiral Zeech.|||Just like what AdmiralZeech proposed a while ago; make it a factory that produces dummy units that add mass and disappear.|||BulletMagnet|||I ninja'ed you.
You're the one who owes me a coke. ;p|||
ok you win|||I'm totally in favor of making it repeatable, and I just hadn't really thought much about how to do it yet. It may be as simple as adding a second ability that acts as a toggle.I can modify the Mass Conversion ability itself to start a countdown thread on the unit for the duration of its cooldown, setting a 'ready' variable whenever it's available again. This info can then be used by a thread that the toggle ability starts and kills to automatically run IssueAbility commands whenever the cooldown is up and enough energy is available. If not enough energy is available, it can poll once per second until enough energy is available, or I could make it turn itself off.
This could be improved if there were some kind of 'is this ability clickable' thing I could check, but I doubt that there is. In FA, this could be made into a UI mod, but I don't really know if it's possible to create new windows/dialogs in the SC2 UI (I'm guessing not).
Edit: Also, to re-state this once more, I don't think early-game mass conversion rushing is ever a viable tactic in a 1v1 game and a totally non-contributory mass conversion rush in an FFA or 4v4 is not a good idea either. However, sooner or later, mass conversion DOES enter the equation, and when it does, it's ridiculous.
The changes I've made almost totally shut down any possibility of rushing a conversion farm within the first 15 or 20 minutes. But as mentioned, that isn't a 'real' viable tactic anyway. The main intent is to stop or at least make extremely risky the endless late-game pgen bloat.
If you research mass conversion after 15-20 minutes in a fairly even game (something that is no longer absolutely necessary and/or a forgone conclusion), one or two converters and a handful of extra pgens should still pay for themselves and begin contributing some extra income within 4-6 minutes.
However, if at any point you try to turtle behind shields and abandon any thought of maintaining your existing extractors and/or trying to win battles against your opponent and/or kill his extractors, you're dead, because you can't run an economy entirely off of converters anymore. So the runaway mega-conversion-farm-with-attacking/repairing-pgens should never be a viable mid- to late-game strategy anymore, even in a skill-mismatched game.
Once I've got auto-converters working, I'll do another release and play a few games, and re-examine the idea of partially restoring conversion efficiency.|||I don't know about everyone else, but I would actually like the Mass Convo to turn itself off when it runs out of energy rather than turn back on when there is enough energy.
I see this as helping beginners who may or may not understand that they cannot build something because their mass convo is using all their energy up.
The other option is to only produce mass if you have more than 5 times the energy of the mass available. The only unit I see that doesn't fit in this mass to energy ratio well is the mass converter itself. If you wanted to increase the mass and reduce the energy of your converter everything would fit. 400|2000 would fit nicely.
If you are thinking about introducing the Paragon then you might want to reserve such functionality for the Paragon. It's up to you.|||Mass:energy ratio deactivation isn't a bad idea. I'll probably go with a hybrid system where it keeps converting while energy is >= 5000, and switches to ratio checks < 5000, pausing while the ratio dips below 5:1.
With more robust conditions like this (where you'll always have enough energy relative to your mass to build one or more of any unit, even major experimentals), I can't see a reason to make it turn off rather than just pause. I'll try to insert random 1-3 ticks into the paused waits, to make sure that multiple converters aren't all checking in unison and knocking your energy below the ideal ratio all at once.
Again, the viability of conversion farming should be such where none this should be a big deal, and you won't have 20 mass converters to toggle on and off. If you do, your opponent(s) obviously made some huge errors, or you're just toying with them, and it doesn't matter anyway.
I have absolutely no plans to make a Paragon-type unit. I loathe endless-income type structures, and 'hard' game-enders in general (not that SC2 even has 'soft' game enders). It would be very very difficult to balance a structure like that anyway, given SC2's pay-up-front and single-builder economy. It 'worked' in FA because you could start chipping away at it far in advance, giving the enemy the ability to scout it and letting you speed up its production with need and resource/buildpower availability.|||Mithy|||This will never happen. I just spent two hours trying to get a custom ability working, and every single file I need to modify other than the ability blueprint itself is loaded directly by the engine, 100% unhookable. There is no way I'm making this a file replacement mod.
The fact that it even needs other files to create simple custom abilities is idiotic beyond comprehension. Every piece of information it needs other than keymap (which is optional) is contained within the blueprint. Then it proceeds to require this information to be redundantly specified in two other files for absolutely no reason, when the engine and any 'real' lua state have full access to the blueprint info in __blueprints.|||BulletMagnet
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