What follos is Vogue's Cadet post on game stages with some information from yours truly on the basic theory of Allegiance economy. This isn't a post on how to manage your miners or what miner splits are good to have or how many or whatever, but it's to give you an idea of the costs incurred in buying constructors and how much revenue you're getting at each point in the game.
It's written for, to quote Yahtzee Crosshaw, lobster-fisted accountants by the offspring of one of these afformentioned lobster-fisted accountants. I'll gladly entertain questions on the subject.
To give you an idea of the costs, a typical opening is OP/TP/REF/MINER. The typical (base) cost for this is 5000+3000+3000+3500 or 10000 spacebux. On Medium money (1.0 start) the amount of cashola available to you is 16000. Incidentally, the payday and start money differences of various factions is HUGE in terms of how quickly they can get their tech up. Let's look at IC: IC has a starting money nerf and so on medium money starts with only 14000 moneys but also doesn't buy a ref. Their opening is thus 7000 spacebux, but they only start with 14000 spacebux. They also tend to buy enh cons leaving them with only 2000 spacebux. Why is this a big deal?vogue wrote:QUOTE (vogue @ Sep 8 2014, 06:20 PM) EARLY GAME
There are only two goals during the early game, make sure your opening constructors plant and that the enemy teams die - in that order as well. Your first ans foremost priority should be to make sure that your constructors plant at strategic locations on the map with little or no hassle. Losing an opening con can be devastating, even if it's just a refinery. The reasons for this are two fold. You want your cons to plant so that your commander can effectively execute a mining chain and make sure that you have equivalent or superior tech compared to the enemy at all stages of the game. The second reason you want the constructors to plant ASAP is so that your commander can push out his second wave of constructors faster than the enemy. The game is very rarely determined by the first set of constructors - it is almost always determined by the second wave.
Once your constructors are safe, then it's time to figure out where the enemies constructors have planted, whether you can still intercept them, and if not then you should start scouting them out to get an idea of where the enemy is situated so that you can properly assess their mining chain and focus on moving into the mid game.
It's a big deal because for all factions except TF in certain circumstances (generally involving absurdly close rock placements) you are going to purchase most of your second miner before the first miner docks. IC can only pay for about 1500 (assuming your team is competent and buys rescue probes) of this miner. Bios, in contrast, can easily afford to finish their second miner before the first docks. Giga can as well because of their cheap bases and high starting money.
QUOTE MID GAME
After the opening constructors have planted then you've officially entered the mid game. There is one objective here - disrupt the enemy economy to the best of your ability. Note that i did not say simply kill enemy miners, even though that is admittedly the best way to disrupt their econ. There are multiple ways to disrupt the enemies economy. You could grab a scout and go deep into the enemy backsectors to find a juicy con or miner that's undefended and ready to be solo'ed. The classic method would be to grab an int or fig and simply rush the nearest miners to your sectors. Or you could even do little cheeky plays such as bouncing miners and keeping the enemy commander constantly on his toes actively controlling his miners.
At the end of the day the main point of the mid game is to make sure that the pressure is on the other team, not yours. "The best defense is a good offense", although it's cliche - it rings true here. The bigger picture of your role during the mid game is to secure as much advantage as possible. If you have properly pressured the enemy economy then your team will beat them to advanced tech and use the advantage from having superior ships to either deal a crushing blow to the enemy by wiping out their economy completely - or by furthering their advantage by taking the map. In order to do this, your ability to disrupt the enemy economy must become quite sharp.[/quote]
The mid game requires a techbase, a second wave of cons (generally just OP/TP), and the research for enh tech. This cost can range between 31875 (dreg) and 18000 (IC). The time can also take, eliminating travel times, anywhere between 2 minutes and 10 seconds (Rix) to 11 minutes (Bios). To use Dreg and IC for a moment, it takes 3 minutes plus travel time for BOTH factions to get enh tech. IC enh tech costs 10000 and Dreg enh tech costs 21875. This is part of the reason why Dreg is generally considered fairly underpowered at the moment: despite having double-speed research, they are economically terrible. In fact, fast research hurts them more than it helps them... and their fast speed also hurts their econ. See, they have less time between con waves thanks to travel time which means that they get fewer paydays between con waves compared to other factions.
There's another important factor in comparing these econds that we haven't touched yet: the paydays. (We ignore tech and cashbox pickups because they're equal across all factions, but it's worth noting that tech pickups are better for Belters and Dreg while cashbox pickups are almost utterly worthless for Dreg when compared to other factions). Dreg has to buy 22k worth of stuff, and over the three minutes it takes to finish the construction and research, will get $2k.
So the meat and potatoes of all this numerology is: how many miner loads must each faction dock in order to have the money for enh tech? It's worth noting that except for the major statistical outlier in TF that most miner loads take about the same time. TF is the major exception because of their capacity (.55) and mining speed (2). They generally get 1.5 loads in the same amount of time that any faction gets 1 on most money settings assuming you mine the same rock twice before moving on.
Dreg miner capacity is .95 and their yield is 1.2. This means that their miners bring in the most cash per load. They also have some incredibly slow miners (.65 speed, yikes) but we'll ssume that this is mostly offset by their 1.2 speed. Hint: it's not. Each Dreg miner load is thus worth $5472. These are FULL miners, which dreg will have on 1.0 money on hihigher. IC's loads are worth $4080. 31875/5472 is 5.8 which is rounded up to 6. 18000/4080 is 4.something which is rounded up to 5. When compared to IC then, after a round of cons and getting enh tech (JUST the ships, no GAs) IC has banked a free miner load which pushes them forward to the late game.
QUOTE LATE GAME
I believe that the late game starts the moment one team gets advanced tech. Whether that is your team or the other team. At this point the number one priority is no longer disrupting the enemy economy. The number one priority at this point becomes probing the CORRECT sectors by predicting the movements of the enemy. I emphasize correct sectors, because if you're out probing some back alephs that they would never use for an HTT, SB, or BBR run then you are wasting your precious time. Put yourself in the enemies shoes. If they have SB's then which sectors would they enter from and what targets would they go for first? Would they go for one of your outposts that is still full of helium so that they can mine it themselves, or would they go straight for your tech base? By predicting and then probing to counter the possible movements of the enemy - you make sure that you aren't wasting any time. Every second counts during the late game - it could literally be the difference between a win and a loss. Making sure that you are efficient in the use of your time is the first step to becoming a "game changer".
Now I know that I said that disrupting the enemy economy isn't the top priority anymore - but that doesn't necessarily mean that it ISN'T a priority at all. As always - killing miners is just good business for your team. If you see an opportunity to kill an enemy miner that won't put your team at risk of losing (i.e. killing a miner while a bomb run is hurdling to your tech base), then go for it. After the early game, killing miners and disrupting the enemy economy should always be on your mind - but during the late game it takes a backseat to more pressing issues that could literally end the game. If the issue isn't going to end the game, then you should be killing miners. Simple.[/quote]
Getting here is the biggest chunk of change anyone who's not BIOS (who doesn't have to research adv techbases) has to drop. To put it into perspective, getting Hvy Ints (no GAs) is twice as expensive as getting regular ints. This nominally costs 25000 for adv techbase and 10000 for hvy int research. For Dreg to get adv tech takes 8 miner loads. For IC it takes 8 as well.
Now, each sector can provide 4 total miner loads except for the home sector which provides 2. IC and Dreg both require 4 sectors of mining to pull the money they need... minus, of course, paydays and cashboxes which we'll assume pay for lost miners and/or GAs.
End-game tech is considerably more expensive on top of that. HTTs are 22.5k, SBs are 17.5k, and figbees are 17.5k. If you decide to go for hvy bbrs, hvy bbrs are 30k total. TP2 for Figbees costs 20k so TP2 figbees are 37.5k... almost a second adv tech!
This is a very simplistic overview of tech costs of course but the practical upshot of it is to point out that when you're talking about how "expensive" something is, it's very relative. Heavy scouts, for example, cost 37.5k total for Rix. That's about 6k less than enh tech costs for Dreg. When someone decides to go hvy scouts as Rix, they're hoping to use a ship that's slightly better than enh tech to keep their opponent off of adv tech. Going (as another example) old Vanguards required a 10k techbase, a 10k transceiver, 10k garr upgrade, 10k gunships, and 10k research for vanguards. That's 50k total when adv tech would require 52k total.
To bring this around to the posts that started this all up, my hybrid ships would cost 40k to get and would, ideally, represent a significant upgrade over enh tech in certain situations. By costing 5k on top of duel teching (which is already a strategy employed by many factions) they don't have a significant expense and are really only there if you're heading that direction anyways. That means that the functional costs of the hybrid ships I'm proposing would be the 5k research cost for the ship and maybe the 2.5k cost of its special tech... as for the functional cost of 40k that Vanguards currently cost (it's rare to upgrade the garr and get gunships and a transceiver, all of which are wholly unnecessary if you were, say, to go for hvy ints), that's a LOT of money. That's almost enough to have just gotten to adv tech in the first place.
So when you compare the basic or enh levels of my hybrid ships to mk 3 tech it just doesn't make any kind of sense based on how Allegiance economies work. Vanguards under my plan would cost 22k rather than 40k because instead of upgrading the garr, getting a transceiver, and getting gunships and paying 10k you'd be getting a second techbase, getting a second enh tech, and then getting Vanguards. As an aside, you'd have a bunch of extra GAs opened up and a second type of end game already partially unlocked.
