New player... can someone teach me how mass and energy work? [SOLVED]

[roxria]

I have little to no idea how the economy works in this game (forged alliance, obviously) so any help? any guides outthere?

[Benoker]

You can find a very detailed explanation here.

You have an income (mass and energy), and as soon as you get something you can spend it. That's a little bit like in the real world, where you can use your credit card to buy stuff even if you don't have the money yet. If you don't spend your mass and energy fast enough it is "wasted", meaning it is lost forever.
- You need mass *and* energy to build stuff (tanks, buildings...)
- You need energy to keep stuff running (radar, shields...)
- To convert mass and energy into units, you need "build power" (factories, engineers, ...)
If you have an income of 8 mass/second, you can spend 8 mass/second. If you build a unit that consumes 16 mass/second, it will be built at half speed. If you build a unit that consumes 3 mass/second, you still have 5 mass/second left. You can use these 5 mass/second income to build an additional unit in another factory. All you need to do is keeping income and consumption in a balance.

To get mass:
- Reclaim, reclaim, reclaim. Every dead unit, every rock, every tree can give you some mass. Never stop reclaiming.
- Build T1 mass extractors (mex) wherever you can, a T1 mex pays off after 18 seconds.
- Upgrade your mexes, surround them with mass storages once they are T2. Never stop upgrading.

To get energy:
- Build power plants, lot's of them.

As a rule of thumbs:
- Always use up a little bit more mass than your income gives you, that way you don't waste anything.
- Never ever run out of energy, running out of energy is worse than running out of mass.
- Always keep enough build power ready, otherwise you may start wasting mass.

In team games I see often two issues with new players:
- They don't spend their mass, they are just wasting it. If you have resources, use them. If you don't know how: upgrade a mex.
- They spend too much mass. That's like buying too much stuff with your credit card, the bank will get angry with you... only start projects that you can afford. If you can't afford it now, continue expanding your economy until you can.

[Ze_PilOt]

Mass production is also tied to energy. As your mass extractors needs energy, if you run out of it, you will run out of mass too.

[Myrdral]

The difference between FA economy and other RTS is that you spend and earn your mass and energy as a constant rate.
You do not pay for anything all up front when you start the build.

When you mouse over a buildable unit or structure, it will show the consumption rate during the build for the selected
structure, engineer or ACU.

If you build something with multiple units/structures, then each contributing constructor adds to the build by spending at its own rate.

Any surplus or deficit in your earning/spending rates will be added or subtracted from your mass/energy reserves. It is better to try and spend too much than too little. Surplus is gone forever or sent to your allies, while overexpenditure simply slows down your current project or disables abilities which consume energy.

If your energy or mass hits 0 and you are still running at 95% capacity, then you are not in terrible shape.
If it gets to that point or worse it would be optimal to pause a project, take engineers or the ACU off a project to have them reclaim the appropriate resource(wrecked units/structures and rocks for mass, trees for energy).

Here is another thing to consider if you intend to do a project which has up to say twice the consumption rate of your current economy. You will want to decide if you really want to do that build right now or wait until later. If you choose to build it now, you may wish to pause all factories and other structures.

You also can do a large reclaiming with the engineers which your economy cannot support on that build project. Building up to near full reserves before you start will not let you finish at an earlier game time, however it will shorten the time from start to completion, you just started later.

This is beneficial as your enemy will have less time to see what you are building. This is a large investment and as such your opponent may scout for it.

After they scout you, you do not want them to have time for a heavy raid against your engineer work force before it is completed. Everything put into a project is a waste until it is completed.

Clustering your engineers is a risk to build a single thing very quickly instead of spreading out your build power.

[PhunnyWolf]

You can find a very detailed explanation here.

wow... thx a lot 4 this link.
this guide is insane!

[Eukanuba]

You can find a very detailed explanation here.

wow... thx a lot 4 this link.
this guide is insane!

It's worth being aware that that guide is four years old and some of the values have since been changed in the name of balance. The most obvious one is that you now need energy storage to use overcharge (the commander's insta-kill super weapon) - this was done in part to make e-storage worth having, previously all factories increased e-storage so the building was entirely redundant.

FYI, starting e-storage in FAF is currently 4000, and overcharge costs 5000 energy to fire (one e-storage gives an extra 5000 storage, so with one of them you will have total energy storage of 9000).

[FunkOff]

Abbreviated summary:

Mass = Resource based on map control. Produced at a constant rate via structures, and in packages when reclaiming wreckages. Higher level mass-producing structures are less efficient than lower level mass-producing structures. Try not to keep any storage, because it's wasteful. All methods of producing and using mass require energy.
Energy = Resource based on tech. Build power generators to make more energy. High-lever energy producing structures are more efficient than lower-level energy-producing structures. Always build more power-generating capacity than you need, because you cannot store much energy efficiently, and (nearly) everything requires energy to run.

[eXcalibur]

if you just want to learn the basics of this game play the single player campaign of the vanilla game: Supreme Commander. there are quite a lot differences to Supreme Commander Forged Alliance though, but for learning such basic concepts (and things like tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, experimentals, upgradeable mass extractors, upgradeable commander, transports, ...) it is really the best way besides an experienced player showing you.