I think that it should remain that there be no efficient surefire way to convert minerals to energy by switching production. Something like that can be horribly abused and lead to more problems.
An example of that would be,
Someone is building up a high mineral building/unit, and then at the last second they switch their production to stockpile energy.
So keep it as is, it seems balanced to me.
It would be game changing for sure. You would be able to drop everything in production to get energy to rush a secret project. Granted it's not very efficient because its 2 mineral per 1 energy then you're spending 4 energy per 1 mineral (assuming no other exploits).
I think carrying forward the excess minerals while stockpiling is fine too. Would it be possible to convert them as they get to the required amount on subsequent turns (i.e. 1 mineral production base, first turn it stores the mineral, second turn you get 1 energy and it goes back to 0 minerals)?
While on the topic, if multiple builds are allowed per turn, would multiple rush buys be possible in the same base?
3. If you can't build multiple things per turn, you won't get any extra energy when you finish a facility or unit (also makes sense; if you can't use those extra minerals for a scout patrol until next turn, the same should go for turning them into energy.) 4. If it is turned into energy, those minerals are removed from production. (This is the flip-side of #1: If you use it for production, it can't become energy. If you use it for energy, it can't become production.)
Case 2:If you finish something with nothing left in the queue, and is set to automatically stockpile (e.g. a facility; I believe that this is customizable to some extent in-game) it switches to stockpiling energy but will not stockpile any energy this turn. This is to allow you a chance to change production before losing it if you don't like messing with queues. Changes in this case are the same as case 1, except that you don't get any extra energy (and don't lose production) regardless of whether it's possible to build multiple things per turn. This doesn't make you lose energy, it's just delayed...
Would it be simpler if rushing to fill every mineral (i.e. turns to complete = 0) gave you the facility, unit, SP immediately? Granted this would have a big game impact. But as it is you're best off rushing to 1 turn to completion (which requires manual calculation) to avoid going over the 10 mineral excess cap.
Another fix to simplify might be just to remove the doubling in cost for rushing before the first 10 minerals. I never really understood the need for this, when rushing is already very expensive.
I discovered something else while playing around with customized mineral penalty/carryforward: the exempt minerals variable is also used as the mineral carry forward cap.
But I suppose that is good. What does this imply for rushing to 1 turns completion vs 0 turns completion? I'm seeing the same for rushing to 0 turns completion in bases with over 10 minerals production: the excess minerals are simply lost. I'm not able to trigger the "Classic Stockpile" bug through empty queue or stockpile queue, is there something I'm missing here?
It's cheaper to excess build a facility by 10 minerals and queue on a Scout Infantry in that case, rather than to just build the facility to 1 turns completion and rush the Scout Infantry the next turn.
What if for queue switches, you simply used the value of the excess *energy* rather than minerals, and converted it to what that energy would buy towards the next thing? Would that be simpler?
Maybe all excess minerals should get stored and if stockpile energy isn't switched off then on the next turn it's all converted (plus that turn's stockpile energy).
Another bug I noticed with building and the city screen is that it assumes 10, 50% I believe when calculating the turns it will take to complete a switched thing. For example a base with 40 minerals producing 7/turn and making a Recycling tanks, it'll show 3 turns if I switch to Rec Commons, even if I put the variables at 0, and 0% (no penalty). It does display correctly once you've actually switched.
Another minor and longstanding exploit is that you can rush a facility and then pay the 50% switching cost to a unit, and come out ahead (related to what I mentioned before). Only is true however when not much has been produced towards the current. Not sure this can be fixed without making unit rush costs linear and it's probably not related to stockpile energy directly anyways.
Is this assuming multi building or in both cases?
I assume that if you switch down (i.e. something expensive to cheap) then the carried forward minerals in excess of production would get auto-converted back to energy on the next production turn?
I think if Stockpile energy isn't explicitly selected then they should still go to energy rather than be lost.
Also a minor bug as it's visible and you have to try in order to make this occur (though it might be possible to rid this one by capping rush energy to the recommended amount, it can still be circumvented in sometimes less efficient ways).
So essentially the rush cap and exempt minerals amount would be two variables in alphax rather than one?
Rush cap = -1 could equal the bases production or something?
Yea, I think it would be hard to spend even 32000 a turn. Theres only 8 queuable slots so thats 4000 minerals per item.
Eventually, I figured out why the SManiaC Mod was crashing under Yitzi's v2.4 terrran.exe. I should have read Yitzi's readme.
If your Mod sets the cost of Stockpile Energy to zero, a divide-by-zero error occurs. Once I changed the alphax.txt value in #Facilities to 2, the build queue became useable.
Yitzi states that the construction cost of the Stockpile Energy "facility" must be an integer. Is zero an integer?
An effective way to cripple Stockpile Energy in v2.4 would be to set the value to 1000, rather than zero.
In such cases of divide-by-zero, why not capture the error and make the result zero? :dunno: