Question about building power and mass/energy consumption.

[Boo Hassan]

Hello people! I have a quick question about how the mass, energy drainage aswell as buildtime is affected by having multiple builder doing the same task.

So for instance, let's say I have a T3 Engy, and he is building a unit that has a buildtime of let's say 100, and the engy have a build power of 30, that would mean that the unit would be built in roughly 3 secs correct?

so if I assign a second T3 engy to the same unit, would that cut the time to 1.5 secs or am I making the equation wrong?

Secondly, if this unit let's say cost 4 mass a second, does that mean that if I put another engineer to the job, it will be 8 mass per second?

thanks ahead of time!

[OutsidR]

That is the one thing I could never do is the balance between mass and energy.. Depending on what I decide to build and and reguardless how many units you have building it... you most likely run out your mass and energy supply and still slow things down. What you calculated may be correct but it still depends on your mass and energy supplies. IMO

[Hollow]

Yes, build time divided by the combined build speed of all construction assisting units is the time it'll take to construct something, just as long as you don't run out of resources while constructing at any point.

Edit - example: If a 120 build speed T3 air factory builds something within 3 minutes and a T3 engineer has 30 build speed you need 4 T3 engineers that assist this factory to reduce that build time to 1.5 minutes aka 90s.

Yes, two engineers of the same build speed finish an object twice as fast as a single engineer of the same build speed.
Yes, the mass & energy drain doubles with the 2nd engineer but the total price stays the same.

Adjacency info: Factories can produce units cheaper if either mass fabricators or power generators are built around them. The higher the tech tier of these structures is and the more of these structures are connected to a factory the cheaper unit production becomes. Any structure producing mass reduces the mass cost of units produced in a factory, and structure producing energy reduces the energy cost of units produced in a factory. The construction squares must connect to receive the adjacency bonus. Units assisting a factory will completely ignore the adjacency bonus and drain resources while assisting the construction as if no adjacency bonus would exist.

For aircraft you'll want to save energy, especially for tier 3, for land units it's rather mass.

The issue with adjacency structures is that they don't work well with assisting units and that they explode if destroyed, destroying or damaging anything close to them.

Storage units help with balancing mass and energy as your economy buffer. Repair stations, tier 3 air units, experimentals and tier 3 shields can easily drain your energy almost instantly by making a single mistake, causing shields to drop and intel to fail as well as everything to slow down. Energy storage units are also required for overcharge shots which allow the ACU to level easily.

[Boo Hassan]

Thank you my man! Wish I could respond sooner, had a power outage lol, anyway very clear and nice information! :)

[Hollow]

There's one thing missing:
Depending on the version or mod of the game you're playing it may be possible to exploit the adjacency bonus. Some mods or versions of the game grant the adjacency bonus even while the surrounding tier 3 mass fabricators are turned off, which allows to save energy, which is an issue early on. In FAF (edit: FAF now updates the adjacency bonus even while constructing; not sure when this was patched; the regular Steam version of the game does not) a factory / missile silo checks if the adjacency bonus applies on each construction start, which is still exploitable by starting to construct something, then turning off the surrounding mass fabricators while still receiving the full discount for this single unit construction. But that requires to monitor and toggle everything each time something is constructed to have things turned on before the construction starts and off after that. Yet this can be useful in some cases, like for cheap nuke production in the campaign by surrounding a nuke with 4 tier 3 mass fabricators which are turned on each time a new nuke is produced and then off to save energy, if that's an issue, as this saves 5 minutes of energy consumption 4 tier 3 mass fabricators would cause while considerably reducing the mass cost for the nuke over the 5min time span.

And one thing not clearly enough mentioned: Mass extractors also grant a discount but one that's worse than T3 mass fabricators, see wiki[wiki.faforever.com].