Power output and drain

Features & systems·Units, buildings & economy·Buildings & economy

Every house carries two figures — the power its structures produce and the power they consume — and every consequence on this page is read from the ratio between them. Both figures are rebuilt from zero rather than adjusted as structures come and go.

How the balance is computed

A rebuild walks every structure in the game, keeps the ones this house owns that are out of limbo and standing on the map, and adds each one’s output and drain. A structure counts from the moment it is placed, so one still playing its buildup animation is already on both sides of the ledger.

In a campaign game a house under the player’s control skips any of its own structures the player has not discovered yet, so a base handed over by a trigger contributes nothing until it is seen. Discovering an object flags the tally for a rebuild.

What each structure contributes

Output is the type’s Power= plus the value of every plug the structure holds — a plug being a structure type carrying PowersUpBuilding=, installed into one of the host’s upgrade slots — and that sum is then scaled by the structure’s current strength as a fraction of its maximum and truncated to a whole number. Drain is the same sum over the type and its plugs, and is not scaled at all.

The table sets each contributor and each condition against what it does to the two sides; a stun there is an EM pulse holding the structure down for a set number of frames. Only one row tells the two columns apart, and it is the row that decides what a base under fire loses.

	Output	Drain
Type	positive Power=	magnitude of a negative Power=
Plugs	added before scaling	added
Damage	scales the total, truncated	ignored
Switched off	nothing	nothing
Stunned	unchanged	unchanged

Three consequences follow. Damage costs output from the first point taken, with no threshold under it: a plant rated 100 with 999 strength of 1000 supplies 99, and the same plant at 1 strength supplies nothing at all. Drain never falls with damage, so a base being shelled loses supply while demand holds steady and slips into low power. Only the on/off switch takes a structure off either side, and an EM pulse never touches that switch, so a stunned plant keeps feeding the grid and a stunned consumer keeps drawing.

When the tally is rebuilt

The tally is flagged as stale rather than recomputed on the spot, and the rebuild runs on the house’s next turn. Anything that could move either figure sets the flag: a structure’s strength changing, opening for business, being taken off the map, changing hands, having a plug installed or sold, being switched on or off, and being discovered.

The rebuild then brings the house’s structures into line with the new balance, re-rates its factories, marks its radar for re-evaluation, and refreshes its superweapons when the rebuild carried the house across the full-power line.

Outside campaign games a computer house answers a shortfall in its own way, by inserting a power plant ahead of the node that would have caused it; AI base planning covers that and the margin it works to.

The power fraction

The fraction is 1 whenever output is at least drain, and 1 for a house with no drain at all however little it produces. Below that it is output divided by drain, and 0 when output is zero.

Surplus buys nothing

The fraction is never above 1. A house at twice its drain is in exactly the state a house at exactly its drain is in, so extra plants are insurance against losing one, not an upgrade.

Switching a structure off

The power cursor offers the toggle only over an object that clears all of these, in this order:

• it belongs to a player-controlled house;
• it is a structure;
• its type is Selectable=yes;
• its type is not a deployed vehicle — one carrying UndeploysInto= without being ConstructionYard=yes;
• its type is TogglePower=yes;
• Any of: its type carries drain, or its type is Powered=yes.

The order the cursor queues refuses a FirestormWall=yes type outright.

The switch itself asks less than the cursor does. It needs only that the type drains power or is Powered=yes, so the Turn off building trigger action and a scenario’s own structure record can put a TogglePower=no structure out of service that the player can never switch back. Switching a structure on is refused while it is stunned.

Taking a structure out of service removes it from both sides of the tally, disables its light source, collapses its cloaking field, drops its laser fences, stops its powered animations, announces the change to a player-controlled house, and — when the structure is a factory — re-examines what its house may still produce. Switching off the house’s last working firestorm generator also discharges an active firestorm wall. While a structure is off and its house is player-controlled, a marker is drawn over it wherever the cell is neither shrouded nor fogged.

What low power costs

Everything below reads the same fraction, and applies to every house, the computer’s included, except where noted.

The structure damage tick

Each house holds a timer reloaded with DamageDelay game minutes. When it expires and the house’s fraction is below 1, every structure the house owns that stands strictly above ConditionYellow of its maximum strength and whose type carries drain of its own takes 1 point of damage through C4Warhead. The timer is reloaded whether or not the house was short, so the cadence never drifts.

Those three tests are the whole filter. A structure that has been switched off still ticks, although it has already stopped adding to the drain that caused the shortfall. The test is on the type’s own drain, so a structure that draws power only through its plugs is never touched. And because only structures above ConditionYellow are hit, a shortfall grinds a base down to that threshold and stops there; at the stock one-point tick it cannot destroy anything, though a raised MinDamage can overshoot the threshold and, once it exceeds a structure’s remaining strength, destroy it outright.

Verses cannot soften the tick

The point of damage is not forced, so it goes through the warhead’s Verses table — but at a raw damage of 1 no percentage below 200 can reduce it, and the result is then raised to MinDamage. Only 200 per cent and above multiplies the tick, and raising MinDamage raises it for every structure at once. Immune=yes is the way out.

Production

The fraction is turned into a production multiplier on a fixed ladder. Each row of the table is a band of the fraction and the multiplier that band produces; what the bottom row settles is that the multiplier never falls below 0.5, so even a house producing nothing at all still builds at half speed.

Power fraction	Production multiplier
1	1
0.75 up to but not including 1	0.75
0.5 up to but not including 0.75	the fraction itself
below 0.5	0.5

The multiplier is then raised to MinProductionSpeed when it falls below it, and the object’s build time is divided by the result — 0.75 makes a build a third longer, 0.5 doubles it.

The middle band is the only one that tracks the shortfall

Between half and three quarters the multiplier is the raw fraction, so a house at 0.6 builds slower than one at 0.74. Above and below that band the penalty is flat. At the default MinProductionSpeed the floor sits exactly on the bottom step, so it changes nothing until it is moved; raising it lifts the whole ladder at once.

Build time reaches that division already shaped: it starts from the object’s cost through BuildSpeed, is multiplied by the country and difficulty BuildTime figures the house was handed, and after the power division is adjusted for the number of factories through MultipleFactory and, for a wall, by WallBuildSpeedCoefficient.

Every change to the balance re-rates the house’s factories. Each one recomputes the delay between production steps from the new build time and keeps the step it had already reached, so low power slows a build in place instead of restarting it — and restoring power speeds it up again from where it stands. That delay is a whole number of frames between 1 and 255, so once a step already takes 255 frames a deeper shortfall costs nothing further.

What a shortfall never does is remove an option. Whether a house may build something is decided by whether it owns a switched-on factory of the right kind, and the power balance is not consulted, so low power leaves every cameo on the sidebar and only slows what comes out of it.

Radar

Only the local player’s house has a radar map to lose. It is raised while all of these hold:

• no ion storm is running;
• the house’s output is at least its drain — the raw comparison, not the fraction;
• Any of:
  • the scenario sets FreeRadar=yes;
  • the house owns a Radar=yes structure that is All of: switched on, out of limbo, on the map, and not being deconstructed.

The campaign discovery skip applies to that search too.

The search stops at the first radar it finds

Structures are scanned in creation order and the scan ends at the first eligible one, which supplies the radar only if it is not stunned. A stunned radar reached first therefore keeps the map dark while a second, working one stands beside it.

Superweapons

A superweapon that depends on a building counts as enabled while a structure granting it — through its own type or through a plug — is switched on, and is disabled outright whenever the house’s output is below its drain. A disabled weapon is suspended if its type is IsPowered=yes; the resume step does not consult that value, so a weapon suspended some other way still comes back.

Suspension stops the charge timer where it stands, replaces the sidebar cameo’s status text with the engine’s hold caption, and refuses the targeting cursor. A weapon that becomes available while its house is already short of power arrives suspended. A weapon granted by the Add repeating special weapon trigger action no longer needs a building and is never suspended by this path.

A charge-draining weapon loses its charge, not just its time

Where an ordinary weapon resumes from the point its timer stopped, a UseChargeDrain=yes weapon has its timer reset to a full RechargeTime on resume. Each spell of low power, however brief, therefore costs it every second of charge it had accumulated.

Defenses

Three separate tests stand between a shortfall and a silent defense, and they do not agree with each other.

1. Out of service. A structure is operational while none of these holds:

   • it is switched off;
   • it is stunned;
   • its strength has reached zero;
   • All of: its type is Powered=yes, its type carries drain of its own, its type is TogglePower=yes, and its house’s power fraction is below 1.

   That is the first gate on firing, and the test used by spotlights, laser fences, sensor-array refreshes and cloak-generator regrowth.

2. Weapons. Past that gate, a structure whose type is Powered=yes with drain reports itself busy while the fraction is below 1. This test omits TogglePower, so a Powered=yes, TogglePower=no defense is silenced even though the first test spared it.

3. SAM tracking. A SAM=yes launcher stalls in its ready state under the same Powered/drain/fraction test, so it never turns toward its target in the first place.

A structure whose primary weapon is an electric weapon charges only while it holds a target, its house is at full power, and it is switched on. That branch consults neither Powered nor TogglePower, so a defense of this kind that draws no power at all still refuses to charge while its house is short, and an uncharged electric weapon reports that it needs to rearm.

Fields, fences and lights

• A CloakGenerator=yes structure collapses its field one ring per frame when it stops being operational and regrows it the same way afterwards. A generator left at Powered=no is exempt and keeps its field through any shortfall.
• Laser fences are re-evaluated on every change to the balance, and a run energizes only while the posts at both ends are operational, so low power drops the whole run.
• A spotlight is neither drawn nor able to notice an intruder unless its structure is operational.
• At full power, powered animations are enabled and powered lights started for every structure the house owns. Below full power the matching shutdown runs only for a type that is Powered=yes with drain and TogglePower=yes.

A sensor array does not go dark with the rest of the base

Nothing lifts sensor coverage on a power change; a SensorArray=yes structure gives its cells up only when it is taken off the map. What a shortfall costs it is the refresh, since the re-marking that follows a cloak field completing or another array shutting down skips an array that is not operational. Its cloak-generator counterpart, which shares CloakRadiusInCells, collapses immediately.

A TogglePower=no defense is silenced but stays lit

The animation shutdown and the out-of-service test both spare a TogglePower=no structure, while the weapon test does not. Such a defense holds fire through a shortfall with its idle animations and lights still running, which reads on screen as a working turret.

Player feedback

The low power announcement is made while all of these hold:

• the house is the local player’s;
• its own announcement timer has expired;
• its power fraction is below 1;
• it has at least one structure of the first BuildConst type on the map, switched on or not.

The announcement speaks the warning, posts the on-screen text for MessageDelay minutes, and re-arms the timer with SpeakDelay minutes.

The sidebar power bar is measured differently from the tally that runs the game. Its height comes from the type-level output and drain of every structure the player owns, so a switched-off or half-destroyed structure still counts at its full rated figure; only the split into colored bands is taken from the real tally. The bar can therefore look healthy while the base is running short of power.

Scripting

The Power Low trigger event holds while the named house’s fraction is below 1. The Turn off building and Turn on building actions reach the same switch the power cursor does, for every structure tagged with the trigger that is on the map: the first takes only the structures currently on, the second only those currently off, and a stunned structure refuses to come back on.

Parsed settings without effect

The production ladder above is fixed in the engine. WorstLowPowerBuildRateCoefficient and BestLowPowerBuildRateCoefficient in [General] are read into the rules and never consulted, and the gentler hard-coded step is 0.75 — the same figure BestLowPowerBuildRateCoefficient already defaults to, which is why moving it appears to do nothing.

Related settings

Filter keys

26 of 26

Key	Description	Value	When omitted
BuildSpeedglobal rules	The multiplier that turns an object's cost into its base build time.	floating point	1
BuildTimeHouseType, difficulty settings	The build-time multiplier a country applies to everything it produces, or the one a difficulty setting applies.	floating point	Varies by type
C4Warheadglobal rules	The WarheadType behind damage the engine deals without a weapon to draw one from.	class	none
CloakGeneratorBuildingType	Whether the structure projects a cloaking field over the cells around it.	boolean	no
CloakRadiusInCellsBuildingType	The radius in cells of a cloak generator's field or a sensor array's coverage.	integer	20
ConditionYellowglobal rules	The fraction of maximum strength at or below which an object counts as damaged.	floating point	.5
DamageDelayglobal rules	Minutes between the damage ticks a house takes while it is short of power.	floating point	1
FreeRadarscenarios	Whether the scenario grants the radar map without a radar structure.	boolean	no
ImmuneNo effect in some scopes12 applicable types	Exempts the type from every damage path that is not applied as forced.	boolean	Varies by type
IsPoweredSuperWeaponType	Whether the superweapon stops charging while its house is short of power.	boolean	yes
LaserFencePostBuildingType	Whether the structure anchors laser fence segments run out from it.	boolean	no
MessageDelayglobal rules	Minutes an engine-raised message stays on screen.	floating point	.6
MinDamageglobal rules	The smallest damage a warhead may deal to a target close to the impact.	integer	1
MinProductionSpeedglobal rules	The floor the low-power production multiplier is held to.	floating point	.5
MultipleFactoryglobal rules	The speed-up each factory past the first gives to production of its category.	floating point	1
PowerBuildingType, Tiberium	Power a BuildingType contributes to its house, negative for consumption, or the damage a Tiberium type carries.	integer	0
PoweredBuildingType	Whether the structure stops working while its house cannot meet its drain.	boolean	no
PowersUpBuildingBuildingType	The ObjectType ID of the structure this type plugs into as an upgrade.	string	none
PowersUpToLevelBuildingType	How many upgrade slots the plug consumes at once, or -1 for one slot in the next free position.	integer	-1
RadarBuildingType	Whether the structure can supply the player's radar map.	boolean	no
SensorArrayBuildingType	Whether the structure marks the cells around it as sensed, revealing cloaked objects standing there.	boolean	no
SpeakDelayglobal rules	Minutes an EVA announcement waits before it may be repeated.	floating point	2
TogglePowerBuildingType	Whether the player may switch this structure on and off.	boolean	yes
UpgradesBuildingType	How many upgrade plugs the structure accepts.	integer	0
VersesWarheadType	The percentage of a weapon's damage the warhead delivers against each armor class, in armor order.	string	100%,100%,100%,100%,100%
WallBuildSpeedCoefficientglobal rules	The multiplier applied to a wall's build time.	floating point	.5

Related resources

• EMP pulseFeature or system
• AI base planning and buildingFeature or system
• Power Low...Trigger event
• Turn off buildingTrigger action
• Turn on buildingTrigger action
• Building animationsFeature or system
• Cloaking and detectionFeature or system
• Laser fences and the firestorm wallFeature or system
• Shroud, fog and the radar mapFeature or system
• Production and factoriesFeature or system
• Sidebar and build queueFeature or system
• SuperweaponsFeature or system

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