The streaming economy

This is the heart of TORRENT and the single highest-leverage skill in the game. Most RTS economies are about saving up lump sums. TORRENT's is about throughput — how much you can pour in and out per second without stalling or spilling. Master the two bars at the top of the screen and everything else gets easier.

Two resources

Everything is built from exactly two resources:

• Metal (M) — the physical substance of units and buildings. Scarce, location-bound (it comes from finite metal spots), and conserved: most of the metal you spend on a unit returns to the map as wreckage when that unit dies.
• Energy (E) — power. Abundant and generatable anywhere, but consumed voraciously by weapons, radar, cloak, and metal extraction. Energy is the throttle on everything else.

Metal is the resource you fight over. Energy is the resource that lets you use it.

The streaming model

For each resource you have three numbers, always visible at the top of the screen:

• Income — units per second flowing in (extractors, generators, reclaim).
• Expenditure — units per second flowing out (construction, weapons, upkeep).
• Storage — a buffer that starts small. It absorbs the difference between income and expenditure.

The crucial rule: construction does not require the full price up front. When you order a building or unit, the build order begins immediately and drains metal and energy continuously across its whole build time. A 1,200-metal factory over 40 seconds simply adds 30 M/s to your expenditure while it builds. This is why you think in rates, not totals.

The two failure states

Because income and expenditure are independent streams meeting at a small buffer, there are exactly two ways to mismanage the flow. Both are visible on the bars before they bite — the whole system is designed to be legible.

Resource structures

Income comes from structures you place on the map. Metal extractors must sit on finite metal spots — the map's primary strategic geography — while energy can be generated anywhere. Numbers below are prototyping targets, not final balance.

The energy converter

Energy is abundant; metal is scarce. The Energy Converter bridges the two, spending 60 E/s to make 1 M/s while it's running. It is the economy's pressure-release valve: when your energy is overflowing but you're metal-starved, converters turn that wasted energy into the resource you actually fight over. Left on auto, they switch on when you have spare energy and off when you don't, smoothing both bars at once.

Reclaim — the battlefield is income

Any constructor can reclaim, and reclaim is a continuous stream like everything else:

• Wreckage returns roughly 60% of the dead unit's metal cost. Every destroyed unit — yours or theirs — becomes a metal deposit.
• Trees and rocks give small amounts of metal or energy. Maps ship littered with them so the early economy has texture beyond metal spots.
• Live structures — even standing buildings, enemy or your own — can be reclaimed slowly for partial cost.

The design intent is a signature sight: after a big battle, the winner's constructors flood in and eat the field, funding the next attack from the enemy's own dead. Aggression is self-funding for whoever wins the engagement, and deliberately reclaiming the enemy's fallen is a central strategy, not an afterthought.

Assist & build power

Construction speed is a function of build power applied to a project. Any number of constructors — plus a factory's own nano-turrets and dedicated stationary Nano Turret structures — can assist a single build, and their build power stacks linearly. Twenty constructors on one structure build it roughly twenty times faster.

This is the source of the signature late-game spectacle: a swarm of constructors erecting a superweapon in seconds. The only limit is your economy — build power just raises the drain rate, so a big assist stack will stall you instantly if your income can't fund it. Build power and throughput are two halves of the same skill.

Sharing (team games)

On a team, players can freely transfer units, metal, and energy, and overflowing metal automatically distributes to teammates who have storage room. This enables the beloved role-specialization dynamic: a dedicated economy player feeds a front-line player who spends everything as fast as it arrives. (Exact overflow-sharing rules are still being tuned — team play arrives in v1.5.)

The core skill loop

Put it all together and good economic play is a simple loop you run constantly:

1. Watch the two bars. A bar pinned at empty (stall) or full (overflow) is money left on the table.
2. Never let build power sit idle. Idle constructors are wasted income. Queue expansion, defense, or army.
3. Match expenditure to income. If metal is overflowing, add factories or converters or reclaim more. If it's stalling, add extractors/energy or ease off the build queue.
4. Turn kills into metal. After every fight, send constructors to reclaim the wreckage before the enemy does.
5. Keep energy in the black. A brown-out on energy quietly throttles your extractors, weapons, and cloak all at once.