A laser power control method for additive manufacturing includes a pre-processing component and an intra-processing component. The pre-processing component creates in the system controller a machine code expressed additive-path-with-geometry-metadata that includes a path description. The path description represents the path of the beam source on the build and includes a geometry index for the build. The intra-processing component calculates required power for the beam at intervals and events on the beam path based upon the additive-path-with-geometry-metadata and calculations of the energy balance at the melt pool and the total energy for each point P(s) on the path.