Economics needs more complexity

At the moment there are not enough means by which to out pace other players economically whilst owning a very small plot of land and not expanding. If you like this could be a parallel path of style compared to fast expansion.
Maybe it is better to make the game economics more complex, i understand that the scale is large and therefore you think it wont need the kitchen sink like supcom. But I think you have gone too far the other way. A few tweaks now could make all the difference. You only notice when you switch between supcom and FA, supcom is far more disciplined.

No, this does not need to be in the game at all. Ever. SupCom is far more *boring* than FA. The fact that SupCom's gameplay sucked horrifically and FA's was quite a bit better is an excellent reason to never, ever, include fabricators in PA.

The eco in FA works far better as in SupCom vanilla. The eco in PA is pretty okay, there is no need for mass converters. I would like to see energy usage drop when not enough metal is available though. Currently energy stalls are even worse than in FA and they happen way easier.

I'm talking about FA. And I'm happy to disagree with you.

Are you?

So which is it?

Fact is the Economy system of FA resulted in better, more dynamic gameplay when compared to SupCom Vanilla and this is widely regarded as fact.

Mike

And that is a good thing.

And mysterious? Sorry, couldn't not make that joke.

In any case, I disagree with you. I don't particularly want to spend a lot of my time thinking about how to get an economic edge over others... unless it was blowing up their economic infrastructure.

I'd much rather be spending what precious mental capacity I have thinking about how to get more of their things to explode and less of my things to explode.

When you're fighting across five planets, and umpteen dozen moons/roids, I think you'll have enough on your plate to manage.

Adding my voice to the choir here; being able to keep pace with an aggressive expansionist in terms of ECON without any risk of leaving a small patch of land is a bad thing.

Obfuscating economy mechanics to promote and enable players that tend a tiny patch of land, and punish those that expand... in a game about moving and fighting across multiple planets? Also a bad thing... a very bad thing.

No support for your argument here timevans999 I'm afraid.

You should let him tend to his small patch of land. When we direct an asteroid towards it, he won't be able to recover because his entire base will be gone.

Fabricators would require 2 extra building models, as well as UV maps and textures for those models. I would much rather Uber's Artists spend their time on useful things.

Even if it would only take a few hours, that's a few hours they could be spending on the Orbital unit set.

What he's advocating is making getting to that asteroid so difficult and/or complex for an expansionist that it would take too long to hit them with it.

And/Or that they could get an asteroid in the same type of time frame despite having less real estate.

Mike

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^Farmer B's Farm^

Now tell me, which one makes a bigger profit?

ASCII art is worth a thousand words?

I thought I was going crazy thinking that PA economy is way worst in these situations. Seems that it's not the popular opinion, people just didn't realize it yet.

Currently the metal spot placement is pretty messed up and will be overhauled eventually. But atm you're almost never limited in metal because of that, giving some skewed view of how hard it is to have enough energy.

Having a few energy storages built makes dealing with energy much easier as it helps enormously with smoothing out the varying energy consumption of moving fabbers and the long rollout time of factories.

What your ascii art fails to show is that Farmer A is using T2 Crops which are 9 times as valuable as Farmer B's.

...

No I am not letting this "T2 Econ is a straight upgrade to T1 Econ" thing go, alright!?

Just going to throw in my tuppence-worth because forum:

PA is a game of conquest. It's about seizing control of territory in order to gain control of further resources to fuel your engine of war. Your hold on territory is tentative, as your opponent can attack from any angle. Territory control is fluid, with locations falling under attack all the time, many separate skirmishes happening all at once. Decoys, distractions, raids - these are all viable tactics for attempting to out-maneuver your opponent. An exciting, dynamic environment.

What the OP is suggesting causes this to stagnate. If one player uses this turtling strategy, the other player takes all the territory they can and you end up locked in a battle in one location - at the turtle's base. Nothing moves, nothing changes. If both players use this tactic, you just have two bases sat on opposite sides of the planet, sending waves of units that just break on one another's defences. No movement, no evolution of the battlefield.

The defining feature of this game is the scale over which the battle is fought. Scale doesn't necessarily mean a huge battle with thousands of units clashing, it can mean many small battles involving just a handful of units, but spread across a large area. If you're going to just sit in a tiny impenetrable base, the scale is meaningless. Gameplay devolves into a tower defence game.

As well you shouldn't

I'm still working on my post on the topic, but I'm waiting for Beta. Once we're there I can let loose and speak freely without anyone using the "It's Alpha" defence.

But it will only be beta

Don't hurt me.