Economics needs more complexity

So if I have a turtle surrounded and I want to strangle his income, I only use air, since these create no wreckages.

As far as we can tell, that is temporary. Air should be creating wreckages, but Uber isn't happy with how it's working right now. (specifically plane wrecks floating on water)

Situational, sure... but it's every situation that involves combat.

I'd argue that the "situation" is so common that it needs to be considered before T2 (unless reclaiming was a T2-only thing).

[EDIT, OFFTOPIC:] The commander being the only unit capable of reclaiming... that would be an interesting mechanic. Massive conflict driver right there.

See edit on my previous post regarding the metal. As for the moon, there won't always be one, or your opponent will get there first (I'm curious about how this will be balanced). It's another form of outwards expansion, in any case.

While true, the general idea of this still stands - it relies on the player being in the lead (thereby making the game even more fragile), and there are several methods to avoid allowing the opponent to gain (tech up, wait for nukes/artillery).

But again, it's a mechanic that favors the leader. You can't reclaim if you aren't in control. Being in front means you already have an advantage, My concern is this will balloon out so that people quit 5 minutes (figuratively) into the game because the outcome is obvious.

Although I've generally been in favour of a T2 extractor variant having higher production (in exchange for other weaknesses), I remain on the fence as for whether or not it will actually turn out to be necessary.

In SupCom, claiming every mex point on the map was pretty much a given, unless two players played on a four player map (or similar). As a result, it was very common for expansion to hit a brick wall, where it was no longer possible to expand without taking territory from your enemy. Although this is obviously the major point of the game, it could result in a system whereby both players stalled at the frontline, and couldn't gain an advantage. Worse from a gameplay perspective, if one player managed to grab one more mex point in the initial expansion, then games could degenerate into a drawn out, yet foregone conclusion. Mex upgrading helped provide a way out of this, but it did it in a very superficial manner. If you upgrade at the right time, you gain a massive advantage. If you upgrade at the wrong time, your economy falls over. It placed a huge strategic advantage on the outcome a relatively 1 dimensional decision. I believe this is something to avoid.

However, in PA, we will often have entire planets and solar systems to expand over. In the games I have seen so far, it is extremely rare for all mex points to become occupied (excluding very small maps which i will come to shortly). Thus the limit that players run up against is not the hard one of "there are no more mexes to claim" but the much more flexible "the more i expand the more I open myself to raiding". Thats a good thing, and it means the whole "battle mex" concept looks a bit more interesting. It might be worth having one battle mex, and a few regular mexes in the average cluster. And we haven't even got to the point with multi planet gameplay yet. I'm really looking forwards to when a player can say "well bugger this", and decide that claiming asteroids is more profitable than a planetside slugfest with their enemy.

However, on small or limited systems, this does become an issue. Players could well run into the expansion wall again, after claiming all mex points. Fundamentally, the TA/Supcom/Spring style economy is rigged to be at it's best when it is continually expanding. If players grab all the mex points, then this falls flat, and the game begins to approach those two unpleasant scenarios of stagnation, or one player has already lost and doesn't know it yet. T2 mexes which boost income are a bandage for this problem, as are metall makers. The former is less open to abuse than the latter.

If the game doesn't feature something more radical, like Zero-K's overdrive system, then T2 mexes which boost would probably be the best compromise we could hope for. However, things can still be mixed up a little, by making them require energy, or making them very fragile, such that raiding starts to become a very viable tactic. I would be strongly opposed to the supcom system, where extractors increased in health as they got better.

Overall, I feel like I'm arriving at the conclusion that T2 boosting income is a necessary evil, in order to delay the expansion brick-wall. But as various people have pointed out here, it MUST be tweaked in some way to make it play and feel different from the early game economy.

Are you all familiar with Open Palms?

Back in the hayday of FA on GPGNet, some bright spark discovered that turtling on that map was not only viable, but amazingly good. It went completely against the [at the time] established meta of spamming the crap out of T1 tanks.

People believed that teching-up was your doom - the tiny map meant that any rush you faced - while upgrading - would arrive before you paid-off the opportunity cost of those upgrades.


But no, a great tactic was spam T1 power, ignore expansion deposits, and fuel yourself on the wrecks that people would feed you. You could become the leader by forgoing territory control. You could grow your economy because you were gifted 80% of the metal that your opponent had. As your opponents grew, you grew too. It was completely counter-intuitive, but it worked.


My point here is; if the fight is at your front door, it's really easy to control the field. If you control the field, you can reclaim. Don't assume that the field is in no-mans-land halfway between each base.

It sounds like a large part of that plan relies on poor strategy from the opponent, feeding you metal (a result of the meta; once people adapt, it would no longer work so well). Which somewhat shows my point - if that player couldn't build T2 didn't have an alternate method of generating metal, they had lost as soon as they had less metal spots. On the other hand, having a higher producing metal extractor gave them a chance to counter a player with larger map control.

Wrecks are too situational to rely on as part of your core economy, and that leaves just one, single, way to generate metal, which is entirely dependent on geography. Even starcraft has ways of increasing income without increasing

Can we explore other options first, before we relegate ourselves to such a fate?

Is there some way we can conceive of that makes more efficient use of Metal to allow greater gains in combat, rather than just pushing the numbers higher?

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Perhaps... some kind of "specialised" T2 units that don't really cost huge amounts of metal, and yet have a huge advantage over T1 (when used correctly). Could we explore that idea... rather than just having T2 cost more metal... just because?

I dunno, it's just a thought, right?

Anything you can do to increase combat efficiency, so can your opponent.

This is simply about having an alternative strategy to SPAM MEX MOAR MEX ALL THE MEX = WIN. I understand that there are conflicting goals here (avoiding exponential eco, not simply making T2 a "better in all respects" T1, etc.), and this is why I don't really have an set answer, other than something is needed to fill the gap. It doesn't even need to be T2, that's just the natural "first answer".

Edit: My fail. Thought you were summrising my argument with what you quoted. Didn't realise it was what YourLocalMadSci said.

Anything you can do to increase combat efficiency, so can your opponent; true.
If there were many options to increase your combat efficiency, and push yourself in a specific direction with regards to efficiency, your opponent would pick exactly the same one every time; false.

If you chose one way and your opponent, another, you gain interesting interplay between strategic choices.
If T2 is just an upgrade to T1, you lose interesting interplay between tiers. Your choice is only "when" to upgrade, not "if".

Oh, by all means, explore away.

The issue with having a special set of "budget T1 killer units" is that it means that in metal scarce situations, you're viable unit pool becomes reduced somewhat. Suppose that three out of ten T2 units fall into the budget class. In a brick wall situation, building T1 units is now un-optimum, as a competent player will destroy them with their budget T2 units. Thus we are left with T2, with a bias towards building budget units. Furthermore, if these T1 killers excel in outclassing a larger expenditure of metal on T1, surely an even greater amount of metal spent on them would be even more effective at dealing with T1 spam. In other words, I feel that in non-scarcity conditions, this would result in the very type of game you have always fought against - needing to tech up to T2 in order to get the units which are really really good at beating T1. Overall, this seems like it would result in a return to the kind of issues we saw in SupCom. This is does depend upon the caveat of what you mean when you say "used correctly". Every unit needs to be used correctly to get the best out of it. I'd have to know if you are contemplating anything special in terms of how the player uses these units, compared to how they would use regular T2 units.

I agree that T2 metal extractors having a higher extraction rate is not ideal. However, although the choice to upgrade may be a bit shallow compared to others, it enables other choices to be more interesting by keeping the game flowing, and keeping economies at point where the full unit choice is viable (depending upon other externalities). A feature is allowed to be a little on the shallow side if supports other more interesting choices. I appreciate the attempt to find an alternative, but I don't see one myself without radically changing how the economy works from the ground up.

There should never be a single unit that is capable of taking on an entire tier of unit diversity and prevailing... never.

A specialised T2 unit would work against specific T1 units, not the entire lot of them.

I'm not arguing it should be. My argument is that an alternate way of increasing metal production is needed that does not completely rely on gaining additional territory. (T2 is the natural starting point, and has issues, so I'm open to other implementations)

Exploring I shall go;

My first reaction in that case is to consult other RTS games and see how they do it. Many have a "spin up" economic model, where resource points slowly yield greater amounts of their resource, the longer they are held. Dawn of War 2 uses this mechanic, as does SupCom 2.

This mechanic promotes two things. Holding ground, and Raiding. It is advantageous to hold ground where possible, especially your first foothold on any given resource. It is advantageous to raid and remove your enemies hold on ground, as the longer you leave it in the control of your enemy, the more valuable it becomes.

The only thing that it doesn't promote is quick land-grabs, as there is not a strong incentive to build in hotly contested areas.

I believe that Total Annihilation-like games are at a unique advantage here. Metal Reclaim solves that problem. A quick land-grab from your enemy is very likely to leave behind wrecks that provide an immediate and significant boost to your economy.

All we need are tougher, more mobile Engineers who specialise in performing such tasks under fire. Or perhaps tougher and more heavily armed T2 Extractors that are capable of defending themselves at a reduced initial extraction rate, that slowly "spins up".

It would work specifically with Metal Extractors (especially if Metal Deposits were limited further in numbers as neutrino expressed an interest in investigating), but I don't see it working with Energy. Which is okay in itself, but we don't want this model to be too complex (as the game itself is massive in scope and thus already mentally demanding to a certain extent) - in vanilla, at least.

I really like what DoW II did with the traditional resource model - it's one of my favourite games for a reason. But the reason why it worked was because all resource points were limited and out on the field (with no safe spots near or behind base structures), as well as the map size being somewhat limited.

Rocket launchable self-building mex.

I think you answered your own problem there

Also, I agree with you 100% that Energy and Metal should be treated differently with regards to this model.

Energy is functionally, a measure of efficiency.
Metal is what you actually build with.

Good idea, and I also forgot about the eggs. Maybe something can be done with orbital units too - metal makers that are solar powered or some such. Hard to say without having a basis for how orbital works yet though.

Actually , i believe Neutrino has expressed an interest closer to in cutting down the value of the metal points, rather than curtailing their number. This is beneficial, as in increases the validity of holding large amounts of terrain (as in TA), rather than a few heavily defended points (such as SupCom).

That'd be something I'm satisfied with as well. Certainly the ability to occupy space should be emphasised in this game, given the vast scope of games we will see with multi-planet gameplay.

@Nanolathe: well, I did say it was workable with Metal