Economics needs more complexity

That would imply, that turtling is a legit tactic and a base must be capable of surviving for a certain period of time using solely space efficient defensive buildings, so building a hard turtle shell for a small base is actually a viable tactic. Although not only when you are turtling, but also in regular gameplay to fortify your outposts for when your enemy has gotten through your mex fields and is on course to the core of your base.

Remember: Contrary to classical RTS maps, you don't have only 1-2 possible locations for bases per player with 2-4 paths, but actually more like 2-5 bases, per planet and player. At the same time, your economy is growing exponentially, but it is yet an inefficient choice to have a full scale army present in every single outpost. And so is protecting anything except for your generators, storages and factories, since mexes are easily rebuild.

You don't have sufficient resources to expand horizontally when surrounded (to start an outbreak and take back mex fields), but a vertical expansion should always be a legit option.

The interesting question is:
How to allow players to fortify their bases without having them build mini bases all over the place?
Remember, there is no such thing as a classic unit cap or upkeep cap.
Well, there is, but it doesn't work as in classic RTS either, since you are not dealing with the choice of splitting your unit cap on 1 or 2 armies, but actually across about a dozen armies and the same number of bases in worst case.

Unit caps per planet, anyone?

This could also be used to balance defensive structures. Expand over the whole planet? You are going to use a decent fraction of your unit cap for mexes, intel, factories and patrols, leaving only little for fortifying a little bridgehead in case of an enemy invasion.
Crammed into a small edge of the planet? Go with cost and space efficient, but in terms of unit cap rather inefficient defensive structures to hold out. Your enemy can still push you back even further with game enders (nuclear, long range artillery), but it's going to take some effort.

Also prevents a lot of issues on the technical side. There are still a lot of tasks which complexity scales in square with the number of units on the same planet and this could get really harry if two players where to invest their whole unit cap for a 10 planet match both on the same planet...



Most of the economical considerations in this thread aren't even applicable with an interplanetary economy.

A turtle, which is really just a turtle, is a rare scenario. More often, a "turtle" is actually going to be bridgehead, with a full scale economy to back it up. (At least as long as the economy is actually going to be shared across all planets, without limitations!)

Trying to discourage a certain tactic by increasing the cost is futile either, at least unless we are not talking about the rare case(!) of high ranked games where people are actually going to do the math and have sufficient APM and skill to benefit from small numerical advantages.

This works for skirmishes on single planets, but it will not work with an interplanetary economy. At least not with a full shared economy since expanding to a new planet would follow completely different dynamic.

Did... did you just argue for a unit cap?

Yes. Yes, I did.

Although it's a huge limitation, it's one of the few mechanics which can ensure that an enemy is not completely crushed in the momentum on the first wave.

Playing without unit cap, in a scenario where the economy and the factories are not placed on the same battlefield, is a dangerous thing to do since you can no longer balance properly on the economy side.

Split economies can ease the problem, but it yet requires an upkeep system which limits your presence on the planet, or you will never see unit based invasions once a player fully conquered a planet.

You can't even argue that the resource would be put to better use at other planets rather than fortifying the current planet. While that is true (at least the numbers can be tweaked that way), this will only affect top level players.

hmm....interesting thoughts, but i dunno if uber statet something about the interplanetary eco, and the nice thing on ta or supcom was in most cases you didnt rly "feel" the existing unit cap. and feeling a unit cap would get us to something like starcraft with its very small limitation of 200.

Surely the balance will come in the balance of the whole system, rather than looking at it on a planet-by-planet basis, though?

think of 2 different planets as of a normal map with 2 different islands. insteat of orbital stuff you have some kind of air and navy to get ur units there after bombarding the coast. same with orbital stuff should work on a planetary style of map.

Except that it isn't that simple.

You assume that there would be something like interplanetary mass transport which would allow you to counter any number of local forces by deploying an even number of own forces to a remote planet.

That however, would make the game a lot more complex, since the game would suddenly no longer play in 2D (which the planets surfaces currently are!) but rather in full 3D (at least the potion where you can't block of a point without controlling a full SPHERE, not only a circle around that point) which breaks any known theorems about base construction and territorial control in RTS.

Not necessarily a bad thing, but that is going to be really hard to master and balance.

And you have to deal with the issue, that the connection between two planets isn't symetrical. This is unlike the common "two way portal" mechanic known from various other RTS which always ensures that the enemy is capable of striking back on the very same path once the bridge has been deployed. There is also a very good reason, why teleporting units are usually only allowed to port towards their own base (or short distances), but not straight into the enemy base.


Unit cap is also quite a complex topic. It doesn't need to be as low as in Starcraft where you are essentially limited to 1 base and 1 army, but it can be chosen high enough to show presence on a whole planet.
It should only ensure, that covering the whole planet requires the use of patrols or a small army on standby, while the attacking / inferior player has access to less efficient, but in return cheaper units. Just to keep the battle going on. I don't even say that all units should be tied to the unit cap, in theory it would even be sufficient if only buildings had an upkeep cost.

we have now the surface layer, and we have some kind of not yet fully implementet under sea layer and the air layer. so we get the additional orbital layer. this is not mutch more 3d than that we allrdy have i'd say. as seen in the kickstarter-preview video there could be unit-cannons fireing units from one planet to an other (or at least from the moon to the planet) giving you a possibility to transport like an air or navy transport. you are right it will be more complex to get from one planet to another than to get from one island to another, but its only 1 additional layer (the orbital one). so it shouldnt be too complex.

for the base building...well we have defence against ground, and against air. we just need aditional defence against orbital stuff and it would fit in the actual base building. there issnt then mutch difference between an air drop or an orbital drop if i'm not mistaken.

Really not in favour of hard capping things. It's arbitrary and an quick-fix excuse for poor balancing.

Not to mention the fact that "Unit Cap Reached" is the single most infuriating, blood-pressure-raising, monitor-smashingly frustrating phrase ever invented.

Right next to "You must construct additional Pylons."

Let's just fool around with that idea for a bit.

First, assume that only some units are "complex" and require upkeep (so they are hard or soft capped in the form of decreased efficiency due to lack of "attendance"), but not all.
The question is then, which units should be considered complex? I would say every structure with strategical or economical value.

This includes pgens, mexes, factories and storages in the economical tree, offensive and defensive building from the game ender tree (artillery, nukes, tactical missiles), but also "oversized" units, including not only experimentals, but also the lager naval units and orbital. Last but not least, defensive buildings which have superior range and damage per cost when compared to mobile units.

Simple autonomic units (this includes like every single spamable unit) should never be capped (unless the engine says so due to technical limits). These can easily deployed and destroyed in large quantities, so there is no reason to limit it. Same goes for walls.

Engineers are tricky, there are reasons pro and contra limiting their numbers, but I feel like their numbers shouldn't be capped.


This is not meant to limited the scale of battles (hey, let's swarm the whole planet), but on the opposite:
To keep regular battles with mobile units the main focus of the game, without making advanced elements of the game unattractive.

You find patterns like these also in other games with interplanetary mechanics too. Planets in such games usually have a limited number of "slots" which can be filled with structures of strategical or economical value, but the army sizes are close to unlimited at the same time. Preventing you from growing exponentially past the expansion phase, although still allowing you to stockpile on units. To name one many of you might now: Sins of a solar empire. But also many browsergames, like Ogame and all it's successors. But not only them, also SoaSE's precessorcs followed this very same idea and so did like every other expansion focused strategy game.

Obviously for a good reason.

PS:
Just had to realize that PA isn't really going to invent "new" mechanics. It's "just" about to bridge between the classic RTS genre and the even older expansion based strategy games.
So many of the solutions from the second genre also apply to PA, despite the first impression of being a pure RTS.

Then represent that upkeep in the form of continuous Metal/Energy usage. Don't use arbitration to define limits.

It's interesting to consider, but I feel like your proposition is unnecessarily complicated. How does a new player know which units are capped and which are not? What if one forgets that a certain type of unit is included in the cap and accidentally eat into points they had been saving for other strategically important units?

I'm sorry but I agree with Nanolathe here, arbitrary things like this just add another layer of complexity to what is already shaping up to be an incredibly complex game.

sins of a solar empire completely focus on space battles, while pa mostly will focus on ground battles. also soase had a very strict unit limit in every part of the game, making it complete different from ta/supcom/pa-style games.

if you share the eco between all planets then the only thing you have to do to invate is to get enough units to a spot of the planet that hassnt to be crowded with mex (and therefore mostly issnt that heavyly guarded), fighting for a small place and surviving long enough to build your factories to pull out more units to start the fight over the planet.

You can't express limits on the economy in values used by the economy. A lever to balance something always needs a fix point outside the system.

Giving corresponding indicators is as simple as giving indicators for metal and energy cost.

Like I added to the previous post, this issue isn't exactly new, it's something inherited not by the RTS predecessors, but by the other genre PA is leaning on: Expansion based strategy games.

They all have one thing in common: Your growth is always ultimately capped at an linear rate by a hard limit of "slots". This limit is the reason, why these games can allow you to have large quantities of regular units (so it breaks down to numbers). It also limits your strategical options, so these options can actually have an huge impact on the gameplay while not replacing the original unit based warfare.

Sins of a solar empire and PA are not that different if you look at the meta gameplay which results from the multi planet system. PA is "only" a lot more complex on the planetary level, featuring not only a small, single layer, 2D maps per planet and scissor-rock-paper unit mechanics, but interplanetary expansion and defense follow similar rules.

Unit caps are like cutting off someones hand when they get a paper cut. The only limit that unit numbers should have is your economy and your skill. This sub-genre is not like starcraft where you can just bank your unspent resources without any effort. The early game would be a race for the unit cap while in the late game the second the unit cap is reached the need for expansion stops , the game devolves into a tech war death ball simulation and we're suddenly playing Protoss at 200 supply. This is not a desirable direction.

There is always going to be the practical unit cap of simply running out of area to expand your economy to. There is always a tradeoff there.

BTW I think our new economy system that uses energy to run things and metal to build them works very well, especially early game. It's much more predictable and harder to tank your economy with.

@dacite
Read again, it's not the number of mobile units which needs a limit. It's the economic and the game enders which need a hard limit at some point or they will get completely out of hand.

Balancing a ridiculous number of normal units is difficult, but perfectly possible. At some point, they just make up for each other at a certain, calculable ratio. So let the user just deploy as many of them as he wants, it will never get out of hand.

Don't even try to do the same with nukes, artillery, or even just pgens. Not even to mention the advanced stuff like meteor attacks and alike. You will run into a situation, where these options become the ONLY viable choice once you can afford them unless they are limited in number. Your economy continues to grow at an exponential rate (at least until you have covered every single mex spot in the whole game) and going for regular units just isn't time-efficient any more if you can just stockpile stationary defenses and game enders instead.
The only other option is to nerve these options into nirvana, so that NOBODY would every use them in competitive play. It's similar to the issue with experimentals in Supcom, except that the game in PA is supposed to extend via the point where you would have ultimately ended the game with experimental or game enders in SupCom.

I also don't believe that "build space" will be able serve as the limiting factor, a planet offers quite a lot of build space. Unless you go for a completely distorted scale with tiny planets only, that is...
Also leaves you with a small problem: Where to land if the whole planet is covered in defenses because you lost your presence on that plant a while ago?

They allready did a lot to rein in the exponential economy by not having metal generators.

Now they only thing they need to do is to find a good balance in regards to metal spots so that at end game metal income isn't so high that any cost of units and buildings gets meaningless. Currently metal spots scale linearly with surface area, that's not a good thing as on large planets metal income gets limitless pretty fast but that is easy to change.

As for game enders, while they can be build to the dozens when metal income is high enough, that's not an issue if there are still countermeasures against them. It only becomes an issue when you can build them basically instantly thanks to the assistance of tons of engineers/fabbers. One just needs to keep some time to react against them in the system to greatly rain them in. Ie. nukes shouldn't be assistable by fabbers, no instant nukes and the enemy can scout them and react to them even when you build a dozen of them at once. KEW need time to charge their engines with energy, doesn't matter how many you built, thus the enemy has time to react. Etc. etc.