Less Metal Spots - How is it so far?

That's not necessarily a good thing. I like multiple bottlenecks. In Achron, I was used to dealing with THREE. (LC, QP and Reserves). I feel energy should also be a limiting factor in the game for supporting energy-based units and structures.

I actually did send out fabbers to build Missile and Normal Turrets. It doesn't really work when they strike at a not so opportunate moment though.

That's a good thing for the game. Otherwise raiding is hard and the game is auto-play.

I'm having the greatest trouble keeping up with the AI. His continuous air raids make expanding tricky and it makes metal enough of a headache. i'm note sure we need 3 bottlenecks, as an energy-crash can still cripple someone.

A 1-dimensional (e.g. metal as a bottleneck) streaming economy is already pretty tough to manage. I feel that controlling multiple armies across multiple planets and planning assaults in 4 dimensions is tricky enough. However, since the Beta is fairly heavy on performance when it comes to multi-planet systems, we still have to see the true extent of this complexity.

my two cents, although bear in mind i probably haven't gotten to playing as much as some of you...i am a big supporter of less metal, solely because it would mitigate games that simply become a race to be the first to drop a Nuke on the other (Nuke is just an example of any expensive high tech concept that, upon being the first to have access to, quickly and dramatically shifts the power balance).

i'm not even implying that this is necessarily the case as of the current build, that sort of thing is tricky to pinpoint until unit/mechanic balance becomes the primary goal. i am just thinking of other strategy / rts games that have a sort of "go-to" strategy that, if you hoard better, become a shoe-in or at least easy contender for victory.

i also believe resources in general being less accessible forces imperialist conquest of territory, whether that be the same planet or a new one, and the inverse of this is building just enough that you can satisfy all resource requirements and still attack with as much strength as needed without having to expand beyond your much smaller number of resource allocators / controlled territory (and then, even if you do expand these, you do not need to do so nearly as much to get the increase required).

again, this is somewhat theoretical as i haven't played as much as i would like, but even from the small number of games i have been able to have more resources than i can spend more often than not enough resources, and i would not attribute much of that to my experience as i really don't think i'm that great at the game ;P

1 dimensional bottlenecks aren't hard to manage at all. As I've said, I've dealt with 3 before. I'm not saying there should be 3, but I don't believe resources should be used that are not bottlenecks, otherwise management of them is pointless. Without energy being a limiter, energy is pointless. I consider it too easy.

I prefer having less metal as I like the slower economy but I look forward to them allowing for cusomisation of metal quantities so that everyone can be satisfied.

i like the amount of metal spots.

Energy currently isn't a bottleneck but an economy motor: it serves a different function. Anyway, i feel that things like multi-planet warfare and the general logistics of multiple battlefields will serve as a far more powerful and far more effective bottleneck, and deserve more attention than making energy a second bottleneck on top of the complexity of war.

All in all however, this is Beta and thus the best place by far to actually test this rather than theorizing and discussing it. For it to work however, we need more optimization on the planet generator because i've had a couple of 5+ minute "game starts" and it makes playing on a serious solar system ineffective.

I think the amount of metal is about right, alot of people have problems with it because they are playing on a small planet with quite a few players, this makes it worse. As i said in another thread, if you had the start option of putting 3 players each on a planet in a 9 player ffa, you wouldn't have much of a problem. Raids can still occur because of the vastness of space.

My only problem with the current metal setup is that the spawns only give you one guaranteed metal spot.

When you add in the fact that single metal space can actually spawn in unbuildable terrain (edges of craters/canyons etc.) you can be faced with a long, long walk to an area you can actually set up a base, which basically ends the game for you right there.

Obviously metal spawns don't 'balance' yet. But a few iterations on that balance would be handy too.

Overall though I have no problems with the current metal spot values & spawn rates. Expansion is still key, but it does make the T2 economy useful relatively early on - earlier at least than in the alpha casts I've seen.

+1 for more Metal! Or the activation of metal sliders!
But I think every planet could use somewhat like 20-30% more metal!

Yea. The last game i played was a 2v2v2v2. I started with 2 nearby metal spots and the rest was quite a walk away. The other teams had 3-4 next to eachother, and one enemy even had a secondary set of 4 metal spots nearby.

So yes, metal spot distribution, especially around spawns, could do with some work. Especially in the early game it hits insanely hard.

The things is that wouldn't actually help PA in any way, everyone would just play with whatever metal levels they wanted and it's be very difficult to figure out what the 'standard' should be, don't forget we're here to test and such and part of that is helping Uber find the proper standard for the amount and distribution of metal.

Mike

In the last five games I've played, three times I've ended up in spots with a lot less metal then my competition and lost. Half of those times the metal spots were in large cracks and could not build extractors on. Very unbalanced now.

I am a beta player, that has not played the alpha, and have only played games with a few other players at a time.

As a default I think it is in the range of reasonable default numbers of metal points and here's why:
T1 is a more predominant part of the game, and it takes a certain amount of finesse and/or luck to reach T2 quickly, unless you have significant control of the map (encouraging conflict).
Once you reach T2 it is relatively easy to stall your economy, and while in the middle of a conflict you need to balance resources until you have established a reasonable and stable T2 economy. This provides a natural ultimatum during this period (Elite vs Spam), the duration of this period depends on the players map control and skill, as with most flux based systems.
Once you manage to get off planet, the scope of the game changes significantly and allows effectively unlimited resources - that being that I find it can be difficult to spend the 2000+ M/tick and 600,000+ E/tick that I often attain, especially while dealing with combat in more than 2 locations.

TLDR:
I think the current number of metal points is a good default as it requires players ration early on, without unreasonably limiting players in the later game.

"Player attention" is a resource as well, and perhaps the current complaints are that early rationing causes a surplus of player attention which cannot be easily spent on making decisions in the game?

I think the amount is a bit low currently, the startup phase is kinda painful like this. Apart from "tons of mex" I see 2 more possible solutions:

- Have the same number of mex as we have now, but make sure ALL of them can be used.
- Implement the "egg" concept and let it have a few K metal as startup resources to be used.

I never thought I'd be craving eggs as badly as I am after reading this

This is true to an extent, although this can be elevated to some degree by creating a couple of scout units for the purposes of determining where the other players are, and the best direction to expand.

Perhaps the above is a good win-win? Deals with some of the early game issues, without directly effecting the late game.

EDIT: After checking the game creation area, it appears that they will allow the creator of the game to change starting metal storage and energy storage, as well as the default income values for each. This does not appear to be implemented, but it is there in the GUI.