Energy vs Metal shortage penalty

You -do- stall. You only use the material you have. That slows you down.

If you stall your engine, your engine doesn't slow down. It stops outright.

I mentioned in an earlier post that stall is a bad word for the situation, but it's the one that people have adopted to describe a specific occurrence(Running 'out' of resources).

Problem is that a stall isn't what happens. You just slow down.

Making the economy actually stall isn't a good idea in my opinion because the economy is supposed to be fluid, not tick or 'turn' based. Because once it stalls what makes it come back 'up'? Do you have to destroy buildings that are pulling power to un-stall?

The way it is now is the best way it could work I think. even if you go over capacity you don't completely stall out(because that would basically lose you the game right then and there), and allows people to expand while their infrastructure catches up.

As much as I am in favor of having games be challenging, I think it is important to avoid harsh punishments for newer players to just crash and burn without interacting with the enemy.

Uber needs to consider carefully what someone who is 100% brand new to the game, or even to TA-like games, is going to do. They are going to mismanage their economy very seriously. While that should obviously be suboptimal, I don't think harsh punishment is a good idea.

Bad things should happen to the player because the other player did them. Suboptimal play is obviously bad, but it's not a positive punishment like stalling is. I think Zero-K has largely solved this problem with its economy rework using simplified costs and generation rates, and a relatively large pool of starting resources to build early economy with. And especially because of overdrive, because excess energy goes to overdrive instead of being strictly inefficient. Instead of telling new players to stall metal and have barely enough energy, you tell them to stall metal and build extra energy.

Overdrive is also brilliant because it encourages a turtle to expand, and encourages a player with map control to build energy. And it gives diminishing returns so a player who is ahead must spend more to increase their marginal advantage passively, encouraging activity. Acquiring another mex spreads your overdrive across more mexes, increasing its efficiency as well as your yield.




I am convinced that the only reason why Starcraft actually became popular in 1998 when TA was an obviously superior game in every way in 1997; 3D tech, full physics, more unit variety, better UI, more maps, modding, and so on, was because of stalling.

New players got turned off of TA purely because they had a bad experience with being punished by the economy in their first game(s). Being unable to build anything and unable to do anything when enemy units show up is, simply put, unfun. You can say they need to learn to play all you like, but they had a bad experience and would prefer to go play Starcraft where building a worker simply requires 50 minerals, and where any dumbass could cheese and occasionally win. And once they're playing either game, they learn and get better. And want to play with their friends.

SupCom made the huge mistake of using an overly complex three-tier system which just results in a redundant roster and overly complex economy, as well as adjacency bonuses. These things made the SupCom economy very complex, but not very strategically interesting.

SupCom 2 made the infinitely worse mistake of abandoning the flow economy entirely, and ruining itself utterly, and now I shall stop speaking of that abomination.

PA should get rid of the advanced mex, and do overdrive instead. The advanced mex is really not that interesting, overcomplicates the economy by having two mex rates, and its purpose of increasing metal yield can be accomplished by other means. Such as overdrive with diminishing returns. Overdrive has positive gameplay effects in the mid and late game by making regular mexes more valuable the more energy infrastructure a player has.

And overdrive benefits the new player because overdrive is conceptually simpler and easier to manage; you tell them to always excess energy and stall on metal. More advanced economy comes later.

Also Starcraft matches usually end much faster and aren't as boring in the early game. (And the early 'boring' part is over much more quickly)

I think that is another reason it has become so popular, because it's easier to jump in and play a 20min game than it is to sit down and play for an hour like what seems to be the norm for PA/SupCom/TA etc

For some reason this is a very common mistake. The fastest possible player interaction is something like a 4pool in BW. The timing on a 4pool is what, 2 minutes 20 seconds? 2 minutes 30 seconds? In TA games your arm kbot lab is done in, what, 22 seconds? The first Peewee takes 14.5 seconds unassisted? Or 3.6 seconds boosted with your commander?

People played TA passively because they chose to. Probably because they were scared of raiders, they liked making turrets, they wanted to use advanced units, they wanted to see Berthas and nukes and stuff.

But you're completely wrong about early aggression. TA's early aggression is many times faster than anything in Starcraft. The only difference is that early aggression cannot possibly immediately end the game, since you'll never kill their commander with it. Which is intentional, by the way.

That's still sort of my point. TA matches last longer. Starcraft ends rather decisively usually anywhere from 15-20 minutes.

A game like TA with tech tiers and everything else is designed for longer games, and unless you make the map artificially small, that's what happens.

I wasn't talking about the efficiency of factories. I was talking about the product of your factories and the efficiency they are running at. Hence, the number of effective/theoretical/actual factories you have.

10*0.1 == 1*1.
1 = 1.

You both have one factory running at 100%.

If you have 10 factories running at 10%, you effectively have one factory running at 100%, which produces 10 units at once. Your ten factories running at 10% is clearly exactly equal to one factory running at 100%.

Correct. That's the mathematical depiction of the argument, which everyone tries to explain without using the equation which describes it.

I'm not arguing against the maths which shows how the economy works. I understand it now. The description is very very confusing if you stray from the maths, pick arbitrary numbers to support your point, and otherwise stray from the way that the economy actually works.

I'm not a native speaker so I'm probably wrong here but I was taught that "to stall" could be used as a synonym for "to delay" and therefore I never had a problem with running out of resources being described as stalling.

I agree. The current system is intuitive, easy to understand and allows you to quickly fix issues with your eco without destroying parts of your infrastructure.

Technically yes. It has a meaning which fits with that - you stall for time, or equivalently you can stall [something or someone]

BUT in the latter case you stall something or someone by acting or speaking in an evasive way. I.e. you stall your girlfriend so she doesn't realise you completely forgot the dinner with her parents. It does mean to delay, but not in the same context.

you stop using so many fab s that brings it back up....... was that hard???

sorry in against another pussified game. That's a plague that has swept through to many games. Remember super Mario..... you screwed up you had to start over. Games should be challenging......... I understand your point on them being punished by the enemy..... but its a STRATEGY game. Trying and crap out every unit in the game at once

Shouldn't be rewarded you should learn. There's a learning curve with life and everything in it

Yeah. I agree. If your metal storage or energy storage goes full your commander should explode. People will learn not to excess resources then.

If your energy or metal stalls it should just stall forever and you'll never have an economy because you screwed up and you should pay for it.

This would actually be an exceptional training aid as a mod.

You guys are taking it to another level here, I'm simply stating your should build slower than you do now with a crashed eco......... idk why you think I want comms to blow up or economies never recover.....smh

You already build slowly when your economy 'crashes'.

I don't really know what's hard to understand about that. You lose production because you can't build things at full speed.

How do you guys sill not get it? I'm dropping pure Au knowledge, and you STILL don't get it.
You're all wrong.
There is no artificial penalty for attempting to use more resources than you have. Projects are finished when their entire metal cost has been paid. The question lies in how metal is distributed between fabbers, which I have answered.

As for why SC was more popular, I'd say the biggest cause of that was marketing. People were already playing Diablo and Warcraft, so when the same company that released those two comes out with Warcraft in space, people are going to find out.
You can't say that an equal amount of people tried playing both TA and SC, and decided that SC was more fun. That's just not true.

Yeah, it's getting a little complicated here. At some parts I'm like .

Can't it just be as simple as:
Low metal = you build slower
The more you stall the slower you build

Low power = some buildings stop working and you build slower.
The more you stall the slower you build.
The more you stall the slower you power based weapons shoot. (Artillery)

Does it currently work like this? Please keep it simple.