Economics needs more complexity

Why do we need to limit nukes, artillery and PGens? Explain to me why.

If you have enough nukes to wipe your enemy thoroughly and completely off the planet, you have already, hands down won, and your enemy has less than 0% chance of coming back. Your victory is guaranteed, 100%, completely, insured and reinforced by Chuck Norris' beard. There is no point in giving your enemy a 1% chance of winning by limiting nukes because if you are running into a hard limit for nukes then you have successfully beaten your enemy, or are at least keeping up with them. Nukes, KEWs, and to an extent, Catapults are a way of ending the game. They're called Game Enders because they destroy your enemy and any hope they have of winning, because that's what they do. That's the reason they're so damn expensive; they are a way to win when there is no other way to win.

Hard limits are a way of putting a band-aid on an unbalanced issue. If a unit is so unbalanced that it needs a hard cap, it needs to be rebalanced.

Because the game isn't supposed to end once you have the economy to build game enders, the game is only over if you dominate on ALL planets.

What was done so far works great when dealing with a single planet only, but I assure you, that a lot of economy related problems are about to pop up as soon as the first legit method of hopping to another planet is introduced.

All the precious economy controlled balancing will just go bottom up, as soon as a player is capable of getting just a 5 minute headstart to another planet. And don't even think about fighting about that planet, the player with the headstart would be a fool if he didn't use the largest part of the new income for a short while to fortify the planet (which means deploying catapults or at least lobbers all over the place).

Games where not all planets have been populated from the start are going to be an huge issue, but the issue will occur in any game as soon as one player dominates a full planet, there is nothing which could stop him from abusing game enders as defensive weapons - with no counters.

Good luck at trying to balance game enders, so far we know only about a single type of counter for that issue: Meteors.
So either wipe the whole planet with an non counterable super weapon, or "rebalance" game enders so that they are not to be used for an perverted "Cold War" scenario: "You land on my planet and my nukes already await you."

And try the second without invalidating their role as tiebreaker when fighting over an shared starting planet (where you are likely to get an even situation).

The fact that you are not going to be able to jump from planet to planet without fulfilling certain requisites, is going to cause quite a lot of funny implications, caused by highly asymmetric situations.

Unit caps are not a magical solution to all problems, nor are they an elegant solution, but they are capable of solving a very specific issue: Planet sized turtles.

there are several possible ways to crak a heavily guardet planet, first you have to do seems to be get control over the orbit over the planet, and then
- get some kind of satelite there who grants anti-nuke capacity
- deploy planetary bombardement units to destroy nuke silos (<- rods from god)
or you have some kind of stealth generator unit that grants your expedition force radar-invisibility so you have time to deploy anti nukes or you could land on several spots with a small number of units so he shoots all his nukes on you and when everything is used up you get your main invasion force on survace and so on.

it will be hard to invade, but i would be boring if its too easy wouldnt it?

You can also Shove an Asteroid with Factories and Unit Cannons into Orbit and rain down a continuous stream of units onto the surface.

And naturally just ram a bunch of KEWs into the planet until it isn't a planet anymore.

Mike

How to assplode planet-sized turtle:

Get rocket fuel
Get fabbers
Get really, REALLY big asteroid
Put rocket fuel and fabbers on asteroid
Make fabbers build stuff that can ignite rocket fuel
Press big red button
Laugh heartily as the asteroid goes haphazardly rocketing towards the enemy planet, breaks up into 3 smaller but still explodey pieces upon contact with the atmosphere, and explodes the enemy's stuff, causing a gigantic firestorm-tsunami-hurricane-tornado and turning the entire planet into a massive glowing hellscape.

Edit: Ninja'd by Mike

Edit 2: Also Nukes aren't that devestating. They need to cost more though.

yes they are too cheap, and the anti-nuke building radius is too small, as it is now you fire the nuke at the edge of the radius, the anti-nuke missle is too slow since the nuke is flying too low exploding before it gets destroyed and the explosion also destroys the anti-nuke buildnig so you can send in a secound nuke for rest of base, but thats balancing that can be made in beta-phase then.

Well if a unit has a metal upkeep it has a very real cap since metal income is capped by metal patches. Although I don't think it would make much sense for a unit to use metal just by existing and I doubt people would accept that.
Energy as an upkeep cost only acts as a soft cap like pylons or supply depots in Starcraft. You only pay for the additional powerplants to support your units once. If the unit dies you can replace it without having to build additional powerplants to cover for the extra energy drain.

An interesting approach would be to have powerplants consume metal to produce energy. Energy production would have a very real cap and energy hungry units would in turn be limited by their energy drain.

Well meteors will most likely be limited and using them is also likely to result in destroyed planets limiting the economy even further. An interesting prospect in my opinion.

Just nitpicking a bit. The economy doesn't grow exponentially until the last mex spot has been taken.
The usual cycle looks something like this:Make factory - make fabbers - build energy with fabbers - move and build mexes with fabbers - make more factories with fabbers to make more fabbers faster.
In order to reach the unclaimed metal spots the fabbers have to move longer and longer distances from the factories. This means that the rate of growth will slow down as the fabbers have to move much further away from their factories. The fabbers will sort of take longer to pay-off.
While the surface area grows exponentially at first, as you can expand in any direction on the planet, it will soon start to decrease as the planet curves and converges on the other side of the planet meaning more and more fabbers will be heading for the same mexes spending more and more of their time walking as their projects gets finished faster and they spend less time building.
Making factories close to the mexes might cut down the time a bit but this is time that the fabbers could have spent walking to the next mex instead.
At some point it is probably even more efficient to switch your fabber production to air fabbers as land fabbers simply will spend so much time walking and so little time building.
I guess it will be similar with interstellar expansion unless you are using instant teleportation.
Otherwise fabbers will spend more and more time rocketing towards the outer planets and asteroids increasing the time for them to pay-off.

Using air to cover a planet if you have an headstart should be considered given, everything else would be inefficient.
Build air factory, produce 4-5 fabbers. First 2 fabbers swarm out to build mexes, followed by 2-3 which build T1 pgens for the upkeep. Have the first two to build T2 air factory wherever they are, mass produce T2 fabbers. Build adv. mexes first and if energy is running short, a adv. pgen right next to it. If more than 50% of the planet is covered, use additional fabbers to build "defensive" structures. At last replace T1 mexes with T2. Efficiency doesn't really matter in this scenario, since you can rely on the upkeep from your main base for the first 1-2 minutes and afterwards it pays for itself rather fast.

You just wanna make sure that no enemy fabber can exist long enough to succesfully construct something. Unless your enemy is capable of taking an orbiting moon (that is if there is any), you may feel completely save from everything short of meteors.

Also note that, (at least if you have gone for nukes(!) or catapults as defensive structures), hitting the "base" with a single meteor won't be sufficient. Either you take down the whole planet at once, or the defense and most of the economy stays intact. A planetary turtle tactic does not require dense building, on the contrary, that would be counterintuitive.

At what point air fabbers are more efficient than bot fabbers isn't that easy to calculate since air fabbers and air factories are much less efficient. Fabrication Aircraft is about half as efficient as Bot fabbers* and the Bot factory are about 30% more efficient than the Aircraft factory**.

Edit:Efficiency is based on my calculations in the spreadsheet here
*According to column O
**According to column AK with the Bot Factorys line set to 180 in column Z(Most expensive unit in factory).

I agree with the principle that hard limits are a band-aid of sorts.

However - and I'm not saying they're necessarily needed here, I'm just trying to change how you look at things - they are sometimes needed to balance something that cannot be balanced in conventional terms.

Where are you pulling the assumption that nukes are game-enders? How many nukes does it take to count as a "game-ending" strategy. One nuke? Ten nukes? There is a massive difference between the two states; the latter can be balanced against economic drain and enemy harassment, the former may simply require a hard limit simply because you can't nerf a one-nuke-game-ender, because then it is no longer a one-nuke-game-ender.

Nukes aren't that scary if you think of the big picture.

If you are going for map control everything will be spread out so much that nothing the enemy can nuke will be worth the cost of the nuke. You'll be able to rebuild everything in less time than it takes him to nuke you again.
If you are turtling anti-nukes cost less than nukes so he won't be able to nuke you unless he has more economy than you, in which case he could just overwhelm you with tankblobs anyways.

If the enemy can nuke you, it means you either neglected nuke defenses (Dispersed redundancy, or anti-nuke placement) or the enemy out-produces you enough to kill you with conventional means.

It's also interesting to point out that the dispersed redundancy method also makes you slightly more vulnerable to conventional attacks, which adds and interesting strategic choice to the game.

Nukes are just one example, and not necessarily the best one since their extreme range comes at the cost of attack rate, and they are also rewarding targets due to the high economic value of an yet unfired nukes.

Lobbers and any other type of regular/rocket artillery would also do the job.

The point is: A tank blob is incapable of overcoming a AoE based defense if there is no safe spot to land in the first place.
And yet stationary defenses need AoE, or they loose their validity way to soon.

That is actually an awesome idea. It has little effect as long as you don't have any (or at least many) energy consuming units, but it actually forces you gain additional area control if you were to go for energy hungry units, be it defensive structures, nukes, artillery or offensive experimental sized units.

If generators would also power down automatically if energy storages were full, that would mean that it would actually balance itself, since resources which are not required for upkeep (energy production) are at expense for additional unit fabrication.

That would just be the required unit cap, but without the artificial feeling a hard, external cap would cause.
It also balances (not counters, but actually balances!) planet sized turtles very well, since the upkeep counters the economic gains.

Nukes are, late game, an annoyance at best. A dangerous annoyance yes, but still just an annoyance. You probably have antinukes on your energy farms and your Commander (by the way, Antinukes need to be a bit stronger, either more radius or shorter build time for the missiles), which will force your enemy to take the farm by conventional means.

Hitting literally anything but energy or the Commander at this stage in the game is nothing but a hinderance. By the time the Nuke impacts, you've probably already built enough additional factories to replace whatever it killed, and you can always rebuild metal because metal pays for itself in next to no time.

This is still a major issue and if its not addressed a large proportion of your fan base won't adopt the game. Yes they may have bought it, but don't you want to see us play it as well

Woah. Old thread.

The economy does not need more complexity. If you want to play an economy game, go play Sim City.

This game won't work without economics

I never said remove PA's economy.

I said don't make the economy more complex.

We already have plenty to be worrying about when it comes to scouting, expanding, determining what units to build, defending, attacking, and more – and this is on just one planet. Now we need to do that on multiple planets.

We don't need to worry about a more complex economy. The game is complex enough as it is.

Its not its far to easy

If a streaming economy is easy, then Starcraft's "collect minerals and vespene gas" is child's play, yet that doesn't seem to be a major issue.

As brianpurkiss said, the rest of the game is already substantially more complex than a regular RTS; no need to increase the complexity of the (already more complex than usual) economy.

Care to expand? Why is it too easy?

You can't just say "this is too easy" or "this should change" without explaining why or how. Your original post was very vague on what the problem is and how to fix it. Maybe you added more in the middle of the threads, but I'm not seeing anything.

How would adding more complexity to this overwhelmingly complex game be a good thing?

And how is it less complex than SupCom? I didn't play lots of SupCom – but SupCom has only Mass and Energy as well. The only difference is the lack of energy to metal converters – which doesn't add to the economy's complexity – that lessens the complexity and promotes turtling – which is not what PA is about. PA is about constant aggression, map control, and macro gameplay.

I guess the other thing is metal extractors being able to upgrade themselves. But that capability would make the game less complex. Forcing fabricators to go around to each extractor to upgrade it increases the strategy involved in the game.

If anything, PA's economy is more complex than SupCom because you have to constantly expand in order to have an economy, unlike SupCom.

If you're going to make a claim, please provide evidence to support your claim as well as provide a solution.