Economics needs more complexity

Versus how many people (Not AI) have you played? How many of them have actually been good?
On how many planets have you played?
What is your average game length with decent players?
Do you even understand the economy? (what is stalling, what is the prefered energy/metal output, what happens when you're stalling, which fabbers are the most efficient and which the least, what to do when you are stalling, ... )

If you've played on many planets with decent people for a decent amount of time and you understand the economy and still find it easy then that's your opinion, otherwise you either lack experience playing against decent people or you don't understand what you are talking about (or both).

I find the economy complex enough to figure out as it is and it's even harder putting what you have learned into practice, especially since most people that are coming to play this game are coming form strategies like Red Alert and Starcraft which have acumulative economies rather than flow based.

Sup Com's economic complexity is caused by it's non-linear economy. The upgrades to mass extractors, and the jump in production from T1->T2->T3 power combined with mass fabricators meant you got an exponential increase in resources. Badly timing an upgrade or just being slow to tech up would put you far behind. Maybe complex is the wrong word for this, but it was certainly harder. I don't think we should go back to that.

Damn!!! Why do people place so much time and effort answering threads that hold little to no value???? Leave the newbs to learn on their own or teach them.....

Now can we direct focus to discussions of higher merit???

Guys, ignore Tim. He rarely knows what he's talking about.

No trolling remember

I had 6 scalps in one game the other day.

People need to stop using the word "complex" in a positive connotation, at least for games. Complexity is bad. It increases both concious and unconcious learning curves, and adding complexity explictly for the sake of adding complexity is backwards game design.

What we're looking for is depth and diversity. TA's binary resource system, featuring a map dependant Metal/Mass introduces diversity which changes for each map, while energy changes with environment (assuming Solar/Wind/Tidal/Thermo generators are implemented). The issue with SupCom is that this was direly exaggerated into a binary resource system spread across 3 tech levels. Yes... Each tech level filled a different niche, and there was diversity added, but it became much less paletable than TA's economy system which was more or less "Build Extractors/Generators to get moolah." While each tech level filled a different role, each type of unit filled the same role, which results in niche crowding. You have 3 units that do the exact same thing over the course of the game, they just do it at different times. As a result, you get all that complex stuff like cost/reward curves, construction time efficiencies, investments, risk/reward, and that isn't even taking into account multiplicative adjacency.

And ultimately, SupCom gets the exact same thing done as TA; build producers to get moolah, but it is very fat and lathargic in the way it does it. This results in a practically vertical learning curve for competitive and mid-level play, with no addition to depth whatsoever. When have you ever said "Holy **** dude I can't believe I built that T3 Powergen where and when I did! That won the gamd, hands down." You don't. Economy management is a job, not a game or an art. It's the kind of thing we build computers and algorithms to predict and manage, not the kind of thing you front-load into a videogame designed to be fun and engaging.

No. The more complex the game, the more options there are. Period. The less options, the less potential for fun. Its what keeps people thinking about the game. If players are warded off by a learning curve, we do not want those players. Let them play LoL.

One of the best games ever made that gets my creativity and brain going is Dwarf Fortress. Yet I still don't know completely how to play it properly. The challenge\complexity of the game keeps me coming back time and again. Lets not conform to the ADD generation please.

Convoluted - BAD!

Complex - Yeah, pretty good.

Tim is advocating for impenetrable, convoluted, economic systems. This is why I warn everyone to ignore him. I simply think he lacks the eloquence to explain his ideas.

@timevans999, I'm not trolling. Trolling implies that my actions are to cause grief. You're never online enough for any of my "trolling" to have an effect. I told people to ignore you because it's in their best interest to do so.

You are confusing depth & complexity. Options are a result of depth, and while complexity can increase depth, it's not always (often not) the case. I can make a simple task take more clicks to achieve the same goal; that's more complex but doesn't increase your options. However, complexity does act as a kind of gate - given a set amount of gameplay mechanics, there's only so much you can do to increase depth before you need to add another mechanic (and therefore increase complexity). Unless you are at that gate though, you shouldn't open it.

I don't consider starcraft complex, but it requires so many clicks that should be automated or AI handled. What you speak of is 'artificial difficulty' where the mechanics could be simplified but they require way more babysitting than any game should require. I personally feel with land sea air orbital interstellar we are going to have our hands full unless they implement some sort of planetary UI where you can control everything from orbit. (Factories, etc)


Anyways, what Bullet said. **** convoluted.

mmh

Im generally against the whole automation aspect of game mechanics, because you can automate away to a point where you no longer have a game. The very obvious and tedius(being the subjective word here), should be automated away, but in the vast majority of the cases on this forum, automation is a result of just bad design. Such as the people calling for automated scouting.

They want to keep away from units that convert energy to mass.... IMO that is what makes games different than SC.. as SC was a map control war.. Supcom came out.. was an ecom war, popular.. changed it to a map control war, it died... I have my doubts about how far this game will go being map controlled based..

They want to keep away from units that convert energy to mass.... IMO that is what makes games different than SC.. as SC was a map control war.. Supcom came out.. was an ecom war, popular.. changed it to a map control war, it died... I have my doubts about how far this game will go being map controlled based..

Do you have anything to back you up on this "fact"? Everything I've seen showed that FA was a huge success in large part because it fixed the broken gameplay from the Original SupCom.

Mike

I think the complexity of the eco is enough. I see many players struggling to balance metal and energy, expanding and get to T2 at the right moment. A reason for me to avoid team games with shared eco Hope to see alliances soon.

Your the most negative idealess person on the forum.

I haven't seen you make one suggestion on this thread.

I even called you out on that a few threads ago. Several people have called you out on that.

You make claims and then don't back them up or explain them. You make claims but don't make suggestions on how to fix them.

When I called you out on it, you replied to my thread quoting my post and then didn't add anything at all to that post.

As far as I have seen, you haven't contributed anything towards change in this thread.

And then you go out and make personal attacks like that?

Come on man.

If you have an idea, cool! Back it up and provide suggestions.

Don't lob out personal attacks. It's not cool.