Remove Power and metal from the game

I know it sounds weird, and eventually it was postet before, i looked for "ressources" via search tab n found nothing so i open the thread.

I know that this will not be implemented, but i just want to share my opinion.

After watching some replays of Planetary annihilation, i think Energy and metal should removed or strongly reduced.
This game is supposed to be large armies, in most games i see the thing massed the most are energy and metal buildings.
This is not bad in itself, even so it looks ridicolous when a moon is 75% covered in the same buildings.

But thats not my point. Even with all thats going on, i think the game starts to go beyond human capacities.
It is almost impossible to focus in the same time on the building of production facilities, armies, defense mechanics, army handling, and the colonization of new planets. Take that, add it with the strategic and tactical thoughts u have to put into your army, which tech path you need for what, building buildings for crashing planets etc., and im pretty sure we reach a very, very small amount of people who are able to handle all of this at the same time, and having a fun experience.

In personal opinion, it would be more important to focus on the production and usage of your armies, offensive and defensive strategies, rather than spamming 2 buildings all game long.

In that case i would strongle advise to remove all or most of the metal spots, and remove or greatly decreasy the need of energy. The game makes huge improvements every time i take it out and play it, but it starts to feel overloadet.
My suggestion would be to work with longer building times for stronger units / buildings instead of more ressources.

Economy is an EXTREMELY important part of the game. There's a reason why every RTS game out there has some form of an economy.

Otherwise we could build as much as we want and there's no strategy.

With economy in the game, I focus down on my enemy's economy buildings so they can't produce more units. If I don't expand properly, my opponent out produces me.

I agree that economy should be a secondary part of the game, but it definitely needs to be in the game.

Maybe its time to rethink this. Planetary annihilation is a one-of-a-kind, and many games im watched where t1 massing (the better one), or ~30 minutes of extremly boring play because the player teched up. I recomment the game "Wow. Such smash. Much planets." - right now its in the recommendet videos when u start the game.

The player is focusing most of the time on ressources and teching, making the game extremly boring to watch.

just to point it out again: He did the whole game almost nothing than focussing on colinization and smashing of planets. If that "small" part of the game takes that amount of time and you have at least theoretically a whole other stuff you can use in a RTS, you have to adapt.

If his defence, I wouldn't mind if metal points were spread out and less clustered unless forced by terrain obstruction, and if overall metal spots were reduced by 1/5 (40 for an average game) and metal income increased by the same ratio, so you get same metal, but only have to keep up with 10-20 eco structures.

Then again, having 30 eco structures on even a small game, means your enemy has to eat through 30 to completely stop your eco. Him killing 8 barely reduces it by 1/4 and is incredibly rebuildable.

So there are pros and cons. Really, most people like the game right now, but eco is an adjustable part of the game anyway, with eco-percent (in lobby, next to your name, 1.0 is 100%, .5 is 50%, 2.0 is x2) and metal sliders in planet generator (lower "cluster" less clusters, lower "density" less points per cluster), you can make less metal points and more metal generation.

A lot of Realm Clan players set up "Spawn Wars" rules. You break metal generation by setting cluster to 1 and density to 0 or something on a generated custom planet. Then, you do a 10FFA with x5 eco. When you spawn, you will have 5 metal points on each player spawn, each metal point grants 35, t2 ones grant 140, and your commander generates 50 metal from start. You could go factory first, you can probably fuel a factory and a fabber or two off each single mex and pgen. You have a single easy to defend point and huge blobs of army to work with in the first minute.

I would prefer to have less resource buildings which have to be spread out (I.e metal spots are spread far and wide), take longer to build, and are also harder to kill. Maybe your energy plants can be built in parts, i.e. one energy plant has four modules, and you start producing after each module is finished. I do feel that this game lacks the epicness of massive armies clashing. We need resource management but I think it can be implemented in a much better way. At the moment it does feel too cluttered and hard to manage. Say one metal and one energy gives you enough to power one factory, one T2 metal and energy is enough to power one T2 factory. This would make management of your economy a lot easier to understand and manage. This way you would get more strategic clashes with bigger armies around different parts of the planet.

On the contrary, building as much as you want would be the height of strategy, as your focus would be on organizing units offensively rather than building infrastructure.

Hence the reason for games like World in Conflict, RUSE, or every tabletop strategy game ever made.

Then I just build as many nukes as I want, launch them all, game over.

Boring.

I agree somewhat, but with PA i still do want an economy to manage, I just don't want it to be the main focus or hard to manage. Having to expand to other resource points and raiding the enemy resource points, adds some strategic depth to the game. I don't like the way it has been implemented in this game, so they just need to tweak it somewhat, that's all.

True, I'm not really arguing for a pure strategy game... But I'd prefer if we didn't mislead the argument for why we want PA to have an economy.

So basically the same as the current orbital gameplay?

Indeed.

Actually securing resources have been and always one of the most important parts of strategy.

Why did Hitler attack Russia in WWII? Because of the resource it would provide(but they screwed it up).

Resources force you to take time to build up your army. Otherwise they might as well put timers on them and allow you to start off with a huge army.

Removing the economy won't make PA better, it will simply change the foundation(which would mean a lot of wasted time and effort on Uber's part), remove some strategic depth and a little bit of complexity.

Also, if the balance isn't finished why would this improve it? It would mean Uber would have to time and effort towards rebalancing the game from square 1.

In the end, if you want to make a mod, go ahead! But removing the economy would simply waste too much time and resources that Uber needs to finish the current game.

P.S. Once something is half done is not the time to suggest removing pieces of the foundation.

Yes, but in WWII there were more people who were able to think and manage about stuff like this. In other RTS games you dont need that much focus on one single part. Everything is really time consuming, and as mentioned before, more and more the "epic fights" i witnessed when the game was early alpha disappear more and more.

In its core, this post is NOT about "Remove ressources from this game" - its more like "Make the planning and execution of your strategy, tech, economy and army manageable" - I can manage it barely, but even i focus on standard t1/t2 tech and try to ignore the orbital stuff, and ive played RTS games half my life. And it is still kind of stressful to me. (And i dont even do core things like "Destroy t1 metal spots and replace it with t2")

The economy management takes a HUGE amount of time, time that could be used to think about a better army composition, to raid your enemy with smaller armies, giving the possibility to build an army and attack your enemy WHILE you are teching, and not barely only tech + get ressources.

My question is this: Why is Metal Point Dependent, and Energy is simply how many buildings you have dependent?
I kind of like and understand the importance of separating the two, however, one (metal) is very limited, where you can simply build an unlimited number of Energy gathering buildings.

It just seems counter intuitive. I know that it adds strategy and purpose to the game, however, the OP is correct. And also correct about spamming 1 or 2 unit structures in every game and just winning with those two units.

There also needs to be a Unit Pop Cap. Without it, strategy goes out the window.

Also, I don't think the OP is meaning to remove the economy from the game entirely.
Personally, I think balancing Eng and Metal points would be more suited to game play, and having tool tips for mouse hovering over words like "Seed", to explain exactly what that means in the System creator.
Not everyone knows what seeding is.
Having tool tips gives us knowledge as to what everything does. Which is nice when we can hover over it and go, Ooooh, cool!, I want more/less of this!... So we need to start there and let people know that the ability to add more Metal to a planet/system is there and how to do it.
THEN we can move on to saying whether or not the econ is balanced based on what you get from the start.

Economy is nothing but the management of resources; removing the two resources energy and metal still leaves us with the resources of production capacity, space, time, military power, attention and possibly others. Which is still quite a lot of management to take care of.
Economy being all about the resources that are portrayed as such by the game itself is thus not correct. Which in turn means that removing those resources does not result in a removal of the economy part of the game.
I would say that this is an interesting idea that could be quite insightful and even benefit the classical economy in the long run.

As i said, i can strongle recommend "Wow. Such smash. Much planets." - and then imagine he had the time he put into ressourcemanagement and build t1/t2 armies instead and they would be battling already.

It would be quite awesome to watch, but with how it is, even the clashing planets left a pale taste because 30 minutes of nothingness lead to it.

You know you can change how much metal your planets have in the editor already? And with upcoming mod-ability, you will be able to rebalance the game to whatever you want.

That said, to remove energy and metal, or in other words to remove economy from the game, would in my eyes be to dumb it down to such levels it would be boring to play. Economy management isn't that hard but you do need to figure it out. As soon as you do, it will be a fun and important part of the game, not an obstacle.

edit: don't watch boring replays, check out the community cup today instead!
http://exodusesports.com/tournament/community-cup/

If there's no restriction then the strategy boils down to spamming crap. BOOOOOOOOOOOORRRIIING.

Well, don't get me wrong. Lots of casuals, even ones in this game in the Realm, play with near-unlimited resources. It is just a fun sort of unbalanced. It is fine.

However, we have eco sliders now, we have metal sliders now, I don't see what you want us to do, screw up the "competitive" standard metal generation?

The economy is there to make the game challenging and to create a goal for the player to attack or defend. part of the problem of of expanding is choosing where to expand and you cant protect all of your metal extractors at once can you? If there was no econ, the winner would be the one with more factories. If your being out produced, what you should be doing is attacking their supply lines to ruin the other guys economy and keep his production in check. if you don't like that idea, then im sorry to say PA isnt for you, which is not a bad thing. Try games like total war or wargames to satisfy your want for straight strategy and tactcs, but pa's unit management is bare bones for a reason.

Also for the love of God, please stop saying 'PA should be about (blank)' PA is whatever uber wants it to be, they are the ones woking overtime and trying to make a game they want to play. This doesn't just apply to this forum but to every forum. So stop with this self righteous thinking about how your vision is clearly the one PA is destine to be. Your entitled to an opinion, not a demand. Sorry for venting, just a pet peav of mine.