Not that I want to but if I did, is it ok to call you an assface? Confused by your comment, are you attempting humor or an insult?
That title gave me a heart attack. Removing economy would remove ALL strategy from the game. Making economy secondary to unit management is fine but REMOVING economy completely is not.
The narrow and arbitrary definition of economy that is prevalent around here continues to baffle me. It might prove most enlightening how the game would play out with an economy entirely revolving around the resources of time, space, intelligence, production capability, military power and attention. I would wager it being not less complex than the current economy system with a measly two resources more to manage.
You see the games right now, and a lot of the time its just plain boring. And many games just end in "Who sneaks 10 units better into the enemy eco?" - thats not a lot of strategy neither. Reading what youve written, my imagination got straight forward to strategical critical positions to further expand or push into enemy terretory, with armies clashing about it. This doesnt exist right now. You just say "it would be down to fac spamming and massing the enemy out" - i say this is what we have now. Spamming metal/energy n factories, sending small groups of units into random directions in hope to hit the enemy eco badly because it IS kind of impossible to defend all your eco, is almost nothing to do with real "strategy" - Removing or greatly reducing the need to spam energy and metal would provide a LOT of more time you can spend on units, factories, teching, army movement and army composition.
With all the build assistances like row building and circle building(storages) it is quite simple to manage a huge build queue and you are totally able to focus on your army movement. Main problem right now is the newly introduced mouse lag. PS: I backed this game partly/mainly because of its dynamic resource management and you want to get rid of it, wtf man?
Since reading comprehension seems to be stretched thinly: Th original poster does not in fact want to get rid of metal and energy. Removing them for testing purposes, though, might yield valuable insights into how essential they are for the game and where its focus should be at.
Reading the last couple of post and giving it some thought, this would be great fun to try in the PTE. But i feel the distinction between the actual in game economy and the (for lack of better words) more meta personal gamer attention economy and the indirect economy of the game aren't very obvious and it feels a little like mixing apples with pears bundling it all together calling it all economy. Technically you are right but it is a bit confusing
I just dont see removing metal and energy as smart. The eco is an important part of the game, without it we would simply just be playing "who can build the most, in the least amount of time" and would remove alot of strategy. Like most of the responses people have it just doesn't feel like a good move for PA.
And no one is advocating removing them from the game for anything other than testing purposes. Given how many resources there are in PA and how woefully undocumented and obfuscated they are doing so might yield quite a few pointers on how to improve the 'classical' metal and energy economy.
I think OP is trying to say something different than what he is implying. I may be wrong on this, please point it out if I am~ PA should have less economic complexity, and resultantly have more economic depth. I.E., because you spend less time carrying out decisions on your economy, you can spend more time making those decisions. This would result in "smarter" gameplay, both in terms of economy and engagement. I don't agree with the idea of completely removing Metal and Energy, like what Brian said, this would just result in nuclear plink-plink matches and fast-teching, and would be even more boring to watch than before. But reducing the amount of metal spots, while increasing the amount of metal they provide would be a start. Increasing the cost and build time of metal extractors would also help, but I think this would be too much like SupCom where nobody ever bothered expanding because it was too risky. Adding a "surface bonus" to taking a "virgin" metal spot (say, an immediate +1000-+5000 metal) would also encourage more dynamic gameplay. The idea is to force the user to think about how to use resource storage and think about where to expand next, instead of just spreading like the Plague. At least, that's my opinion on the subject. The OP may, no deliberate offense OP, just be very new to the game and have a poor understanding of how the economy works.
I've made a server mod so people can test this: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/game-modes-server-mods.60762/ It's the remove eco mod. You have to play on PTE and know how to use server mods. The commander is given so much eco, you don't have to build mex or pgens. Don;t spam too hard or you'll just crash the server.
Thats why we have shared armies I also think player generated systems tend to have to much mass, and in general too many planets for the number of players. I agree that the game in its earlyer stages was more fun,
RTS game with minimal economy? Dawn of War. Fun as hell, and built around the massing of crap-tons of dudes to smash the other guy with. It's also not quite a Total Annihilation successor without letting us put metal extractors anywhere and with varying metal deposits.
Indeed, there are still many things that could be closer to good old TA. But at least we just got proper bombers!
After reviewing this forum, i came up with another idea for an improved economy. you can find the threa here https://forums.uberent.com/threads/simplified-economy-metrics.60980/