WYSIWYG- Harmful, or Helpful?

No. None were as bad as the nuke launcher by a pretty big margin. Like the nuke launcher was by FAR the worst. On all other things supporting with t1 engineers was good and the right thing to do to speed it up. The nuke launcher is a pretty big exception. Using it to argue over the support mechanic is pretty far fetched.

I (think) I really disliked how it was in FA, most because it was incredibly difficult for me to get up anti-nukes in time to defend against a nuke (If I hadn't scouted it early enough that is), because speed building was very difficult, would that be considered an edge case in which wasting resources on an anti-nuke causing yourself to stall to speed build one is more worth it than something else in your opinion? I suppose it would matter more based on if the enemy actually ends up aiming for said area under protection and how much damage that nuke would actually do, but meh.

Anyway, I understand I may be going a bit too far against the economy of FA and TA, in fact I actually liked them; I wasn't too confused by them. It just took a bit to understand them, but personally I feel PA's economy metric is superior, and that the only thing holding it back now is the energy/metal balance.

PA currently is like SupCom but with some inaccuracies, less options for balancing and no automatic balancing between energy and metal. Especially once the metal/energy balance is not as limited by energy anymore it will become very visible that having a mod that automatically pauses engineers and similar based on "do I have metal or not for them" can save a lot of energy without any drawback at all.
Wasn't PA supposed to be micro free? The current economy is played best by pausing and unpausing all your units once per second depending on your metal/energy income Now THAT's something I really would call micro.
Sure impossible for humans. But a perfect example of why some people are afraid of mods.

Well now if fabricators just stopped fabricating when they were negative and acted like they did in TA in that fact then I feel we'd still keep with the WYSIWYG principle without having to use Supcom/TA's economy metric. Which in my opinion would keep things simple and intuitive whilst still keeping people from spamming nukes or tanking hard in economy.

I have no idea what you mean by SupCom economy metric now.
Yeah PA can try to work with less hidden multiplers even if they are using the automatic "pausing" like in FA I guess?

You can always tank your economy hard. No economy system will protect you from it. I tank my energy economy really really really hard in PA if I don't have a very well planned out build order.

When I said that I meant how Supcom's economy worked, how it would change fabrication rates based on what you were building, said it in a weird way, I agree. :S

Yep, auto pausing.

So, it's just an extra visual cue. It doesn't matter if it's visible all the time. It does absolutely no harm to people who are zoomed out, but provides a visual representation of how a your eco is affected by stalling that you can see if you aren't zoomed out.

You definitely don't have to look up every single unit. In fact you barely have to look these stats.

Just try stuff! Try building stuff and see how it effects your economy. If you start energy stalling, stop building it. Keep doing this until you've used all of your mass. This is what I've always done. It's very simple. You'll learn pretty soon how much things cost roughly.

I agree with both sides of the argument. To me both PA and SupCom have hard to manage economy systems.

The variable ratio between energy cost, metal cost and time cost in SupCom is hard to intuitively grasp and think about. One set of worker tasks may result in a well balanced economy while another set completely wrecks it. A good player needs to remember the ratios (perhaps intuitively and not explicitly) in order to run a tight economy and transition between different production setups. This system is not WYSIWYG because the important cost ratios have no representation in the game world. I do not agree with the claims that variable cost ratios are required to act as a balance lever.

I think the PA economy system is bad because it creates stupid unit behaviour in the name of WYSIWYG. Draining more energy than you need to is clearly a bad idea and it is just a micro frenzy mechanic because the mechanic could be mitigated with a pause/unpause script. I am also confused as to why they made energy drain differ between construction units. Surely a simpler system would have a fixed ratio of energy drain and metal drain in order to make it easy to permute constructors. The balance between constructors can be absorbed into production cost.

In general I like WYSIWYG. It is nice when a bunch of combat units all deal consistent damage to each other. It is nice to be able to reason about an economy based on what you can see and control, not on hard to find ratios. This principal has limited application almost everywhere in ways we barely think about. For example tough or healthy things look large or armoured.

I think the concept has been misapplied when arguing against automation. For example firestates are bad because a unit will only automatically fire at enemy units when it is does not have the 'hold fire' firestate. The argument follows that the firestate is not represented in the game world but has an effect on the unit so it violates WYSIWYG. My response is that the player and the control they exert is not represented in the game world. Unit states and automation do not change what a unit is capable of doing, it is merely a unit being pre-ordered to act in a certain way. In the case of firestates the player could intervene and manually cause the unit to fire and their opponent would not be able to detect this.

WYSIWYG seems to have two meanings in peoples' minds:

1. Things that look alike, act alike.
2. Things act as they look.

I argue the second isn't WYSIWYG in the form that Uber are after. It's a design/aesthetics choice to make it easy for a player to conceptualise units and their roles when compared to each other (and in most cases, one that Uber follows). There's definitely a disjoint if there is too much of a difference between expectation & reality, but as long as Unit "A" always acts the same as other Unit "A"s, then #1 is not being broken and WYSIWYG is maintained.

To me, this means that Economy, Fire states, automation, UI, terrain etc do not fall under the WYSIWYG paradigm and have leeway in their design. All that really does fall foul of WYSIWYG is invisible upgrades, like the Starcraft/warcraft style armor and weapon upgrades that change a units' power with no visible sign, plus carriers (air transports, or sea carriers, bunkers etc.) with internal storage. There's bound to be more, but they are the "big ticket" items.

Neither PA's or Sup Com/TA's economic models violate #1 - there's a clear formula that is consistently applied universally, and all engineers/fabbers of the same type act the same. There's definitely difficulties with both, though I'm coming round to @cola_colin 's way of thinking.

Even special abilities on units don't technically violate WYSIWYG - as long as any effect they have is visible and obvious (although there is probably a purist view of WYSIWYG that may disagree, but I don't subscribe to that).

Definitely misapplied. Because by that argument, merely having a second player violates "WYSIWYG" because they are giving commands you can't see.

Supcom and TA did violate WYSIWYG in the fact that other things changed how that unit functioned, for no immediately apparent reason, other than balance.

It fit for those two games, and I wouldn't change them now, but personally I enjoy PA's more simplistic form of economy, as it's much easier to work with.

I didn't say they didn't violate it at all, I only said they didn't in their economic models.

Some things that come to mind for TA that violated them are:

• Missiles doing different damage vs Air
• Immolator tower damage vs EMG based units
• Silos not showing stockpile

Some things that don't violate it, but might appear to:

• Different metal output from metal spots: This was visible by the size of the metal patch, and the speed of the extractor arms spinning
• Wind & tidal generation: The animation speed matched the power output
• Solar generators entering an armoured state and taking less damage when hit: There was a visible animation of the structure closing which gave this a visual indicator.

Perhaps I was casting the net a bit wide when I made that comment about how things look like what they do. I think it is useful to define WYSIWYG as "Things that look alike, act alike" and I mostly agree with what you said here. The distinction is that I disagree with this

and I think the disagreement stems from our compartmentalization of parts of the game into "Things".

If see a two identical constructors working at their maximum rate then I consider them things that look alike. In SupCom they do not necessarily act alike because if they are constructing different buildings their metal and energy drain rate could be quite different. In PA they have the same metal and energy drain so they are acting alike. This definition of a "Thing" is what makes me say PA has WYSIWYG in construction while SupCom does not.

If you define a "Thing" to be a constructor as well as the thing it is constructing then all constructor-construction pairs which look alike do act alike in SupCom. This is a lot of "Things" to remember which I think is unreasonable but that may have no bearing on WYSIWYG. Armour bonuses could be justified in the same way because every attacker-attackiee pair would result in the same damage every time. I noticed that you did not list damage bonuses against particular units as violating WYSIWYG so perhaps this is not a problem for you.

I can derive your definition of WYSIWYG if "Thing" is defined to be some local interacting clump of stuff. So a constructor-construction pair and attacker-attackiee pair would be things which always act the same.

oops

so much for pure WYSIWYG then,

Very edge cases, though I don't think we need the commander thing anymore, the fighter exploit was terrible. (Build a bunch of fighters and they're missiles would fly around crazy destroying air factories in half a second)

it drives me up the wall and I'm not alone in this.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/economy-too-easy.63536/

Cola actually thinks it's harder than Supcom's.

Could we agree on ditching the term WYSISWYG for PA's discussions? How about consistency, that one is much easier to agree on.
Which leaves us with two concepts:

• Internal Consistency (visuals and mechanics matching, i.e. a unit is consistent in itself)
• External Consistency (instances of the same unit matching in behaviour, i.e. unit types are consistent)

he didn't use the word hard.