Here's an idea I built as a mod for Supcom, but couldn't get the AI to use it so it just ended up collecting dust. I modded the metal extractors to be able to be placed anywhere, rather than just on metal spots. Then, I put in a limiting factor which reduced the amount of metal extracted depending on how close other metal extractors were to it. It worked nicely, and had the effect of acting much more like real world oil fields. The concept was to simulate the effect of resources having a maximum production capacity within a specific territory. Adding more extractors to an area already being pumped would not produce a greater total yield. At first this is a difficult concept to visualize especially if you're used to how resources are mined in other games. Basically, your resource yield will grow as the territory you control grows. You are rewarded for spreading out, as opposed to clumping up your extractors in one super-defended area. There are a few reasons for this idea. First, I wanted to introduce some variety and unpredictability in the expansion route the player chooses. When metal spots are fixed, the player will make very predictable expansion decisions. Even to the point where you can make surgical strikes on metal spots you've never seen with your own units, and likely take out an important resource. If you can place extractors anywhere however, then expansion becomes much more organic, and scouting the enemy becomes even more important. But permitting the player to build extractors anywhere produces a known behavior as can be seen on TA's metal maps, where you find super hardened defenses surrounding tightly packed resource farms. This is the reason for metal spots in the first place, is it not? To force the player to expand. But what if you just had a proximity penalty rather than actual metal spots? Its the best of both, I think. Add to this, perhaps the proximity variable could be dependent on the planet you're sitting on. If it's a planetary variable, you could make it extremely small on "metal worlds" permitting tight clustering of extractors, where on much less rich worlds the proximity penalty would be a lot higher. Upgrading extractors could be considered giving them the ability to "dig deeper" which would produce a greater yield in the new depth, but being consistent with the idea of a finite amount of resource yield from your controlled territory. Actually playing with it is quite intuitive. Much easier to understand than reading about it, so forgive the rough description. The general idea is that you view the land itself as a resource, where the more land you have the more resources you have. You merely have to dot extractors across the landscape to claim the most optimal amount of these resources. Visual aids could assist in showing if there's areas of your land you aren't tapping enough and to show areas where its pointless to build redundant extractors.
You sure would be tempted to cover the area in extractors though. That being said, I'm not seeing a big problem with this.
Heh, indeed. And that said, it wouldn't actually hurt anything to have more extractors than you need. The redundancy would certainly benefit you when you're raided and lose half of them. ^_^ However, overlapping fields of extraction would produce only a hair fraction more resources, and you'd quickly get accustomed to the fact that building new extractors on the edge of your territory and expanding outward would give you a hell of a lot more yield than building more in your home area.
There should be automation through. I dont want to click 100 times on a single planet just to make some mexes.
I'm ambivalent. So long as there is support for resource rich areas I don't really mind. I've never had a problem with metal spots though.
Might be a fun mod, but this would reduce the need to fight for specific areas, since you are able to build mex everywhere. If the middle of the map has most of the mexspots, players will be forced to fight for them and thats good. Fighting over mapcontrol is key to fun games and mexspots are needed for it.
Everywhere? No, just within a radius of 5-10 building widths around the actual metal spot, beyond this point the extraction rate becomes almost 0. Only enough to get out of the AoE range of artillery or tactical nukes beeing fire blind on the metal spot.
Spring has a cloud metal map. Basically the metal map is a greyscale image (similar to a heightmap) and each pixel creates a certain amount of metal. Mexes have an extraction radius which gives them an income equal to the metal of all the pixels within their extraction radius. Each pixel can only be harvested by a single mex. For example here are some maps. The top image is texture/minimap, the middle image is the heightmap and the bottom image is the metal map. 1) Normal cloud metal map. 2) Graduated full metal map. 3) Low yield cloud area in the middle. 4) Large extractor radius. The cloud system is very general. It is easy for mappers to implement discrete spots, full metal maps and all the cloud systems in between. Map (4) above is the most like the idea in the OP because the extractor radius of 400 is significant; about 1.5 mexes can fit across each side of the pentagon in the middle. My main point is that the mappers for Spring have shunned cloud metal maps. Those examples are rare and fairly old maps. Most of the power of the cloud metal system is wasted, almost all maps from the last few years have discrete metal spots and small extractor radius. A few old maps have even been remade to fix the metal map by removing the cloud metal such as this map and it's remake. So after several years with the flexibility to chose what works people chose a discrete metal system. I think that says something. As for my experience, placing mexes anywhere and variable payoff depending on exact placement is bad. It is a lot less intuitive than discrete metal spots. It is hard to 'solve' a region for optimal placement but once you do so why not replace the optimal spots with discrete spots? This suggestion can be almost duplicated with discrete metal spots arranged in a triangular grid. I think the engine only needs discrete metal spots.
You said Spring, but your links are to Zero-K - heh. Looking at the way this game is about controlling entire planets, it might be good to keep it simple: either 2 or 4 big metal producing regions, or better yet for the sake of simplicity just make the entire map/planet have a certain metal value. Either way, applying the proximity limiting concept is a great idea, encouraging players to expand and claim territory. You'd definitely want the interface to make it obvious where you can put the extractor to gain the most value. When you go to build one, range circles should appear around existing extractors to show where you will get maximum output from the next one you build, i.e. outside existing circles.
The ZK site has automatically generated pages for just about every map uploaded to the main Spring file repository. It has the nice images aid explanation.
There's a way to get the best of both ideas here. Yes there's a lot of value in maps where you fight over specific resources. One way to get the best of both would be to have resource deposits under the ground in regions. To use Eve Online again as an example, look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-8dTt5LciE Skip to 4:30 in the video and take a good look at that interface. You can see how the resources on the planet are distributed in zones of varying density. Perhaps something like this would work where there are "rich zones" that yield the resources when you put a mex on them, but lean zones where putting a mex there doesn't help you at all. Then, with that model, you could have some planets where the resources were distributed entirely evenly, which would play out exactly like my original suggestion.
