Should resources be tracked per planet/moon

What I'd likely do (and I expect most players would do this, if PA used local economies) is drop an invasion onto the planet and start shooting things. Get the fight going with units manufactured elsewhere.

Including in that invasion, would be engineers that start building factories to replace dead tanks.

Sending a lone commander, or engineers on their own, is pretty silly.

The question is: can an invading army blow up enough stuff and allow engineers to build a base, before the defenders start bearing back down on them?

It's a question none of us can answer.

You obviously haven't taken the time to read the posts that have been made on the subject before your arrival to the conversation. It's not through lack of argument that I haven't elaborated, it's because I am sick of repeating myself.

This is even more ridiculous than your original idea. I'm sure you know that and it was meant to be a direct comparison to how ridiculous energy as a global resource is. I think you fail to see that simply because two resources are global it doesn't make them the same.

What ideas? Cargo ships? Space tax? Trade ports? I saw them. They're bad ideas. They're redundant ideas. That's fine if you don't understand why, but what the hell. I'm not trying to obfuscate anything, so stop shooting me down if you don't even know what's going on. this thread doesn't need TWO Zordons.

The idea of a specific "trade" structure only makes a foothold MORE difficult to establish. It's a single point of catastrophic failure. Destroy it, and the invasion is over. Fail to build it, and the invasion is over. The defender has a HUGE advantage in this scenario because he already has his local resources built up, likely has multiple trade structures well fortified, and can survive being severed from the empire no problem. The invader can not.

The idea of a space tax is dumb. A local economy already has the default advantage, by the simple virtue of having infrastructure. Adding a space tax is completely redundant, when it only provides a defending advantage to a defender that already has an advantage.

Space cargo is pointless. Why send unprocessed metal when you can deliver real units, ready to fight? Why trek across a hundred light years when a local base can deliver new units and reinforcements directly to battle? The only thing a first wave needs to do is establish a good foothold. If the enemy defense can be crippled to help things along, all the better.

Local metal takes away from the idea that planets are being stripped bare to fuel an ever escalating cycle of destruction on new worlds. It's humanly impossible to track every drop of metal on every world and make sure it gets used. It only serves to make a nightmarish metal mayhem, which I can safely say is not the point of the game.

Anyone who has played TA or Supcom before already knows that is EXACTLY how the economy works. The nanolathe is already a "construction hose" that connects directly to the resource bank, and by default limits how much the engineer can use! I'm stuck here scratching my head, because I'm being shot down for explaining an economy that everyone here has played before.

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The vast majority of ideas in this thread are DIVERGING from the TA resource model. I jump in, explain that the TA model is pretty good, but replicating it exactly as is will cause some serious issues with Energy. Queue the troll party, the endless "I don't know what you said but youre'er wrong"s, and the "but all these other ideas make the economy even more confusing, nonsensical, one sided, and we liked it, so get out". But no one has yet explained how Energy can keep the functionality(I.E. the juicy targets and outages) that it established in previous games, because a direct copy-paste on mechanics is either going to not do anything it's supposed to do, or it's going to explode.

I know I shouldn't be upset. This is the internet, and I should expect to run into a stone wall of prepubescent teens at any point in time. Sometimes I even feel bad, and try to help them out so they can be better posters and better opponents in the future. But it stretches disbelief that a fan of the older games could take such huge offense to keeping the economy as true to the originals as possible.

While I agree that we can't answer the question yet, here's what we're looking at:

1) Defending army with active economy and production.
2) Attacking army with no (local) economy or production.

Now regardless of economy, it's going to take a smart attack to pull this off.

IMO, this is nearly impossible with a local economy. As the attacker, you have no ability to replace your loses until you first go through your starting build order. As the defender, you're factories are already churning before you've taken your first loss (depending on factors related to attack detection).

Anyway, whatever type of economy is chosen, the defender should have an advantage, but it will have to be designed so that it's not an impossible situation.

It's not impossible...but it will require some sort of dedicated assault unit, and the traditional 3-1 superiority of numbers that military history dictates a successful assault of an enemy position have. Where your units land and begin the attack is also important-In Your Base and Killing Your Dues via airdrop is very different from assaulting a fortified line. And since these units will be coming from space, unless there are Anti-orbital missiles or lasers defending the base, there's no reason not to drop in among the buildings if you can transport significant forces.

And as an additional note, just because you have committed to an attack is no reason to shut down your factories-the next wave would already be under construction, it just needs to wait while it is transported.

But-What if we cannot sen large forces to overfly our enemy's base? What if our orbital units cannot land? What if, and given the game's title, I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case, the best way to kill a heavily fortified enemy base isn't vehicles or Kbots, it's KKVs and rocks at high speed?

You're assuming that anti-air units can't shoot at units in the air. Sure the devs can make the game do whatever they want, but that just sounds weird.
You're also assuming that you're somehow going to outnumber someone who "owns" the planet. I guess it's my fault for not being more specific: The issue with planet assaults isn't associated with attacking a planet the enemy didn't quite expect to be attacked, the issue is that the enemy knows your coming, the only question where you'll land. Also, I can say outnumbering my opponent 3-1 will get me the win in pretty much any battle, the problem is actually doing it in a game where units are constantly rolling of the assembly line. The difference is that their assembly line is at worst a thousand miles away while your is millions of miles away.

This could be a way for the devs to balance things. Common sense says that the defender would have a much shorter travel time for reinforcements, regardless of where on the planet they have to go, but it's definitely something that could be altered under a "gameplay>realism" argument.

Well, even if you have a global economy, you would still have to build local unit production to take advantage of the resources. This discussion seems to be polarizing around weather or not there should be a "beach-head" effect, or, more specifically, how large this effect should be.

There is always going to be some sort of defenders advantage, I think we can safely assume that. The economy is also going to be manageable. So, no, splitting the economy per planet (or per continent, or depending on supply lines, or whatever) is not going to ruin the game. Uber will figure out how to make it work.

What this discussion has suggested to me is that perhaps the concept of a "building" and a "unit" is a false dichotomy. Want to establish a beachhead? Construct a few turrets, generators, etc with rockets strapped on! Sounds awesome to me! It would have to be more expensive than normal buildings, but it's an option!

We already have the (stated) option to build a beach-head-on-an-asteroid and put it in orbit. Maybe that's the equivalent of "mobile buildings" in this game. Could you soft-land an asteroid to establish a base on-world? That could be cool.

None of those are my ideas. In fact, I was against all those ideas. You must be confusing me with someone else since I am in favour of a global economic model.

And that's why it's a bad idea.

You go on to elaborate on the negatives of the above subjects that support a local economic model, which have been done to death here. You're not saying anything new here.

You're refering to build power. It's been mentioned here and several other topics as a means to restrict resource consumption and therefore growth. Read before you start running people down, otherwise when you try and be condescending it just comes off as foolish. Want to earn respect then get your facts right. I know 33 pages is a lot to read, but you've obviously read some of it.

That's why I've been so vocally against them. There's nothing wrong with the TA model. As you already said yourself, the aspect of build power restricts the rates at which these resources can be used, so all we are left with is the issue of energy consuming stationary weapons, structures and mobile units, such as mobile stealth. I don't think this will be the problem the way some people are touting it to be.

Almost everyone who has had an idea supporting some kind of local economy that someone has been opposed to has said "No one can give me a valid reason why it's a bad idea". Yet there are plenty of good reasons why a fully global economy would be perfectly adequate.

I don't understand why anyone is under the impression that tactical targets will become any less valuable or that there will be an end to outages due to overspending on power. I think that we just need to get a grip on the scale we are talking about. We're no longer talking about two or three T3 power gens in a chain explosion to topple a player's economy. By the time it gets to the stage in the game where we are worried about it happening, it's more likely the generators will be on a separate planet. If someone is using a planet full of power gens to fuel their interplanetary artillery, go to the planet and take out the generators first and then attack the forward position. If they've decided to spread their power gens over a number of planets, then that also has it's advantages and drawbacks too. It's a case of getting to know your enemy by scouting. Just the same as you would in TA and SupCom.

Re: power outages. Late game it was rare unless an inexperienced player over-stretched their economy building experimentals and such like. Even then, power was more a case of storage than production simply because players were making so much of it anyway. Generally, energy was plentiful and a great deal was wasted. However, taking out storage effectively removed the buffer they needed to create game enders quickly. By destroying a bunch of storage a players economy could be crippled in just the manner you describe.

Congratulations, your condescension has reached a new level. It's one thing making assumptions about my age, but claiming the intellectual high ground while standing on a soap box of experience when you haven't even got your facts right about my contribution to this topic or my views on the TA economy and what would be right for PA really makes you look silly. You made it personal and you got it wrong. I apologise for the long post. It's becoming a bit of a habit unfortunately.

What about, being able to send resource from one body to another, but a certain percentage of the resources is destroyed in transmission. There could be a structure or upgrade for a unit that would boost the percentage of the resources going through.

Then again this may be too much microing just for resources, while the main part of the game(Fighting and building) is left on hold.

A global economy would certainly work, indeed it would be as you say 'perfectly adequate'
My arguments for local economies are not that global wouldn't work, but rather that it would add to the richness and depth of the game and be more appropriate for a game of this scale.
Maybe we should be thinking about breaking new ground here, after all TA certainly broke new ground and brought (at the time) wild and exciting concepts which worked.
We have a chance to improve on what has gone before, lets not write off local economies (more specifically the requirement to transport mass from the planet where it was mined to the planet with factories) before we even know how it plays.

I think my issue with what people are saying about a local economy adding depth is that it just seems to end up with people talking about either hiding things from the player or adding lots of clicking and cluttering the UI. That's not depth, it's tedium. You're not adding richness to the game or breaking new ground, it's just going to make it convoluted and shift the emphasis from strategy and make it into an economy management sim. There was enough of that in TA and SupCom.

The new ground we're talking about breaking in this game is the galactic war metagame, never before seen numbers of units to manage and 40 player, 12-24 hours matches.

Wait until Alpha or beta, depending on what you pledged. See how the game plays and then pass judgement on it. I'm pretty confident that Uber will start off global simply because it's easier and quicker for them to implement. That and it's the tried and tested TA system. My guess is that it'll work just fine and if in the event that it doesn't work, then maybe they'll try adding something to fix it. If that was the case then I suppose what bobucles suggested about mass staying global and energy going local would be my next best choice.

In the end all any of us want is what is best for the game. I don't care about being right as much as I care about having a working game that is a true spiritual successor to TA and SupCom. Although I have a funny feeling that I will end up being proven right when the game goes gold.

Economy and supply is a big part of strategy. Supply lines can be debated to be the most important thing in a war.

So "drawing emphasis from strategy" isent realy a valid argument (In my humble opinion).

Sorry for the confusion. I agree that strategy and economy management are synonymous, I am merely stating that economy management shouldn't be the main emphasis of this game, not that it shouldn't be part of it at all. Far from it. It is an important part of all of the previous games and should be an important part of PA. That is why it is important to get it right.

In many cases the player with the strongest economy does win the game. That is true for both TA and SupCom. But it doesn't mean that it should be a game about struggling with a convoluted economy to gain victory over your opponent. Games should be won and lost on the battlefield. Sure there are games out there with much more complicated economic models than TA and SupCom, but it doesn't mean that is how PA should be just because it's a bigger game. In those games it is fine because that is the emphasis of their gameplay. IMO PA, like it's predecessors, shouldn't be a game where gameplay is based around a complexed economy but based on sound strategy and map control.

To be a true successor to TA and it's younger kin, PA needs to remain true to it's heritage. At their heart, the economies for TA and SupCom were actually pretty basic. With only two resource types and a streaming economy, managing resources is easy to pick up but harder to master. Getting the most out of your economy in any of these games is an art in itself as it is, without making it harder by adding hidden penalties or trade structures that can be sniped. That was never what these games were about.

Neither TA or SupCom ever gave reasons when I built a power gen on one side of the map and a shield generator on the opposite how the two were linked. And if I chose to build all my power gens away from my base then how is that different to building them on a different planet? The build strategy is the same and so is the attack strategy. If I have a huge farm world that's fuelling my galactic war machine, surely that's the juiciest target of them all?

I say no as the build time or using resources will adjust depending on the amount of resources used which equates to the time in which it takes to deliver to the factory, mabe some dynamic could be put into the game about how close collection facilities are close to factories or whatever.Other wise you are trying to focus on too much at one time. and yes I under stand these games are about micro management but too much of anything is a bad thing

In all these games, good economy management is key to victory, and TA and SupCom stood apart because of their excellent economy models. Making the economy so merciless and so central to the battle is the single feature that elevates this series.

Increasing the number of things you have to stay on top of or the number opportunities for being caught out, or being able to do clever or surprising things to out think your opponent adds to the immersion, adds to the feeling of scale, and adds to the satisfaction of defeating your opponent.

Additionally I think you may be over-egging the complexity of managing it. You are likely to have a couple of planets where the action is taking place with your main economies, and maybe a lot of moons/asteroids where you set up automated resource transfer infrastructure (once) to move mass to one of your homeworlds. Obviously this infrastructure is then subject to attack etc. thus increasing the tactical options...

I know I won't convince you, and I don't expect to, this entire discussion is solely based on our separate imaginings of a game that isn't written and you clearly know what you want. I do however want the idea to be discussed as IMO it is well worth consideration.

You don't consider 34 pages adequate consideration?

hehe, you might have me there...

There should be Supply ships. its the only advantage if u attack a planet, that you have already supply delivered to the planet.

by my limited oppinion, there should also be a resource storage limit on each planet, in every other way it would be almost impossible to conquer a planet.

If the defender first needs to apply a resource route to the defending place, so you have some time to make a base before he can overroll you.

Farming Bases with autorouted Transporters should be possible.
May easy to manage as in galcon ^^
But may that there could be some additional settings, like 1 transporters every 10 minutes, or 10 every 1

As attacker you have the additional possibility to blockade a planet and BLOCKADE is the interesting thing here

emphasis my own.

I'm sorry what?

It's an awesome game. Look it up.