Scarcity of Natural Resources and PA

I like the old TA/FA way of infinite resources. However, PA will have a game mechanic that is similar to limited resources in the lategame: planetary annihilation!

PA has some advantages though: Running out of resources is boring. Blowing up planets to deny your opponent resources is awesome! And it adds an interesting choice: Is it really smart to blow up a planet or is it better to try and conquer it? What's more expensive, to send enough troops to break through the defenses or to make a planetary killer?

Just my thoughts.

Jessep out

I agree with this here. The fact that entire planets can be removed from the playing field is certainly something that will surmount concerns about turtling (also the lack of shields I'd have thought?) as well as worries about runaway economy.

Limiting the resources just limits the scale of the armies that people can throw at each other, which to me isn't what PA is supposed to be about. PA is to be in the vein of TA and Supreme Commander which was more about managing the streaming economy than worrying if you were running out of resources.

To alter that and have limited resources would be to change a fundamental aspect of the game that makes its economy model unique in the face of most RTS games on the market. This games fanbase is predominantly people who enjoyed TA/SupCom and so I think to make its economy more like micro intensive games such as starcraft would be a mistake.

Limited resources clearly wouldn't work. Long games should definitely be possible, and without a proper income the game can stall out with players trapped on separate worlds. That's just lame. However, diminishing the primary way to get metal can definitely shift the game's focus in good ways.

For example, stripping a planet's resources may reduce extractors to half, a third, or less of their original income. Aged worlds will be more dependent on metal making, which means expensive, explosive holdings that hurt the defender's advantage. New worlds will be worth more despite having partial coverage, increasing the need to expand out, raid, and contest enemy holdings. Scrap becomes more important as a source of raw metal, and denying scrap may become important as well. Reducing the value of old worlds will diminish the value of legacy victories, giving chances for new victories to put players back in the game.

Mostly, it dampens the effect of an exponential economy. Exponential anything is terrible as it places excess emphasis on booming, teching, and snowballing, especially after players get separated by worlds. The shape of the tech tree is going to change as well. A deathstar priced for a 1x-> 100x economy is only going to be available at endgame levels, while a deathstar priced around a 5x->50x economy has a better chance of surprising players around the midgame.

While an interesting idea, I'm not sure that resource depletion would work well for what we have heard from PA. For example, we know that in one extreme PA will support a *lot* of people playing, and that there would be some kind of mechanism for people joining mid-game. This could be seen as an evolution thing, with older players dying and newer plays coming in. Except that newer players will have the short end of the stick because any base they set up where someone else used to be will suffer from reduced mass production from the get go, before they have had the chance to set up alternative economy.

Notice that the extractors in the proposed system would never run out of resources it would just be halved every X amount of time.

In my proposed system the metal would get halved by the time the extractor resource had been halved.

Another approach is to make destroyed units on the planet fill up the resource pool on the planet they are destroyed on. Metal/mass not left in wreckages will go to the resource pool aswell.
So if the planet contain 100 000 resources and an invasion army of 10000 lands, destroys 10000 of the defenders stuff before the invasion army is destroyed and leaves 50% of their worth there will be 10000 worth of resources to reclaim and the planet resource pool is filled up to 110 000 increasing the output of the exctractors by 10%.
That way metal/mass is never lost making large armies possible throughout the whole game.
The question is what to do with units that die in space or between planets.
Just brainstorming.

Edit:There is also the ability to let planets fill up their resource pool throughout the game all the time.

Indeed, some game modes might have nothing to gain from this economy refinement idea. Perhaps it shouldn't be used for these giant, hop-in-when-you-feel-like-it, multiplayer galactic war type deals they want the game to be able to do. Or maybe it can be adapted simply enough to make sure the above scenario not an issue (new players spawning on previously depleted planets find the resources restocked, perhaps?). Or maybe before your commander spawns within the world you log in, you get a chance to check out the battlefield, converse with allies/the others and then pick where you want to spawn. Straight into the action on a somewhat depleted battleground? Or start a new front on the flanks on a green world? Having depleting resources might still do the same it does in smaller, one-off games, by driving the game across the map/galaxy.

But yeah, even so, the option to stick to the old, non-depreciating system should probably always be available. Heck, it might remain the norm, but if there's enough to be said for depreciation they could at least take a stab at it and see how it pans out.

Though I think there's a lot to be said for your previously proposed way to implement mex depreciation, godde, I'm not sure letting bits of destroyed units seep into the mass pool would have the intended affect. In fact, this would make a heavily contested planet continually more valuable, which would increase pressures to fight for it, sending ever more resources and eventually making it the sole focus of the game, instead of spreading the focus across the play field.

This is making a bold assumption that players will claim a planet, fight over it, and then mutually LEAVE, as if nothing ever happened. The more likely (99%) scenario is that one player wins, occupies the land, and there's a greater chance of it blowing up than ever being a viable spawn point.

There are a lot of assumptions about multiplayer at this point, because we simply don't know what it will be. If it's something where two teams start and duke it out over an hour or day, then variable resources may very well give the pacing they're looking for. If it's some kind of 2b2t server left up for weeks or months at a time, with new commanders warping in at any random point, then unlimited is probably the best way to go.

Well it depends. In a 1v1 situation you would have alot of resources and you would get it back with your mexes. Once both players have a serious investment and a stalement have happened or of the player have seized control of the planet then the income from the planet will be small.
Aslong as you keep fighting and losing units on the planet the income generated would be good.
I don't think that is bad gameplay.

I think it's bad gameplay.

Why is it fun, as time goes on to be able to achieve less.

Diminishing resources don't make any sense in a game with exponential economy growth. If anything this will increase the likelihood of stalemate, due to the fact that both sides have defenses built for defending against an enemy with a stronger economy. You'll get strange unintuitive strategies that will involve reclaiming your own buildings and units. During the endgame, map control will have lost its importance, due to there being less/no resources to fight over.

Don't forget planet hopping.
Also consider that unclaimed mexes might still have a higher output than mexes that have been mined for a long time giving an incentive to fight on the map.

Ugh, more hidden modifiers? Really? The last thing I want is to capture a metal point only to discover it's been mined out and is more or less worthless. The need for territory control to feed your economy drives conflict, make the territory less valuable and you get less conflict over it.

Mexes gradually depleting would be even worse than normal RTS approaches to limited resources - usually your income is constant until the mine runs dry, then it stops. That lets you plan because it tells you how much you will get out of it in total. With depleting mexes your income would just slowly dwindle. Now that really would make a streaming economy hard to manage. Needing calculus to figure out how long a major construction project is going to take as your metal income shrinks and the build rate falls off doesn't sound like a particularly intuitive game mechanic.

If your counter argument is metal makers you're asking for the return of the mass farms that were so infamous in vanilla supcom. Donotwant.png.

Doesn't need to hidden. You could see the output of the mex when you hover over it with your mouse or when trying to build extractors. Not that different from different valued metal patches in TA.
In the spring engine you can see how much the mex will produce as you are about to place it.

Care to address any of the other concerns?

Hidden or not, in introduces more complexity into something that is already perceived to be too complex.

Mike

Sure.

That is your opinion.

The battle would still escalate in terms of units under your command. Units that die increases the production of mexes again fueling more unit production. Once one planet is dry it increases the incentive to gain another planets. This would be fun because there would be less focus on 1 world and devoting all your economy to 1 spot on 1 planet.

It depends on how you look at exponential economy growth. Starcraft got capped exponential growth as your income can grow until you reach the unit limit and mine out resources.
SupCom got capped exponential growth as there is a unit limit preventing you from reaching infinite resource income rate(if you count buildpower as resources aswell, not even the Paragon allows infinite income rate).
The system I propose could have capped exponential growth in the sense that the more planets you control the faster you can expand to other planets and increase your income exponentially.

If you say the last case is not exponential economy growth then I say that PA doesn't have to have exponential economy growth.

Why would both sides prepare defences when 1 side will come out ahead? If 1 player has more resources than the enemy he can deploy more units and therefore has a greater chance of winning.

I think that would be interesting. Once you have claimed a planet why not recycle the units on that planet since you propably won't need them anyway?
When you can have an exponential economy on 1 planet, reclaiming is the same thing as wasting buildpower which otherwise could have been used to increase your economy in most cases. With the diminishing economic return using buildpower to recycle units suddenly becomes more viable as putting resources into economy isn't that effective.

Already replied.

Contested metal points will typically produce more metal since they haven't been mined for long increasing the incentive to fight for more territory.

In a standard 1v1 SupCom game the income fluctuates over time as mexes are won and lost, mexes are upgraded and mass fabricators are built. I'd say that in the most cases players have to account for fluctuating income when they are to determine the buildtime of a superproject.
The skill to determine how long it takes to finish comes with experience.
On the face of it would be harder to determine when a buildproject would finish but with experience I don't think it would be that much harder.

That is not my counter argument. I don't know where metal makers fit into this or if an Overdrive system like in Zero-K could work in conjunction with diminishing mexes or instead of diminishing mexes since the Overdrive system already has diminishing returns.

Of course it's my opinion, that's why I said I think, not it is.

None of your other points addresses why it would be fun. Merely that it's possible. Why change what isn't broke?

A simpler system with diminishing returns... Hm...
If planets are fairly easy to "neutralize", prevent the enemy from gaining an exponential economy on a planet then I suppose as players get the ability to destroy planets and moons they can stop the growth of economy by destroying planets and forcing the opposition to fight for the scrap as they battle through the newly formed asteroid belts.
As proposed by others.

Why do we need to deal with diminishing returns in the first place? The game is already operating on a very large scale across planets which makes things complicated enough from a logistics perspective. Uber and the community have stressed the need for PA to encompass larger scale strategy, be simple to read, and remove a focus on micromanagment. Asking the player to think about and manage diminishing rates of return in their economies across multiple celestial bodies does not fall in line with those design goals, it strikes me as overly complicated.

As others have mentioned in this thread, asteroids being converted into KEWs and thrown at planets is the answer to issues of runaway economy. This to me is a much more elegant solution than having economy issues scale to hinder combat. For one it is an active aspect of gameplay that a player can visit upon another player. Secondly it has the added bonus of shrinking the available battlefield, forcing players together which has the effect of removing stalemates.

I just dont see a reason to mess with the economy model and make things more complex when there are existing and fun systems in place to deal with the issues you are discussing in your arguments.

How do you know that an exponential economy will work well in Planetary annhilition?
What will prevent a player from getting a run amok exponential economy from just 1 planet?
What will prevent a player from spamming deathstars endlessly?
What will force players to contest several planets?
What will make planet hopping interesting?
What will reduce slippery slope to prevent small advantages from growing into bigger ones?
How will units sent across the solar system still be useful and not obsolete when they reach their destination?

I think diminishing returns is the answer.

Battlefield is shrinking and the economy is shrinking. Sounds good!