Scarcity of Natural Resources and PA

Damn that's a lot of words for no actual content. There are a huge range of RTSes with limited resources, please feel free to go play any of them. The TA lineage does not work that way and your attempts at justifying this massive change amount to personal prejudice, FUD, and vague hand waving. Your idea is bad and you should feel bad.

Because it works well in the game it is based on.
Because more planets = more mexes.
Because deathstars are units that you made up from incorrectly reading Neutrino's description of metal planets.
Because more planets = more mexes. If destroying a planet means destroying one of your mass=generating asteroids you will eventually need some way of reimbursing that economic loss.
Not diminishing returns (frankly I think this point is unrelated altogether).
By harassing their base? Targeting certain structures? (god-forbid) use air? Unit cannon?
Again, don't see how it is related.

We have seen the existing streaming economy work well in prior games. Any rough edges in the system real or imagined have the opportunity to be ironed out. How do you know that diminishing returns economy will work well? Your argument is circular because the same logic can be used against your proposal, it is a worthless criticism.

Map control, Manoeuvrability, Resources, Denying the enemy resources/map control, leaving yourself less vulnerable to asteroids, having a higher rate of income to enable more simultaneous structure/unit construction. If a player remains on one planet and maximises the rate of return there, then their enemy gets unrestricted access to the rest of the planets. The enemy then has the choice of crushing them under the weight of a multiple planet economy or simply throws asteroids at them.

The only reference to anything resembling a death star is the existence of metal planets which may have reactivation components. In which case they are a highly limited resource that players are incapable of spamming.
I think that a lot of people in the forums are misapplying the concept of slippery slope. If a player gains an advantage, in combat, in economy, in map control - that they then capitalise on to further press their advantage, that isn't slippery slope. That is the player being better at the game than their opponent. In any case this is too general. There are many potential answers depending on what aspect of the game you are talking about. Clarify your meaning and then we can see.

We have nothing confirmed about the mechanisms for moving units between planets, or the travel times involved. Criticising an economy model as unworkable based on speculation on mechanics that we have no details on yet, is more than a stretch. It is completely irrelevant.

It is like you think that Uber is not going to balance game mechanics with an economy model that they are well versed in using. You cannot speculate wildly about all of these perceived issues varied aspects of the game and then lay down a change to one aspect of the game (albeit a dramatic core change) and expect that it will behave like a magic bullet that suddenly makes all parts of the game balanced and workable. That isn't how this works.

Each part of the game is going to be carefully worked with and balanced, and then it will go through alpha and beta. Uber are pros who have worked with a streaming economy model before, to suggest that these issues are insurmountable without massive overhauls in the economy model is to greatly underestimate or undersell their abilities.

So...you agree that asteroids and streaming economy will work? that was the thrust of my argument, your responses to me and other posters dont seem to line up.

If anything, that's where it makes the most sense. An exponential economy creates a very slippery slope. Fall slightly behind, or get a slight advantage, and it magnifies very quickly. That sort of snowball effect is terrible as it ensures battles become one sided and the game is basically over halfway through.

The flow of a game is absolutely determined by its progression of resources. Players will naturally fight over the most lucrative resources in the cheapest way possible. If the greatest gains are to be had at home, there is little need to expand. If the biggest sources of income are also the best secured, there is little benefit to raiding. None of these things are good for the game.

A good economic model should place money where the action is. If a source of money is easy, it should lose value (long fought worlds will invariably have one owner and a lot of stuff). If it is too well secured, then it should be made more vulnerable(by pushing for a high risk economy). If nothing else works, blow it up. The key reason of course is to drive conflict on ALL scales. More conflict means more action, more action means more eye candy (and fun, I suppose). A purely exponential economy might have worked well enough for a single map (even then, it had clear diminishing returns and increasing risks in previous games). But in a multi-map environment, it doesn't do these things. It can't. Other answers are needed.

It was used against my arguments. I just wanted to highlight how little merit the the argument had.

Slippery slope is where the loss of one player furthers inhibits their ability to strike back at the opponent and having a comeback. Your example is a little bit weird since it is an example of slippery slope. An example would be this:I beat the enemy army and pushed back my enemy. Now I capitalize from that by reclaiming the wrecks, make mexes on the territory I gained and make a bigger army. That is pretty clearly slippery slope as the loss from one players prevents him from doing much about you getting a bigger army, getting a bigger economy and more territory which further it hinders the losing player from having a comeback.

Edit: Will there be the possibility to add thrusters to a planet and make it go around the solarsystem?
Then you basically have a "deathstar" where you project your power from a single orbital body where you can put on whatever weapon that is in the game on that planet. If that represents your whole force and that you will most likely lose once that planet is destroyed that would be a good thing in my opinion.
If you can simply erupt more and more deathstars because you have such a huge economy from 1 planet I think it would be a bad thing.
I disliked how experimentals usually became obsolete by the time it took for them to go across the map on Supreme Battlefield in SupCom. The exponential growth of the economy made it beneficiary to expand your economy above all else and then as you saw incoming experementals you threw up counters before it reached you. This also put more emphasis on air because of you would need a "standing" air army ready as you wouldn't have time to build counters to air in most cases.

How do you know that Uber isn't thinking about having a local economy with diminishing returns? We simply doesn't know. I just wanna say it is possible and propably favourable to a have diminishing returns.
We will see how either of them works out.

With the ability to destroy planets this could counteract an exponential economy growth and prevent the potential problems from it. So that might be more intuitive and fun than the system I proposed.

This. The general thrust of the argument for diminishing returns seems to keep coming back to this idea that by turtling on one planet, a player will be able to amass an extremely large amount of resources.

What is it that you all think the other players are doing? sitting on their hands? Do you really think that one player turtling one planet will be able to defend it against someone who therefore has uncontested access to the remaining (greater than 1) planets? I seem to recall in SupCom and FA that you could turtle all you wanted on your t3 mass extractors (all 4 of them) that you started with, but you would eventually be doomed because your opponent ended up with t3 extractors on the remaining 20.

Math fail, methinks.

-Stretch

It depends on how and if they implement metal makers/mass fabricators.
Mass fabricators in SupCom where more effective than tech 2 mexes so by the time all mexes had been taken you could basically spam mass fabs making the importance of territory much smaller since the income generated by mexes would be so small compared to the mass fabs.
This was in most people opinion a bad implementation.
FA severly nerfed the mass fab economy in favor of upgrading mexes.
This made territory much more important.
Personally I think the Overdrive system with diminishing returns could be favorable instead of metal makers/mass fabricators as it both incentives territory control and provides to economy to grow with dimishing returns.

Godde has brought up what you might call more radical ideas on the topic than what I initially proposed.



From what I can tell from what he posted the evolution of a mass extractor over time would look like the red line in godde's case (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, godde), while I proposed the blue line. Don't worry about which line is on top or the specific numbers, the graph is meant for nothing more but to note on the shape of the lines.
If you were to continue drawing the lines the blue line would remain level while the red line goes ever slower towards 0.
I'm not even hellbent on the way my particular graph behaves, but I feel it has some good qualities.

I may have said this in every single post I've made in this topic but I'll say it again, technically my suggestion has always provided the players with unlimited resources, what I've suggested is essentially a bonus to untapped/new/fresh resources over resources that have been mined for a long time already.

This doesn't make it worth while to reclaim old mexes/abandon entire planets mined barren (because mexes will always produce something that makes them worth having).

This doesn't stop the scale of the game from growing ever larger, but it can slow the growth down as time goes on compared to static resource production out of mexes. However, it will all depend on how it gets balanced in the end, the way the game plays out and there's always fabricators to consider. Saying that this suggestion stands in the way of ever growing scale is untrue.

This has nothing to do with the 'slippery slope'. As far as I'm concerned the game only needs to create equal opportunities (and this suggestion doesn't change that), if one player gets an advantageous position during play, its through his merits or his opponent's fault. That's fair, no game mechanic needs to change that. I don't want to play some kind of socialist game.

Depreciating mexes does not increase 'micromanagement', yes it makes the economy more complex, much of it can be helped by the UI, but the bottom line is irrefutably that it gets more complex to some degree. What you get in return is making strategic expansion choices more important.

Planetary annihilation doesn't really matter during the timeframe where I would suggest scarcity of resources plays a big part. At least, assuming nobody has the ability to throw space rocks around in the early game. The idea is for resources to be readily available in the early game but eventually dwindle and drive people towards fresh resources around the mid game to encourage spreading across the solar system/galaxy and with it the conflict.

The obvious thing which sets PA apart from the games before it is that we'll mostly be playing our games over a set of maps, instead of a single map. Multiple planets and space rocks of all kinds. Getting to these different 'maps' isn't like building an engineer and sending it off, its almost like building an air transport and loading the engineer, but it is in fact an entirely different kind of infrastructure that is needed to get from one planet to the next, distinct from the infrastructure used for planetary combat (at least this seems like a decent assumption, wouldn't you say?). With static resources coming from your mexes no matter how long you've mined them you're less inclined to expand beyond your spawning planet. Yes, eventually you will, but you'll invest in the spaceflight infrastructure a lot later than when your own dwindling economy is pressuring you to find greener pastures.

Is encouraging the players to get up into space (and simply new territories in general, if for some reason you're playing on a super huge planet) faster really that bad and no fun at all? Can it hurt to have the economy give them a shove in the back?

It seems to me that based on this, a better, simpler way to get your stated end goal (read: force planetary expansion by the players) is to just nerf or remove mass fabs. Based on empirical evidence, the devs know this. You stated it yourself - they made mass fabs less effective in FA.

-Stretch

I would favor getting rid of metal fabs altogether. In TA and SupCom there were a limited number of resource nodes, making fabs necessary to push past the natural limit. That's not a problem in PA since you keep gaining access to more resources. That is until you reach the planet-destroying stage of play, at which point those nodes would become increasingly valuable.

Good point, the abundance of mass in PA means that you wont need to consider utilising mass fabs late game for extra resources.

Of course! I forgot about that! Luckily I can build those risky mass fabs to compensate for the reduced resources.

Thankyou for negating your own argument in one neat paragraph.

He didn't actually negate his argument. It just means you really, REALLY have to think twice before you throw a metal rich asteroid at a metal rich planet just to get rid of a portion of your enemy.

With the absence of mass fabs and non diminishing returns from extractors I think the answer to when you should expand to other celestial bodies is propably gonna be when you can afford to spend the resources to expand without losing mexes to the enemy. The resources spent on traveling to other worlds might be better spent increasing your territory and gaining mexes that way, if the battle isn't too entrenched depending on the map and such.
If you can stream resources directly from another planet I guess the focus will remain on the planet that you both started on since you are probably already gonna have a big army there and if you win, you will have alot of reclaim, extra mexes and the enemy infrastructure will lay in ruins.

With diminishing returns the incentive to keep fighting on the same world diminishes as mexes run out and the incentive to expand to other worlds increases as mexes are giving more income there.
You would still have armies there and if you win the battle there, you gain the reclaim but you might not be that well off unless you expands to other planets.
Units could even be reclaimed to fuel wars on other planets.

Well diminishing returns would kinda undo one of the things that makes these games unique.

But along with asteroid strikes the ability to use a scorched earth strategy would give the impression that you will eventually be forced to leave a world and that the battlefield would become devastated.

To end a game with the only remaining resources on a single moon would be great, and would really add a tense ending to a game when resources really do start to run out.

Where did this 'exponential' economy nonsense come from? It is very much linear.

Now, for nodes producing less over time - that's fine, and can work. In a micro environment. However, on the large scale that PA brings, having large chunks of your economy suddenly disappear, is bad. Having them disappear because some of your 200+ mexes have suddenly become less efficient is frustrating, and out of your control. If you have the time to check through those mexes, and are able to project your mass flow for an extended period of time, hell, you've probably already won your game.

Time spent checking how long until a mex drops to the next 'stage' means time not spent blowing stuff up.

Finite resources, again, probably will not work on this scale. Once a planet is used up, it would risk becoming obsolete. Reclaiming the structures there would be more beneficial than keeping them - beyond any actively producing base, which it would make sense to keep with your resource production.

What's the point in a huge map if you eventually just end up with each player on a planet close enough to the other players to attack, and nowhere else? In the same way that units shouldn't become obsolete, the battlefield shouldn't either.

No, its nowhere near linear in supcom.

To be honest, as long as it's the same for everyone I don't see why it couldn't work. I just like the old tried and tested way and that's my personal opinion.

I agree with your opinion.

1 word:
Gamemode

Another word: modding.