Economy

Can someone pls explain the economy System of PA for me? I am not that sure about it anymore. There are Mass and Energy right? And a Income/Spending rate? how do you generate Income(Buildings/ Geysers or worker?)? How is the Income/Spending managed? is there a income cap? What about ressource caps, can you only save a limited amout of resources? will resources deplete? what about expansions?
Thanks for your help and answers!

Re: Ecomomy

I don't know about PA specifically, but in supreme commander you had energy generators that could be placed anywhere and mass generators that must be placed on specific points.

They generate a constant flow of mass and energy which you can use to build or power a cloak and such

Then you had storage that could be placed separately and you could use the mass and energy from those when you're income drops below zero

Re: Ecomomy

you got a mass income per sec and a energy income per sec, Those are generated by buildings(mass extractor and energy plants) and/or the Commander.
based on the cost of a Unit / Building and the Time needed to build it there then is a drain in mass and energy per second.

let say a unit cost 100 mass 100 energy and needs 50 seconds to be build. So you have a drain from 2 mass and 2 energy for this unit per second while building it.
In Supcom/TA it was possible for enginers to support factories or other engis. So the Unit/Building will be build faster, but this then increases the drain per second.

There also is are storages for mass and energy. if you produce more then you spend the storage will fill up. If you spend more then you the storgae will drain. If it is at zero building projects will slow down to equal your current income.

Re: Ecomomy

Did you pull an Idiocracy on purpose?

Anyway it's a streaming economy where you have inputs/outputs that get resolved. If you have more energy/metal it's stored until you storage is full. If you have less it pulls from storage until it's empty. If you have no storage and a deficit stuff starts shutting down and/or building slower.

Re: Ecomomy

The key is in Gruenerapfel avatar.

Gruenerapfel, welcome to the (probably) best RTS you'll ever play.*

*for the next few years at least. Until Uber makes a new one. Or someone else. But it will be Uber probably.

Anyway, The streaming economy is the best model I've seen in many years of RTS playing.

Re: Ecomomy

I've found that the key to the streaming economy is to know how much your engineers, commander, and factories will drain when they do things, and to make sure you have enough gross income to handle it. However, that view is partly derived from Zero-K, where metal and energy are equally spent and the metal and energy drain rate of any construction unit or building is constant.

I find doing it this way helps me to plan and time out when I can build more factories or engineers/caretakers (engineer tower) to speed up production and generally ramp up in scale, based on how many metal points I have.

Re: Ecomomy

... no mass.. building is slower...
... no Energy.. buildings/units shutt down(also Metal Generator!) so always have enaugh energy

Re: Ecomomy

Imagine a bucket.

Production units/buildings fill the bucket.
Construction units/buildings drain the bucket.

The more production, the faster the fill rate.
The more construction, the greater the drain rate.

Fill the bucket at a rate faster than you drain it, it fills up.
Once full it overflows, and you start wasting resources.

Drain the bucket at a rate faster than you fill it, it empties out.
Once empty, you're limited to draining it at a rate no greater the rate you're filling it at, and production is slowed accordingly.

Storage buildings increase the size of your bucket.
You're less likely to overflow it, and you have a greater buffer available to smooth out spikes in demand (i.e. drain rate).

Re: Ecomomy

That is an awesome analogy. ^_^

Re: Ecomomy

Thanks for the answers!
I havent played TA that much and wasnt realy sure about the income System. I mostly play Starcraft as u can see, and many other games dont have streaming ecomomy

Re: Ecomomy

Off topic a bit, but I've heard of this feature of Zero-K and it sounds strange to me. From a learning point of view, I can see that it would be handy for every unit to cost the same metal/energy. From a game variety point of view though, it seems to mean that you would never have any reason to vary your production of resource buildings, there will always be an optimal ratio which you have to stick to.

So you'd get no energy-heavy builds for air-focus like in Forged Alliance for example.

Re: Ecomomy

The trick in Zero-K is that excess energy production is converted into metal, but only if that energy production is close enough to a metal extractor it can boost. But it has receding pay-off, so you want your energy net to connect as many metal extractors as possible for the most efficient conversion.

It's a different kind of balancing, in the end. What's optimal depends on the terrain and the part of it you can protect more than on what kind of stuff you're building. It works pretty well.

Re: Ecomomy

If you want to get an introduction to the system, I suggest heading over to GOG.com and buying TA cheap. It will be a bit of a struggle to get used to the interface at first, since you're a Starcraft player (in TA, left and right click are reversed, for example), but once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to judge the merits of the streaming economy system for yourself.

Alternately, you can try out Zero-K, which is completely free. It's a game based on TA that adds a lot of new features and is a bit smoother to play. It's a little more complex than TA, but I suggest it because the interface is a little more modern and it's free. (There are other games that use the same engine as ZK, but I feel they aren't quite as polished for a new player.)

While I love the game I won't suggest Supreme Commander: FA because it does cost a bit more than the others, in addition to being more complex.

Of course, you could also head over to youtube and watch some videos of the games in action. (TA tends to be the easiest to follow. I myself made some gameplay videos showing off the basics, with an emphasis on playing slow and simple, but they are old and low res.) However, videos can only do so much at showing off the system.

Re: Ecomomy

I tried Zero-K, but it always lagged terrible, and i didnt understand much. The visuals werent very clear to me. I also played supreme commander 2 on a Friends Computer Somtimes.
About the reversed mouseclicks... i would realy like to have an option to reverse it!(left click select/right click move)

Re: Ecomomy

Energy is also used to power radar, cloaking, and shields, so while the idea of an energy-focused air build isn't really a thing (not to mention that starting with air in 1v1 is typically unwise, since they can't easily control the map), you need more energy to support a shield factory build.

In general, the optimal ratio is around 1:1, but favouring energy. However, the focus of the game is more on directly interfering with your opponent's economy than with perfectly crafting your own.

Supreme Commander 2 has the same income system, but the spending system of StarCraft. As for Zero-K, I agree that the visuals aren't the clearest, which is why I've turned on a couple widgets to make things clearer (Outline and XRayShader). As for lag, I suppose that depends on where you are geographically and a little on what kind of computer you had at the time.

Re: Ecomomy

Supreme Commander 2 is less complicated right? No flowing ressources.
About Zerok lag: I live in Europe. My computer should be fine.... nearly all games run on it(low settings, Starcraft runs without problems), the CPU is week tho(CPU heavy games with lots of Physiks lag unless Physik ist turned of). Are the requirements for ZeroK hight? oO the game is fairly small and its free 2 play... so i didnt expected high requirement.....

Re: Ecomomy

You can switch the left and right clicks, but there are still some issues because the system isn't directly analogous to Starcraft. For example, by default left clicking your own unit selects it. Left clicking and dragging does a box select. Left clicking on ground gives selected units a move order. Left clicking on enemy units gives the attack order (which is only really used to focus fire, otherwise units attack on their own). Right clicking ground deselects a unit. And so on.

Essentially, left click does everything in TA, so while you can swap it with right click, it turns out it's even less comfortable. (In my own experience.) Better to suffer for 10 minutes while you figure it out.

Re: Ecomomy

So its pretty much like the old C&C control? :/ but even C&C had an option to make it like the "standart" control. I think left to select and right to give order has a big advantage....u only need to click once to select other units.

Re: Ecomomy

We'll have to see what the economy turns out in PA.

In particular, I really liked TotalA's original system of "strategic" metal and "on demand" energy. It was possible to build up a fairly long lasting reserve of metal with minimal investment in storage. However, energy reserves were incredibly volatile and it was not possible to store enough energy for most projects. Even moderate units would require more energy than the default storage, making any power blackout a huge catastrophe in very short time.

That was the most annoying thing about ZeroK. Energy had the same "weight" as metal, which led to both resources having very large reserves and little real difference in function. This was made even more apparent by the overdrive system, which made the difference between energy and metal nearly invisible.

Re: Ecomomy

I don't think "annoying" is the right word to use here. Economy is easier to balance when energy and metal have the same "weight".
Arguably running out of energy and stalling all your mexes is much more "annoying" in SupCom and TA.
Metal is still the "strategic" resource because you require map control to make more mexes while energy can be made anywhere in Zero-K.
I agree that stalling on energy doesn't have the same impact in Zero-K but I think stalling is mostly a failure of your own rather than something that is easily exploitable for the enemy. Even in SupCom and TA you can rarely force the enemy into a crippling energy stall.