storage

I can agree with automatic logistics. Something simple, if X planets are within range of the planet you are on, you get Y static bonus to mass/energy income.

Of course there would be exceptions, such as solar systems that cannot be practically reached by a supply line.

Why not just have a very simple yet essential logistics system?
I remember Age of Mythology making me and my friends make a big deal of the market to city supply lines, which were the only way to get gold, and therefore also wood, in a more end-game phase. The controls for it were also really simple, just right click which town center to support.

Also i think it might open up some chance for losing players to turn the tables on a big game by resorting to guerrilla tactics, hiding their own assets while attacking the enemy war machine in any weakness it would show.

Well, we can presume that PA's Galactic War is going to be more than a pretty quest map. It's going to be a full-featured metagame, with macro economics, fleet movements, civil wars, all that good stuff. I'm guessing supply lines will be an essential part of the metagame, with the higher-ups making decisions as to which planets should be reinforced with additional supplies, and which planets can be left for a lone commander to conquer.

That is doubtful.

You'd be surprised what kind of crazy stuff units cook up. Planetary Leagues from the MechWarrior series comes to mind.

Even if it isn't included, I doubt Uber would constrict the Galactic War to the source code, we should be able to mod it to our heart's desire.

So yeah, one way or another, supply lines are possible in the future on a large scale.

But back to the original topic, I liked the way SupCom had warehouses and batteries. It added just a bit more realism to the game, and a whole lot more risk-and-reward.

STOP saying mass! Its metal ok! PA is a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, not supcom.

Calm down buddy, it's not easy to overturn 6 years of habit, personally I prefer mass just because it's one syllable.

Mike

Your mistake is thinking the same principle doesn't apply to all war. The general principle is depriving your opponent of supplies to weaken them, allowing you to defeat a force later which you can't defeat now, and applies to war today just as well as medieval times. And can be made to apply to PA quite readily.

The reason siege tactics were such a huge feature of medieval warfare is because at the time architecture was so much more advanced than their weapons technology. It was possible to build a huge defensive structure, allowing even a small garrison of archers and other defenders to defeat a MUCH larger attacking force.

Depending on the logistics system, having localized resources may vastly simplify this process, rather than make it more complicated.

A global flow resource system becomes more complicated to manage as the number of constructors and construction projects increases. As you said, the hundreds of resource sources and resource consumers are balancing loads. This can become very complicated for a player to manage, as if they assign too much construction it can stall everything simultaneously.

However if an engineer has an internal supply count which it uses to build, then it can construct as long as it has internal reserves regardless of the state of your economy, which is actually much simpler both from a CPU and a player management perspective.

True, internal logistics would require transferring resources to the engineer from some other source. However this too is simple for both a CPU and for the player, especially if constructors can automatically patrol back and forth from source to construction.

Localising resources doesn't simplify things. It makes it almost impossible to check the state of your economy, because you'd need to check on each of your engineers to see how they were doing, and then check on each of your power stations to see if they are producing enough energy to resupply the engineers, and then you'd have to make an educated guess as to how things were going.

Comparing that to having only the numbers "production", "used" and "efficiency %" in the top bar of your screen and calling it easiers seems a bit of a stretch.

envisioning the need to check every engineer, power/metal producer to know the state of your economy is a classical case of assuming the worst kind of implementation for a feature.

aside from that, if you are currently looking at a construction site for building/units/etc you don't necessarily need to the global state of your economy, just the available resources at that base.
Sure, a screen where you can see the states of different local resources productions won't hurt.

If every unit has a personal economy, I don't really see any worthwhile implementations where you won't need to check each unit.

Generally speaking, you want to keep an eye on your entire economy. If one of my far off bases runs low on economy, I want to be aware. It means I need some way to check up on each vehicle. Doesn't have to involve going to each unit and checking, but it does mean I'll need a lot of eco-info on my screen so that I can notice when any of them is falling behind for whatever reason.

Simplify the economy in that case, so that you don't need a squillion pieces of information about each economy context. Eliminating energy requirements for anything built by an engineer would be a start.

Yuck. Having two resources means you can do things like having energy-heavy aircraft and metal-heavy navies. Having a "single resource + power" system is basically the same as having a single resource. Why change such an integral part of the genre - look what happened to SupCom 2's economy.

1. Go back and read my damn post. I never said remove energy from units.


2. Sorry to burst your bubble, but everything in Sup2 used mass and energy. It was a dual resource system too. Sup2's economy was broken for other reasons.

You can't just play that card and win an argument.

What you said could be read multiple ways, though I stand corrected knowing you meant something different to what I thought.

You misunderstood me; my point was changing an integral part of the genre (removing streaming & storage, specifically) usually ends badly, but in light of 1, it's no longer important.

But in this case, it's accurate.

A supply system only makes sense if there are situations where your worker units are idle, but can not do any work. If a player fails to keep track of his supplies, then his base can stall, despite having good resources overall. It's stupid. Worker units should be mindless and get the job done as long as there's money in the (main) bank. No one wants to pay attention to a hundred mini storages.

Metal heavy navies on a sea without resources? That had to have been the worst part of TA and Supcom. Talk about 10 minutes of building 3 ships that die in 10 seconds.

Making units cost more energy (1m:2+e:1t) is fine, since it's a flexible resource and it can help lock down certain strong units. It does not necessarily have to be restricted to air units (like supcom/TA), as any advanced unit could cost extra energy. The end result is that a player needs more generators before those units can be produced, acting as a form of tech barrier to push bigger energy.

Making units cost tons of metal is no different from scaling everything up. Reckless scaling causes contradictions between theaters and gives us less robots to fight with. There's no reason we can't have naval craft that are just as cheap and effective as land units.

High metal, low energy units (2m:1e-:1t) make sense for things that you want built quickly, but are expensive at the same time. Basic generators might not require energy at all, always allowing energy production during a crisis. Fast factory production is great for getting a base up quickly in potentially hostile territory. They may be expensive, but every second saved is more time to build defenses or get full production going. In TA, factories were expensive but quick and easy to build. It was a good idea to build more factories from reclamation, rather than waiting for the extractors to stream in.

High time units (1m:1e:2+t) make sense for weapons that are produced by a specialized unit. Nuke launchers and drone builders might build their own armaments efficiently, but outside assistance is slow and ineffective. It may not be allowed at all. This existed in both TA and Supcom, and in the latter it was an annoying tech barrier for upgrading factories.

Aw dammit, now look at what you made me do. I got all ranty. Oh well. :roll:

An entire multi planet campaign can be run off the 2 generators needed to use extractors. That seems a bit silly, isn't it?

Only one structure absolutely needs to cost zero(or very little) energy to keep the game going smoothly. That's the first generator.

A logistical resource system can be really simple to manage.

As mentioned in other threads you can have sort of powergrids providing metal and energy. A construction unit outside powergrids lose buildpower depending on how far it is from the nearest grid.
If you want to increase the buildcapacity on construction units far away from your power grid, you can have special units that can are good at receiving resources at longer ranges thereby making a new powergrid or you can link up your powergrid closer to the construction units.
This makes powerlinks and powersuppliers a strategical target that you can disrupt by destroying it.
If certain units require energy or metal to fire you can severely decrease their rate of fire by destroying the powergrid or powersuppliers next to them.

That's not entirely true. It is said that PA will have a "base egg" that starts you off with some economy already so that you don't have the same boring 5 minutes of building 3 powerplants and a factory each game. So the first power generator could have a reasonable energy cost without breaking the speed of early game

Do we really want powergrids and stuff that makes the game more of a hassle to play? Too much logistics can easily make the game less fun to play because your main game aspect, fighting giant wars with lots of robots and smashing asteroids into plantes, is lost somwhere between building powerlines to the frontline so your bots can actualy shoot?
I could understand a limit of resources to the planet where they are beeing produced and you need big metal teleporters to connect the economies of your planets from a logical standpoint but such a mechanic probably makes colonizing small asteroids and moons a lot more of a hassle.
Personaly I'd rather have fun playing the game than forcing real world logistics problems into a game that wasn't meant to have them in the initial draft of the game idea.
You can build a game around the idea of economic and military supplylines. If you do that it of course is one of the core game mechanics and probably makes the game slow and heavy to play just like war in reality...

Sure you can do loads of stuff for PA but think about what makes the game actually more fun to play not what is close to reality. If you want real robot war study cumputer engeneering and make one xD

Yellow

But WHY would anyone want that? Long distance expansion is already difficult to deal with. It's been difficult in every RTS ever created. It doesn't need to be more difficult.

Yes. The simplest solution is to have none at all. You have metal, and you have energy, and you have units to use it.

There is a real reason to have some kind of planet-bound economy. It helps to encourage front line production and create front line vulnerabilities. Energy is well suited for this, because the ideal is to keep them tucked away on a safe world, and we don't want that. Instead, a planet-bound economy forces generators all over every world, makes energy nodes(geotherm etc.) more valuable to fight over, creates weak points for doomsday weapons(metal worlds), and might even be carried by asteroids to an invasion. Despite this heavily simplified scenario, it will still create a dozen micro economies across the sector. That can be a big chore without first class orders.

Having metal a local resource will drastically limit the ability to pump huge amounts of robots into the front line. That's bad on every single level.

I'm not gonna argue about this in this thread. There are lots of threads about localized economies and supplies already.

I'm just stating that it can be fairly easy to manage while opening up more complex strategies and counter strategies.