storage

So you say(correct me if I'm wrong):
1. Metal must be available to frontlines no matter where it was harvested.
2. Energy must be a local resource
And what do we have as the best solution for these two statements?
Supply lines. They can be quantum gates powered by energy and transporting mass, ship caravans or even containers fired by a transport gun. No matter how, but they would be great to exist, because supply is a great part of strategy, too.

Well you can make a whole game just based around supply without even the actual fighting done by yourself. Supply lines are so super darn complex when you try to aproximate reality...
I'm not convinced they have to be part of a strategy game. If you get too complex in a game and have too many aspects that people have to strategize about the game becomes a chore... do we want that? The game already has more complexity than other RTS games because there are multiple battlefields and the orbital layer as well. I'm not hooked up on the idea of supply lines

Yellow

Yes. Everything about local logistics ends up part of the game, by default.

The ability to use metal is completely dependent on having someone to use it. Thus, engineers and factories are the supply lines. The challenge of bringing units from backwater planets to the front line is no different than the burden of doing the same with raw resources. Using a transport to carry units to the front directly parallels the nanogel facility, which transports raw resources to build units on the front.

It can be. At the worst, energy would encompass everything inside a "gravity well". This includes asteroid bases in orbit, where extra energy plants and storage may be used to assist an invasion force. It doesn't need to be more complex than that.

For example, planetary defenses/factories/doomsday weapons can be shut down by destroying the local power plants. Energy nodes can serve as key bombing targets, and as excellent places to stage an invasion. Commanders won't be able to use their abilities without first setting up a base. Units that demand energy (like cloakers) will always be tied to something that is plainly visible and relatively close to battle. When zooming out to a strategic view, energy levels can show if defenses are active, or if a planet is in crisis.

All of these things are possible because of a local resource, and the added complexity isn't too great. You have to worry about building generators with every base, which is something you do from the very start of the game. If that doesn't work, then make energy global like everything else. I think it would be a tragic loss, though.

I'd honestly rather that supply lines are placed in this game the same way they are in Supreme Commander.

They're not.

Remember, you're playing as a retardedly advanced robot capable of building bases on far flung planets with no external input whatsoever, which I had assumed to be the entire point of the Commander, anyway.

Simply have Metal(mass) and energy be tracked on a planet by planet basis, there's no need for it to be more complex. This still provides a target for enemies to raid, as no outside economy can support it beyond simply dropping units in from orbit.

It's easier on the player, doesn't force semi-vague ideas and makes it easy for the devs.

Except how do you start building on another planet in the first place? Just make the economy universal.

EDIT: Although If only energy was planet-specific, I suppose you could have a mobile energy generation unit that you could drop in to form a beachead.

I think that's why the commander had a reactor. Unless its only reason is to make him go boom.

Making the initial generators cost no energy would also suffice. This was done in Balanced Annihilation. If you had a huge amount of metal, it was actually pretty quick to get things set up.

Then you have to use your commander to go to another planet? Seems very limiting.

That's quite an ugly hack.

TA's version of that was the wind generators.

Low cost, low power generation at an unpredictable rate, but a good stepping stone in the beginning of the game to afford the more expensive solar generators.

TA generators still cost energy to produce. They were much cheaper than solar, however.

Yeah, so what? It's been tried before and it works. It's even easier if engies produce a bit of energy, as they'd automatically bring enough to get things started.

Hacks are always bad. They break immersion, make it harder for new players and can't be intuited, as they don't follow the ground rules of the game. Engies would have to produce a non-trivial amount, and that leads to abuse by spamming them as an energy source (in addition to the existing issues of engie spam). A dedicated mobile energy production unit would solve the problem without a hack and without causing more issues with engineers.

Like the carriers in TA?

yep, but maybe more purposely designed as resource units.

Repairing aircraft, radar, sonar and energy generation.

Why want any less?

What ground rule are you referring to? Units can cost whatever they need to cost. It makes sense that energy can be developed without worrying about energy (just as a lumber mill doesn't cost lumber or a refinery doesn't cost vespene). There's nothing hacky about it.

Energy free energy addresses a game ending issue where losing energy creates a permastall. The only way to solve this is with a generator that costs 0 energy. Adding wheels to a generator does no such thing.

Mobile energy might be interesting, but its real uses are limited. It is effectively a way to move power between worlds, so its utility depends entirely on how travel is handled. If asteroids can carry generators, then the mobile unit is pointless. Bigger and better things can be brought to an attack by default. If teleporters can bounce units around, then the risk of stationary exploding bombs becomes vastly trivialized. Or you lose power and the teleporter shuts off, once again rendering the mobile energy pointless. Whoopee.

So what would a mobile energy device do?

You seem to have missed something. The whole point of the mobile energy unit was to solve the initial need for energy on a new planet, under your idea that mass is universal, but energy planet-local. You're assuming that structures won't cost energy normally; only under that assumption is this not a hack. Given that change would be a departure from the genre, it's a big assumption to make.

I'm not sure what you mean by asteroids carrying generators, if you're suggesting that they can be used to transport structures, that's pretty crazy as it's not like they'll survive the impact. Teleporters do make things interesting, but I hope that if they do implement them, they aren't done like Sup Com 2 and allow units to go to an arbitrary end-point. Even if they did though, mobile energy would still be needed to be able to construct on a new planet.

I've never seen someone lose all their power in a game of either TA or Sup Com when they weren't in the final stages of being eliminated. The mobile energy unit was not envisioned to solve this problem, and it's non-issue in any case.

I'd rather problems were solved with in-universe realistic solutions rather than arbitrary "we'll make the first X units free" or by not needing a resource to build it. That's like giving Rock-Paper-Scissors type bonuses to units vs other units, rather than utilising intrinsic attributes such as speed, health, cost and type/style of weapon to achieve differentiation. It's lazy and boring game design.

You're forgetting that we have an orbital layer to work with. Anything that goes into a planet's gravity well has no need to crash down on the surface. A rock can stay in orbit, with whatever structures that happen to be built on it. That could very well be generators. Those generators may even have been needed to move the asteroid through the void, so there's always a seeded energy source on a planet.

Orbital assistance provides resources, and potential moon bases pump out massive fusion power for the big land war below.

I guess the ultimate question is how much energy an invasion needs. Setting up a bunch of factories isn't a big deal. Even with Zero-K's triple-1 system, energy was a fairly trivial expense when planting factories. Using Comm abilities could drain a bunch. Using laser defenses drains more energy. Activating energy based abilities and bulk teleporting could drain fusion plants. Energy->metal shenanigans can drain whole planets dry.

But those latter things are all optional. The first priority when invading a world is getting up a base and pumping out units. It would not take much time to spam enough generators to get that going, no matter what they cost. The worst case scenario is that tier 1 generators cost less energy than most things, because their purpose is to turn a hunk of metal into energy, not turn E into more E. Whether it is zero or just a very small number depends on how other E sources work.

If engineers produce a tiny amount of energy (in TA they were 9-24 compared to solar's 20), then they will always have enough to get some generators started. It may be ugly at first, but a dozen guys will build it up sooner or later. It satisfies the desire for mobile energy straight up(just build more, you always need more). It also justifies more Comm use, since he has the big storage and resources to get things going no matter how a planet is. The Comm might even have a bonus for this, if one wants an ability similar to the ZK facplop.

Energy nodes would become a huge factor for invasions. A geothermal/hydrocarbon node can give big energy while being very cheap to build. Capturing one would greatly assist an invasion as it can support a lot more development. If the opponent wants to blow them up, well... lava is just more geotherm energy.

I don't know if someone's proposed this before- but how about a 'power/mass' relay tower building? It would essentially be a building that would connect a world to the main 'pool' of your economy. Without it, you couldn't build anything on the planet (or just restrict it to the planetary economy). But if you build it, it allows you to build stuff using all of your income.

That allows people to build stuff on another planet, while giving it a vulnerable location while getting set up on the opponent's planet.

i believe there is a topic like this in the normal area, and logistics should only work solar system to solar system. if you don't have it any smaller you don't have a logistical nightmare ( :lol: that's logistics for ya) like getting resources from A, B,and C to D so you can have a unit launcher on the moon.

Star Ruler is a good example of how local planetary economies can mesh with a sector economy. In short: Holy crap it's a lot of trouble.

The subject has been brought up at least a dozen times. It isn't that good an idea for several reasons:
1) It is a single point of failure. Kill it, and the invasion is over. Laaaaame.
2) How does it get set up? Initial resources are a big deal when setting up an invasion. Killing those resources can very well kill the invasion. Lame.
3) Where do the resources come from? A relay only works if resources can come from somewhere else. This means you have to be fully aware of every single economy in your empire at once. That's very messy.
4) Anything that moves units across the cosmos, automatically moves metal across the cosmos. Unit cannons and bulk teleports already work as mass relays.
5) Anything that moves structures across the cosmos, automatically moves bases/power/everything to other worlds. Asteroids, generators, and any mobile source of energy already works as a power relay.
6) Anything that can build, already counts as a relay for construction power. Nothing gets done without fabbers and factories, making them the ultimate relay that every invasion needs to succeed.