Metal Makers

I voted against Metal Makers. They were one of my few beefs with the original TA. Once you had the power to support them they kinda seemed to make metal veins obsolete. I hate to bring other games into the discussion but Dawn of War had a decent system. Strategic points you had to capture them and once controlled and reinforced awarded Requisition for purchasing units. It was basically TAs metal deposit system with a little bit of extra tacked on. However there were no structures you could just build to produce more Requisition, so you had to go out and take the strategic points and defend them. It was good for forcing you to get out of your base and start getting aggressive.

Considering the random generation, and multiple angles of attack likely to be present in PA, getting players out and about is probably best for game play. Turtling players are probably going to be even more disadvantaged in PA than in most other games, creating a false sense of viability would probably not be doing new players any favours.

Hopefully we can get turtling to evolve into a more appropriate and viable strategy, by getting players to build stronger defences out in the field to protect their metal mines we can turn a open map into a intricate network of high powered turrets to defend all of a players economy across the map.

That way turtles can turret push to the parts of the map they need in order to prepare for the offensive strategy they wish to peruse.

We have an entire solar system to work with. What about harvesting asteroids for metal? They may be difficult to reach, and they may be difficult to build up. But a few extraction points is still extra money to work with, and they can still be blown up. Best of all, they're practically an unlimited resource with unbounded growth, just the way a metal maker economy would work. An asteroid belt has thousands of potential asteroids, easily.

The big challenge is justifying a defense for something that's worth so little in resources. What value is there in protecting a tiny rock with 1 or 2 extraction points? Even if you manage to defend it, how can you ever get your defenders back? The rocket ship alone is a big investment, just to get here. Committing an overkill defense, with no cheap way to get the units back... that's a big loss.

Using asteroids can give an unlimited resource cap, but the resources are a big pain to deal with. It is easy for an opponent to unit-gun their stuff on any rock, destroy the extractors and claim it for his own. It is also easy to just nuke the rocks. It is not so easy to mount a counter offensive, and there is no point spending the asteroid's entire income on defenses. So you spend a lot of money to bring it into play, but anyone can capture it and it's a lot of headache to deal with. Doesn't sound like such a bargain now, does it?

Considering thier use as KEWs and orbiting firebases, and mentions of potentially "boarding" them to divert a KEWs course and such, there should be reasons to protect them beyond thier value in terms of resources.

Mike

Here's a possibly interesting thought. What if asteroids were a finite resource. I mean what if Asteroids only had so much metal in them and that harvesting that metal ultimately destroyed the asteroid, say it was reduced to dust and gravel by the mining process.

This leaves you with a few options for asteroids, they can be resources (temporarily, and finitely), construction/weapons platforms or WMDs. What you do with them is up to you, but ultimately you have a limited number of options and some of them have consequences. It gives you options for metal harvesting, but it affects your strategy, do I harvest it, make it into a bomb or hide a base on it? Well it sounds interesting to me anyway.

Why don't we have it so that the power required grows exponentially while the metal made grows linearly?

1 m = 1 e
2 m = 4 e
3 m = 16 e
4 m = 64 e

And so on and so forth, where you get to a point where it's practical to make very small amounts of metal just to supplement your standard metal production, and impractical to use metal makers exclusively, as the power required for a decent amount of metal far outweighs that metal produced.

Still. The more money you're putting into it, the less profit it's giving back. The only way to really gain money from an asteroid would be through capturing a ton of them, and using minimal defenses.

Another possibility would be to have asteroid harvesting consume the asteroid (I.E. limited resources). Due to an asteroid's extremely small size, it would be very easy to tap them out and render them useless. You would need to constantly find new rocks to continue profiting from them.

I think metal makers should be possible. But of course with there own limitations.

Maybe make the metal makers, core extractors. (Not my idea) A machine that gets metal from the core of a planet but at the expens of a lot of energy.

Possible solutions:
You can make it so that they have a large range. If there are more then one in an area the efficiency goes down.
Make the building very large so you wouldn't wanne spent the space to make more then 1.
Make the building very expensive. (duh )
Make it so that you can only build it on a rock ground for stability, or only certain locations on planets.
Make it so that you can controle how much energy you pump in the building at a constant pace, the more energy the less efficient the building gets.
Make it a big strong building... and if it goes BOOMMM it makes a ******* vulcano.

Make an option in the game that you can disable certain buildings and units.
And just dont use it.

There are also players the enjoy turtleing. Players that aren't that good at rts games. And they just love making big *** bases for the hell of it with infinite energy en metal.

This is just my idea (or the idea's of other forum posts) Think in solutions not problems.

That do you think?

PS. it would be awesome if you could hollow out a moon. You could: 1 make a base in it or something, 2 make it a jumpgate or 3 let it collaps then you extracted the maximum amount of recources. Then there would be half a moon left and some more astroids.
(srry for my crappy english )

I think metal makers should be in Planetary Annihilation because it can create interesting strategies and different possibilities.

For example, there can be a planet that have no extraction points, such as a barren dust-ball with no metal extraction points. And maybe in a match the random generator created a map with a bunch of these types of planets. So then any planets with extractors become very valuable on this match. This might make them a heavy combat zone. And maybe one person sits out of the battle and spends all of his resources making the metal makers. Then oh $%&#, did anyone wonder why he never came to the planets with extractors?

Another way for this situation to go is, maybe someone was able to hold the valuable extractors and noticed that a player was making the metal makers. So the person that spent all of his resources making metal makers is defeated easily, because it was inefficient to do that.

I just think it leaves a door for another option. By all means, I am open to other methods of gaining metal. The overcharge sounds interesting, but unless there is an easy way for my opponent to find out just how 'overcharged' my extractors are, I wouldn't want it.

And lets not forget the option to not allow certain structures or units in a match. With that, most people can be happy and get rid of buildings that they don't like and maybe (but I hope is not the case) buildings that are unbalanced.

tl;dr: HAVE METAL MAKERS IN PA! lol

Scouting how many energy structures the enemy got is 1 way.
Although scouting might be expensive or hard to do.
But if overdriven buildings have visual cues like glowing brightly depending on the level of overdrive and is supplemented by showing how much metal it produces on mouseover or selection it could work.

Alternatively as someone said in this thread, you build other buildings around the metal producing building which overdrives it making it clear how well developed their economy is.

The only reasons to have metal makers you mentioned is for a planet that has no metal extractors... Besides that I don't see any other purpose, because as you said metal makers are very inefficient, to the point that players should even use them.

But that is the purpose. What more do you need? I'll try to elaborate on what I meant in my last post.

I am saying that it is piece of many pieces that can create different strategies.

If if there isn't a basic structure such as a metal maker, there better be a replacement. Otherwise we may start seeing the same strategy over and over again.

Oh look, he is trying to take my extractor, surprise, surprise.

Also seeing a player with many metal makers makes his energy generators a higher priority target to cause havoc for your opponent.

Finally and obviously, in a match with many, many metal extraction points, the metal extractors are the best way to get your metal. Plus if there is extra energy, you can get even more metal by building the metal makers.

And again and most importantly, if there are no metal makers and in a match there are no metal extraction points, what then? I am only saying keep that option available so that if a map comes up with little or no metal extraction points, then the strategy I mentioned before can become valid.

I hope that helped.

EDIT: Spelling mistakes and more ideas.

Or we just not have any planets without Extractor spots?

Mike

Then that can take out the fun of adapting to the situation.

I am however not saying: do not have metal extraction points. I am saying: keep both, and have the possibility to create planets without metal extraction points. So that we can then see different scenarios and hopefully different strategies.

All in all, I believe it will be fun with it all balanced.

If we do however remove the metal makers, there better be something else that can cause differentiation. So that we are not left with nothing but metal extractor makes metal, and energy generator makes energy.

Just to be clear, I am talking about having a metal maker that is similar to TA. Maybe some things can be changed. Like maybe it can deteriorate the planet it is on as mention in the following quote.

But this may be hard to program or balance since it is more complicated than working with two resources. Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance had this with the linking bonuses of structures. So if they start making more and more things deteriorate the surface of the planet, it can get out of hand.

Huh, what? I probably wasn't clear. The mantle extractor would extract metal, and it would demand a high energy upkeep to do so.

I agree that it's difficult to limit a metal resource if it can be built anywhere. There are a lot of angles to try attacking from, but there's no guarantee that any(or all) of them will keep things in check.

@xosk00, creating planets will not create new strategies, it will simply make the game take much longer, and there won't be any spreading out at all. The fun of adaptin to a situation comes from your opponent making a surprise attack with something you weren't prepared for and you adapt to that.

Your statement about it could be fun if properly balanced is exactly the problem. This is almost impossible to balance properly. There are better ways to gain more metal that doesn't involve using energy.

Metal makers provide a different strategy to simply capturing more ground.

Having alternate methods of defeating the enemy is almost always a good thing; it moves a game towards adapting to and out thinking your opponent/s and at the same time moves it away from simply being better at the system and controls.

This creates a deeper and more strategic game.

What I meant was the fact that when it is destroyed, it would ruin the land it was on. And maybe some around it. But the fact that it does, it may make it difficult to balance. Just how much land should be destroyed? That is all. Overall I think this is a good idea.

Adapting to an enemies surprise attack usually falls under tactics. It is a quick thing that can be fixed quickly by moving some defenders to retaliate. And I agree if someone is using quick hit and run tactics throughout the game, it may cause someone to change their strategy so they are not as vulnerable. i.e. Build more defense structures when expanding.

What I mean is that if there are more different maps, it can create a different strategies for the entire game. Again the best way will always be to build metal extractors and they are valuable to defend. But if that is the only way to gain metal, it will be very limiting.

Total Annihilation was fairly balanced. When I didn't bother to go for the metal extraction points and instead gun for the metal makers, it always left me vulnerable from the ones that rushed for the metal extraction points. And about 90% of the time I was defeated, because I never got close the amount of metal he was making.

Edit: Fighting my worst enemy, SPELLING MISTAKES and BAD GRAMMAR!

This poll result is a good showcase of how you shouldn't always trust what forumites demand.

+1