Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

The system doesn't have to apply just to production.

Moving workers takes time. It encourages building too many workers.

You seem to think priority is a crutch which people would use to patch poor situations. This crutch would then lead to their economy being screwed but not realising it until it is far too late. You are wrong on all those points and don't seem to know what you are talking about.

With respect, this is ignorance. The priority button in ZK is off by default on everything. It is something you switch on for a selection only. What it does is provide a way of effectively switching off every other source of drain with a single click, where that drain would elsewise be reducing input into the prioritized project.

Its simple, very easy to understand and staggeringly useful in high level play - where you might have ten constructions on the go around the map and then suddenly need one of them to complete quickly at the expense of all the others (a half completed turret that has enemy raiders moving towards it, for example). If all these builders have queues that took micro-time to set up, cancelling all of them to prevent their various resource drains for a few moments,then re-instating the build queues for each constructor again afterward is an incredibly laborious way of managing build power vs clicking a toggle on. This certainly doesn't make controlling economy harder and it is optional, off by default - it just makes a requirement for resource channeling easier to action.

This thread has been seriously derailed off of the economy system. I obviously don't have time to respond point-by-point to every post here but I think you guys understand where I'm coming from. I'm sorry that some of you are going to be disappointed in some of the decisions I make but it's very very clear that there is no way I can please everyone.

My official stance here is simply this, PA is a game but it's also a platform for other people to innovate on. If people feel really strongly about certain things they will have the opportunity to try them out themselves.

I have a vision for this game. That vision has already been seriously revised by the community but the feedback I get here is only a part of the overall process. That vision does simply not include being as hardcore as zero-k which has some great innovation but is ultimate not approachable for a normal gamer. I'm glad that those who worked on zero-k realize that they've created a game that caters to a very hardcore part of the community.

I'm very much a KISS (keep it simple stupid) kind of person. Transparency and simplicity. Combining many simple elements to create emergent complexity is the way of TA and it's what I'm trying to accomplish with PA.

Pretty much. In an ideal world that info would be telegraphed somehow or we would come up with a better control system that doesn't require them.

Exactly how it should be.

In my opinion, because of the top-down perspective, a player usually doesn't really feel like he's a part of a RTS game's world, so when he's facing himself, he's already been taken away from that world's experience, the distraction from the UI is trivial compare to this.

Then I don't understand why are they required but the others are not. We can have only two stances like starcraft, or don't have any stance at all.

i'm with neutrino, in fact so far i've been with him for almost every post he has made good job neutrino , keep it up

I agree that ZK is not approachable, but disagree that it is even remotely hardcore. On the contrary, playing it at even high levels requires less than 25 commands/minute - people can often play fairly close to their normal Elo while inebriated simply because automation and powerful controls make dexterity, reaction time and remembering housekeeping activities less of a factor than making the right decisions, which a good player often does with unconscious reflex . Compared to C&C Zero Hour and RA3, which I also play(ed) extensively, the demand for muscle memory, attentiveness and memorization of the interface is several orders lower - to me, that says softcore.

The poor approachability is due to the lack of an accessible tutorial, single player or even a main menu - just a multiplayer client that throws the player straight into rooms with 6000 hour+ TA vets to get mauled. The automation/interface massively increases accessibility.

I wholly agree that KISS design philosophy results in the most enjoyable, commercially successful games. I completely disagree that TA was transparent OR remotely simple (or intuitive!) - it was a fantastic game for its time specifically because it had incomparably more depth (and beautiful graphics, and 3D terrain, and awesome music, and a way more powerful interface) than its popular contemporaries - Red Alert, Dark reign and Starcraft. It won 57 awards, including Best Game of All Time It was also very, very complicated, brutally unforgiving of economic blunders, and playing it to anything approaching a high level required intimate knowledge of every unit that was certainly not accessible to the player through any means but experience and modding tools. It was exactly for this reason that the Spring game engine (read: open source TA remake) introduced so many interface improvements, like automatic metal makers.

I dont want to present myself as an opposition because I agree with all of your design goals, I am just curious to know how you are creating the gameplay implied within the kickstarter video (eg. simultanious base development, land battle, expansion to other planet and then interaction between planets) without delegating to some degree of economy/basebuilding/unit control tautomation.

edit:
Apologies if this is offtopic.

So I'm guessing every time we want to plant a base on another planet during the game, we will fire off a commander + egg or engineer + egg, so the economy will be planet-specific?

There is a very mistaken notion that unit behaviour scripts creates min-maxing gameplay. The truth is only the underlying game mechanics can lead players to want to min-max their strategies, which is just the natural order of humans' desire to solve problems, in which case that gameplay is already there. The desire to get rid of it by making it require a dozen mouse clicks is just running counterproductive to the appeal of your game. The demand for better unit scripts is just a formality.

There is also a mistaken notion that fighting your opponent's plans isn't fighting your opponent - that the game will just 'play itself'. Plans still have to be formed by players. Without going over the whole mind reading aspect, strategy games are (theoretically) about players pitting plans against each other, while also adapting theirs on the fly depending on how they interact. Chess is about coming up with the better plans over your opponent - do you really care how the players have to move their hand over the board to pick up and move the pieces?

Regarding what job a user interface is supposed to do: Theoretically, the ultimate interface would have to be direct thought input. One should be able to form a plan or decision no matter how grand or small the instant they conceive it. Why waste time ordering the building of two turrets by moving your mouse and clicking over a construction unit, the build turret icon, then two precise locations on the terrain, if it were possible to just think all this and be done with it. Does everyone not agree with this assessment? - So barring this, the job a user interface should do is emulate this as excellently as possible, by making the distance between user thought and practice as direct and short as possible.

Agreed, and in a game where the interactions between player & unit can be modded, the mod/script will only be limited by the underlying gameplay. Which is my only disagreement with Neutrino - either he will need to eliminate mods that turn on/off engineers in this case, or those mods will make the element / feel that he is building for, obsolete. The only factor left is to determine whether this is such a game-affecting issue that people are going to bother getting the UI mod. Admittedly, some people really didn't like using the auto-mass fab UI mod for FA either.

I'm fine with that though - if PA comes out and the level of automation that I desire isn't quite at what I like, then as long as we can roll out mods of our own to make it how WE like it, there is nothing to worry about.

Sure.. and as long as we can cater to different people and thought processes with different mods that are easily shared and rated and reviewed, I think you'll end up with a couple different UI styles that emphasize different things. A minimalist UI with an emphasis on visible unit state effects as proposed by Neutrino will be a perfect starting point. Often it's too easy to just slap some data points on the UI and call it a day - I'm all for putting the effort in to thinking it through and displaying it visually as much as possible.

KISS doesn't necessary related to being approachable, Go is a really elegant game, but it is much less popular compare to games with more complex rules like mahjong or Xiangqi in China, perhaps it is because the emergent complexity in Go is too much for some people.
I would argue that the unit AI used in 0K is something that fit the KISS, just because the units can kite or strafe themselves, which can be understood easily, they get complex counter relationships without damage types or making the game too micro heavy.

I don't necessarily disagree with this but you also have to admit that the underlying game mechanics aren't the interface. I think you are mixing them up. In your thought example it doesn't mean the turrets instantly appear, it just means that you've given the order for them to appear. You could still have a game where the mechanic of placing orders in advance isn't allowed in the game. What you are asking for is not the ability to give an order to quickly turn things on/off (which I agree with) but the ability to program the units to do the things you want before they are needed. If that ability isn't part of the gameplay it's not an interface issue, it's a design issue. Where we draw the line on automation is a different axis from how powerful the UI is to carry out the decisions that are allowed. It's aesthetics much more than you seem to want to admit.

In all things if you take them to their extreme they tend to break down. I brought up the example earlier of simply removing all of the graphics from the game and simply playing with icons that have the same abilities. Would that be ok with you? I guarantee you there is a contingent of players that would be fine with no graphics because that's not what they care about.

Please realize that different people get different things out of games. Everything you are saying is simply your take on the "best" way for games to work. These things are not nearly as black and white as you make out. At least I admit that my opinion is simply an opinion. It's just that I happen to be the one having to do the work to make it happen so I get the final choice (responsibility and authority cannot be separated).

I never stated interface and mechanics are the same. An example of an underlying game mechanic is simulation. An example of a design decision is cannon shells deliberately moving slowly that it's possible to dodge them with fast units. If players figure out they can better their game performance if their fast units dodged cannon shells, you will see players try to order their units to dodge shells, regardless of the user interface in place. That gameplay is already there.

I'm not sure how you inferred in my example that I want turrets to instantly appear, that it wasn't just about giving orders.

Graphics is about the natural evolution of reducing abstraction in games. I'm not sure this is a good comparison.

The fact of the matter is players often already predetermine what they want their units to do. Their ability to convey this to games has simply been limited by the user interfaces in place. In this thread's instance, I don't want my construction and factory projects using more than the optimal rate of energy required.

I'm don't know what player looks at the Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander games and thinks they would enjoy min-maxing their energy usage by carefully monitoring the on/off state of every factory and builder unit. If such people are out there, I'm curious to know their exact numbers in the grand scale of the RTS market.

Well, Neutrino has said mods can do it, so I'm cool.

Funnily enough, I play ZK at 75 icon level, which means it's practically always icons unless I zoom in to micro units. >.>

I enjoy playing Defcon, and basicallly all units in that game are icons.

While I'm not entirely behind Neutrino, he's experienced enough to know what he's doing, so I'll trust him to make a great game :lol:

I might just have to get into modding myself.

I think I've made myself pretty clear here but I'm doing arguing about priority systems. It's simply too much time on my side for an issue that's fairly minor in the scheme of the game.

Remember, I need to look out for all of the players here.

Neutrino is a uber experienced veteran, but this might be his first time as a lead designer. Considering even guys like Chris Taylor can make some mistakes, I'm not totally convinced that Neutrino is rational with everything yet.
The UI design might be the most risky part for developing a multiple playgrounds RTS game, really hope the outcome will be great even without those automations.

Don't you think this makes it even more important that I stick with my vision of the game instead of getting randomized then? At least it will be coherent instead of being random. Bottom line is that I am building the game that we've envisioned in the promo video because that's what people are expecting.

Also games are much more of a collaboration than most people seem to think. My job here is vision holder and project coordinator but we do things all the times that come from the team as well as from you guys. Just because we don't implement every single thing every person on the forum wants doesn't mean you guys aren't contributing to the game. I think we are on the same page most of the time. My keep it simple philosophy exists as a result of the last 20 years of making games where it became quite obvious that the things you leave out are just as important as what you put in.

Our games are a reflection of the people that make them which is why I've concentrated so hard on building a team that reflects the correct philosophies. Sorian doing the AI, Elijah doing pathfinding for example are bringing things to the game that we wouldn't get otherwise.

I will never claim that any of this is easy or that we always make the "right" tradeoffs in design. But somebody has to make a decision on this stuff and this time around it happens to be me. C'est la vie.