Visually representing wasting resources

Background:
The hardest thing I had to learn to do while playing TA and SC was to be able to use my economy in the most efficient way. In order to have "the most efficient" economy you should spend 100% of all the metal you generate, while keeping a reserve of energy. In SC you would generally build as many factories as you can, and pump out units en masse. The more mass extractors, the more factories you can support. It also didn't make sense to me when your extractors are working as hard as they possibly can even though you have no storage for all of these "new resources" that your resource structures are making.

Problem:
As it stands in SC, nothing tells you outright that you are wasting resources. Some GUI mods will have the mass bar flash if you aren't spending any mass. However, you either need to memorize a build-order that you know will not stall your economy while not wasting resources, or you need to watch your mass and energy bars for when they start to fill.

Solution:
What if wasting resources is visually represented in gameplay? I propose that when a player hits the maximum of his or her resource storage capactiy, every extra resource structure will switch off and into its "hardened" mode (if that is still a thing). What I mean is: All metal resource structures are on and actively moving/being dynamic while the metal bar isn't full. When the bar does reach full, the game calculates how many extractors need to be on to keep the bar from draining. Every unused extractor then switches off. The same would go for energy structures; everything is on until the energy bar is full, then extra power gens are switched off. When the bar does start draining, due to a high-energy weapon firing or you order 20 fabbers to start building, everything will switch back on. To add more visibility, resource structures could have a green light when on and a red light when off (or something similar).

I think this would be an almost unnoticed change to veteran players. However, for new players it would be game-changing.

Pros:
Intuitive.
Easily readable.
Unused resource structures are inherently harder to kill (if a hardened off-mode is implemented).
Encourages good gameplay behavior for new players.
Allows veteran players to gain valuable information from scouting.

Cons:
I have very little experience with coding, and cannot honestly think of a good way to implement this. The best thing I can come up with is to silently "name" every resource gen a number as it is finished being built (energy and metal being in separate counts). Every tick, the game will ask, "Is the resource bar full?" If no, nothing happens. If yes, then the game will deactivate the resource gen with the largest number name, and loop until resource input matches output. This will make your early resource structures the most primary; they will turn off last. Resource structures that you build later in the game will be deactivated first, making them more "secondary".

This system also assumes that the time for structures to switch from on to off is minimal, to avoid disastrous penalties from having structures destroyed.

Example:
A new player just started a skirmish, and begins to build his or her base. After building a factory he or she starts pushing out power gens like crazy. However, after building the 6th power gen or so, the structure switches off immediately and goes into armor mode. A previous two power gens also switch off. What happened? The player then notices that the energy bar is completely full. The player thinks to themselves: "Well, I should stop building power gens. This isn't energy tycoon." The player now starts building metal extractors. After a a few are built, the new one and the last 3 switch off. "What happened now? Oh, the metal bar is full. Maybe I should start spending it."

Example 2:
A veteran player is playing on a large map against another veteran player. Player 1 sends some air scouts over player 2's base. Player 1 notices that the factories in Player 2's base are not producing, but his or her energy gens are all still on. What does this mean for Player 1? Player 2 could be:
Building something out somewhere that Player 1 does not know about.
Just finished building a high-energy artillery piece that Player 1 doesn't know about that is now firing at Player 1's base.
Pushing out energy storage somewhere in preparation for something that uses massive amounts of power.
etc...
Player 1 then decides that he or she should start scouting out around the planet for something bad. Player 1 then finds that Player 2 is rushing a nuke.

Footnote:
Thank you for reading. Please Discuss.

PS: TL;DR=Problem/Solution. This is my first post. I apologize for the wall of text!

There's no limit to the resources you can extract so extractors that keep working aren't wasting anything compared to ones that don't.

The easy way to see if you are wasting anything is to simply look and see, if you are in the green then you are wasting. There's no real downside to going negative as everything will keep working as fast as it can on limited resources.

Right. I thought to reinforce when you are wasting resources, "unused" structures are visibly off.

It is very easy to glance at your resources and see that you are wasting. A new player might not immediately understand that, though, and having your own base reinforce that is a good way to encourage good habits. Veteran players can also get more intel from scouting.

I think it's a cool visual effect that makes sense logically.

Though, it would just be easier to have a warning come up that says "Wasting!" near your resource bar.

I could just see an oponents base and know they are at full resources and just not attack them because of it

There were multiple issues with wasting resources:
1) No obvious "spend everything you have" mindset. Tooltips and game advice should lean players into spending every last ounce of mass they have. Accomplishing this goal is up to the player.
2) No connection between units that need mas, and what they spend for mass. Fixed to the infinity+1 in PA, perhaps even more so than strictly needed.
3) Holy crap reclaiming was fast in Supcom. A mass windfall would create an energy stall in short order. PA has some solutions, but it is unknown how reclaiming will work at this time.

Anyway, there's no reason to complicate a situation a player should NEVER find themselves in. Money should be spent, and rewarding the opposite is a toxic learning device.

I don't quite understand those last two lines of yours; were you talking about the resource generators automatically becoming hardened with no other input? If that's not what you meant, then you misunderstood the OP's aim?

Anyways, I've played the original SupCom and Forged Alliance, and SupCom 2 (even though that Economy is certainly terrible), not to mention I've actually started playing TA days ago. I've played those four games for quite a while now in total, and even then I still can't wrestle to my favor the Economy system. Then again, I haven't looked for any no-doubt-available tutorials on the Economy... Eheheheh...

Lets not forget the resources are going to work slightly different this time around.
So the aim would be use mass as much as you can and have enough energy to sustain the building while powering you base.

Units don't cost energy using nanolath costs per lath well at lest far as i understand the plan hope it works in practice.

I only truly learned this last year.....

And it really should be the first thing you get taught when learning these games when coming from most RTS games when you don't really need to, or if your power in those games isn't a resource you waste.

The problem is now that I now find FA games such a micromanagement nightmare (In that there is so much to think about at any one time, rather them me saying it's bad) to manage my spending (Or to make sure I am spending all of my mass without a noticeable slowdown, 90% efficiency or bust) that I spend even more time playing SupCom2 then before......I find it to be the modern military shooter of the RTS genre, stupid, but really fun.

Failing to spend your money isn't something that should be rewarded. Hardening extractors and saving their energy are bad things to give a player when he should have never overflowed on resources in the first place. Save the noob friendly mechanics for disasters that are truly out of a player's control.

I think if a player overflows on mass, it should spill all over the place. If you really want it, go over and reclaim it. If the enemy wants it, go over and reclaim it.

I can't remember a single RTS where it was good to have resources banked up. It is always better to have tanks on the field instead of money in the bank. At least if you want to fight a war.
TA-style wasting just makes it a bit harder to notice the problem, because resources don't bank up, so the "Ah I just got overrun, because I had 2000 gold banked"-effect is not there.
That's why the "mass wasted"-stat at the end of the game is really helpful.

Well there were less negative effects (Or at least you could get away with not constantly streaming resources out).

I think that representing this scenario well is crucial for newbies to learn the game, since newbies have a tendency to hoard resources and that's bad in any game, let alone a flow-style game where those resources will vanish into the void, never to return.

It doesn't need to be too complicated, though. The UI just needs to flash as obnoxiously as if you were stalling. Maybe a nice Zelda-low-hearts-style beeping to really get the point across! Ok, that's mostly a joke... mostly.

Was funny when I first played zero-k and the game's UI told me not to build additional factory's, and instead just assisting engineers.

A little bit of me inside died.......you have failed to replace TA.

For some reason this is exactly what I was envisioning too. Overflowing on resources? Cool. LETS SEE IT. A small fountain of mass blocks pumping out of your extractors would catch your eye pretty quick... and leaving them there for the enemy to reclaim is just brilliant. It gives the noob player a chance to recoup their mistake by spending some time & effort reclaiming the mass, and it gives the enemy a bit of a bonus if they conquor the area too.

I actually really like this idea.

1. It's kind of hilarious. Metal spewing everywhere...
2. It's visual on the map, which Uber loves.
3. It clearly communicates that something is going wrong and the steps to correct it are intuitive (stop wasting mass and go reclaim what you spewed)
4. It's memorable - because it takes some extra work to go clean up your mess, you'll learn really quickly not to waste metal.
5. It adds new tactical options: you can steal metal from your opponents if they're not paying attention to their economy, or you can pick up mass you yourself spewed earlier in the game to boost your economy once you're running a deficit.

The challenge, of course, is being reasonable in the implementation. Obviously every single unit of metal can't be a game object to itself. It should probably gather in piles, which increase in value as the extractor continues to spew.

Also, how would you handle energy like this? Lightning coming off of the power generators? Maybe instead of being reclaimable, it would deal some damage to surrounding buildings and units. A very small amount of damage, to be sure, but enough that you wouldn't want it happening for extended periods.

Another idea: While your metal storage is full, engineers/"fabbers"/commanders should not reclaim anything. If they're ordered to do so, they'll just kind of pause and wait for there to be extra storage.

I was thinking that energy, traditionally, is more of a 'you need to keep this in surplus' (enough to power defenses suddenly etc) whereas metal is much more 'if you store it you're not using it right'. So in that case you wouldn't want to make energy overflow be this huge bad thing.

With regards to spilling metal out, I would suggest some kind of animation that spews a stream of cube particles, based on how much you're wasting, and it just adds to a 'wreck' prop on the ground that is a small/medium/large/huge pile of metal cubes. No need to be accurate in showing the correct numbers, just that it is spewing blocks slow / fast.

Why do you need to assume that the resources are "wasted" if you aren't keeping your available resources depleted?

There is a reason for the Metal & Energy storage buildings, and that is to increase your resource buffer so you can build things faster without having to wait for the resource collectors to slowly refill it.

Think of it this way. If your storage is maxed out, any additional output from the resource collectors is automatically stopped until there is space in your storage buffer again, then resource collection will resume.

There is no need to make it a visual cue. The income indicators convey enough information on whether you are on surplus or deficit mode (+100 metal/-1000 energy under the resource storage bars).

Penalizing players for not spending everything they have is equally as bad as "wasting" resources. I'd rather focus my attention on managing an army than having to spend too much time babysitting my factories and resource buildings.

This isn't a game with limited resources like Starcraft. I can set my factories to continuously produce a steady stream of units, and give them complex orders straight from the factory if necessary.
And sometimes when I need to get a particularly expensive unit or building built, i'd like to stockpile resources beforehand so I can cut the construction time in half.

It's not 'wasting' in the sense that you're going to run out.

It's wasting in the sense that your opponent WONT be 'wasting' that mass, and all other things being equal, you are putting yourself behind in the race by not using the maximum amount of resources you can extract in x amount of time.

If a tank costs 25 metal and you stopped your mexes from producing 250 metal because you're 'full', you 'waste' (put yourself behind in the race) by 10 tanks.

It's hard for newer players to understand that it's Very Bad, because it's completely invisible - you just end up getting rolled over by a huge army of tanks. It's not because he fought better, it's because he didn't waste as much metal as you did.

If you have a full storage, that means that you have a storage full of metal that is not making you more metal, or more units.

Wasted metal is just plain wasted. It is a limited resource and a player who fails to spend it is screwing himself over. This has been true of RTS games since the dawn of time, and there is no reason to sugar coat it. SPEND YOUR RESOURCES.

Eh. Energy comes from metal. Excess energy means you spent too much metal. It's a slight waste of resources, unwisely overspent on generators but at least not thrown away.

The thing about excess energy, is that it's sometimes a GOOD thing. Having a reserve of power is less dangerous than running out of it, and units that depend on power will spike demand at the worst of times. But this will depend on how PA handles energy supply/demand.

Excess energy?

We could have power-storage lights turn green indicating that they are full.