Should resources be tracked per planet/moon

If done on a per planet basis, you could set up Nano streams between specific streaming/storage units, so that nanites or whatever the green stuff is could flow. It would look cool, and it would be a great target to sabotage.

In terms or sabotaging it yes it is cool, but being sabotage when in a battle with up to a million units it would be a bloody pain. And it would be difficult to defend. Attacking the actual production planets would be a lot cooler.

I have no idea what you're babbling about. Why on earth would you make it cheaper than anything else?

The idea would be that you have a whole planet's worth of economy and you need to pinpoint your effective force into one or two areas on the enemy planet. So call it 'experimental class' or whatever, but make it something you can build on your planet (or in orbit) that you can then land on the enemy planet. Takes a planetary economy to build one, but allows you to project your economic force. Once it's down there's a number of different things you could do - give it a huge nanolathe that operates only for x number of seconds (allowing player to quickly establish defenses & factories), or a huge storage bay to carry units safely through the combat zone. Maybe let it carry a fusion generator for energy (if energy indeed is limited to the planet), or let it produce a large amount of metal for the local economy as it 'eats' itself. All these things are useless if you're both on the same planet.


It's also interesting to note that a unit like I suggest is a good answer for attacking a planet with a global economic system as well. Global or planetary, it doesn't really seem to change the problem of attacking a well established planet all that much.

So basically, you haul resources directly from A to B? You can do the same thing by hauling finished units. There's no need to bring what amounts to a giant pile of scrap.

The problem isn't initializing an invasion, it's SUPPORTING it. The invader still needs constant reinforcement to stand any chance of success. Adding a "travel tax", in addition to demanding constant attention between two worlds only makes things worse.

This negates your previous assertion that a new planet lets players start back at zero. Given that a player has the full might of their starting planet, no invasion will be small, whether the planet is occupied or not. Even an empty planet will see an invasion consist several "eggs" and dozens of fabbers.

In short, once the economy is established, there's no going back to the beginning. There may be reasons for a local economy (which I don't agree with), but saying it somehow rescales/descales/realigns the economy is false.

You guys are conflating two different scenarios at once.

First one is where two players 'own' a planet each and are trying to attack each other, in which case it's a good idea to have a large single point unit to project the force of your planet onto the enemy planet. You don't want just more units, you want a way to land hold territory long enough to get a supply chain established and/or clear a path for reinforcements to land. This could require some kind of heavy duty massive experimental class unit / landing structure that gives you a chance to land a beachhead.

The second scenario is where players are arriving at an unoccupied planet at similar times. Neither have spent much resources to get to the planet, and yet they need to perform the same kinds of tasks as when they start the game - build an economy, scout, etc etc.

*shrug* it may very well be that the limitation of build power in the form of needing to transport fabbers to the planet is enough to keep things at a starting level for a while.. but with a large amount of resources it really doesn't take long to pump out a bazillion more fabbers and put the new planet on an equal footing with the home planet.

"I control every planet in the solar system, but to defeat this enemy with one planet left I have been fighting for hours I must manage to land then begin supply chains to this planet with advanced orbital defense platforms destroying anything that gets close from the ground and space. So I must fly my asteroid fleet and spam drop pods to get a base. But because I need to deliver the res I must then spend another 5 hours trying to get the res to his planet.

Land experimentals can certainly help with various beachhead roles. Several options have been proposed and can be explored if they're viable.

What an invader actually needs is a way to bring his resources to the front with little hassle. That means an easy way to build or acquire forward bases, easy access to resources, and a good ability to function with only orbital units. An invasion ultimately starts with orbital power, as units and resources become transferred between worlds en masse. Strong orbital play is needed at the game's core for good planetary battle.

Are you making facetious arguments on purpose?


How would you imagine this scenario you just made up going ANY DIFFERENTLY if you have global resources? Do you think you'd have less advanced orbital platforms destroying your incoming forces? (no). Do you think you wouldn't have to fly your asteroid fleet over? (no) Do you think you won't have to spam drop pods? (no).

So the only thing you're griping about is some imaginary 'I need to spend 5 hours trying to get res', which is, frankly, being rather shallow. It's ok, I get it, you don't like the idea of localized resources. But if you want to contribute to the discussion, some valid, relevant arguments would help a lot more. Even with a global economy you're going to need to land enough engineers to match the planet's production, so in your case you may very well spend 5 hours trying to get those engineers on the ground...

In any case - worried about how to supply resources? Why not a mass driver that fires massive chunks of metal at a target. It can serve as an inter-planetary orbital bombardment weapon AND a resource supplier. Remember all you need is enough resources on site to match the amount of buildpower you have available. Wreckage field on demand would meet the need nicely.

Yes, this is where high cost, high utility units come into play. They concentrate economic power, and make moving that economic power much easier (less units to worry about). Being able to drop them from orbit is going to be a great mechanic to play with. Hopefully we will have the case where we have enough orbital units to have an interesting battle. Being able to punch a small hole into orbital defenses and land troops while you hold it open will be very interesting. Also required seems to be good strong ground based defenses against orbital drop pods.

You must not have read the entire thing, I mention I have to create a supply line to the planet I am lucky to land on to actually build a base to do anything. If I had global res it's just a case of sending down engineers along with my unit drop pods. Much easier.

We need to think bigger! ZOOM MORE!

Lets talk per planet resources, but also a tier of experimental buildings. These babies can only be built on asteroids - due to their size it would require too much in the way of resources to lift them off a typical planet (either that or scale their cost proportional to the gravity of the build location).

There would be a complement of buildings required to establish a beachhead on any planet. Basic Kbot factories, metal storage silo (pre-filled), hardened fusion reactors - you wouldn't need more than the basics.

These would be compact, high HP, but low build-rate/resource generation. Most of the initial unit (and the cost) would be the fuel tanks/thrusters to insert the building into the orbit of a target planet, whereupon it would begin a controlled descent to the surface.

Along with a using a unit cannon from another celestial body to provide your initial beachhead with units for defence, this would allow a way of breaching a planet with high defences by a player with the resources to spare. Obviously these experimental buildings would need to be balanced by extremely high costs, but at least it allows a way of creating a syncronised attack where you can, through careful planning, create a functional base within seconds after orbital insertion.

Rather than the super-units being units (with all the combat balance problems that go with them), let them be specialised buildings for facilitating planetary invasion. This is an RTS game after all, the focus should be on logistics/resource management and overarching theatre-level strategy. To me it feels as though late game could deteriorate into stalemates between players who are too entrenched on certain planets and can't be assaulted from orbit. One might not always want to turn all the planets in a system into slag and what if there is a limited supply of asteroids, or none?

You win one free internet in my book. I was over here just thinking about setting up little orbital cannons with their own mexes and factories on asteroids and using those to pester the enemy's establishments randomly and sporadically, and someone else is over here thinking about launching entire factories onto a planet from orbit. Kudos.

If they go for the local economy, a cool thing to balance it out would be to make a "resource cannon" that could pack resources and launch them to another orbital body, effectively allowing for a global economy, but with the restriction of having to wait for resources to arrive if you plan on using them interplanetari-ly.

Local economies using transports to ferry supplies around works fine in Stardrive, I like the system.

murcanic sums it up nicely

Here's an easy path for the devs to try both local/global economies. Sorry if someone already mentioned it, I only got halfway through this colossal thread.

You have a single scaling factor from 0-1 that determines inefficiency loss from using off-planet resources. When set at 1, you have a totally global economy - a mass extractor on this planet generates the same mass on any planet. When set at 0, you have a completely local economy where you can only get mass from local extractors/plants.

If set at 0.5, then on each planet, you run down local storage/resources first. When that is exhausted, you pull in resources from everywhere else at half efficiency.

This would allow the devs to very quickly and easily experiment with a mixture of the two. In fact, you could make it a variable that is chosen by the person who sets the game up.

Personally, I reckon a value of 0.25 would work well. You can still bring overwhelming off-world resources to bear on a tiny asteroid, but you have an incentive to build local stuff too. So there a little bit of micro goes a long way, but can be safely ignored late game.

Otherwise maybe people who dislike local economies might settle for a value of 0.75 - a mild penalty, but still an important one.

Something definitely needs to be done.

Either you dont get resources off planet.

Or you have to build an expensive building to send resources to your new planet.

Or you get at a slower rate.

Or metal points and even energy would deplete or planets gets destroyed.

Else after you have like say 2 planets that you own, then you will have unlimited resources. That doesnt sound fun to me. I cannot see how there cant be any sort of decay. so that you run out, to encourage to build and conquer new planets.

I'd be alright with a visual FYI breakdown like what SINS has but just like that game your economy is unified. Any breakdown is just an FYI

Although I voted no, for the same reasons that have already been stated, mostly because it would be really hard to expand. I would be willing to change my mind if they implemented shipments which you could package and shoot into space toward a planet. That way you could have a separate economy for each planet/moon/asteroid but still be able to expand to other planets rather easily ( Just shoot a shipment out to the new planet ). Plus it would be more realistic and would bring more strategy to the game. The downside would be more micro management because you would have to worry about multiple economies instead of one massive one.

I guess we will never know how well one way or another works until you actually play with it. Until then it's all just speculation.

EDIT: Also to manage all the economies the developers could do something like they did in a game called "endless space", where there is a small icon in the screen and when you click it a page pops up with all the economies listed with simple, easy to read indicators and information and when you double click one in the list it jumps you to that planet. Also there could be indicators that tell you if an economy is doing poorly and to check that page. Of course if you zoomed in on a planet/moon/asteroid yourself it would show correct economy UI that is implemented right now for that planet/moon/asteroid.


Here's what that page looks like in "endless space", just an idea, I'm not saying copy...
http://i.imgur.com/rPPR4.jpg

here's what I'll say in regards to the OP:

If there is a way to go and actually manage combat on multiple planets (with sub-commanders or adding more players to the game-in-progress, etc) then no. Otherwise yes because what will happen is you will already control multiple planets fully populated and developed where there will be no fighting and thus they will be producing so much resources all your resource problems will be nullified since you will be getting more than 5-10 times (possibly even 50-1000 times or greater) resources then you need allowing you to instantly build 100 T2 factories on a planet an just zerg your enemy with t2 units.