Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

This is exactly my opinion on the matter.

When it comes to a strategy game, the thing which separates good players from average players should be strategy, tactics, and control over their army.

The ability to control your structures should be fairly automated, an energy priority is a great idea to me, so was being able to set repeat build queue, or make waypoints so your factories send units to where you want them.
I can't think of a good reason to not have any of those things, unless you believe that APM is legitimately the most important skill in a strategy game (IMO, it is not).

You say that but EVERYTHING can be automated. the goal is to automate only the things that really need it. This is things like reducing the amount of clicks for tasks, like drag to build lines of things. if you attempt to automate more complex tasks like your economy things you lose control over the workings of your base. what follows is the time you would have spent understanding the cost of energy instead goes into micromanaging tiny scraps of efficiency out of troops. also it almost entierly removes the effect of twrgeting your power necause the game just compensates.

Im all for automation but if you go to far you remove depth and strategic options from the game.

The point is not to remove control but enhance it so that you can manage it on a higher level as well.

Yes, it compensates the same way a person with a broken leg will limp instead of running when being chased.
It simply changes the effect from "Everything crashes unless I manually shut things off" to "Those things I prioritize highly keep going until I have time to fix everything else".

No , Its the players responsibility to ensure that your power doesn't crash during an attack, if you cant do that then you should be punished. If you cant shut down less important systems to keep your own high priority systems online, then you shouldn't have access to your main systems running at 100% until you can fix everything.

Yet another point i read;

'How are we supposed to micro our bases across multiple worlds without priorities'

For starters, it will most likely be another human playing against you, and they wont be able to co-ordinate more than 2 intensive battle against you effectively. If they can, they are better than you.
If you cant run multiple bases with just your human brain, then perhaps you should play a smaller map where you don't need to expand as much, or just not expand as much all together.

There's a magical thing called 'Hotkeys'. These wonderful things allow you to 'pre program' control groups for easy access to specific units/structures of your choosing.
If you need more than hotkeys to shut off factories,workers, etc. then you need to just be better, and not have some AI fill in this gap in your skill set.

Part of the strategy of this game is maintaining a functioning economy while killing your opponent. Some people (the vocal minority i hope) want it to just be a game about killing your enemy.
You know, there are many games like that such as DoW2, you wont have to worry about your base at all in that game, PA should not be one of these games.

More comments i read about running your game on +0 -0 resources. And how +10 is wasted. lol what?
For starters, the mass in this game is infinite (you cant waste it).
Storage is in the game for a reason.
Running on 0 net resource IS dangerous and if you make a mistake you should be punished with a crash.

Why do people want this game to be easy for them?

TA and SupCom have always had a "bugbear" to many that limits mass-market appeal, and that "bugbear" is the complexity of its rather unique economy system.

I'm relatively sure that, since TA and SupCom were always accused of having "disproportionately" hard to manage economies, that it should be the first barrier torn down so we can all get to the business of throwing tanks at each other and watching the explosions.

I disagree with such a statement, but I think that's the general idea for most posters that want the economy to accommodate for them, rather than the other way around.

Honestly the changes outlined in the first post are enough. Everything is very intuitive with the new system. Those posters that claim that the economy is still to hard to manage need to just wait until Alpha and test the new system.

---

There are upsides to some posters proposed additions, mostly the making of an "idiot-proof" Economy that everyone can... I would say "learn", but honestly there's nothing to learn with it... "Ignore" I guess is the closest word I can apply here. You can almost literally ignore Econ and focus everything into tanks. As long as your Engineers have a build queue for building more Energy and more Metal... you can pretty much just ignore them until they've finished the queue.

Yes you can spend time balancing your build order... or you can brute-force it. The question becomes;

Brute-Force is a valid military tactic (though inefficient). Should Brute-Force work for the economy as well?

By-the-by, I vote 'No'.

That is quite an assertion you made there and you'll have to back it up if you want to convince anyone. Sure you can have an opinion but there isn't much discussion if you just keep asserting it without digging into why you hold that opinion.

You're also a bit contradictory. I see a contradiction here:

Here you argue that it doesn't matter if the UI is hard to use because it will be hard to use for the other player. In this way the battle will peak at what both players can control and the player who can control more efficiently will win.

But here you ignore a reversed situation which is basically the first statement. If the UI is easier to use then both players are able to control more. In a competitive setting the game doesn't become any easier. The battles will just be larger as more players are able to control more.

It is true that with a powerful UI the game can become degenerate. To reach this situation we must first solve the game (find the optimal way to play) and then simply tell our UI to implement it. But if we have solved the game then actually playing and winning is all down to manual dexterity. Also if we are able to solve the game then I would not call it strategically deep (this is a practical definition based on how difficult it is to actually solve things, not theoretical solvability).

I won't be so silly to argue that there is a clearly superior system. Many people like Starcraft and dexterity is bound to be part of games. But regardless of the consensus on micromanagement it there is a decent consensus on these particular forums that PA should be an 'epic' game. This means people want large games and to allow large, competitive, games to occur there needs to be a UI powerful enough for people to manage large things. You said so yourself that a weak UI will just mean that games are smaller, we just disagree on whether games being smaller is a problem.

I don't think is impacts the strategic skill required for the game. In general strategic and manual skill requirements seem to be orthogonal.

This makes me think that you don't know what you're talking about.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Priority and other related powerful UI things don't make the economy idiot proof. If anything they let the economy system be more complex because it will be easier to manage the basic things which take up all your time with a weak UI.

Metal Points don't have a "limited" amount of Metal to extract. Metal is an infinite resource.

You can't waste Metal. You only waste potential

---

Streamlining the User Interface to a point where you no longer interface with it is a rather sad logical end-point.
But that is what some people are very close to proposing.

And potentially you should try to just over spend metal to try an account for random metal income like reclaiming.

If you don't, give it a go and just keep your income at -2 or -3 and see how it affects what you can build, it might change how you play.

Indeed, at that point, might as well remove all economy aspects from the game completely, just have if so you get X amount of units every Y minutes and fight it out. or play games like Gratuitous Space Battles.

Mike

UI is a tool to aid the player in controlling their battle.
NOT a tool to control it for you.
Having an AI manage your power is NOT a UI feature, that is a game mechanic, which does NOT fit a game such as PA (successor to TA & SupCom).

Previous post suggested that the Economy system is what turned alot of players off.
On the contrary, the unique economy system is probably what drew alot of players in.
And id hope that Uber would stay true to the TA and SupCom Formula.

Googlefrog, just replying telling me my points are invalid. good argument you got there >.>

One of yours that is invalid is claiming that the UI will be hard to use. You haven't even seen it yet.
My point about multiple battles goes for any game. Your focus can only be on one thing at a time. A good player can switch focus between more than one thing to overwhelm their opponent. If you get overwhelmed, its your fault. ALSO, there will be multi screen support (from what i can tell) what more do you want?

Oh yes, an AI to run your base while you are away fighting.

"You said so yourself that a weak UI will just mean that games are smaller"
Um, no i didn't . Once again, the UI is a way for the player to control their actions (User Interface) not a way for an AI to do it for them.

You took a quote and made a meaningless comment about my knowledge...good one...
Makes me think that you don't have an argument at all , you just disagree, in which case you shouldn't reply at all.

No, bro... seriously, it turned people away. I'm not saying that everyone thinks TA-like economies are hard...
but more often than not, they find it the most difficult thing to master when playing the game for the first (several) times and some people never get used to it.
There was a reason that SupCom2 tried to use a different economy model.

Don't get too defensive or you'll find the whole world against you

As I stated earlier: The ultimate user interface would theoretically be no interface - just direct mind control over all your unit's orders and behaviours. An interface is just a buffer between the user and the execution. An interface, by definition, should become obsolete.

What is sad is believing navigating a weak user interface constitues 'difficulty'.

No longer interface. As in NOT doing anything and it's all automated. Try reading next time

No, sorry, you need a UI otherwise you cannot use it.
'Mind control' would require your brain to interface with the game (a User Interface), therefore, it cant be an obsolete feature.

And the key point here being; Mind 'Control'
Even with 'mind control' you need and should have to command your economy system to keep it running efficiently.
Here is where your argument falls apart. You want a UI that makes it easier to control your economy, by removing your control from it, and replacing it with an AI ....

Arui you're saying some good stuff but there is no real reason to get so personal with it, lest we wind up reaching godwins law. If he says something meaningless just dont respond to that section.

But direct mind control is also a user interface, possibly the perfect one, you can't really call it no interface.

Defensive >.>

Nanolathe,
I agree that the economy system was/is a difficult part of TA and Supcom. Simulated projectiles also makes the game deeper, and potentially more difficult, aswell as the huge scale.
While these intricacies may have turned alot of people away,
these intricacies are also what defines TA and SupCom and what alot of the player base (I would think) enjoy about the game and have spent time learning.

To change the game to suit lesser players doesn't work , SupCom 2 is a prime example of this.

Its not about the difficulty as far as i see, its the LEARNING thats the issue.
Good players willing to teach each other (i recently recruited 2 friends to SupCom) and a good tutorial will make the game popular.
Not simplification of the key features (economy control, map awareness, etc.)

The SupCom 2 economy helped me to learn SupCom's economy.

To say that it didn't work is nothing more then your opinion.

I agree that SupCom2 will have alerted some players to SupCom.I was actually going to say that SupCom2 was a bridge to SupCom and SupCom could be a bridge to PA.
But i felt it wasn't necessary in my post, so i removed it.

But since you brought it up

However, i still think that SupCom2 was a failure, they tried to make a game to gain a wider audience, but isolated the original fans . It didn't work, they just swapped their player bases around.

SupCom2 was not a lesser game. It just wasn't the SupCom2 we wanted.