Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

Yet.

Just like to point out that in the last live stream, all factories, construction units and the commander used 100 energy for every 1 metal while building (all had a 1:100 efficiency ratio).

The factories spent -10M, -1000E while building, the engineers -5M, -500E and the commander -25M, -2500E.

Well pre alpha.

Yeah, I should have put that disclaimer in

Wait, what? No. Your analysis is incomplete. What you fail to realize is that a loss of energy is worth more than the sum of its production. Every other device in the player's arsenal is being affected as well. The loss of all those devices is FAR more damaging than any little idling inefficiency could ever hope to be. Losing radar may not be a biggie, but losing something like stealth or cloak can be a game ender.

There is a choice between either system. You can allow metal surges to create a spike in energy demand, or you can allow energy waste when metal demand exceeds supply. Either way represents a different kind of downfall when the player screws up.

They appear to be placeholder values for now. It can be adjusted for individual units as needed.

"Every other device in the player's arsenal is being affected as well." We don't know how much an energy stall will affect different units in PA other than construction.
"You can allow metal surges to create a spike in energy demand, or you can allow energy waste when metal demand exceeds supply." We don't know how much metal income will fluctuate in PA. We don't know how powerful reclaim is. We don't know how large energy supply you will have compared to metal.

Frankly, we don't know how damaging an energy stall is. Basing your assumptions on that energy would fluctuate highly and that reclaim is very fast like in SupCom means your line of reasoning is dependent on that assumption.

bobucles, that is why in that same post I included this:

It seems a pretty deep empasse has been reached then. The two sides of this argument really have become mutually exclusive.

The one thought is to have energy be simple, very hard to self crash through mismanagement, but be extremely damaging to run out of (all artillery, PD, radar, jamming, metal making, asteroid engines, and unit cannons stop firing. Perhaps some mobile units cannot use full aps, construction pro-rates to remaining energy, etc etc).

Enemies can have a reasonable chance to cause a catastrophic failure of ALL of these things at once by targeting energy supply.

Econ mismanagement causing a catastrophic failure would be extremely difficult to do without enemy intervention due to no increase in energy use from reclaim, and a 100% predicable amount of energy use based on number of engineers and factories built vs number of pgens built.

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The seconds thought is to have energy be simple, impossible to crash through almost any means, and permit preset conditions for how to have the game automatically deal with energy shortages. First turn off all Metal Makers, if still running a deficit stop firing artillery, if still running a deficit then pro-rate construction without turning off radar, jamming or PD. Thus an energy stall would require almost no immediate player input while still performing the players strategy set by the prioritization of energy.

The player would have experienced a large drop in production by both prorated lathe and by the loss of metal making, but would have experienced no serious damage to his ability to defend himself through loss of radar/PD/jamming. In a competitive match, such a loss of production could be extremely difficult to recover from, but generally would be a much much smaller effect on the overall win-lose of the match than the first scenario.

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I'm personally way far into the first camp, but at this point I guess its a 'wait and see' point where I'm just going to have to play it and see just how idiot proof this econ will be with no variable build costs and just how catastrophic Uber decides to make an energy stall.

Many a ZK 1v1 player after being early raided: "E stalling, gg"

Many a BA player after his fusion farm went nuclear: "Why no fighter screen?! This game is over!" (add rage to taste)

Another thing to consider: If you are a totally new player, you more likely would not realise the effectiveness of reclaiming to begin with; let alone begin to stall from it. I know this was the case for me with Total Annihilation.

Reclaiming does not come into play until you set foot online and reach an intermediate level.

Seems my original post was not understood, here is another attempt to reach you.

With regard to factories:

1. engies are effective at assisting

2. engies are not effective at assisting

If 1. then energy/mass costs of units produced from factories is irrelevant since it can be subverted with engie assist

If 2. then engies are only useful for constructing structures and units produced in factories can be balanced with regard to mass/power ratio.

With regard to construction of structures by engineers and assisting of ACU upgrades (if they will exist):

It is not longer possible to use power/mass ratio to balance the costs of different structures in the game (or ACU upgrades), since the ratio is dependent completely on the identity of the constructing/assisting engineer.

Three relevant examples from Supcom FA:

The power mass ratio for a t1 tank is 5. The power mass ratio for a t1 interceptor is 45. This balance decision allows for a delay of early air harassment relative to early land harassment, since more mass must be invested into power production for the air strategy.

The Aeon ACU shield upgrade has a power to mass ratio of 200. This makes it an impossible upgrade for early game. The other two ways to prevent upgrades from being used in early game is to increase mass cost, or build time cost. The problem with increasing mass cost is that mass availability varies drastically from one map to the next, which would make this upgrade either impossible or too easy to get. The problem with increasing buildtime cost, is that now the ACU cannot get this upgrade in a reasonable time without assistance from engineers. Keeping ACU upgrades viable for a lone ACU hiding out in some pond in the middle of the map is a balance decision that creates a lot of interesting gameplay.

One of the major compains about the last GPGNET patch 3599 game balance was the domination of T3 air. The elegant solution chosen by Ze_Pilot et.al. (perhaps this was also part of the official 3603 patch) was to drastically increase T3 power to mass ratio. Currently a T3 air fighter has a ratio of 114. This change necessitates the construction of many T2 or at least one T3 power generator (3000K mass+), in order to begin T3 air production. This removes T3 air from early and mid game.

These examples show that allowing power to mass ratio to be a viable balancing tool, gives the power resource a "tech tree" like character. Organizing gameplay through time, parallel to the organization given by tech levels.

Thank you for reading, I hope it was useful.

PS

Some more power mass ratios to think about, from Supcom FA:
Nuke launcher: 14
Nuke missile: 113

cruise missile launcher: 5
cruise missile: 20

ACU_gun: 30
ACU teleport: 100

T1 air transport: 40

average T1 land unit: 5
average T2 land unit: 7.5
average T3 land unit: 11
Aeon experimental: 12.5

T2 land factory: 9
T2 air factory: 18
T2 naval factory: 4.6

The choice to attack enemy power or build capacity is a critical decision to a Supcom FA player.(if you want to play the ai and make big robots, all of this is of course irrelevant, just play x2 resources)

Which is why your argument was so strange. Running low on energy is a problem for either system, and it resolves almost the same either way. The presence or lack of energy waste does not change the outcome nor the need to prevent it from happening. Priority also works as a similar solution for either system.

The real question is which aspect of economic failure causes more harm to more players. It's really too difficult to say at this point.

We do know that metal income will fluctuate. It will change with map design, with battle, and with swarms of scavengers cleaning up after battle.

You only have to look into the past to see how powerful reclaim will be. It's a defining feature of the series and not something that will be discarded lightly. The actual rate and power of reclaim isn't terribly important. It is a temporary resource that fluctuates simply by watching it in action, and a player is going to have "enough" ability to pick it up. It is a surge of income that demands extra energy to use, which will dynamically change your resource ratios regardless of how much storage there is.

These things are simple intrinsic facts of reclaim, which you can't get rid of without removing reclaim.

This is definitely something that needs to be fixed in PA's presentation. Reclaim is one of those things that should be taught early and often, because it controls a great deal of the game's pace. Tutorials and smart AI work to an extent, but the game should also embrace it.

Supcom2 showed a few niches with the magnet gun and recycler, and PA can do very well with dedicated scavengers or maybe even wreckage radars (it's like a radar, except you only see the mess that happens after battle). There's no point letting good scrap metal sit in the mud.

How much metal fluctuates from reclaim is critical to your argument about metal fluctuation causing energy surges.
It feels like we are arguing in circles.
Anyway. I wouldn't mind if reclaim was the primary source of income for the first 5-10 mins of the game in PA. You try to gain territory and harass enemy reclaimers and then you go for the more secure mexes and powerplants in your base. Might be a bit micro heavy but I like when you weigh making stationary infinite resource income versus taking control of expendable reclaim.

I guess the "power" of reclaim can also make a difference. In FA, it was easy to triple or quadruple your economy from placing a few engineers on a big wreck. These huge swings not only forced you to massively overdraw on metal (so you can actually use the income), but the surge in income created the huge energy swings that crashed the economy.

There's not too much that can be done about it. If reclaim is too slow, players will simply throw more lathes at the problem. But FA clearly showed that too fast (it was 10x? more?) is a contributing factor towards happy fun time stalls. I guess the moral of the story is to not have mechanics that differ by orders of magnitude.

That depends on how much overall wreckage the average unit gives. If it is a high percentage (60%+), reclaim will make up a major portion of the economy and create more powerful swings in energy demand. If it is little (40%-), then it will naturally demand tighter play.

Then what was the whole point you were trying to make in this thread!? From the very beginning, you were arguing that the inefficiency of the new economy is a healthy execution barrier for players to improve on! Now you are agreeing that it should be patched out!?

Difficult to whom? I already know the answer:

With Total Annihilation's economy: Players running an energy deficit due to a metal windfall are not losing energy production. Even lost radar and stealth is just energy being reallocated to more unit production, so players are technically not losing anything. Although, knowing when they have an energy defecit is apparent just by reading the energy bar.

With the new economy: Players who do not bother to micromanage their builder usage to prevent energy wastage have a definite inefficiency against players who do, and will be outperformed. Energy wastage from metal proration is not conveyed as game information to the player, and the effects of it are not apparent until their opponent faces them with extra or better positioned fighting units(thanks to extra radar coverage). These players can not correlate why this keeps happening, and will get frustrated with the online community.

But this has a twofold effect, and I just defined one aspect; novice online play. Top level players also now have to contend with this tedious, micro-intensive mechanic of shutting builders on and off to constantly match metal income, alongside managing the rest of the game, just to stay competitive.

No. Reclaiming is not crucial to anyone just entering the game. The fundementals of setting up a base and unit production can be done on metal extractors just fine - unless their map has no metal spots(in which case, generate a different map). And newbies can readjust the game's pace with the difficulty slider.

Knowing how to reclaim effectively is an advanced player concept; just like knowing how to move units effectively, or how to start a build order effectively. Players are not required to play well until they want to step online and win - at which point, they need to read up on guides, just like everyone else.

Also, tutorials -instruction sheets, rather than actual game experience- suck for learning. Forged Alliance's in-game tutorial was a bunch of rudimentary exercises, like how to navigate menus, and to build a couple extractors and power plants - but it did not provide any real game scenarios to allow the player to put these concepts to use or understand their context in the game, making them useless. Near the end, the game just spawns a tier 3 army in front of the player to finish off the opponent with - without context again, and making everything the player built beforehand pointless, robbing them of the opportunity to grow and learn for themself, because their hand was held the entire time. Now maybe Forged Alliance is a poor example of a tutorial. But people here seems to think this is how games should introduce players. Players do not want to feel like they have to listen - they just want to get into the game and have fun, where they can figure things out for themselves - or god forbid, risk losing.

Lathing units aren't free. I know this from Zero-K. A construction unit reclaims at about 2-4 times the extraction rate of mexes while they cost just a little more than 2 mexes. So when you are presented with wrecks you have a multitude of choices. Do you make mexes first and reclaim later to maximize income in the long term? Do you make defense to secure the reclaim? Do you make more construction units to reclaim faster or do you make fighting units to push the enemy?
In SupCom it's just "Reclaim!!! Fast, before the enemy do!!!" since reclaim is about 10 times faster than in Zero-K.

It also depends largely on how fast and easy you can reclaim it. If reclaim is fast and reclaim power is abundant then metal income will fluctuate highly from wreckage fields. If reclaim is slow and reclaim power is scarce then it it hardly fluctuates at all.

I'm sorry if it was discussed before, I skimmed through the 60 pages, but couldn't find the answer for the following.

How metal extraction going to work?
As i see there are no specific points like metal deposits on the map. My first thought was that there would be specific clusters of metals with fixed quantity which could be mined with a metal extractor if it is within the extractor's range. See the following pics:



Where:
- red circles are the range of extractors
- purple is the metal deposit (can be switched with a click to a layer showing the metal deposits on the map with quantities)

Or is there any confirmation how the DEVs decided how it will work?
If it was discussed before, please point me to the right direction.

I think they mentioned in one of the streams that there will be "mass points" which means metal points in this game.

They've answered this question in the May 3rd livestream:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQavbTGa ... ge#t=1013s

I would like to see a realistic resource transfer system. Like, resource consuming units can only operate within range of transmitter, or by depleting their inner storage.