"The Economy Is Too Hard" <-- Lie

Bugs are still part of the game experience. If they are not clipped out, then players have to deal with the implications of finding and avoiding(or abusing) the bugs to compete with everyone else. It ended up a layer of complexity that hurt a lot of players and should not have happened.

No, I'm not going to repeat Supcom bugs yet again on these forums. If you didn't know what they were, then you just weren't that into the game. If they happen again in PA, then I'll point out what I can.

Stalling happens. Instastalls should not. Supcom has a few ways to instastall your economy:
- Pick an expensive upgrade. The cheap upgrades have 20E:1M ratios, while the expensive ones have 150:1 or more. They also have obscenely low build times, causing absurdly high resource demands. (The seraphim teleporter upgrade demands 5000 energy at BASE construction speed!) Stall.

- Repair the ACU. I dare you. Stall, if not an instant game over.

- Try to use the billy launcher. Instant stall.

The Supcom economy showed how to screw up streaming, big time. While TA had moderately different construction rates and demands for every unit, the actual minimums and maximums of construction were well bounded and occasionally meaningful for the game. Supcom introduced huge and violent swings in construction rates, where one unit could consume 10 times the resources of another (or more!) simply by moving to a different project. It created resource spikes, it created resource crashes, and it created many issues that perpetuate the "difficult economy" complaints to this day.

Does the system HAVE to be simplified to be so close to a Zero-K level? No, it really doesn't. But it does need to be more consistent and logical than Supcom's system.

I think the loss of "Build time" is going to really hurt when making a meaningful difference between base construction and unit construction. And energy cheap/expensive units do have their place in the grand scheme of things. But eh. I guess we'll have to see what happens.

That's fair ayceeem, I have since read the OP. I think we can agree Forged Alliance didn't have a difficulty problem as much as an approachability problem. FA's economy was off putting to new players and we should ask ourselves why. I think it's because FA's eco wasn't always straight forward. Do I build 4 Storage after T2? Should I ever upgrade straight to T3? Do I ever build storage before T2? Do I upgrade another MEX to T2 or make storage? This stuff wasn't self explanatory.

http://wwpct.webs.com/facts-about-mass-upgrades
As you can see, not particularly difficult but not straight forward.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanagement_(gameplay)#Economic_micromanagement

FA had an economy that required evaluation and attention. In StarCraft increasing your eco is straight forward: if your base is saturated build a new base, if your base isn't saturated build workers. The latter constructing of workers and sending to mineral patches is economic micromanagement and it was extremely important despite being a trivial click. In FA increasing your eco is has more to do with evaluating the marginal benefit of additional MEX, MEX upgrades and storage adjacency. It's not any deeper as there's always 1 best option but it requires more evaluation and more attention. The actual act of hotkeying engineers, assisting MEX upgrades and queuing storage rings was economic micro though.

Not impeding players through the UI and reducing other forms of micromanagement (e.g. factory loops) is something FA does right. Uber wants to take these advances, add to them and shift the focus back to strategy.

Lastly for those arguing that variable mass depletion rates remove some management from the game - isn't that what storage was for? Didn't variable depletion rates make storage redundant? I would cede you still build storage in FA, but rarely for the sake of storage. Energy storage is now Overcharge research and mass storage is a T2.5 MEX.

The point is, bobucles, when a game suffers from bugs, you don't point your finger towards the game mechanics; you point it at the bugs.

Yet, no one focuses on anything other than the mechanic of resource streaming.

But I still never heard anywhere of these bugs you claim existed - and I followed Supreme Commander from its announcement up to a few years after its release. So if you wish to make a point here, you damn well better explain it.

---

And what is an "instastall"? Do you mean the act of running a very large deficit? So for a hypothetical scenario: I have X amount of energy storage and Y amount of generation, but built enough build power to consume at least X and Y energy per tick - activating it all depletes my energy in a single tick - does this quality as "instastalling" to you? So you are suggesting that it shouldn't be possible to put yourself in a deficit to potentially unlimited scale, after an imaginary threshold? Well I reckon it should. Everything after this then is a matter of degrees.

Look, while I fully acknowledge that Supreme Commander had added fluff mechanics to its economy which, while seemingly evolutions, ultimately took away from the elegance of the system as present in Total Annihilation; from commander upgrades, to the poor adjency system, to extractor and factory upgrades(just upgrades in general) - and its unit cost inconsistencies were generally wack - both games ultimately have their source in the fundemental mechanic of streaming resources, which is what is supposedly the focus of these crybabies; they never bother to mention any of the redundant mechanics.

Yet still, I don't see how any of this - even "instastalling" - is supposed to be such a huge barrier to new players, who have no concept of competition and can have fun wallowing around in skirmish mode or with friends. It's not like running minus 300 energy because you hit the commander upgrade button will cause the A.I. opponent to maul you to death.

---

It's an awful shame, Mavor, that you don't want to bother to debate my argument. My intention here is to reach the bottom of this whole controversy.

Oh look a "you haven't play the game" implication, when someone criticizes their game. The fact the economy stalls like hell, makes the gaming pace slow down thus ruining the gaming experience for quite a good number of people. Do you always assume user error when they experience difficulty when handing the game mechanics?
As a matter a fact I have play the game online, and guess what? They emphasized on build order GREATLY at the start of the game. A screw up on the build order most likely cost you the entire game, because the economy is that unforgiving. There is only one build order, there's no room for alternative strategies or anything like that. The only change depends on the map itself. WE EVEN HAVE GUIDES THAT GO INTO DETAIL OF THIS.

What is this I don't even...

Instastall is the most frustrating thing in the game and you think it's not a barrier to new players?

And you think only hardcore players playing against eachother can feel competition?

Seriously?

Seriously?

@swordy12345: It is evident you are not a newbie, but an intermediate who is grasping advanced player concepts and has to content against other online veterans; who also had to understand advanced player concepts to reach their level. What is this?...I thought the argument was the economy system made the game inaccessible to new players? Online isn't the whole game.

Also, I currently play Balanced Annihilation and Forged Alliance, and my experience does not correllate with yours if you think there's only one optimal build order.

And I gaurantee you, every other strategy game's online scene would fu©king kill you for not knowing their correct build orders.

@teod: Frustrating in what context? New players aren't exactly required to pump out most tanks/bots out in five minutes. You know - I always found it simple to just turn sh!t off whenever I overspended on anything, in any amount.

When newbies compete against eachother, it's not like it really matters, because they're all prone to making the same mistakes.

And if they were fixed in a week, I would. But they were core mechanics that lasted the life of the game. Some of them weren't even fixed by the community patch (nor could they be). When someone quit early on, went to the forums and complained "the economy is too hard!", those bugs are what they were complaining about, whether they knew them or not. They are part of the game, and they led to the events that created Supcom2.

Broken mechanics absolutely account for difficulty. Fixing the glitches goes a long way to fixing the difficulty.

See, this is the big problem, and the thing you seem to be missing. It shouldn't be an advanced concept to not stall the economy. At most, it should be an intermediate concept. Because if most players are stalling, do you think they are having fun? I certainly wouldn't. That was one of the things that was off-putting: when you stalled, you totally weren't having fun, cause you couldn't do anything. At least in starcraft, you just have to wait a bit if you build too much for your resources to handle: in a streaming economy, everything just slows to a crawl, and there isn't much to do about it. Especially like if you upgrade a mex, crash, and then try to turn it off, but it doesn't solve anything (one of the most annoying bugs).

No one's complaining about streaming. Streaming is neat. The problem was how it was implemented. It wasn't intuitive. Uber is making it intuitive, which is why I'm not that worried about it this time around. It has to be intuitive, otherwise, players will leave.

You still haven't bothered to clarify what these bugs are, yet you prattle on like I'm supposed to understand.

Bugs and glitches only account for buggy and glitchy games; nothing else. No one should have to be explained this. To help you realise the absurdity of your argument, here it is in the context of other games:

The handling of Mario Kart's go-karts is hard because Nintendo never fixed all the glaring shortcuts in their tracks.

The time units based combat in UFO: Enemy Unknown is hard because an 80 item limit had to be coded in.

The economy in Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge is hard because Yuri was never balanced.

I see a lot of talk about how the streaming economy is "hard to learn", but in reality the streaming economy completely changes game play and strats, which is the part that most people find hard to tackle.

Early game in a save and spend economy system you have to weight your options. Do you build this unit now, or do you wait a little longer get the money to build that slightly better unit later? In a streaming economy if you are not building you are wasting resources, which seems to blow a lot of peoples minds. In a proper streaming economy the game should always be moving and there is no reasons to turtle up in a corner.

Mid game in a save and spend economy is buying the best units that you can afford. Generally the tier 1 units are no longer useful once you get through the first wave of attack so you turn them into scouts or cannon fodder. Where as, in a streaming economy you build the best units you can afford and you are still building anything else you can afford because if your resources are ever maxed out then you are wasting money.

Also streaming economies have a considerably different end game then spend and save. In spend and save if you can sneak a few workers out during an attack, even if your whole base is destroyed, you can rebuild in a corner fairly quickly. In a streaming economy, if your production facilities are destroyed, you are pretty much done. Your opponent now can out produce you and run you into the ground. This of course makes bases more valuable, but it can also encourage players to spread out more.

The majority of the games on the market are based off of save and spend. Peoples budgets are save and spend. People inherently understand save and spend because it is drilled into their head from a young age. There are very few real life common examples of a streaming economy for the average person.

I will go on record and say that I prefer streaming economies because they encourage fast game play, eliminates rallies and prevent no win situations. Of course, streaming economies can become very complicated/confusing/hard to learn if they are not easily predicable, but based on what I have heard in the live streams and read on the forums it sounds as though PA will have a very straight forward streaming economy.

TL;DR: Streaming economies change strats, which players have had engrained in their head their whole life. I am happy PA will have a simple, straight forward streaming economy.

So in other words, children make better Total Annihilation players than most forum whiners - because children are more imaginative.

And less inclined to shout 'ITS TOO HARD' when they are trying to learn it.

TA was very easy to understand and learn when I was 10, far more forgiving than starcrap as well. The only thing I would suggest it a tooltip to show what the active resource drain would be, as well as the costs and build time.

Looks like some people should stick to mobas.

(Continuing on from my last post)

What I see in these complaints against stalling is the fear of making mistakes, which is seen conditioned into us by our education systems and workplaces. Our capacity to think becomes constricted. imaginative youthful insight is shed as we grow rotten and descend into intellectual entropy.

Suddenly the difficulty they have with the streaming economy system makes total sense. It's sad to think though what this entails for our game design palette.

Truly, this is a more fundemental hurdle facing our detractors than anything cost tweaks can do.

Thank you, daleeburg, for your insightful contribution.

You really have blown this way out of proportion.

Glad to continue the theme started years ago!

Riskier spending style is riskier; using the mass that could have made you some backup generators to make combat units instead is a calculated risk. If losing generators in one area will cripple your production (you do not have the backup capacity to cover the loss), then a surgical strike by an opponent to remove them is astute gameplay, not a failing of the resource mechanic. It was your choice (conscious or unconscious) not to build any spares.

Also, while I understand your intent, "actually playing the game" includes managing the economy for any RTS. You can't make stuff without spending, so earning is just as important as sending units out to blow stuff up, or deciding what to build and where.

What I learned from making all these mistakes (and more): do not build something you cannot afford (check the price of something before you try to build it), and if you do start something that is too expensive, cancel it.

I completely agree that moving an engineer from one project to another could cause a massive difference in resource drain. I don't agree that this is necessarily unintuitive, or bad design. Engineers have scaled build rates compared to each other (T1, T2, T3, sACU, ACU) which are static. One T1 engineer would always use the same resources for the same project, and a T2 would use n times more. The same n every time.

Projects always have the same cost, and the resource use is scaled based upon the build time. Any engineer capable of building a particular unit, shows you how much total cost, and how much stream, it will use in order to get the project built inside the stated time. Add another engineer and it will use the scaled multiple of the original engineers stream; if the second engineer can also build the unit natively, you can hover over the unit icon to see the actual calculated values yourself.

Take the 2 together and you have the basis for SupCom's build mechanic. You also have all the information you need to decide whether to add more engineers onto a project, and you can add an overlay (took me a while to find out it had that option) that shows the resource spend for each unit, so you can actually see the spend for an in-use engineer without even needing to hover over build icons.

It is entirely possible to make mistakes, but it is also easy to learn from these mistakes. Something as simple as stopping an assist, or cancelling a build / upgrade / repair (that you obviously could not afford to do anyway, hence the stall) will fix your instastall right away. An instafix, if you will.

I am a little saddened that something as straightforward as a streaming resource mechanic is considered a barrier to adoption by some players. IMO a new game (or a game presenting new ideas) is something to be explored and learnt, experimented upon until you grasp the fundamentals and follow the concepts presented (maybe read the manual if you get stuck ), until you become clear in your understanding and confident in your gameplay.

I actually enjoy learning a new game, with new systems and mechanics, but I'm now starting to wonder if other people might consider this a little weird :|

What "advance concepts" are you referring to? From what I understand they're unnecessarily complexity added to the game.
Most of the time users rarely use adjacency boast, because a: The game tutorial doesn't inform you of it's existence and b: it makes more tedious to manage buildings to take advantage of it. Frankly I'm glad that I won't expect to see it again in PA. It's unnecessarily complexity that kills the entertainment for me.

I wasn't talking about being inaccessible, I was talking about how stalling ruins the gaming experience for a lot of people and how unforgiving the economy is for making mistakes

No **** Sherlock Homes, Watson here knows that.

I was referring to SC and FA not BA. And I can assure you that there is a dominate build order. It appears to be different, because every map have it's own optimal build order.

Your unintentionally implying that there is a optimal build order. Every other strategy game doesn't guarantee that there will be more than one optimal build order.

Frustrating in any context. When everything you did suddenly just stops - how can it not be frustrating? We are not technically required to be super-effective, but we still want and try to. And most of the time turning random stuff off won't help, because I have to find that one thing that takes 90% of resources and I have no idea what this is.

It doesn't matter all that much for the match outcome, yes. But it does matter a lot for our perception of the game. That makes it a barrier.

But that barrier you are describing is GOOD. It forces the player to take some time and to learn what is actually going on. The same mistake won't happen again since the player just learned a new trick about the game.

Dumbing it down, so that every player can master the game in the first match (which happens quite often in modern RTS) is not the goal, as it requires a simulation with very little actual features. If you have a close look at which types of RTS have become classic, it's not these where you could beat the game on first attempt, but these where you had to master every single aspect of the game, not only unit balancing in battles, but also economy, base layout and build strategies.

Take titles like Stronghold for example. It was almost impossible to master the economy at first attempt and you would get crushed by an experienced player before you could even get build your first real unit. And yet people still play the game a lot on LANs since is challenging and allows to try new approaches in every aspect of the game. Even a experienced player can try to make the economy based on something else, and even with all the experience it can still go wrong or it can work just perfectly fine.

There is only one limitation to this thesis: The player actually needs indicators to find out whats going wrong. If you leave the player alone with a crushed economy he's going to be frustrated. Give him a hint, show him where things went upside down and he will actually learn something.

Easy to learn, hard to master.

The problem is the learning, especially with SupCom's economical bugs.

TA was fine.