"The Economy Is Too Hard" <-- Lie

One think that makes the eco hard is the visual perception. In supcom its plain easy to oversee numbers, costs.

One think that came to my mind is a poker chip esq visualisation.

like this?
https://sites.google.com/site/supecono/

No, it's not. Exactly because it forces player to do it instead of encouraging and compelling him to. And it doesn't prevent player from doing the same mistake again, because it doesn't tell him what the mistake was.

Learning every game can be divided in two stages: learning the rules and learning how to use them. First stage should be short, second should be long - easy to learn, hard to master. Chess, for instance, have very short first stage - there's only six types of units with very simple interactions. But you can't say that it's "dumbed down" and "every player can master the game in the first match". Second stage is so long, it's potentially infinite. That makes it a good game - easy to learn, hard to master.
RTS is a complex genre, it's very hard to make something as simple as chess and nobody expected this level of simplicity, but SupCom had so many unintuitive rules with fatal consequences... It makes first stage of actually learning how to play so long and frustrating, it scares away almost all the newbies.

This is right. If PA will give a player good feedback about what he does wrong and right, it will be much more friendly.

Starcraft forces you to learn what a 6 pool and a 9 pool is instead of encouraging and compelling you. And it doesn't prevent you from doing the same mistake again, because it doesn't tell you what the mistake was.

Do you see where this is going?

It's an advanced player concept precicely because it's only important to master the game; which is only needed if you indend to win against online players(and then, only the good ones). Stalling to any amount isn't going to matter as long as you are generally pumping out enough units to overwhelm the A.I. opponent.

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And you didn't bother putting any context to why "instastalling" ultimately poses a barrier to new players; you just described stalling effects. Here I analyse the only contexts I can think of:

"It's frustrating because everything slows down"
In order for slowing down to be frustrating, there has to be a time pressure on the player. I'll call this pressure the time it takes for my opponent to mount an assault on my location. Given the history of most popular real time strategy games is they come with A.I. players of varying difficulties, and these difficulties historically range from almost harmless to marginally competent and/or cheating(or better, substitute A.I.s for an incompetent human), I find this hard to believe.

"It's frustrating because it causes me to lose"
In order to lose from stalling, again, there has to be enough pressures on the player from their opponent. Again, given there will likely be a choice in A.I. opponent difficulties, and so anyone having trouble with the A.I. will just pick an easier one for their naxt game, this is hard to believe. Anyhow, losing is supposed to be an experience.

"It's frustrating because everything stops"
Now this is hyperbole for a fact. Overspending your production doesn't equal lost production. You are still producing, just at maximum your existing capacity. This in itself isn't bad.

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@swordy12345: I'm still not aware of Forged Alliance having one optimal build order per map, and I've recently been actively playing 1 vs 1 for half a year now, while occasionaly checking replays and forums. The most I'm aware of is starting with a factory and a couple power generators.

@igncom: If you and everyone else are not going to bother explaining what these bugs are, I don't want you arguing them here.

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Lastly, I want to clarify something to everyone: My argument here encompasses all of Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance, and the various Spring engine games; which all fundementally have streaming resources. I notice a predominant of you posting about mechanics which only relate to Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance; such as extractor and commander upgrades. Bringing these up is redundant, since the team at Uber Entertainment have stated their main design framework is Total Annihilation, and actively deny the implementation of aforementioned mechanics like upgrades. My argument is solely about streaming resources; but particularly the Total Annihilation economy.

So considering the mechanics only relevant to Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance you hated are irrelevant to Planetary Annihilation - doesn't that make Uber Entertainment's further efforts to make the economy 'accessible'(lol) pointless?

Build orders are not the same as economy types. And your argument is wrong already, in that learing build orders is the easy part, where executing them is the hard part. What teod was saying is that, given this context, learning these build orders should be easy to learn (which they are, you just go to team liquid and there they are. Economy, though, should be more intuitive then that), while the execution of those build orders (timing, unit composition, unit micro) should be what you master. If you really want to apply it to economy, the same thing holds true: it should be easy to understand how the economy works, but it will take skill to use it, and streaming economies do take a certain degree of skill. This was the problem in supreme commander (I haven't played TA, so I can't argue those): it was difficult to learn how the economy worked. PA is remedying this directly; If you crash the economy, resources are distributed evenly: in SupCom, I still don't know how it worked, but it certainly wasn't even, as everything went to a crawl. In PA, engineers/factories will have their own fixed output of resources: this is way more intuitive than supcom, where each unit/building had it's own cost. This is what PA is addressing: making the economy intuitive, make sense, and easy to understand, so that noobs and hardcore players alike don't have to go through the hooplah of it not making sense immediately, instead, being able to master strategies, build orders, and whatnot.

Wrong. It's frustrating because you can't do anything, and it's difficult to understand what you have to do to stop it, as I outlined above. In non streaming economy games, like both SC2s, all you have to do is wait for more resources if you are low. With streaming economies, everything literally comes to a crawl, and new players aren't immediately made aware of why. And games aren't fun if you can't do anything. This is why it was frustrating in supcom: not only is it not made obvious why everything is slowed to a crawl, but I think there was a bug that slowed production way more than it should (unless apparently if you put an ungodly number of engineers to a project, which somehow speeds it up), meaning that even dipping into the negative meant that you couldn't do a single thing. You could try to wait like in non-streaming games, but in supcom, this would take forever and lose you the game. Effectively for new players who haven't used streaming, it's boring and doesn't make sense, and it takes a lot of time to figure out how to solve the problem, thus making them go away.

You can call bs if you want, but people experience gaming quickly. For you, you overcame it quickly. It took me some time, but I learned how it worked as well. But people learn in different ways. Just because it was easy for you doesn't mean that it's easy for everyone, and from my experience, you can bet that I'll believe that it turned people away from the game.

Losing isn't a component of the problem, it's simply a side effect. If losing were a component, then people would up and quit starcraft for good, and there wouldn't be so many bronzies playing. Read above for the real probem.

Read above. I can't speak for TA, but SupCom was bugged so that everything slowed down more then it should have. Or maybe it wasn't a bug, but still. PA is addressing this, if you read the economy post they made, by distributing resources evenly across all projects when the economy crashes, which seems to fix this issue.

You can't just sweep supcom's problems under the rug. I've tried to address in this post that I've never played TA so can't speak for it, but perhaps its why PA is attempting to be "TAs spiritual successor." I don't know. All I do know is that PA is addressing many problems that were in supcom, because there were problems, as I've outlined.

And if you really want to ignore each individual game and focus on the whole, then of course streaming economy is more difficult and challenging than non-streaming SC2 style economy. It features limited storage, and an ever changing production per second that allows you to build things without an upfront charge. This makes things way more complex: you can't just create a bo off of full cost anymore, as you can even dip into your storage reserves to create an expensive building, and you can continue to build if your storage is 0. It isn't worlds more difficult than non-streaming, but it's enough to be intimidating, but the great plus is that it opens up a world of possibilities.

It's more difficult to learn for the very reason that it has more components. That's all there is to it. It's hardly bs. If you're arguing against this, then I don't know why. Everyone here wants to use the streaming system for the positive reasons it gives.

If that's not what you're arguing, then are you arguing about PAs changes to the economy? Because I don't know why you would.

And if you're calling bs that people were turned away by the economy in supcom (which seems to be what you're doing, so I don't know why you brought up the 'in general' bit), then stop. Neutrino already called out on it, and he probably knows the sales figures, where we don't. And obviously, it was enough people who complained about it that CT changed the economy system for SupCom2, so it's hardly an insignificant amount of people who didn't get it.

I guess I really just don't know what you're trying to say at this point.

There is always a time pressure in a Real Time Strategy game unless you pause the game and command your units from there.
Stalling simply doesn't happen in Starcraft. The effects of stalling can be very frustrating to deal with if you are not familiar with it. In many cases you have to actively shut down production in order to deal with the stall which a big difference from a pay-upfront economy.

Stalling on energy can be severely crippling in SupCom and TA. Not only are you wasting buildpower and all your production slows down accordingly but an energy stall means that you lose metal/mass. Couple that with metal makers/mass fabricators that you might still have on and your economy metal/mass production can be hugely crippled by a powersurge.
Energy is the volatile resource that fluctuates highly. Avoiding energy stalls was simply very important in TA and in SupCom and players had to learn it by trial and error most of the time. Knowing how much energy you need in different situations simply caused a steep learning curve as the economy grew exponentially and everything had different energy to metal ratios.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHNl-gPDBhM
Here is one of them.

The latest big TA-derived game with a streaming economy was SupCom. It is probably the latest installment of a streaming economy that most people played. Personally I think a streaming economy is easier to manage than a pay-upfront economy because it is easier to maximize production, start a huge buildproject, queue up multiple units in factories and place down buildqueues for mobile construction units.
That said, varied energy to metal ratios, energy dependent mexes and how varied energy use and drainage is sure makes it a lot harder in TA and SupCom.
Now how to reduce this complexity and decrease the steep learning while keeping the depth is where the monies at.

So, as far as I can tell, the proponents of the 'The economy is too hard' are basically arguing that due to the complexity and bugs surrounding the most recent RTS with streaming (Supcom), it made the economy too hard.

I have to agree, only not in the sense that it is not streaming that is hard/frustrating, but rather, it was the combination of things (adjacency, upgrades and eco bugs) that made it hard. Add in the odd effect of it being OK to be negative mass, but very bad to be negative energy, and you get player confusion on top of the complexity.

I believe there are solutions that could have been found, but the devs just didn't have the resources to really give it a polish, and CT threw the whole baby, bathwater and bathtub out with Supcom 2, somehow blaming the streaming part for the difficulty of all the rest.

The current SupCOm2 economy is actually quite good, but not what we are looking for here. (For a RTS, It is a really good economy, and really allows players to focus on playing the game and maxing out their factory's.)

I never had problems with the TA economy that wasn't my own meddling.

And that's that, PA, based on TA with TA's economy and not the weird problems/solutions that SupCom 1, FA and 2 introduced.

Lol, this debate is still going on?

Pretty close. The only way to make it really accessible at this point would be to copy StarCraft.

Will according to him, there nothing wrong with SC Eco, we just not "hardcore" enough.

It actually shocks me to read this and see that no one has made a single very important point.

Well duh, because most games don't use it. People are familiar with save&pay because nearly every other game uses it. (As a side note, I think some of the original C&C games actually used something similar to streaming for output, but you still had the workers gathering tiberium for input...)

But the 'barrier' here is an artificial one, created by the fact that the vast majority of games use the same model of pay up front.

In my opinion, stream economy is easier to use despite it's complexities, because it's possible to get a project going before you have all the resources needed.

Oh, and people are too familiar with using the flow model in real life; what do you call car payments, insurance payments, etc. It's just that the 'ticks' are a lot bigger than you usually see in game -- but the concept is there.

Short answer;

The economy isn't too hard; most people are just too lazy to learn something "new".

and by "new" I mean an economy model that's been around since banks were first opened around 4000 years ago.

Except it wouldn't. The Starcraft economy only works if there's a finite number of payments to deal with. It clearly falls apart when automatic build queues meet expensive projects, and we saw that happen in Supcom2. If you overspent in the SC2 economy, only the smallest payments would succeed. Anything expensive would be stuck in a permastall, unable to ever build. In addition it was impossible to determine how many resources a structure actually requires (a value that changes with veterancy); leaving base construction and build tasks a guessing game. It was horrible.

In addition, a starcraft payment economy ruins the purpose of energy. Instead of being a peak production limiter, it turned into just another unlimited resource. Once again we saw that in Supcom2, where energy was not only impossible to budget but worthless, and spamming generators for mass conversion was the norm.

The streaming economy fixes the issues that a large economy demands. It is the correct system to use when queues and automation is paramount.

Correct answer;

The economy isn't too hard; Supcom just made it hard. TA used the exact same system and it wasn't anywhere near as brutal or confusing to learn as (or as bugged as) Supcom.

Streaming is fairly unique to TA and Supcom, so it was a huge barrier to have no tutorial or guide to using it properly. Guess which game was easier to learn?

The fact that the human race has been using the same economy model as Total Annihilation for about four millennia isn't enough? Sure we don't pay bills by the second... but the principle is exactly the same.

Then again we're stalling the real world economy right now...

So we've established that the most hardcore players don't find it too hard.

Where have you been?

We established that 16 years ago

I remember back when I was a kid and I picked up TA for the first time.

That was when I went "why doesn't every other computer game have this style of economy?!?" (RTS was synonymous with computer games for me then)
No one else I knew played TA, I was the only one so I did figure it out by myself. Including reclaim even.

That was... I think in my first skirmish game. Certainly not in the campaign since I didn't get past mission 4 as a kid. (later I came back finished the thing, so it's all good)

I don't think the economy is hardcore. It is rather simple. Instead, what has happened is RTS economy's have got worse over the last decade to the point. If the economy doesn't run itself kids will whine.

Exactly, we can definitely all agree that a streaming economy system added an additional layer of complexity to an RTS game. The questions are, what is complex and how complex is it? I do not believe the system is too difficult for most people to understand the basics, especially after a few games, but I do believe it is a very difficult system for people to master. You may need to calculate out charts, consult the forums, and re-calculate for patches/mods just to figure the optimal build order or resource management system; that's not "lazyness" that's: "I got stuff outside of this game to do..." ...it's a lot of time to invest.

Personally, I prefer an RTS game to have linear growth & instant depletion. A simple economy is one less thing for me to manage, so I can concentrate on unit tactics. I've been playing SC & FA and there are times when nothing is happening and my power/mass start fluctuating radically or I'll go from a power surplus to a power deficit and I have no idea why. I get the basics but by no stretch have I been able to master it. Just my two cents, either way, I'll love PA.

@veta: Nice chart regarding the Mass Extractor, it really illustrates how difficult it can be to master.