Metal Planets - Should Metal Extractors Be Buildable Anywhere?

Completely genuinely, could you explain your reasoning on this? Is it that you want roughly the same number of metal patches per square metre of any planet for standard play reasons?

I think those of us who want it as an option would be entirely happy if it was a mod included with final release, however we'd rather not have to wait for someone to make it a mod; we enjoyed the TA style metal-mad play and when Uber announced metal planets this is what we expected.

Options are only bad for competitive players if they're hard to notice, and as we've said earlier, Uber absolutely will have to make it obvious whether the server you're joining is running mods. Mex-everywhere will be the least of your surprises otherwise

My gods you're a pompous ***. I'm done arguing with an idiot on the internet. Look bub, you have your opinion, I have mine, and clearly you're just arguing for arguments sake.

Oh look, you won. Way to go. *slow clap*

I would expect there to be a roughly equal density of metal spots per square meter, yes. Of course there's gonna be variation, but the total spots per planet size should be roughly the same.

Maybe some biomes might have a higher density and others lower (e.g.: a moon is resource-poorer than a planet), but overal it shouldn't vary that much.


I am not a competitive player; i hugely enjoyed Uber's stance of intuitive gameplay (e.g.: they didn't tell which unit was which when they revealed the unit sheet to see if people could tell) and i would like that to be continued. I would like to join a game and be certain that it's the game the way it's mean to be played. Especially if it's vanilla.

I suppose it depends on your definition of very much

I guess I'd be happy with the slider at minimum meaning half as much metal and at maximum meaning twice as much (or 1.5?)? Thoughts?

This might be surprising but, yes, something like that would be ok.

I think it should only be allowed if the number of extractors you can build on it is limited, otherwise it would be silly

Well it depends, maybe its just me, but i like the idea that you make extractors and they actually eat the surface, so the more people you mine the more of the planet you use, until all that is left is a bare bones metal skeleton.

Money maps belong in the mod section, not in a serious game. Metal worlds should stand on their own without infinite resources.

We've already seen plans for metal worlds to be a "King of the hill" type planet, with the winner gaining the ability to destroy worlds. Something along those lines should be plenty to justify a metal world's being awesome.

But that completely defeats the point of mex-everywhere.

I voted yes because I thought it would allow for interesting system scenarios. While creating the system of planets it will be your discretion to make interesting scenarios while being fair. Only problem is that new players/younger audiences would just spam metal planets in the system builder,or only play on metal maps. So maybe if it were an unlockable planet in the system builder that might be another option.
I know because back in TA, as a kid I would only play in metal maps. I did not care at all about strategy/economy and just wanted to build a massive army to steamroll multiple ai's. That will probably be the mindset of some players. haha

Yes, but at a reduced metal generation rate. I'd also like to see only a few metals nodes on the planet but with high metal generation rates.

Personally, I like the idea of putting metal extractors anywhere on the planet, but PA's resource system is fundamentally different from the system Total Annihilation had. It's not going to be easy to balance it the same way TA did. I'm torn, and reasons are thus:

• Remember, TA's energy was a resource to be used. Spending metal did not require energy. Energy was a separate resource. Having a planet with large quantities of metal didn't make your game exponentially larger in the same respect that PA does.

• PA's energy is not a resource. Not in the realistic sense. Your energy is simply power. You need power to use your resource (metal), yes, but power is not something actually used in creation of anything in-game. This means metal is exponential in terms of how much you have, and because metal is the ONLY limiting resource (power being infinite).

Imagine when you were playing Red Alert, and you suddenly had low power for whatever reason. Your production slowed down, but since it didn't directly power your ability to spend your money, you could have 0 power and still spend (albeit extremely slowly). It's the same concept with the added realization that power is a necessity.

In TA, everything was built out of metal and energy, and balancing both was essential. It didn't matter if you stalled on energy or metal as doing either would limit your capabilities.

PA on the other hand, as long as you have enough power, you can stall on metal all day every day and never have issue. As long as energy > metal, your efficiency is only balanced by how much excess metal you put into power generators that you don't need. (As a basic economy is concerned, anyway.)

The problem with metal planets working in PA like they work in TA is that metal is the only limiting factor in building units, and more metal = better. Without the energy limitation that TA had, metal planets are not nearly as balanced on here as they were on there. This is where metal makers would come in for PA, since metal makers would instantly balance the lack of owning a metal planet, but would cost more. This equation is, again, only balanced if one person is on a metal planet, and one person isn't. The person on the metal planet needs to waste space building power generators (and can't build everywhere), while the non-metal planet has much more space to build, but needs that space for the more inefficient metal makers. This would, in a correct scenario, create equality between a metal planet and non-metal planet.

The problem is that no scenario can truly be equal. The entire reason metal planets are seen as imbalanced if you could put metal extractors anywhere is because whoever gets there first and controls it will have an exponential economy that basically cannot be challenged. Metal, again, is the single driving force that controls your output, and if that were not the case, then metal makers would not be deemed too powerful, and metal planets would easily be implemented with a full metal extractable surface area.

What you see here in this thread is the result of the choice to make energy simply power your nanolathe and metal as your resource instead of both being a limiting resource. (not saying this is a bad design, theoretically speaking.) Putting multiple planets into the equation makes it even more unbalanced.

What to do? Who knows? Uber knows exponential amounts of core game design, and both them and us as players added together have knowledge of extreme amounts of balance possibilities. It's all about what Uber will go with.

So I must ask. As legendary game developers, what will you go with?

I remember reading a quote from Neutrino in a old post "UI is Evil".
Here is mine : "Options are equally Evil, maybe even worse."
Like said in other posts, they fragment the player base. Create holes in the game balance. Kills puppies and make my Mommy cry.

The best example I can find to illustrate this is a case that I'm facing.
I enjoy a lot a game called "Clash of Heroes" (great puzzle game by the way, if you can try it, wont' regret it !).
There is one option for multiplayer in the game : with/without artifacts.
(well, two, but the second is the adjunction of a timer, which is so generous that it have not impact on gameplay, and protect you from afk people. Good option !).
Problem : artifacts are broken. They are so completely unbalanced than some specific characters (that are already completely cheated in normal gameplay) became almost unbeatable if they use the right combo. The only way to have a chance is to choose the same combo. Then bye bye Strategy, hello Luck.
Thus i never play artifacts games. Not fun at all.
=> almost all games created (a good 90%) are artifact games, so it's a real pain for me to find a decent game.
So the only way i have to enjoy a fine game is to create one myself, with my rule (no artifacts). Then i must wait ages before someone join. And when an opponent join, the outcome is often the same : a short, tasteless and flawless victory for me.
And insult messages from my opponent. And my name in their blacklist. Joy.

TLDR : if a mechanic is sensitive, devs have to make a choice and force the best gameplay solution.
Making it an option will only break the game.

About the poll : the result is worth zero, nada.
It is merely a popularity contest and not a wise gameplay consensus.
Remember, most people know jack about gamedesign. Me included. But i'm usually good at smelling fishy situations...

This would be a nice post if this were actually true, but it isn't. PA's economy system is only different in that now mass:energy consumption ratio is set by the worker, not by the unit being built, and in TA terms all units have identical mass:build time ratios. Metal is the limiting factor on production in both games, and adding more of it increases the size of games in the same way. There are minor edge cases where the two systems differ in the rate at which the storage for one of your resources fills when you're stalling on the other, but these do not significantly change the way the game is played. And extractors in TA consumed small quantities of energy, which would sometimes mean stalling on energy stalled your metal too, but again this only reduced the rate at which your metal storage filled up during an energy stall.

In practice the optimal strategy for both games as far as eco is concerned is the same: Have an excess of buildpower and a small excess of energy and stall on metal all the time, as this ensures you can actually spend your reclaim when it comes in.

The economy in PA comes off almost exactly similar in respect that TA does but because energy is required to run nanolathes, and isn't used as a resource at all. And no, if you stall on metal, you stop building in TA completely unlike in PA where you don't stop. PA's metal is actually divided among your build capacity.

In TA, if you lose your energy, you can't build anything because you have no energy or metal. Your metal extractors use energy to run, yes, and when you have energy stall, your metal output becomes 0. In PA, even if you negative on energy, you will still build at the limit of what your positive energy is (limited only to your metal) This is the design that specifically changes the in-game balance of metal makers. They're not designed to work where energy is used to power lathes, but designed for a system that actually uses energy to build things, so your energy is just as important.

I don't have to balance in PA like I had to in TA. I had to make sure neither one stalled ever, while in PA I can forever stall metal, as long as energy is positive. I can stall energy and build slower as a result, but it doesn't stop me from building completely. I can get out of both without issue in PA while TA is much more unforgiving.

Either way, multiple planetary gameplay is the major killer in terms of metal planets, while metal makers are imbalanced by the economy design itself. It's not extremely balanceable, and while I would much rather prefer metal planets allow you to build extractors anywhere, even I can see that it's a problem that may have no viable solution. I voted yes and will not change my vote. Having said that, I do think it would be good for an option, but having specific spots for metal like this post here:

..would be an extremely viable solution as well. I had a similar idea a while back in which metal planets could specifically have small and limited numbers of large-scale metal maker structures that make lots of metal but require large amounts of power to use them, and that being the case, wouldn't have metal extractable anywhere on the planet. Posts are here:

This would not only fit into lore as you wouldn't have to send metal to the planet to repair it, but the metal you take from the planet has to come from somewhere. (Keep in mind that the metal planets have been there. So it's very possible within the lore that they were built before you could use your resources from any planet anywhere like you can now)

That thread was a long while back, and I've learned a lot about the economy and how the game functions since then, but even now looking back at it, I think naturally capturable metal makers on metal planets instead of having metal deposits (or even in conjunction with set metal deposits IE Ortikon's idea) would be a viable solution instead of having deposits all over the planet. Many people in the above thread and even in this thread had similar ideas, so I think having defined metal deposits instead of random ones irrelevant of their use definitely something to be considered.

These are functionally equivalent on timescales of more than one second. If you're running at 50% metal, your builders just build on and off on alternate ticks, which works out identically to PA's system.

Again, this doesn't actually make a difference in practice. Your mexxes flicker on and off when you're stalling on energy in TA, but if you're running on 80% energy and previously had balanced mass, your mass generation drops to 80%, which doesn't matter since you wouldn't be able to spend 100% anyway. All it means is your mass storage won't fill up while you're stalling on energy (and in PA, your energy storage won't fill up while you're stalling on mass), which is a fairly minor change.

EDIT: Okay, there's another minor difference, in that it meant massfabs needed to be micro'd while you were energy stalling to get optimal usage, since ideally you wanted to give all your energy to mexxes first and then only give leftover energy to massfabs, but the game spread it out evenly, and TA was too old for a massfab micro UI mod to exist. This doesn't make a difference because PA doesn't have massfabs.

Actually, in TA it was optimal to stall metal all the time. Good players had wasted metal figures in single digits.

I don't really have the time or energy to read through all these replies, so I'm going to state this after only having read the original post: I think that you should be able to build metal extractors anywhere, but that you would need upgraded metal extractors to be able to actually extract the metal. My reasoning is this simple.
1. Metal is refined from ore. The process of refining these ores is completely different from recycling already-refined metal. Admittedly, it is technically easier to recycle metal than it is to refine ore. But this is a game. Game logic, yo.
2. This would make sense gameplay wise, as it seems that resource nodes matter less and less the later you get into the game (by that I mean you typically don't need to find new nodes, you simply focus on defending the ones you have). That means the ability to mine from anywhere is more of a luxury or convenience than an outright advantage (made less of an advantage by the fact that your opponents can also mine anywhere).

I think it would provide a unique dynamic in one-planet systems, as everyone would have a nigh-unlimited source of metal at about mid-game, therefore making the battles more strategic than logistic. In multi-planet systems, the metal planets would be a coveted territory, which would encourage massive system-wide skirmishes in order to capture those planets.

p.s. I'll read through the earlier replies later to see if anyone else has thought of this, so that I can share in the comradery of good ides.

I'm pretty sure that PA extractors still stall during an energy crisis. The only difference is that energy consumers won't slow down at the same time, making it even worse.

I think that was changed in a recent patch, I think extractors work in an energy stall now.

I would actually love to see metal planets allow you to build extractors anywhere, but not if they're going to be like any other planet. Seeing as metal planets are super weapons it would make sense that they would have defences, so what if the planet starts building units to defend itself when you start building extractors? If that response scaled proportionally to the square of the number of extractors (with a scaling factor so it doesn't rise too sharply) it would effectively limit the number of extractors it's worth building, and make playing on a metal planet very different to everywhere else.