Metal Planets - Should Metal Extractors Be Buildable Anywhere?

Nothing requires you to play with metal planets. I mean, really, the fact that metal planets come with a planet destroying weapon attached to them kinda makes your whole "Metal planets will be so OP" kinda void lol. Having the starting conditions you describe is a recipe for 1 sidedness any way you slice it. Rushing to build hailys on an asteroid or moon would be just as deadly.

Uhm, no.

The plan Uber has so far, is that the metal planet weapon would have to be activated somehow. Either by building buildings or controlling nodes or what have you. It proves a king-of-the-hill type gameplay where you can battle over control of the superweapon, but it has no influence on your actual economy.

With infinimetal, whoever holds it first gets an economy boost that they can immediately invest to secure the planet, making an invasion MUCH harder. Even more so if the starting planet was shared between friend and foe, and your foe now has a planet pumping out vast amounts of metal allowing them to tip the battle on the starting world.

Infinimetal is like king of the hill, except holding the hill gives a major bonus that ensures keeping it becomes increasingly easy.


Infinimetal labelled as a "mod" in a modslist somewhere is fine. Actual game feature? no.

Admittedly I have not read the whole thread, but thought I would give my ideas on this anyway.

I am against free placement of metal makers on metal planets because:

Allowing metal extractors to be built freely on metal planets would encourage turtling when starting on these planets and shifts the games focus away from map control to who can eco the most efficiently while you both sit behind your defences and try to snipe/nuke/arty each other. The only relevant places on the map will become you and your opponents bases. It puts games on metal planets at risk of becoming too much like vanilla supcom gameplay with mass fabricators.

The impact on orbital gameplay would make control over other large planets in the system irrelevant, aside from movable moons and asteroids. Why go to the nice lava planet or ice world when you can beeline to the metal world and get infinite resources and some form of a superweapon to boot. If your opponent has control of two or three other radius 800 planets, who cares? You can still out eco them anyways.

That said I would not mind seeing this option as a optional mod or gameplay option just for fun, but I don't see myself using it.

My idea for metal planet economy:

Now going slightly off-topic for this thread got me thinking about metal planets. What if we went in the opposite direction to what this thread is suggesting, no extractors at all on metal worlds. I mean in current gameplay we are extracting metal from the outer layer of an armoured space-station that seems to be impervious to nuclear weapons, that sounds a little difficult compared to extracting metal from an ore vein on an earthlike does it not?

What if instead we use metal planets to introduce 'metal makers' to the game, metal makers are building which allow the conversion of energy to metal albeit at a steep conversion cost. I think metal planets would offer us an opportunity to introduce these to the game without either making extractors useless or making metal makers so poor they are not worth building.

However I do not think these metal makers should not be build-able anywhere on the surface as this would just create the vanilla supcom issue all over again. The build locations should be limited in order to maintain map control as an important game-play feature. This would also fit in with the style of the metal planet as the commanders would exploiting the already existing advanced metal conversion technology present on the planet. Two ways I can see this working are:

1. Many small terminals scattered around the map which can be built on, which become little more than energy using mass extractor analogues which will change game-play relatively little aside from the fact that energy will become more important.

2. Fewer larger terminals that are either already existing and are capturable, or must be repaired for a metal/energy cost. These would produce more mass and cost more energy than the smaller terminals, but the planet would still maintain the same maximum potential metal income. This would have the effect of shifting a game starting on a metal planet to a more control point like style, with fewer but more important key locations to capture.

Making mass more difficult to obtain on metal worlds and at a greater cost would also serve to push the settlement of metal worlds to a later game proposition. This would make other planets more attractive initially, providing a far cheaper way to obtain mass. But as more and more planets are taken, the mass advantage and hopefully the super-weapon of the metal planet (which hopefully requires energy/activation by building or capturing some structures) will become a more attractive proposition.

Sorry for the long read.

What if we allow metal extractors all over the planet (which, by the way, isn't infinite metal. it's [planet surface area / size of extractor] x amount of metal an extractor gives [and that's if nothing else is on the planet]) but for every metal extractor (including enemy and allied ones) makes activating the weapon harder or take longer. That way, players can choose to use the planet for eco or offence and an enemy presence anywhere on the planet effects the ability to use that super weapon. Then, not only is the planet the hill (for king of the hill) but the weapon on the planet is the hill of the hill so to speak.

You are correct in saying metal extractors being build-able anywhere on metal planets will not strictly give infinite metal reserves. However currently even a small planet has a (surface area/extractor size/metal produced) ratio that will allow for an insanely powerful economy compared to other planets, even assuming these mex are not eligible to be upgraded to t2.

While currently this huge eco disparity between two planet-owning players is not likely to make much of a difference, as for now it is difficult enough to spend a planet's worth of metal as it is. The metal planets however should be balanced with the expectation that we will have more expensive late game options/costs in the future that will differentiate different sized planetary economies a which will subsequently give the metal planet player a significant advantage in this regard.

It is a nice idea having to choose between eco and the usage of the super-weapon, however currently very little is know about the metal planet super-weapon or how it will work. Even if this was the case I believe that near infinite economic power will be too good to pass up. I think that the mere presence of the super-weapon on the metal world should be enough of a 'hill' to warrant it being fought over.

A final point I would like to make is that you seem to be looking at this solely from an orbital game standpoint. I think we also need to consider the implications of metal makers anywhere on a metal planet start. This scenario would result in the turtling/eco vanilla supcom scenario I mentioned earlier. The delay to using the super-weapon would also be a much less significant drawback as the metal planet will likely be the primary point of conflict, so there will still be very little reason not to spam mex.

I still expect this will be added as a mod or as a gameplay option but I do not think it belongs in the standard gameplay of PA.

Wow, ten pages of pointless discussion.

Mavor already made it apparent that it's going to happen on the first page. What are you people arguing about?
TA was a great game we can all agree on that. You could build metal extractors anywhere you wanted, that's undeniable. So unrestricted metal extractors on certain map don't ruin the game. This thread should have been over nine pages ago. lol

I don't get the issue. TA had all metal maps, Spring has all metal maps- and you know what, they're not played all the time.

Also in PA I don't see it as such an advantage. It will allow bases to be a bit more compact but it's ALWAYS energy that is the limiting factor to the economy, not metal. I always get to the stage where I have more metal than I can spend due to energy limits, all that happens on a metal planet is I get there a bit quicker.

Metal plamets are not maps. They are parts of the maps. And having "Get here first and you win" part on a map is rarely a good idea.

You are wrong. You can build limited amount of mexes and near-unlimited amount of pgens. This means that the hard bottleneck that can't be extended is metal. Your personal problem is that you don't build enough fabricators to use this metal and build more generators.

That's No Moon, It's a Space Station!

For early gameplay I would go with these statements: I

For lategame I envisioned

With one difference: You would have to repair (seal) the damaged (metal) spots to be able to activate the engines/weapon system(s)!

So no Haleys on metal planets, but 60% sealed metal spots for movement capability and 95% for the big gun. Numbers of course to tweak accordingly.

My point is that technically yes metal is a limited resource, but the huge Amount given on any sizable planet makes it a non issue. You're assuming I don't know how to play- I'm a long time competitive ota and spring player... there comes a point that more metal simply doesn't help, and that clever use of the units and weapons you've built up is more important than chasing even more resources.

The other point- having a key location on a map is good. You ever play maps like king of the hill? Point is your assuming only one player can or will reach the metal planet. In reality it will be highly contested- which it's a good thing.

Thats a good idea

There is no point to having metal planets if they are not going to act like metal maps. Might as well take them out of the game already.

If it's the option not to play on metal maps you want, you don't need a special menu option. As has been said already, just don't play on them.

Did Uber not explicitly state that they wanted metal planets to behave like upgradeable super units of a sort? Don't get hung up on planet nomenclature here.

They also stated they wanted them to be the equivalent of metal maps. They have no business being in the game and taking up development effort if they don't offer that. It's not nomenclature, it's the whole point.

They do act like metal maps. Ohhhhh, you mean like TA metal maps. Well that's a different game so that'd be stupid.

Because that is their stated purpose. Otherwise they are little more than a weird looking regular planet that adds nothing to the gameplay.

Citation needed.

If that is the case you have a point. Not a claim, though.

Is it really thought? I talked about this earlier in the thread(or it might have been some other thread with the same topic), there is nothing specifically stated that they would function exactly like TA Metal Maps, in fact the addition of giant lasers makes that kind of impossible, because TA Metal Maps didn't have those!

Mike

[1]:
"they" can refer to:
Water planets
Desert Planets
Earth planets
Moons
anything you can imagine.

We could play on a pink sphere because trees do not add gameplay.

Trying to force a gimmic on a planet that doesn't need one is nonsense. We play on different planets for variety.