Progressive penalization for overbuilding defences

This idea suggest two ways of dealing with overproducing defences, they both are based on progressive increase in material use.

1. Progressive building costs
Every type of defence will have its separate penalization pool. Lets talk for example about pelters.
The increase cost coefficient is 1.1.
Cost of a pelter is "current cost" x "coefficient".

Let's see a table of costs for pelters (metal cost).

1. 1500
2. 1650
3. 1815
4. 1997
5. 2196
6. 2416
7. 2657
8. 2923
9. 3215
10. 3537

From certain point it will be very unefficient to build more pelters. This point can be altered by changing the coefficient.

2. Progressive energy consumption
Currently defences do not consume energy unless firing. This part is based on a fact, that defences would consume energy, when online, similar to radars.
Every type of defence will have its separate penalization pool again. Lets continue with pelters.
The increase energy coefficient is 1.1.
Energy consumption is "current consumption" x "coefficient".

Here is a table again (energy maintanance cost for new pelter - total)

1. 300 - 300
2. 330 - 630
3. 363 - 993
4. 399 - 1392
5. 439 - 1831
6. 483 - 2314
7. 531 - 2845
8. 585 - 3430
9. 643 - 4073
10. 707 - 4780

The energy consumption can be dealt by building more energy plants. The building costs remain the same.

Any of these two ideas can apply to many kind of buildings. It could also apply to some offensive structures, for example nuclear launchers or rockets themselves.

The numbers used are only for demonstration, they are the point to be balanced.

Big difficulty with this: What happens when fights get bigger. Sure, the coefficient helps stop some guy from putting 10 pelters in his base, but when you're building the Maginot Line because black owns the other half of the planet, you're going to need more than a few pelters. But if the coefficient is small enough that late game defences are great, is it really going to stop the early game pelter turtle?

I think the more important question is, do we want units to scale better than defenses? That depends on what Uber imagines late game to be like.

Well, if anyone owns half of a planet and you have nothing to do, but defend by stationary defences, you are only prolonging the game by building insane amount of defences. And we do not want this. Nobody likes these long games because people are turtling in their little base.

Understand, that you can never be a 100% safe turtle. It ussually is just a matter of time until your oppononent builds enough nukes to launch them at once / build orbital laser turrets / build huge air force etc.

I am against this turtling should be a viable strategy and not penalized.

If someone is turtling he is not expanding and will be at a disadvantage against someone how is expanding. But by doing this you would also give a penalty to people who expand. Because you need to defend you expensions and to do this you would use defencive structures. Someone how has half the planet might have a similar amount of defences compaired to a turtle or more.

If defences would become so expensive, turtle players would just make a lot of artillary units behind a wall with a radar tower.

If you want a game with out turtles when the game is finnished, just disable all defensive structures. Personally I like breaking a turtles defence line, and his base.

Yes!

And i think it would make the game more complex to understand. It will be difficult to know how the actual cost is atm. Of course you can show this in the ui, but it will be very hard to get used to always changing numbers.

Overbuilding of defences is already penalised. You spread out less and claim less territory less quickly while also spending resources on units that are immobile and only useful as a deterrent. Even when massed, a defensive line can be breached because it literally lacks flexibility.

Couldn't have said it any better myself.

I am guessing the reason this is being suggested is because Pelters are way too strong. This can be fixed by balancing/reworking Pelters. There is no need to add confusing rules that people will only figure out by reading them.

All this rule would do is punish players who don't spend time reading the finer details about this game, and it won't make Pelters that much weaker.

So, as a follow up and in an attempt to discuss things; @martenus, is there any particular reason that implementing either a rather arbitrary building or consumption 'soft-cap' is indisputably the only way to balance defences?

If yes, how do you reconcile the fact that Total Annihilation managed to avoid turtles always winning, or even it being a particularly viable strategy even to very skilled players, even though there were objectively more powerful defensive structures in said game?

there are SO many reasons not to do this. Warcraft 3 did this for units, it was called "upkeep" and it was ******* horrible!

Meh. I don't really like it.

Main reason being, a 1v1 on a 600 size planet is WAAAY different than a 20v20 on 20 different planets.

Actually I could see a similar system working quite well for a game like TA or PA.
Lets say that producing energy always costs metal. Say you would get 100 energy for every 1 metal.
Then almost every unit would require energy to function so your unit cap is basically how much metal income you have because at some point you wont have enough metal income that you can turn into energy to run very many units.
I think this could be an interesting balancing mechanic that could offer some interesting choices and lower the slippery slope.
Some units could require more energy to run. Some units less.
Then you could also balance different power plants in more ways.
Basic power plants might be cheap but require much more metal to produce energy. Say that you get 50 energy for every 1 metal.
Advanced power plants could produce much less energy for their expensive cost but give you much more energy per metal. Say 200 energy for every 1 metal.
So advanced power plants would be a long term investment while basic power plants are a better choice in the short term and for a rapidly expanding economy.

Limits suck, no one likes limits. They aren't fun. Limits arn't epic. Anything like this only works to limit PAs scale which goes against a fundamental goal (large scale) of this game. A million times no. If your enemy build Defenses, or units or anything on a larger scale than you did the solution is to build more, not to limit them if they can legitimately afford what they built.

Really are topics like this needed, its like everyone is completely missing the point of the game being larger than a single 2d play place.

Turtling is dead, when you can obliterate a planet with an asteroid, PERIOD. Doesnt matter if the whole planet is defensive towers. You are working too hard if you are trying to take a planet with units.

If you sit on a planet and turtle, an expansionist is going to completely annihilate you from space.

Note that my suggestion scales with the available resources. When there are more metal spots, there is a higher potential unit limit. Some units could also have no energy drainage which would mean you could make an infinite number of those units.
I think the biggest reason that there usually are unit limits in games is because of technical limitations and that the developers want to frame the scale of the engagement.
My suggestion is mostly meant to address slippery slope and technical limitations so it's a little bit off-topic.

I disagree with limiting anything in the way described by the OP. It is an un-scaling lookup table and a lazy way to balance. It is basically saying;

"We know unit X is OP so how about we increase its cost as the game scales up to encourage people to make other units."

I like Godde's idea as a game mechanic but not necessarily for any particular game. I think it would have to be a core mechanic of whichever game it appeared in and so it cannot easily be added.

Straightout horrible suggestion imo

Making things progessivly more expensiv in a game that is build around constand production be it static or mobile weapons? .. just no!

Perhaps to stop turtling while maintaining the ability to defend your expansions, Uber could implement a energy saturation system. It would work like a heat map. As you build more and more in one place the energy in that area gets used up until no more construction is possible. This would force players to spread out a little. Further more this system isn't cryptic, users could view the heat map by holding a hot key.

Why does everyone want to punish the turtles? They are already punishing themselves! LOL

Im against this kind of system unless its balanced out for the Large Massive wars. Id rather not be screwed over to only defend one or two fronts from invading forces due to this kind of system. I see alot of Problems spawning around this kind of thing.

Edit: Also I thought this game was about an unlimited number of units and ect.... Doesnt this create a limit in one way or another and simply change the over all core idea of Massive hordes of units for war? Oh well just adding another voice to the topic.

Pelters are good. They are game winning. Honestly, I have seen t1 blobs and levelers win more games than pelters and catapults. Pelters are good though, once you have 2 up and growing in the same spot you make it rain like a handful of hundreds at a gentlemen's club. Then you creep them in, slowly eating more enemy land away.

They are good. They aren't breaking, possibly could see a future nerf, but defences in general aren't the entire end all beat all center of the game. If anything, a fighter perimeter is more vital than any turrets at all.