an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threads

Emphasis on the "noob" part. Too casual for ladders kind of noobishness.

Anyways, in terms of easiness to understand, I have no troubles understanding how the PA econ (as of now) will work. As said in the "The Economy Is Too Hard" thread:

And I get that. Actually, I love how that works, and I like it more than SCs 3 resource method of minerals/gas/supply. It's also not that hard for me to understand how the streaming econ works. Keep both around +/- 0, mass stores low(ish) and energy somewhere around the middle (or wherever, depending on who you ask apparently [I have a friend who played SupCom ALOT back in the day]).

I guess, tl/dr: econ is OK!

Now I guess the one thing that really has me stroking my hairy chin with the Planetary Annihilation's Economy System's thread was all the talk of econ-crashing, and all the talk of how some saw problems with it only solvable with scripting/prioritizing. Now keeping the above talk of "getting" the way the econ works in mind, I really DON'T get what the BIG deal with econ-crashes needing scripting is. For 1 major reason:

From what info I have gathered on PA's units and experience with SupCom's, they aren't really "micro intensive" in and of themselves, and I guess I think that most of the game seems to be of managing the economy enough to consistently produce units. And that's why I don't get how scripting/prioritizing in the case of econ-crashes is such a request. It seems to be like asking to take the game out of the game.

What about just simply building some defenses around your econ centers and just keeping in the back if your mind that you might have to shut stuff down, and to keep things on control groups (are there any in TA/SupCom/PA? I am drawing SUCH a blank right now as I type this), or just work on boxing your stuff and pausing it.

I guess, my whole question on that thread and the economy in general, is how not scripting makes the game worse, in the sense of econ management not being a necessary "player action" part of it. It seems to me that econ management (including reaction to attack/defending your econ) is pretty much 90% of the game, and attacking your opponents econ and/or his forces are the other 10% of it, or at least, in general.

Also, apologies for any spelling or grammar errors, or if it is wrong to abbreviate economy as econ. All this typing has given my a low blood sugar.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

From my experience, in competitive games you HAVE to keep your opponent on their toes with random attacks, otherwise they gain the upper hand.

I disagree with you, if you're talking about what I think you are. TA had sound alerts for when something came under attack, and I brlieve there were specific sounds for the Commander and for eco buildings, though I may be wrong on that account.

I personally believe a degree of reactionary warning from all units would be nice. If a defensive/unarmed unit comes under attack while "out of combat", and it's a super-futuristic expensive deathbot (or metal miner), that relies on ME to give it any orders of tactical significance, I would want it to give me a shout out. I remember in my early days of FA ladder play, I would loose entire battalions of idle tanks while microing a battle somewhere else. So much as giving those tanks a "get the **** back" or "get the **** forward" order would have saved them all.

So I'm for alerts, but units giving themselves orders is out of the spirit of PA.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

Not talking about sound alerts at all (all for em!), but more the attitude of "I want my economy to save itself when under attack via priority" in the economy thread. I dunno. It just seemed like some people want the game to play itself or something.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

OP, without specifically addressing your points I think you would gain more credibility if you had experience playing Supreme Commander competitvely. Luckily it's never too late to start and there is a vibrant community around the Forged Alliance Forever network. 1v1 ladder is a good place to start, it will temper your expectations for what is to come as well.

If you don't have FA you can buy it off Amazon for $7 or steam for $15.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

There are many people who seem to want weird automatics for everything. Let them talk. Uber know what they are doing.

OT:

You could also just send my an inquiry. I had 5 full accounts on gpgnet and each of those yields 2 keys that can be activated on steam. So I have sooo many steam keys to give away xD

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

Supreme Commander has only Mass and Energy to manage. Originally you could even combine buildings with eachother to tweak the economy, which was great, but they removed it in the blasphemeous game Supreme Commander 2.

Personally I'm all for the original's version of doing it. Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. Epic games.

Oh, and if you do happen to have 2 keys left over, I'd love to receive them, because hopefully I can get two friends to join in on the series. They're hesistant to buy

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

To sum it up from my point of view.
You can fight the game.
Or you can fight your opponent.
I prefer fighting my opponent.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

Supreme Commander was in fact phenomenal economy management wise, a solid majority is in agreement here.

One of the most common and justified criticism of the supreme commander economy however, was the VAST differences in resources the same build unit could use to build two different things.

For example, the commander upgrades. You could have five t1 engineers set to assist your commander to speed through an upgrade. You could pick one upgrade and your commander would draw 10 metal and 100 energy, and the t1 engineers would draw 4 metal and 40 energy each. Cool, everyone's happy and you easily cover that drain.

You decide you want another upgrade immediately afterward, and pick a different boost. Your commander now draws 25 metal and 20,000 energy, and the t1 engineers add 10 metal and 8000 energy each. This drains all your energy to 0 within a couple of milliseconds, stopping all your metal making, which causes your metal reserves to drain to 0 within a second or two, and all of a sudden all your construction everywhere has slowed to a complete crawl.

This immense 'self crash' issue was a real problem with SupCom and the learning curve involved with the game's economy. Like it or not, it causes a lot of people to move on and never play again (nor buy forged alliance).

PA is solving this by removing build time as a variable. Builders will have a build power in terms of metal applied per second, and an energy cost required to run the nanolathe. Therefore you know if you apply 10 fabbers to a project, it will use EXACTLY this much metal per second and EXACTLY this much energy per second no matter what that project is.

This is a HUGE improvement for reducing the learning curve of this style of RTS. I think the 'automate everything' crowd should suspend their criticism until we actually see it in action, because I truly believe this will be the best of all worlds. 'Self Crashing' will be nearly impossible, while 'forced crashing' by the opponent doing run byes and raids on your economy sector will still cause a damaging crash (that would be prevented by the suggested automation of the economy system).

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

Point the first: I actually agree with most of shandlar's points, however:

I obviously don't play FA the same way, as >50% of my mass income is from mass points rather than mass fabricators. Primarily this is due to me focusing on mass points and forgetting fabbers exist, however it also always seemed to be a fragile reliance on power gen, as it would appear is confirmed in the number of posts about massive economy crashes people have had.

I also check the cost of something before building it, and this may be a learned behaviour after the odd (mini)crash of my own. It is indeed unexpected the first time you try to build the commander teleporter and find it needs 20k energy, but to be fair it does tell you this when you hover over the button; how much of a safety net should be implemented to save players from themselves is a whole other conversation though, I guess. Is picking the wrong thing and crashing yourself a fault of the game, or a fault of the player not paying enough attention?

All that aside, I'm looking forward to trying out the set output scheme PA is going to use; like you said, it does make economic expenditure a lot more straightforward to grasp, and may well be enough to eliminate the self-crash element from all but the newest players. If your commander is always going to use 10 metal and 50 energy (or whatever) to build, you can easily plan for that.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

Eh. The problems with Supcom had nothing to do with a streaming economy. They were caused by mixing numbers that have no business being mixed, letting the 3 build resources getting out of hand. You can create the EXACT same issues in Starcraft by giving Carriers a 30 second build time, or making all air units cost half minerals. It was simply bad choices up front.

Removing build time certainly keeps Uber from putting bad numbers in the game. But it's ultimately a set of training wheels for balance. It's a sound starting point, but some issues will be best addressed by utilizing the differences between all 3 factors of a unit's cost.

For example infrastructure is something you want built quickly to help the game's pace. However, it also needs to be costly to lock in player choices from a strategic angle. Another unit may be overly powerful when rushed, but peters out as the game goes on. The unit is ultimately underpowered, with its only crime being a bit too easy to build on low infrastructure. These sorts of issues are not so easily solved through a single cost factor alone.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

sums up my view as well

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

Yup. This is basically my answer.

I made a thread a while ago about a 'script,' and at first I thought it was a good idea, but I see where I went wrong.

There's a few components that are brought to the table when discussing economy, and they boil down to fighting the game and fighting the opponent. I originally thought my idea fell into the former category, but it actually falls into the latter. This is because of econ raids.

A stall can happen because of two things: either you didn't manage your economy right (unless you are purposefully stalling, for which there might be good reason, but lets ignore that for now), or an enemy attacked your econ. The former is a case of fighting the game, and it's something that, while it should definitely be there, it should be obvious why it's happening, and the solution to stop it should be just as obvious. In the case of an econ attack, however, you are fighting the opponent, and that econ stall should keep on stalling until you can manage to build up some more structure (if you can). I think this might be a point of confusion in the argument: stalls from not properly managing the economy are not the same as stalls from your economy being destroyed. The former are bad and the player should intuitively know how to stop it, the latter are a good component of gameplay, and shouldn't have mechanics addressing it.



Interesting side topic that I thought was tangential but irrelevant to the discussion: something that we came across when my pop and I would duel together is that he would build a whole bunch of T3 engineers, like, tens of tens, to start building experimentals, and or some reason, despite his economy being completely tanked, he would be able to pump them out like crazy. Where I, being the good little commander and managing my economy to keep it in the green (except to perhaps draw on some storage), couldn't produce experimentals as fast as he could, despite both of us advancing at relatively the same speed. Just one of the interesting little quirks that supcom seemed to have...

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

If I did, they would be yours. Unfortunatly I didn't get in on the KS, and pre-orders don't come with extras

This right here is why I was glad to read:

All in all though, I have been booting up supcom/fa quite frequently simply to practice/mess around with the economy.

Seriously wanna play PA tho

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

This actually clears up a lot of my confusion on the topic. Thanks

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

I believe supcoms mistake was improper build time balance for the economy of the game on a few structures and the experimentals.

Other than that the only instance of fighting the game I can remember was that silly *** mex upgrade bug. That right there was the new player killer because it made NO sense of why it happened, and you wouldn't know unless someone told you or you figured it out for yourself.

Most of the arguments here seem to stem from being unable to determine what the resourse draw is going to be before the construction of the unit and what draw happens with additional build power.

Does nobody want to practice a game to get good anymore? Or is this another instant gratification push?

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

As long as they don't simplify too much. Either you play the game, or the game plays you.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

I wish we could simplify to the point that people coming from starcraft could understand it. Not gonna happen though. All we've really done is try to file off some rough edges and differentiate energy/metal more.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

Starcraft people understand it? That's crazy talk.

I can understand your mindset though, Supreme Commander require so much more than just building units and sending them out. This did put some people off, on the other hand it pulled some in. The game was before its time, that's for sure.

Anyway, since I haven't tested your game myself I can't speak for how it feels once playing it. And it's how it feels playing it that decides everything.

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

I always felt the issue with supcom1/FA econ was the exponential tech levels. Building some thing from a later level or going to a higher level too early would trash your economy. On the flip side failing to upgrade your econ, particularly mass extractors, meant being quickly overwhelmed by the enemy.

Question: Are mass extractors going to be upgradable in PA? If not when you build the higher tier extractor (Advanced extractor?) do you have to build them over existing ones?

Re: an SC2/SupCom noobs take on the economy/econ-crash threa

Nope. This game is getting away from upgrading. As far as we can all tell, what you get is what you got, and the goal is to make do with exactly that