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

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

Day[9] should get into this game, if he isn't already. So much "outtake" potential

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

Go through all the reviews yourself(the 3 or lower star ones; because at the end of the day, the ones who were actually disgruntled are those who matter.) -- you will conclude the same results. In the mean time, don't misinterpret mine.

All the complaints of "no strategy" are of the variant of "just spam tanks to win" or "just turtle and tech up to the best weapons"; they had nothing to do with economy.

Such complaints rank somewhere between "performance issues", "this game has no humans" and "no casting abilities a la Starcraft". Should Uber Entertainment be right to add humans or casting abilities? At the end of the day, the high frequency ones are the only trustworthy ones because they actually form a pattern; the rest delves into inane sh!t like "no casting abilities". If Uber Entertainment took on board every wild complaint from sole or minoritiy reviewers, their game would be a mass.

The frequency of complaints from forumites and customer reviews don't match. If the forums were totally honest, we would be seeing complaints about system requirements, zooming, poor A.I. driving newcomers away in far greater frequency before we ever got to the economy. -- Even xnavigator wouldn't be totally lambasted like he is now. In the end, I trust customers over forumites.

In the end, Supreme Commander still scores higher than god damn Starcraft II. What else do you need to signify it's a solid game?

Lol. You realise Uber Entertainment wants to push the boundaries of hadware; where the game continues to grow as hardware evolves, don't you? This is the exact same situation as with Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. One faction and no campaign are going to be the new top complaints; if not already as we've seen. And "unique aesthetic" -- really? None of the units so far blead personally nor exposition like say, the GDI Orca or Starcraft Marine/Zergling/Zealot.

So this is the first time I saw anything Extra Credits... that was some tired garbage.

"games aren't just competing against other games, but also books, movies and the internet." - lol! -- games are the same as books and movies! Who does this guy think he is?

What's funny though is even the advice you linked to ends up working against you:

But queueing up all those marines with all my resources stalls my production of anything else; like say, more workers, or a new headquarters! This stalling is having an economic impact on me!

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

Yeah. Queuing up marines in the barracks hurts your economy the same way as storing metal in SupCom and TA does. But it is still worlds apart from losing income because of an energy stall in TA or SupCom.

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

I'm not a top player by any measure, but I play Forged Alliance Forever regularly and I'm rated in the top 10-20% global, slightly better 1v1.

So I'm better than the average person playing FA, which is a hardcore game by any definition and the people still playing it six years after release are argurably more hardcore than most.

I find the eco in FA an absolute pain in the arse, and I can't understand why ayceem is so angry about the proposed changes. The main things that are a pain in the FA eco are upgrading mexes and the fact that certain units/structures/upgrades drain wildly more resources than others with little warning.

I have learnt to deal with these things, but what about all the people who don't have a longstanding obsession with Total Annihilation? What motivation would they have to learn why these non-intuitive complexities cause them to get their arse handed to them time and again?

There is definitely a skill in knowing when to upgrade a mex, but is it a fun skill? Knowing which upgrades will crash your economy isn't even a skill, it's a thing you have to learn or it will bite you, so you could call it a noob-trap.

I am looking forward to the proposed PA economy, it follows exactly the same rules and internal logic as TA or FA, just without FA's unnecessary complexities that frankly detract from the reasons anybody would choose to play a strategy game about robots exploding each other.

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

It's 'storage' you must turn somethings off to access... just like you have to turn things off to stop an energy deficit. Otherwise, things build slowly. It's overspending!

But the game doesn't convey the information to you that queueing unit production is bad. Why am I being made to figure out the game's nuances to beat my opponent? It's not fair!

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

Your analogy doesn't work and it comes across like you're deliberately misrepresenting the other point of view. In Starcraft if you spend all your money you can't buy any more stuff. This is pretty intuitive, and the obvious solution is to go and get more money.

In FA if you run out of energy your mass income also stalls, thus utterly devasting Johnny Noob's economy when he decides to build a MonkeyLord before he has the eco to support it. This is something that is not intuitive.

Even good, longstanding FA players get it wrong and have (admittedly more minor) energy stalls pretty regularly, so what hope has a new player got?

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

I hope you realise Total Annihilation didn't have upgradable extractors.

What you fail to convey is what is the majority of the strategy gaming customer base trying to achieve that they could fail at to begin with? "cause them to get their arse handed to them time and again" - this assumes they're trying to play online... but I thought most gamers prefer single-player. After all, the more frequent Amazon customer complaints are single-player-centric.

You want intuitive? This is all I had to know to pick up on Total Annihilation's economy:

• Build more production when resource plusses are greater.
• Build more resource structures, or turn off more production when resource minuses are greater.

THAT'S IT... That's all I had to learn to be able to have a good game. I actually couldn't believe during my newbie RTS gaming days how simple the system was - and every resource flow was visualised on the map too, so it was easy to correlate everything going on.

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

Certainly FA's eco is much more complex than TA's, I don't think I've said anything to the contrary.

And whilst PA is touted as a 'spiritual successor' to TA rather than SupCom, it's clear that lessons learnt making SupCom will very much apply to PA. The arguments about upgrades etc. are a reference to SupCom/FA rather than TA of course, but I think it's entirely valid to make comparisons as this is the last game of this sort that the devs have worked on.

It seems that we agree that FA's eco was a bit much and simplifying it from that point is a good idea.

Your concern seems to be that by simplifying the economy slightly past the point of TA, it will remove a large amount of depth? To me it looks like it will be effectively identical to TA, just with the causes of power stalls more transparent and therefore easier to avoid.

I don't think that this will cause any harm to the gameplay, and that it will make the game more fun for more of the time. But without playing it, it is hard to be certain.

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

couldn't agree more

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

Yup

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

One million plus sales(as well as one million plus sales for a 1997 game) still disagrees with you all. There hasn't been a proper rebuttal to this.

I so can't wait for the new complaints that Planetary Annihilation's economy is too hard.



One more thing:

Why would johnny noob be building a superunit? Is that how far into the campaign he's gotten?

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

Again you're missing the point. SupCom was needlessly complex. The devs have therefore looked at why it was too complex, and instead of reverting to the exact same system as TA, have realised with the benefit of hindsight (and with SupCom showing what happens when it gets out of control), that there is no benefit to having variable drain on one builder.

Can you make an argument as to why it is better to have variable drain? Do you think PA will be worse for not having it?

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

Variable drain gives you more control over expenditure (albeit greatly increasing the knowledge burden on players). But it also makes mass storage redundant, because instead of needing mass storage to make proper use of irregular income changes you start projects with irregular drain rates.

You can buy Forged Alliance for less on amazon than the StarCraft battlechest.

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

Variable drain mostly supports base building. It lets bases remain expensive and valuable targets without slowing down other aspects of the game. Mobile engis will have weaker production to keep factories competitive, so it helps to counteract that. It was super effective in TA and there's no reason to remove it here.

Variable unit production is very limited in scope. I don't think anyone cares if a scout demands half the rate of a heavy tank. The important thing was to spend everything on something. Perhaps it could find use as a way of tweaking troublesome units, but that depends on testing showing a problem, rather than something to do up front.

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

variable drain rates mean an engineer with 5BP can spend 5 mass per second on one project but 25 mass per second on another project.

Right now FAF is having a problem in the Engie Mod patch because some high tier T3 units drain mass much more quickly than other units. As a result these units are extremely useful in spending resources and experimentals aren't getting used as much. They're addressing this by normalizing its drain rate with other units.

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

I play SupCom all the time as well, and I frankly don't find it needlessly complex. And if I should at some point stall, it takes 2 seconds to see it, and then you stop what you're doing until your economy is better. See, the beauty of SupCom is that thanks to it complexities, it's a game that lasts. The economy is very much a part of that.

Not saying PA won't last, but the same players that actually enjoy the complexities of SupCom might not enjoy PA as much. This is how it is with all games. At the end of the day, it looks like less people enjoy the more complex games than those who prefer it simpler.

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

I'm not missing anything here. Why would johnny noob need to build a superunit?

At the end of the day, johnny noob is who's at stake here, because the whole argument in the first place is the economy system driving away newcomers.

Anyone can play skirmish and do whatever the fu©k they want; set the difficulty, the amount of A.I.s, map sizes, whatever. Anyone can very much play against themselves, and set their own challenges.

I don't diagree with stable metal consumption rates, for one.

The side effect of tying energy consumption to builders is unit costs from different factories can't be balanced properly with regard to assisting. And it's not like simply standardising energy costs couldn't've solved Forged Alliance's wack cost balancing for good.

Another thing just occured to me: without solid energy costs, the player has to do extra math in his head figuring out how much energy a unit will cost(especially when assisters are in the mix); as opposed to having the energy cost numbers visible on the build menu.

One million within the first five quarters, you dolt.

Yeah...no one is going to match the longevity of Starcraft. I'm very damn sure that has to do with a lot more than simply what economy system is being used(such as not having developers who abandon support after a year or so).

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

It sounds like you want to settle for playing second fiddle to starcraft, I don't.

Also why do you care about sales figures. SupCom didn't do spectacular in sales and what significance do the first 5 quarters have? 1 million copies is what supcom sold in the first 20 quarters too and the FAF support today is arguably better than GPGnet.

I think I'm done responding to this though it's clearly troll bait.

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

And I don't want to see a game ruined by some kid running a vendetta.

Game design isn't about being as obscure as possible. It's about taking solid game rules and mixing them in exciting ways. Starcraft is a veritable cornucopia of game mechanics- some good, some not so good, but nearly all of them given a home in the map editor. It is a great place to go for ideas and their proof of concept, even if it does not line up to everything desired in PA.

There are some ideas you won't find in Starcraft, and most of them are connected to the unique economy being used in PA. A streaming economy stands apart from other games; it has different strengths and weaknesses to the classic payment model. We saw many strengths in terms of working bulk production in real time, supporting tasks with team work, and making base growth much easier to manage. There were also weak points that we saw in Supcom, where unstable behavior causes more trouble than good. Reclaim is also a fairly unique mechanic that is incredibly powerful, yet remains poorly developed across the years.

Few other games have tried to utilize a streaming economy since TA, so PA stands alone in trying to solve many of these problems. Emphasizing the strong points, minimizing the weak points, and expanding on the unique mechanics are top priority. They are the foundation from which the rest of the game evolves.

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

I would say that taking a minor part of what I was saying and trying to pick it apart is the very definition of missing the point.

In response to this minor diversion from the actual point, when players see that they have a big unit in their build menu, they will try to build it. But that's not what we're talking about.

I don't diagree with stable metal consumption rates, for one.

That's a pretty weak argument. If for instance your basic construction unit always uses 20 energy when it is building and you have 30 energy spare, you can set one more assisting. It makes much more logical sense that a given builder always uses the same amount of metal and energy - if a T1 engy can output 30 mass (for instance) when it's making a MonkeyLord (for instance), why does it only put out 10 mass (for instance) when it's making a point defence?

I get the impression that you're just looking for any argument you can think of, and that you're not being honest about the real reason you don't like this idea. Either that or you're refusing to accept any arguments people are making.

Your objection to "the economy is too hard" is fair enough - your opinion is that the economy is not too hard. Cool, I can't argue with your opinion. But I can talk about whether or not it will be overall a better game experience with these changes, and I can't see what you're actually disagreeing with.