Another Economic Thought: matching mass and build times.

While upgrading mexes in Supreme Commander had the interesting dynamic that forced a player to maintain control of the map more than you did in Total Annihilation with Metal Makers, it was executed poorly.

Adjacency bonuses and poor UI feedback for mex upgrade progress, which often led to your economy grinding to a halt from timing ugprades incorrectly, made the game really suck for inexperienced players. On the other hand, getting the mex upgrade cycle done right would benefit players with exponential increases in their economy causing them to be much further ahead of the others. It was economy micro.

It just needs to be done right this time to reduce micro and complexity. Removing T3 is at least going to help dampen any exponential effect.

This seems to be a good solution to the problem of conveying the information of what a unit costs to the player. As long as the metal/s and energy/s costs are displayed prominently, it will be clear how much income you need to produce.

Engineer support throws a wrench in that, though, since you can have variable numbers of engineers support. Perhaps the tooltip for the assist should show the metal/s and energy/s the engineer needs to work at fully capacity. However, this falls short when a factory is producing multiple types of units.

Any ideas on how to solve that one?

That reminds me to open another can of worms: No Adjacency Bonuses.

Micro at its worst, I could perhaps get on-board with proximity bonuses, but no more pixel-perfect building placement please!

I know this probably isn't the right thread but I've not seen it come up anywhere else thus far.

In Zero K mex overdrive is not based on global energy surplus. You have to link your energy to your mexes. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is to build the energy within range of the mex. The radius for overdrive increases with the size of the energy source, so fusions have a quite large link radius.

If that's too risky, such as for forward mexes, then you can build chains of cheap energy producing structures (like solars) to connect them. Or you can build a chain of pylons, which don't do anything for you except have a large link radius. These things cost an upfront investment, but if you build them in safe areas and keep them alive long enough, they pay for themselves in distributing your overdrive energy over more mexes. It really is quite a clever system.

That sounds awful to me.

Non-adjacency-using bases were ugly. Adjacency encouraged building a base that was NEAT UND TIDY. With build templates, which SC already supported, or an automatic "surround" command, which has already been suggested, it's no more micro, and rewards planning over doing what all the pro players did and just dragging out lines of factories and T1 power. And really, before build templates, it wasn't even that hard to put buildings in the exact square you wanted, unless you were really ham-fisted with your mouse. Why not reward planning over just slapping down buildings wherever?

Agreed, it wasn't a great bonus, but it was a nice touch.

I would think the best option would be to show the engineer's resource use for whatever unit the factory is currently producing and the factory could take into account the build power of the engineers currently guarding it for the numbers it displays for items in its build menu.

Can I voice my dislike of "make players tidy their base by OCD"? As in, benefits which really don't matter all that much but strategy gamers being strategy gamers, will insist on doing it that way because they're afraid of the bonuses they'll lose otherwise?

I do like the idea of offering incentives to proximity based building, but would prefer it be a more generalist system which one can vary within instead of "surround mexes with mass storage, factories with energy generators, and to heck with everything else".

The " 100mins=100 build time seems stupid and long if something big costs 12000mins it would also mean 12000 seconds that would mean 200 minutes and would be stupid

I am not sure what the rate of conversion between build time and seconds is, but you are still wrong. You can assist infinitely. And if you tried to build something that costs 12000 with just one con, then you deserve to never finish it.

Exactly. I don't seeing 'neat and tidy' being a beneficial attribute in of itself.
Why enforce it when there are already inherent benefits to efficient use of land-area.

There are also inherent drawbacks, namely that if your buildings are close together, they damage each other more when they explode, and take more damage in total from AoE. And with shields either being removed or heavily nerfed as is implied, the main benefit from compact bases is being removed.

they actualy did that on purpose. technicaly it was a trade off between ecenomic benefits and a more fragile base.

Exactly. What happens when you remove one side of a trade off?

It depends on the side you remove ;p

Then with my proposal, big ships just take longer to build. If you have a big ship then, intuitively and aesthetically, the big ships should be a lot more than a single floating tank. If it's more than a single floating tank, it should cost more too - if it doesn't, then why would you build tanks when you could build big ships for similar-ish cost?

That was exactly the problem though. Naturally faster and slower made it harder for the common-person to grasp. Using engineers to fix the problem in my system is fine, because they will contribute the same (example) -1m/s to the project.

Then don't affix Metal and Energy together. It means that there's no longer one best answer. Don't homogenise all the resources. Also, what of weapon frontloadedness, and of range? These are balance factors that could vary between equally expensive units.

This is true, but I think you assume that the developer is always 100% benevolent in balancing. In SupCom, they had the extra lever to adjust balance, and I sometimes think that's what caused the problems.

Okay, so I said I was going to write a part two or something, and then promptly forgot. Derp.


Anyway, the discussion here has been good. A lot of that discussion has been centred around ZK's matching of energy and mass. After some of the posts here, and my own thoughts, I think that's taking it too far.

Matching mass and time is nice, because it's the time factor that was unintuitive in SupCom, and it's certainly what caused a lot of economic crashes.

A quick bit of algebra, courtesy of The FA Unit Database shows that a lowly T1 engineer builds a factory at precisely -4m/s. However, that same engineer, when building the mighty Monkeylord, consumes mass at -6.7m/s.

• Basically, 67% faster.

Now, how quickly does that engineer repair the ACU (the commander)?

• The numbers say -1.5m/s (with a massive energy cost too).

There's a 444% (the Monkeylord divided by the ACU) difference in the rates at which that engineer can spent resources. This was never intuitively shown in the UI, it was never discussed in the tutorial/campaign, and I don't think it ever properly talked about in the many community written guides.

Displaying economic rates and estimates was done in Sup1/FA. It wasn't enough.

I would argue that it's not hard to understand, but hard to manage.

This has already been touched on by others, but you still need metal for production. Even if you have an infinite supply of energy, your production will stall if you don't have metal.

Metal comes from three places;

• metal deposits,
  metal makers/fabricators,
  the remains of fallen soldiers (lets ignore this one for now, because it's somewhat a finite thing - any effect it has is transient).

If you don't have enough metal deposits, then you can augment that with metal makers. The question becomes, how easy is it to rely on those instead of claiming ground? If it is easy, then you have a situation where expansion isn't a necessity. If it isn't, then no matter what, you should expand to claim as many resources as possible. If they are equal, then one would logically choose the option that is easiest to defend - putting them all in the same location.

you forgot the most important part

What about, instead of simplifying a complex system, we simplify the interface and give the players the information they need? Why don't we work out a good way to illustrate this complex system so it's easy to understand and easy for new players to manipulate? A huge step in the right direction has already been mentioned - to be able to prioritize certain production over others. Even something as simple as having something like this:


Frankly, after the first 5 minutes, nobody is going to look at a unit and think 'hmm that's going to be -5, I have +6, so I'll turn this factory on now'. You just won't have time or the desire to micromanage your production in this way. Or, rather, we should be able to give the player that information without making them crunch numbers. We have a ‘flow’ economy, why not work towards a ‘flow’ production system? +1.5 units / minute for this sector, or “4 minutes until platoon completion”. 'Flow' economy makes intuitive sense, but it was the management of that economy that was hard (turn this fab on, pause that engineer, don't build that unit, assist here, put stuff in storage there).

Imagine a system where your base will automatically handle distributing resources for you? Not enough power? Ramp the factory production down. Need to prioritize that building project? Engineers from around the base could automatically converge and help out, factories could automatically slow down production. We NEED to have systems like this in place so that we can set up our base and go *look at other planets*.

This is actually a really clever way of representing the system, by breaking it down for the player.

I would modify your breakdown system, however. I think it would make more sense to give the player a breakdown by project rather than by type. Allowing the player to pause or scale down expense for a project from this UI would also be handy for economy management.

So there might be a Factories heading, which if expanded lists all your factory groups and their expenditures. Parties of engineers working on a particular project would also show their numbers by project. So if I have 10 engineers building an experimental, it would list that experimental and then the expenditure going to that project.