Another Economic Thought: matching mass and build times.

Most of the people for the negative are just taking specific examples from the balance of Supcomm and demonstrating that the balance breaks if you change the resource costs! That is not addressing the system at all. As in.

What makes you think there are things that need to be balanced this way?

Sure, if the constructors are exactly copied from Supcomm. Although I already hear that T1 engineers are great to be spammed regardless. I don't even agree that some engineer clumping is a bad thing and if it is a bad thing then add something like nano towers or high BP assister cons. There are plenty of ways around engineer spam.

The unit would be balanced within the system. Someone using this system wouldn't set a unit's energy and metal cost then smack themselves on the head as they realise that they made the BT too short. They have to take all the resources into account from the start.

Why? There is a lot of game specific baggage along with those statements. Why do you assume it would have to be that way?

This makes no sense. If I have a unit that costs 1000M, 1E and 1BT then I expect it to be much better than something with cost 1000M, 5000E and 5000BT. If this is a battle unit then I expect the cost difference to be made up with actual battle strength. What is this about BP being progress? BP is however much BP you decide to build.

The buildtimes should be a lot more consistent than in TA or SC. If they really want to make different buildtimes they could do it like 'this building builds twice as fast/slow'. Through i think its even better to just scrap the whole buildtime and just ad fixed construction rates for engineers.

So for instance you got this engineer that builds at a rate of 5/s, then you got a building that costs 1000M and 1000E and it builds at 4x then the engineer will drain 20/s (5*4) and the building will be finished in 50s (1000/20). So each unit will have the following 'costs':
-Energy
-Metal
-Buildrate modifier

Alot easier to understand what its gonna cost and no need for crazy numbers for buildtimes. By doing a simple calculation even a 9 year old can know how much your engineers are going to drain each second and you still can change the buildtimes for every building. Lets do it KISS.

EDIT: just realised this only works properly if metal and energy costs are equal.

I haven't seen this idea yet, so:

make each production facility have a separate resource spending rate.

So like, an engineer can spend 2 mass a second, a land factory 3, a commander 5, a naval factory 6, so on so forth.

This would balance each subset (land, naval, air) to be within that constant, while still allowing a straight forward view of how resources are spent, and allows you to balance each constructor against each other how you want.

The idea is Brilliant. Makes it a lot easier to manage in and outs of the economy.

Consequence is that "time" becomes the balance factor and probably a big focus on adding more buildpower to your economy. Talking about that, no more imba T1 engineers that have the best buildrate to mass ratio, please.

I hate those SupCom t1-engi clouds around factories that created massive problems with the Pathfinding and caused bump fests, stuck units and a general wonky feeling when you wanted to move stuff through your base

I think it is kind of funny that so many people with a very poor understanding of the flow economy are the very people objecting to simplifying the system.

If metal, energy, and build time are all set to be equal, then more powerful units will simply cost more, and to that same exact degree they will also require more build power to construct in the same amount of time. There is no gameplay-mandatory reason why any unit needs to have this ratio be different, even though some games in the past have had units with differing ratios on a per-unit basis.

However, you will note, and this is very important, that if we lock these costs together, then all units will build at the same resource rate per time per build power. Any unit which can build will expend resources at precisely the same rate, no matter what it is building.

This makes managing your economy much simpler, as you can observe your income and expense, and use the difference to determine what to do with your economy in the future. Suppose that engineers have 6 build power. Then in the situation where you recently constructed metal extractors, and your net metal is presently at +6 (earning 6 more than spending per second), with plenty of energy, then you can add in another engineer. If that engineer starts actively building (it does not matter what it is building or assisting) then your net metal will be balanced.

Why do you say that?

I do not mean to give offense. I would suggest that those players who think such a simplified system somehow loses something interesting to just go give Zero K a try. Units can be tremendously varied and different, without needing their cost structure to be a source of complexity.

Could be a framing of the problem in an incorrect way?

The original post is all about build time, mass etc. Why not make it a lot simpler and just say "Engineers/Factories will always build at a certain rate, no matter what they are building".

What's easier:
1. 'Hmm i have +10 mass and 5 idle engineers, each engineer can use -5 mass, so I should assign 2 to this build project'
2. 'Hmm I have +10 mass and 5 idle engineers, I will assign all 5 to the fusion I'm building since I don't know how much mass they actually will end up using.. oops better stop 3 of them I'm using way too much'.

It would completely eliminate the scenario where the noob goes ahead and starts a nuke and his economy crashes.

That is another way to look at it. However they are fundamentally the same, in a strong mathematical sense.

Those who are opposed want to be able to assign arbitrary mass, energy, and build time values. Let's consider the effects of this. Unit A costs 100m/100e/100bt. Unit B costs 100m/100e/200bt. In all cases, unit B will consume half as much mass per second, and half as much energy per second, to construct. This is unavoidable.

It gets even worse if we are allowed to have distinct values for mass and energy. Suppose unit C costs 100m/500e/200bt. This unit will consume 0.5 mass per second per build power, and 2.5 energy per second per build power to construct.

The way costs per time are calculated for continuous production is to divide the total cost of the unit by the total build time, yielding the cost per build time increment. If these are not at a fixed ratio, it is mathematically impossible to build at a universally fixed cost per time.

And if you're going to fix a rate, might as well make it 1:1 for simplicity, and normalize the value of the resource based on that ratio.

Um, yes, that's what I just said. Framing the problem in a slightly different manner to illustrate the solution better that's all

Ultimately it removes any 'surprise' expenses.

Umm... that's exactly what this thread is about.

I admit I do know what zehusky meant when he said that.

I think this is valid. What exterminans is getting at is that late game units can have lower built times relative to their cost. This reduces the need of large numbers of engineers to build anything late game, and also means that in order to avoid economic stalling you may have to wait to later in the game to build these structures.

I see nothing indicative of lack of understanding in the flow rate economy here. If there is only X as a variable for cost then X will be more important.

Then do not say that your opponents have a "very poor understanding" of the base issue. When and if they have fallacies point them out.

It is not that complex. It costs X metal, Y energy, and Z built time. If the combined builder power of the unit building s It is PX/Z metal/second and PX/Y energy per second. In TA you mouse over a unit and it will tell you how much energy and metal it is using per second. If you hit F1 or mouse over a unit on a build menu it tells you the cost.

Allow me to address the misunderstandings individually then, rather than letting them stand as self-evident.

1)

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the flow-based economy works. Build time is not a literal representation of the amount of time required to build the unit. More build power reduces the amount of time needed. More expensive units with higher build times will either take longer to finish at lower expenditures per second, or finish quickly with a higher expenditure per second.

If a single engineer would build something at a cost of -5 metal and energy per second, and it would take 12000 seconds, then adding a second engineer will double the cost, and halve the time required. As many sources of build power as you like can be used to further increase the rate of production, resources permitting. As a result, in practical terms, giving a unit a 200 minute build time is entirely possible, unlike in, say, Starcraft.

2)

This is just as wrong as the first statement. This fellow asserts that having the rate of consumption scale with the number of engineers makes it impossible for your economy to scale. I don't really understand how this is a reasonable position by any stretch of the imagination. He also claims that the economy in ZK is not designed to "establish large bases or grow beyond a certain point" which is flatly preposterous. ZK has an exponential economy.

3)

The above argument is essentially that unifying the system by normalizing the ratios of resources makes it more complicated. I would rest my case now, but I did quote a second claim that that number "can still be wrong, and if it is wrong the balance issue will be larger." This isn't even an assertion about costs of units being increased or reduced by this change, this assertion is that the act of normalizing the ratio of resources will produce imbalance, which is ridiculous, and conveys a fundamental misunderstanding of how resources work in RTS games. The parameters of the game define what one erg of energy or one chunk of metal is worth, the numbers selected to represent it are utterly arbitrary. This is akin to saying that the Japanese yen is imbalanced because there are so many of them equal to one dollar. The worth of one yen is irrelevant. They simply adopt standards of commonly dealing with larger arbitrary numbers, like 1000 yen bills.

I legitimately do not mean to give offense, though, when I say that others have a poor or underdeveloped understanding of the system they are criticizing or to which they suggest amendments.

Ledarsi, you missed his point with your 2nd quote, which is unfortunate because it is somewhat valid, albeit not related to this issue at all lol.

This is exactly true, but it's true for all rate based economies. In every single implementation, the engineer is your control mechanism for managing your economy, and it does become unwieldy after a certain point when you start having dozens of engineers.

If what he intended was that as your economy grows you need to construct more build power in order to spend it, I would say that should be obvious, and is functioning properly.

I would agree that having mobile engineers be the most efficient source of build power is in error, but that's small potatoes. A slight tweak to the numbers making factories have higher BP per cost fixes that entirely.

Agreed. An issue for a different thread.

My Opinions:
1) It would be interesting to have certain utility things that cost nearly all a single resource. Like, a physical barricade and an energy barricade, a physical base defence and an energy base defence. High-One-Low-Another would be good to balance surpluses of one or the other, and give you the choice of which to use the surplus on. Maybe as a trade-off, make them not as good as the both-resources unit, or make it take more of a single resource than the combined resources of the both-resource unit.
2) If the last is taken into consideration, then also consider making the game randomly at times present you with scenarios that give you a rather large surplus of one resource while making another scarce. It would be interesting for people to adapt to using their scarce resource wisely while trying to fill in roles with their abundant resource.
3) Build times should focus more on balancing strengths of what is being built in my opinion.
4) Build times would be an interesting thing to be able to spend other resources on speeding up. It would give the player the choice of speeding up build times at cost of resources, or slower build times but getting more for the same cost.

You are ignoring that having build time be variable we can do things like have T2 things build faster for their metal/energy cost. If T2 items cost on average half the built time of T1 items, the number of engineers you need at T2 would be half the number you would need at T2 if metal = energy = build time. It also makes it impossible to make units which are any sort of economic sink as the only way to increase spending would be to build more engineers/factories, you could not switch to more intensive units.

First, this is nothing akin the the Japanese Yen and the US Dollar. Second, it is not an argument about making the economic system more complicated but the balance system more prone to larger imbalance in unit costs.

This is completely wrong. I really get the feeling that you do not understand the flow system. There is no situation in which more BT cost benefits the constructor of a unit (given a powerful enough UI).

I am sure we are all aware that if you have variable ratio you can have variable ratio. The question is why is that needed in the first place. For demonstration I could make a similar argument about another topic:

"Variable damage vs different armour types we can have laser weapons and missile weapons deal different damage depending on the unit it hits. So if we have laser units vs something with reflective armour they would be less effective than if the same units instead had missile weapons"

Here I have just restated the position and stated something that follows from it. I did not actually say why we would need the ability to this in the first place.

"Economic sink"? If you are excessing E and M then you're just stalling BP. Here is a question and hopefully the answer should get to the bottom of this issue.

If you ignore how resources are generated is there any difference at all between E, M and BT for the purpose of construction?

None, effectively. The only question is which one is the rate limiting factor.