Consideration for keeping Economies Tied to bodies

I envision (UI wise) that when you zoom out to view multiple planetary bodies you would see a little eco plaque underneath each one with a metal rate and a power rate. and when you zoom into a planetary body the eco details pop up in your UI.

the way to make the "island economies" work as a fluid whole working to one goal i hope for some wort of late game stargate (call it whatever you want) buliding that allows you to "link" planets not only by distance by also allows you to assist another planet with metal at the cost of energy of course.

this way a tactic to break an entrenched planet would be to drop an advanced fabricator with enough mass stored to build a recieving gate and suddenly a bridge if formed between the two planets and the defender's job would then be to try and close the gate and thus close the supply lines leading to interesting play.

there should also be a orbital space station that you can build that can assist or be assisted to send metal to other economies at reduced efficiency. this way you can mine nearby asteroids and have them assist your main planet at reduced efficiency early on and later build gates to full assist where needed.


so your main choices to connecting your ecos are "trading stations" at low power but reduced efficiency and "stargates" at very high power but perfect efficiency


I think it would fit well both in the UI and in the theme of supreme commander/ total annihilation assisting that we are already used to.

I know this has been discussed before i just wanted to throw in my bit.

There is some merit to this. However, Uber currently has no plans to tie the economy to a planet.

For metal, it's a horrible idea. Players who own a planet will also have all the resources needed for battle. Invasions get the short stick, as all resources have to be brought with the war and reinforcement becomes painful. Trading stations centralize an attack's point of failure, further weakening an attacker in a battle where the defender has all the cards. Code-wise, it's not too difficult to manage a global resource with few users and fairly stable demand.

For energy, it's a good idea. It creates respectable weak points of failure for any world and delicious asteroid targets. It creates a powerful role for "eggs" and other units that excel at planetary expansion. Most notable among these is the Commander, which canonically is the defacto planet taking guy. It forces moderately expensive infrastructure to be built wherever a player resides, increasing their base size, overall vulnerability, and easing the burden of scouting. Bringing energy to a front line is fairly trivial because they can be built on asteroids and shipped anywhere. Unit roles can be designed around planets that are rich or poor in energy resources, which is not possible with map-wide energy. Code-wise, it's a bit easier to manage a resource requested by a single world, rather than a hundred thousand units across multiple processes that could demand anything at any time.

There is no point having a transfer station for a resource that can simply be built anywhere it's needed.

There is no point having a transfer station for a resource that is already streamed in at a limited rate.

Local metal already exists by simple virtue of your units being stuck where they're built.

Also, space taxes are dumb.