Do we need tech levels?

The solution is obviously to have all units of the factory costing the same amount of metal per tick, i.e. to have buildpower aligned on metal. Then you would remain the deepness of the flow economy with a more streamlined, newbie-friendly and better explained system.
The description could also add things like 'for each engineer/nanotower, add 1/2 mex and 1 pgen', maybe for a togglable detailed description.
Those infos will be on the internet anyway, so directly putting them in-game wouldn't hurt.

Yeah^

Never really under stood why factory's built units at different building rates, isn't that why its a factory?

Can you even into logistics?
Let's say a car factory gets converted to a tank factory during, say, WWII.
Tanks are heavier and at the time more complex than cars, and have armor. You could build at the same rate or slower, but you're still using more resources per unit of time. Which makes sense.

Well these games use 3D printer guns, and can magically transport resources to the required locations....sooooo

Every unit with the same resource cost? Seems to me you just want to cripple the ability to balance units by cost. Meaning every unit will have to be as effective per mass as every other unit.

When you turn a car factory into a tank factory, you are transforming the factory itself, which is not without cost (including time). And the new factory may as well use the same amount of resources and produce less (expensive) tanks than it produced (cheap) cars, depending on how you do it.

And even if this example was relevant, gameplay>realism anyway.

And how is it a problem to have units with balanced costs?

Nope, in that system, every unit would use the same amount of resources per time, with the only difference being build time. Definitely easier to understand, if, maybe a little difficult to balance.

But this wouldn't solve the problem in any way. TA and Supcom both had the mass/metal cost independent from the build time. For some reason people are claiming that TA was easier to understand but Supcom was harder to understand.
So the solution is to change the mass/metal cost to depend on time? This wasn't the problem in the first place.

If you're going to claim that something was wrong, you HAVE to specify exactly what it is and why it caused the issue. That way you can determine what a good solution would be.
If you aren't clear, then you start throwing around proposed "solutions" that may end up causing more problems that the initial one.

At the moment we can safely say that mass/metal cost being independent from build time is NOT the main issue, as most TA players did not struggle against this. Could this system be easier? Sure. A UI that's more clear and has less scary big numbers being thrown about would do wonders without changing the gameplay at all. This is an ideal solution. If it does not work, then we know that something more fundamental is causing the issue.

In any case, if I recall correctly, this thread was about discussing the tiering system, and how one/two/three/infinite tiers are clearly the best and should be used posthaste. This economy discussion should probably go in a separate thread, but only AFTER the problem we are trying to solve has been declared clearly, otherwise it will just end up being a useless thread.

Nope, mass and metal cost (rate per second mind you, not total) are not independent from the build time. The less time you take to build something, the higher rate of resources you have to expend. Now this is all well and good when the factory is giving you how long it would take, but the problem for new players is that there's no real way of knowing outside of experience what would happen if you tried to speed up build time by assigning engineers to it.

Standardising factory and engineer resource rate usage is just one way to improve on that system. Another is somewhat similar to the economy overlay you had in FA, where you could see how much resources everything is using/giving, except that it would tell you in advance how much, say, an engineer assisting a unit that it would not usually be able to build would cost rate-wise. For instance, you select your engineers, mouse over the construction, the icon changes to the assist or repair icon, and a pair of numbers hover over the mouse, telling you how much would be expended per second if those engineers started work on that.

You have it a bit backwards.

All he's advocating is having the same mass-rate across all units. If something is going to cost more mass in total, it'll have to take longer to build.

I tried pimping this idea out a while ago. I think it's still got a great deal of merit.

The problem with that is that you're forcing the player to do math in their head, which is essentially the same as what they did in the old system. With Starcraft this is fine, since you only have to worry if you have that cost at the moment. With TA/FA/PA, you still have to make an estimate of how it will affect your economical flow, and pure numbers aren't easy to do that with. Visuals do a better job. So finding a way to visually present the user with the economic impact would be ideal.

Also, whether the time is unified with mass cost doesn't matter. All that matters is that the user knows what the economical impact will be (ie, mass/energy ticks per second, but presented in an easy to understand way), and an estimated time. The rest is just numbers that they do not need to know about, as it's just used by the game calculations.

Heck, one solution would be to keep everything the same but to change the unit cost from being displayed as a mass/energy TOTAL to a mass/energy cost per second + estimated build time. That's all the important info the player needs right there.

Well it would be less math, because who really want to do math for entertainment, and math that once figured out would be easily applied to the rest of the game and would lessen the learning curve, while leaving the top level stuff for the pro players.

This would be even more important when your playing across different planets (Maps) so some type of streamlining will be needed if players are going to function appropriately.

I am not sure how to do it, but there needs to be a more efficient way of automatically managing the small economy stuff, otherwise you might get bogged down in micro of building a new base when you need to be focusing on the strategic stuff.

That's how I see it

And yes, more UI usefully stuff as you and other have suggested.

No, what you're doing is giving them numbers to do the math in their head. Which previously were not given. There was no way of knowing what the build rate of an engineer compared to a factory was, for instance, and thus no way outside of experience for a player to know what would happen if you lumped a bunch of engineers onto a construction.

I Vote For TECH LEVELS two or maybe three, and i want a few walking ships ....





Cheerio...

ZK has mass=energy=buildpower.

Works n' that.

Sorry to reiterate but... do you want units which are so similar to each other that their only major difference is their cost ratios?

That's hardly a fair comparison googlefrog, and I'm sure you know it.

The subcom 2 research spec tree was the best thing to happen to new RTS games. With out it if u go the tech route any reasonably good player can overwhelm a would be techker with his commander and a multitude of tier one units. And then every player that is delusional about their abilities will call you a rusher and say your a noob. Pretty much confirming they are a noob. But with the research tech tree u can still tech up and have a chance to defend them self using research points to tech their commander or turn structures into weapons or perhaps tech a unit u can quickly produce to defend what ever is attacking you. Subcom 2 is probably the best game out there in the rts genre not only was the research tree an improvement the ability to cntr move units makes for great strategies in attacking other groups of units . But it was designed so u could get into battle right away and still have to manage units expand economy and as the game went on u could respond to new threats with research on the fly or change your assault based defense you're opponents may have set up.

shakes head

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MRmxfLuNto