Economy ideas.

I love the idea of economy presented in the may 17th 2013 video however I have few comments:

In my opinion:
1) Armies and base stuff like artillery should be supported by economy like Jon Mavor said. This a right idea.

2) Laser, plasma, and other energy units should draw energy to support their operation.

3) Projectile or bomber units or projectile cannons should take mass and a little energy to support their operation (they shoot or drop chunks of mass so it is logic to provide mass to them, and they need energy to aim or turn and run). This makes some sense, doesn't it?

4) Please do not make energy converters that convert energy into mass. This is stupid a nonsense. Who a hell would want to convert energy into mass? The opposite should be supported by the game economy: mass to energy: E=Mc^2. Small amount of mass should give huge amount of energy similar to formula E=Mc^2. If you think that this would give excess of energy then conversion rate could be very slow. One unit of mass should give huge amount of units of energy, but the rate at which mass is converted by reactor into energy could be very low. Higher tech powerplant could provide a little bit higher rate of m to E conversion. This would make mass even more important because there would be no E without m until you have solar panels or windplants or thermal powerplants or something similar.

6) If game has solar panel energy, then these panels should produce energy proportional to the cos(alpha) where alpha is an angle between normal to the surface of the solar panel and light beam from the sun. This would make energy acquisition more strategic because players would want to build panels closer to the equator, and around the planet (spread the base, and make multiple bases around the planet), in such way that there is at least one or more solar panels in a day zone of a planet so the solar energy is provided constantly.

5) You could try concept of uber mass extractors (UMEXes) that could be placed anywhere, and suck up mass from any place. They could be way more expensive and maybe less efficient that normal mass extractors (less mass produced per unit of time).

I think these ideas are worth trying and checking if they can balance out well.

1) Yup

2) This is getting close to Evo-RTS where every unit requires power to fire. I'm not philosophically opposed it's just a different design direction. Also from playing Evo, I know this encourages a lot more skirmishing than actual pitched battles as you try to maximize your firepower in each engagement.

3) see #2

4) Agreed, I don't care as much about the lore as gameplay though. Design wise it really undermines map control. And I don't buy the argument that it's just a matter of providing a different playstyle i.e. turtling. You can turtle and still require map control.

5) Intellectually I see no difference between an "Uber MEX" and Mass Fabricators so I would dismiss them for the same reasons. Zero-K has an interesting Overdrive mechanic that allows wasted energy to increase mass production. This increases the value of the map you already control by requiring more infrastructure investment. I think something along those lines would be good.

6) There's some problems with solar panels, namely that planets spin - so one player could develop a strong early advantage and the other would never recover because of the inflationary nature of stream economies. Deciding exactly where on the planet you build the solar power also reeks of economic micromanagement. What if the planet isn't on the same plane as the sun? Or the planet has a slightly lopsided orbit? This would have deep ramifications to where you want to build a base and would really undermine the more interesting stuff like terrain strategy, e.g. basing near a ravine or pass.

on 6)
maybe solar collectors could be T2 tech instead of T1 so when people started building them it wouldnt create such difference.
about them forcing players to build bases in non strategic places, why isnt that an issue when it comes to mass points ? i think its okay having different reasons to build in different places, different gameplays depending on the orbits and position of stars. makes the game more dynamic and unique each time you play.

I think you might want to rephrase that. If its' logical its' also consistent, no?

It adds depth through complexity. Balancing the cost of the drain adds complexity to the game design and balancing the use and drainage of resources ingame becomes more complex but I like it.

Wait, pretty much everything? Nah. The point of PA is to have hueg robut battles. Energy drain will eat into the number of units that can be fielded or put into combat at any one time.

There are some places where energy drain can restrict the use of a powerful unit, such as a bomber or shrouder or mobile radar. You could also go the TA route and simply have every robot provide the energy it needs to operate. It gives some benefit to an idle army, and it helps reveal your army size through energy income. But it doesn't do much else.

According to my point (4), your (5) doesn't make much sense. What's the point of converting mass to energy to convert it back to mass? If there is excess energy then less mass should by converted to E. On the other hand if energy is obtained from the other source than mass, and there is excess of such energy then according to my (4) (and E=Mc^2) huge excess of energy should produce just tiny amount of mass. Fair deal. In SupCom games energy is free, but in true world it never is free. It shouldn't be like in SupCom games, it should come from something like mass, solar panels, thermal energy, chemicals like hydrocarbons etc.

You are @ least 100% right about this. However if Jon plans to do starting positions a strategic decision then my point (6) makes more sense. On the other hand solar panels could be expensive T2, so it is not built right on the beginning so no one knows who is going to get them first at what time of the day of night. The major problem with solar panels is such if one half of a planet always faces the sun and the other half always is in darkness. The players on the dark side would be energywise screwed up, but on the other hand designer could provide thermal energy there or something similar.

The primary resources will be metal and energy(and buildpower) in PA.

You are writing about names, and directing the topic into nowhere. Is gameplay going to be affected because you are using metal instead of mass??? Metal is a kind of mass too. I don't care if there is going to be metal or mass in PA. I don't see how the difference in names of these resources is going to affect the game. Maybe you will not be able to collect trees or rocks but its a minor thing that will probably have minimal impact on the game.

This thread is mostly discussing gameplay mechanics from a fluff perspective. "Fluff" is justifying ingame mechanics with realistic examples or ingame lore.

If you are gonna discuss the mechanics of the game and include real physics you should also use the correct terms.

On another note. Since metal might not be very easy to obtain on the surface of the planet, converting energy to metal could well be a reasonable use of energy. We can also change the constant of the speed of light to whatever we want. It is a game, remember?
Even though carbon-polymer composite materials or graphene could just as well be used in future technology robots we are using metal as a primary resource to build robots. I'm not gonna speculate what future robots will be made of since I don't know the future. We can speculate but what discoveries lies ahead is unknown.

Don't push discussion on the side track. I am actually a physicist myself. Formula E=Mc^2 applies to mass and this formula doesn't care if mass is made out of metal or water. Metal is a form of mass too. The game mechanics doesn't care if the robot is made out of metal or rock or something elese. I don't think that game mechanics will take into account conductivity, conductance, resistance, resistivity, elasticity, chemical composition and God knows what else to make its game mechanics. It is really not important for the game if the thing is called mass or metal. And besides that, what is metal? isn't it a mass? Besides that, tell me what is a metal if you are so precise? Chemist and material scientist would say that metal is a material that has conducting band and small band gap at the boundary of Brillouin zone. Astronomer would say that metal is any chemical element other than hydrogen and helium. So what a hell you are talking about? Jon Mavor mentioned about pumping He or H from some planets as sort of resource. Precisely both aren't clear form of energy nor metals from material scientists nor astronomers point of view. One of the resources in the game is called Metal, and I don't care if it is named "Mass" or "Metal" and I don't care if some one calls it one way or another as long as we both know what he is talking about. It really doesn't matter for game mechanics at all and therefore you are trolling this thread now.

When it comes to E=Mc^2 and changing constant c it doesn't matter much either for the game mechanics. Proportions in this game are weird. Planets are very small, or units are incredibly big. Are densities and sizes of stars and planets in this game realistic? Definitively no. We don't really know meaning of one meter and 1kg in this game. I don't think it is important in this game if a tank's mass is 250kg or 10000kg or planet radius if 6500m or 6500km, since the game doesn't even care about even average planet densities and their impact on gravity strength. For this game it doesn't matter if you need 5kg of metal to make a tank or 5tons of metal. The only thing that matters is an effort player needs to make to obtain that tank (what he has to build at what cost). Therefore I don't care if in this game c=299792458 m/s or 350235m/s and I don't care if mass of tank equals 10500kg or 350kg. All proportions are screwed up anyway for the sake of fun. I don't care much how much mass a tank costs and how long 1m in game is. I just care for realism whenever it can yield cool results and whenever it can be handled by home computer. If m=350kg and game c=3211345m/s then energy equivalent should be approx. = E =3.6*10^15J. That's all.

Mass is a too broad term anyway. Hey! Water is mass. Why not make robots out of water. We just need to fusion the mass to whatever material we want. But... Wouldn't that require a lot of energy to kickstart the process? Yeah. That's what we got metal makers for. Not that I think metal makers are a necessity.
The mass that PA use for building stuff is called metal.

My first thought was that it would be converted into energy primarily not metal but who knows.

So just use the phrase "metal" then. It is the term that is going to be used in the game.

Anyway I don't have anything against your gameplay ideas. They could probably work just fine. Anyway. Since you are trying to justify your ideas with realism I call this thread to be about fluff.

Since when does real automatically mean fluff? Much of the appeal of electronic games is porting things and concepts we are familiar with in real life into electronic format.

More weapons being resource dependant to recharge or build ammunition means players have to think about weapon deployment and overkilling.

From other thread:Idea for celestial engine and editor. Important and useful.

While I vouch for your ideas in the other thread I fail to see why this is important. I guess you could make a game where you gain as much energy comparatively to real life energy sources. Could be a good learning tool. But I think it might hinder the execution of strategy as it increases complexity and the learning curve.

I like the idea of recharging or building ammunition.

But saying that mass conversion(fission and fusion IRL?) and E=mc^2 is a concept that "we" are familiar with in real life is a bit of a stretch. Saying that we have to balance the game around it sounds like a fluff reason to me.

It is not so important but it makes more sense. It's not just goofy. Your friend is going to ask you:
F: "What you playing?"
Y: "PA"
F: "What does this building do?"
Y: "Converts energy to metal."
F: "That's stupid"

I don't think the E=Mc^2 is going to mess up the economy and make it complicated. It's going to be like in supcom, with the exception that you convert m->E at a slow rate. In Supcom you got energy completely for free, it makes the game to easy. You shoud get E from mass (E=mc^2) or hydrocarbons or sun etc. Having E=mc^2 would give some basic idea how much E you can get from 1 unit of metal.

I think that would be very rare. If it happens it is likely to be between a physician and his physicians colleague. :roll:

What exactly was easy in SupCom? Don't tell me the economy. A large part of the economy is regarded by many and me as unnecessarily complex without actually adding depth to the game.

Of-course a fission, fusion or whatever other scifi mass conversion there is can work. Those powerplants drain could drain a fixed rate of metal. Then its' just a matter of balancing them against other energy sources.
But in my opinion the most important thing is that this should give actual depth to the strategy. If it doesn't I'd consider it unnecessary complexity.

Phenomena explained by scientific equations would probably still be more familiar to sane people than just "it's a videogame".

As for metal dependent power generation, I'm concerned this would result from a depletion of both metal and energy into an endless feedback loop from which can't be recovered from.

i'm not sure what's being argued in here. we don't know what units of energy we're dealing with it makes no sense to say that mass-energy conservation isn't being obeyed

I don't think they'll add that to the game to be honest, imagine you're in a battle and suddenly you run out of resources, all your units will stop firing, it will look weird and unsatisfying as it will be rather difficult to predict how much resources you need for a specific battle.