Economy local to planets?

I mean like once the laser is built the two planets have all the resources in common, so once you built one on every planet(or more if you go with a laser emitter and a receiver) the economy becomes global.

You'd also have to take asteroids into account. Make it harder to transfer resources planet-to-planet than asteroid-to-planet?

However I agree with the developers' vision of "no hidden factors" (like resource sharing decreasing with distance) - it would be too complex and make it hard to really plan your expansion.

Anyway, I do think that local economies sound very interesting! I would preferably like to see these kind of things as toggleable options in the battle set up. Planetary orbits, global economy - things like that!

Here's my take on it. I'm not sure which would make more sense gameplay wise.


Global:

pros:
-intuitive
-simple
-straight-up gameplay
-history of use

cons:
-unrealistic
-uninteresting
-has the potential to provide imbalance. For example, you take a mass-heavy planet, all of a sudden your resources go boom. Your enemy, on the other hand, took the green planet, and has the disadvantage, even though he put in the same effort.
-Asteroids can become instant KEWs (In a sense. Along the lines of you have the resources to do it immediately).

Local:
pros:
-potential awesomeness
-gives home field advantage
-makes planetary battles relatively balanced (You can't all of a sudden start superfunding a war effort on one planet because of an economy boost from another)
-game-enders would take time and effort to create. I don't like the idea of game enders being a surprise, personally.
-realistic

cons:
-has the potential to be unintuitive
-could slow down gameplay
-might not be fun

I also see a few ways to approach this. Assuming that you allow trading between planets (which would basically be the only reasonable way to go), You could:
1. simply require a special building located on each planet to enable instant use of the global pool on a new planet.
2. option one, except you get a limited stream from home planet that can be adjusted. Said stream would be a net loss on the trading planet, and net gain on the tradee planet.
3. option one, except you have to transfer resources in lump sums (with maximums), with a cooldown on the transfer building.

Also, I'm guessing that engies/commanders would count as resource storage, and would take that stored resource amount with them to the planet, so that they can set up shop.

I think it should be a global pool no matter what.
However, structures like this could increase efficiency.

Keeps it nice and simple while providing a juicy target for economic raiding.

I believe that it really should be local to planets, and have a system to supply planets with what they need, whether it's transports, lasers, or a giant rail gun firing blobs of metal at another planet.

Why? Because without putting a logical barrier in place between planets, you end up with a game that will play like an air-only map in TA - you essentially have this 'dead' area where units can shuttle back and forth (aka, space) and each planet just becomes an island.

How hard was it to 'colonize' another island in TA once you had a strong economy going at home? All it took was a swarm of engineers, some stored up metal, and voila, brand new base in no time at all.

Wouldn't it be just that much more awesome if you could assault an established planet, cut it off from its main supply of energy and watch its orbital cannons go dead once their storage batteries are drained?

Well, there is going to be teleportation...so if they make teleportation 'hubs' early access in game then that is how you make a planet's resources global. So yeah, early on in the game so people dont build an empire in a matter of minutes, make it local, then once teleportation is available, boom. Build a hub on your planet, and watch it contribute globally. I dont see any draw backs to that route other than people who rush in the first 4 minutes of a match lol

I've been thinking about this thread and I think a building that connects a planet to the global economy is a really elegant solution. Even more so if it is represented by a giant beam coming down from space.

Making it a T2 unit also helps make invading planets more interesting; you're cut off until you can build it.

I like the SoaSE approach (sort of) regarding trade units. In order to get resources you have to build a transport hub, which will ferry in mass and energy from other planets. Using some (limited) orbital units, an enemy can destroy them before they land and blockade a poorly-defended planet, cutting it off from the economy.

Nobody said you can't drop with extra units.

There is the micro macro thing though. You need to get the game flow right, if anything SupCom had too much upgrading micro.

What you could do instead of local economy is change the costs of new structures depending on existing infrastructure at a location. So it costs more to start a new base than to add to an existing one. I think that might work. Then the cost for first build on an asteroid would be very high, but once you had local power and ore it would drop, representing the cost of transport. It also favours exploiting / defending base locations. Like the next level of adjacency bonus, or where that was trying to go (wasnt exaggerated enough though).

So just a massive tax the farther away you are from, presumably, your home planet, or the next nearest major resource hub or something?

That's the best part about being so open with development, you can let players test it early and see what works best.

A local economy sounds good to me but I cant be sure how it would work out overall.

So we have a global economy, you get your energy and metal and it is universal. i feel that in an rts a player should be able to disable an enemies economy or disrupt it to gain an advantage. When I played supcom online I would always make sure to keep scouts flying overhead to provide information while using bombers to take out the enemies mass extractors. This allowed me to gain a one up on him in production, he neglected to properly defend himself and payed the price by handicapping his production.

Now we are fighting across multiple planets in this game. This is not something commonly done and requires much thought and testing. My thoughts are that we fight across multiple planets and we invade an enemy. We cripple his planets resource extractors but it is meaningless because he has 5 other planets feeding his invaded planets economy with the resources to continue producing units to send out to an invader. I see invading as no easy feat, a player who is has a remote sense of what they are doing will keep radar installations,scouts etc constantly feeding his minimap information for potential landings then will send out a massive army to squash whatever force attacks.

A non global economy would do away with this in my opinion by enabling us to isolate a planet off from the rest of the economy and forcing it to rely on its own domestically harvested resources for defense. We could indroduce a simple building that would "beam" resources to a planet and basically link an economy between planets. No pesky units to transport and worry about. This would be an automatic process and any planet with this structure would link to any other installation that had one. So I expand out from my home planet, I go from a purely local economy to a somewhat global one, rather than being deposited on a planet perhaps make it banked in its own seperate area? A global bank that all planets deposit into and the structure is required to tap into this bank. Each structure links the planet to this global bank.

An attackers main focus at this point would be a quick raid to take out this structure and isolate the planet from supplies. Then an invasion would begin, defenders would have to defend their resource nodes like the plague and send reinforcements from offworld potentially to keep themselves afloat.

There are many problems with an isolated economy and I can think of a few. Mainly that isolating a planet like this could potentially result in a death sentence for the defenders but on the other hand a global economy could ruin an attacker by providing the factories the means to continually pump out units while an invader may only be able to send in a few at a time. i dont see it as being likely for a attacker to be able to set up his own base on enemy soil before being overun by a neverending army.

I am not sure if an isolated economy is right for this game but I would appreciate it greatly if the developers expiremented with it. I feel that despite its flaws it would be more benneficial overall than a global economy. I feel that a player who is holding on by a strand should be able to use smarts to surgically cut out a piece of an industrial juggernauts territory.

I think the question of local vs global economy touches also the issue of resource sharing with team mates in a multiplayer environment.
I would suggest an unified solution, which at least solves the issue in a similar manner.

1. planetoid local economy
2. global "buffers" for resource transfer
- one for inter-planetary(player local) and one for inter-player resource sharing
- explicit as a structure (a possible target)
- or implicit just as a concept
- settings for distribution priorities for either the own planets or players (e.g. in percentage distribution)
- surplus value in planetary buffer, everything beyond fills the player buffer (aka globalising the surplus)
3. structures on planets for transfer to/from either buffer
- could be combined in one building
- transfer in whatever technical manner
4. player defines for each planet ( eg in the settings of above structure)
- low and high limits for resource storage (per resource):
- low: minimum level, fill up from the global inter-planetary buffer
- high: maximum local storage, excess is transferred to global buffer

With a minimum of planet side and global settings one can set up an automatic exchange of resources without loosing total control of it. On the other hand an enemy has still the chance of cutting of a local economy by destroying the planetside transfer buildings and if one would decide to make the buffers explicit objects in space or on planets, players could even destroy a sizable portion of the enemies resources.
Balancing issues would be costs for the buildings, their defensibility and the resource transport rate.

If you can send resources between planets it doesn't seem like much of a local economy. The first thing constructed on a new planet would be a link to the global economy or some way to import resources. I think if you are able to move resources around easily we may as well have a global system.

Unless that building was expensive, and required at least some local investment to build. Essentially making the nothing-to-endgame battle start over again for each planet, which I like.

the costs and/or building requirements are part of the balancing process.

somehow there has to be a middle ground between local and global economy, because either of the extremes seems not really interesting.

pure local: what you do on one planet has practically nothing to do with the other planets (in particular without spacecraft which would be kind of an indirect link between planets). Each planet fending more or less for it self, then you could also start just multiple instances of your favourite rts.

pure global: without some separating effects, resource locations become kind of murky and also the predictability goes done the drain.

Massive transport cost yes, definitely not a tax you are the boss, who are you going to pay tax to except yourself? It makes building outside the local economy zone a major undertaking which is what people seem to be wanting. It would mean that if you just wang up a factory on mars and pump out units they will cost a crippling amount. You would do better to build resource gatherers and get resources locally to build units, ie build a proper base to supply resources, that is what the local economy perspective is looking for. No string of power supplies spread all across the map like FA.

The advantage of this is no micro at all.

But if you think it looks like a tax then well... !

exactly, the end game is cut the micro, what is the point building transporter buildings to transport mass to build more buildings, its a bit too much fantasy-delicious, cut to the chase and use a mega adjacency factor with a bigger range to simulate the boost to local production and its absence to simulate the cost of materials transport. Simply add to the build bonus the more resource production buildings you have locally. Not a tax, a bonus.

If the aforesaid building was expensive and time consuming to build, but you only needed one for every link you wish to establish then it would make sense no? It would be a target for raids to destroy economy quickly and it would make the initial phases of enstablishing a base a little harder than any other pseudo-starcraft rts.

So kinda like what I said in the "resource snowballing" thread, I think there is more of a concern on my part for how to display the information in a useful way on a local vs. global scale. If it can be represented well visually, like bars within bars or something like that, then I'd be up for at least play testing with it to see how it feels in action.

I certainly like the realism behind having only local resources, but also agree that it couldn't exist without a way to set up sharing with other planets you have under control to create a galactic pool of sorts. That way you can still have "mostly just resource" type planets.

If there was a single structure that gave access to X% of your galactic resource pool, and allowed the same X% to be shared with other planet/oids, then invading a new planet could be more like "build supply line, then factories".

Skipping initial resource gathering facilities on a new planet wouldn't be a problem if you had an existing pool of resources, but at the same time it means that if an attack on your base destroys those links, then you could end up with a crippled local economy.

This would add a only one step of "micro", allow for variances on resource gathering in the different locations and the strategy involved in dealing with that, while still allowing for the resource planets to function in the grander scheme of things. That could be very fun to play with.

Just posted this in the So, snowballing resources? thread which seems to the be tracing a parallel path of discussion: