Economy local to planets?

First off, lets dispell the notion that global economy is a overwhelming hinderance to an attacking force.

A), If both you and player X have a multi-planet set up, with each planet being capable of being autonomous of the other (read, you have complete set of factories and resource gen on each planet), you might as well have a "local economy" on that planet. Regardless of any additional income you get from off site, you sure as hell have a whole lot more production capacity then someone invading your planet.

B) Speaking of that person invading, if they are running a local economy, they now have to fully build resource generation in addition to a fully capable base while the other player is unaware? Unlikely. So where as globally streaming allows the defender to pump out endless units once he's paying attention, it also allows the attacker to build factories to start the invasion, not solar plants and metal extractors right off the bat.

C) Personally, I will set every planet up as if it was my only planet in the off chance someone gets frisky and starts plastering them. If you are of the mindset to have "farm planets" for pure resource gen, with not much else, it is very likely someone will go clean you off that rock and take it. Or just blow up the planet and leave you crippled. In this light, it is viable to view all planets being attacked as basically fully outfitted. You might hope for surprise attacks, which might work under certain situations, like well played distractions or just pure ignorance on the part of the defender, but establishing a system that requires one or both of those aspects is unlikely to be successful.

It is unlikely to come to a consensus on this until we know how Uber plans invasions to go. Will it be a whole army landing? Do you bring X number of resource stores with you? Does the UI alert you when enemies are spotted on one of your planets? Will players have to constantly scan their own planets visually? How will engineer assist trains work in relation to building a breaching force? What sort of intergalactic "big guns" will be used to assist an invasion? If their is a long range gun of this type, which economy system would it drain off of?

I feel like part of the problem with this discussion is we are being entirely too narrow minded in how we approach it. All of these aspects greatly interact, but one thing is assured. If the planet you are attacking is well built, it doesn't matter if it is a global or local economy. The attacker is at a significant disadvantage. There is nothing the attacker can do in this case, that a defender can't do better and with more resource/production might to back it up.

The easiest method would just be allowing both, maybe as a pre-game toggle, for those who want to mess with either method. Although that would mean potential balance issues, as you'd have to somehow balance the game for both models.

primewar has some good points as well, but I do think that a local system is more advantageous to the defender. If an attacker has a global economy and brings a handful of construction units with him he'll be able to quickly get a makeshift base up and running. In a local economy system, if the defender has any kind of intelligence network in place, the attack would stand no chance as he would not have time to start an adequate base before being wiped out.

I'd certainly vote for the "Expensive Planetary link" idea, so once a planet gets to a certain level of resources it can just link up to the global network.

And so if the enemy snipes it, the base is running on its own steam, so any players careless enough to not have a few backup generators would be up poo creek with no water wings, cool gameplay feature imo
Graphics wise it could just be anything from a laser going through space to little shuttles streaming about

Of course, i'm sure the devs will test many different ways of balancing the economy, but i'd say this would be a good one to try out :!:

Global economy, stupids.

I'm more in favor of the idea of having a building that "beams" excess resource from a planet (or if build on a new planet, "beams" it down); that said, nothing would be stopping a player from just using other worlds to build a huge army and just land it on the enemy planet (sans AA/Anti-space weaponry). It just means that if the opponent is sufficiently entrenched that you would require a beachhead to bring your production closer to the front lines.

Also if said structure does get incorporated, i don't think it would be necessary for asteroids (they don't have a sufficient gravity well) or in orbit. Also, could we land energy/mass storage buildings onto the planet (would be better that starting at 0 resources on a world)

Please no more of this starting with local economy, then making things to turn it into a global one.

Start local, and end local. Or start global, and end global.


While I'd prefer local/local, I'll accept a global/global. I don't think a local/global is something to aspire to. It's more building of economic structures - ones that don't actually increase your economy. I want more pewpew instead!

[I didn't read all five pages so hopefully this wasn't already proposed]

Possible balance: the Commander leverages 100% access to the global pool wherever it is. Non-commander-occupied maps access pool through rate or percentage-based "receivers". The more receivers built the more of a share you can pull from the global pool (plus any local resources obviously, so you aren't cut off from your own resources on your own planet in the absence of Commanders/receivers). That way you don't need a 'home-base' distinction that necessitates receivers only once you spread, home is where the Commander is, receivers are necessary everywhere. Downside is that this makes receivers absolutely critical targets, but it makes the pro-active use of the Commander in battlefields a much more impactful strategy.

Thus you could establish a forward base faster if you risk sending the Commander there, or more safely with Engineers building receivers. That way you aren't in frontier-territory, all-alone on a new planet, but you're not completely flush with all the resources.
It also diversifies base-building strategies along a spectrum of self-sufficiency (no receivers necessary) to network-dependent production or fortress bases.

I'd prefer local/local as well, but how would attacking an occupied planet work? Not a criticism, simply something I don't know the answer to.

I don't believe the planetary scale will allow for anything other than local economies. There's simply no other way to balance playing on a decent sized map, and balance at the same time playing on a map that's 2x larger.

Planetary invasions will be possible because for many of the planets it will be impossible to cover the whole planet. There will be openings. Local economies would work fine - it's not hard to imagine a scenario where your unit-launcher can fire either combat units, or great hunks of metal that can supply a remote base on another planet.

It's not too dissimilar to what I put forward a few posts back.

I have played a lot of games with local economies and systems, and as the game gets more "local economies" the complexity of management will go up considerably.

For a game like PA, I would not want it, because the game is really about combat, but ferry power and metal around.

We can simulate limitations of a local economy in a different way.

Example 1:
Fusion Planets large amounts of energy. They can only be built on planets.
Asteroids can't build any power plant of any kind, and they drain a lot of power for functions.
Space based or low gravity sites can either provide more metal or faster production rates to make the trek worth while.

Example 2:
In a large scale Invasion, after the initial scouts and recon units, there is a large fleet of transport ships to move the main force into position.

The transport ship could consume considerable resources to build, drain energy for protection on reentry, scuttle upon landing to setup the initial base, or can't leave the atmosphere without a launch site. This would simulate the resource cost of an invasion, while at the same time, forcing players to set up farms of metal and energy in certain places.

Yeah, it's the only downside I can see too.

I suppose you could bring engineers with you (well, at some point you would have to), and just cap metal deposits straight away. Energy then becomes a problem though.

Will some units require energy/metal to fire or move, much like TA?

If so, I really see entirely local economies as being extremely awkward. Invading a planet with an entrenched enemy would require you to set up a base before you are able to maintain ANY sort of offensive army on a hostile world.

After reading the thread, I like the idea of initially local economies that connect to a global pool with the addition of a special structure, with the proviso that the commander also acts as a global uplink. It would give the player incentive to move the commander around in order to start up distant bases, without having to build a resource link.

Well if you must have receivers then a receiver could be one kind of building which adds to the local production bonus (aka mega-adjacency). That would allow building in places with low metallic resources like... chondritic asteroids.

But I agree with bulletmagnet, if you want localised economy what is the point of a building which negates it entirely? Just fantasy football isnt it !?

I prefer the idea of a local to global economy with a building. It allows you to cut off planet from a multi planet player, and allows the ecomony scaling that will be needed late game to assualt a planet resonably. ON the other hand with a purely local econ the simplest answer on how to assualt a planet it pre-fabed buildings and an energy transmitter. You have a beamer to the planet you're giong to assualt and you land a force and a set of (expensive) pre made buildings. You can then build matter converters for mass (at least in the beggining) to run the facs and then claim territory. It's my opinion though that assualting a planet that has been held by a one side for a decent while should be a massive undertaking. Requiring resrouces on the scale of your total economy. This is balanced by multiple ways to do it. You can cut off their econ and land a massive force. You can bombard them from another planet for an asteriod you send to orbit it. Destroy it with an asteriod if too well defended to assualt etc. The bottom line is that whatever tactic you choose will take a ton of resources. So you will need a global econ to make it happen.

I don't think the reduced gain over distance would work. How do you define the point that's taken from. If it's the commander it would get really complicated really fast. If it's the start point you end up with only mirror image maps. And in a solar system how do you define the boundary. How do you define distance between planets? If the solar system is shown as a 2d map it might work.

Easy, define the distance from the nearest available friendly planet. (this could also include an ally, you have shared resources enabled with). Much the same way ships have travel times based on where they are coming from, as say an invading force would have, that same in game mechanic for translating distance to time could be used to translate distance into a resource penalty. Distance, or a plane if you will, is always 2d. Its the distance between 2 points. If you add a third dimension, it's still 2 points. It wouldn't be remotely difficult to determine the nearest point to the destination and run a formula based on that. Island hopping at its finest. I might add, strategically this helps with any player that creates a "farm planet" safe inside his own lines, and expects you to fight through each of his "production planets" in succession.

The issue at heart isn't resources really, its ability to set up shop on a planet your are invading to wage the fight. This whole game is about the massive fights. So enabling the global economy is fairly necessary or ground attacks really can't be sustained. I mean seriously, who expects to land on a hostile world and find untapped mass extractors? Won't happen.

However, if modular bases can be built off site, packed up, and deployed to a enemy planet as a sort of start up base, that might make a rather significant difference. Especially if the player can establish exactly how these modular bases are laid out. It's feasible that a fully functional base could be landed on base complete with defensive units depending upon how the player set the kit up and the number of kits used.

This would still require an economy to function though, especially as someone else pointed out, if guns/buildings have a constant resource drain (like radar towers or targeting facilities).

I don't understand why some are saying it has to go from local to fully global. Neutrino put forth that relay buildings would provide X resources to your local economy. How much "X" is and if you can build multiple relays debatable, but at least it gives you an option in between local and global. Even if you only get one, it's at least a boost to your invasion.

On a tangential topic, I think a local economy makes building on an opponents planet undesirable. Ignoring relays for the moment, starting over from zero on a new planet is ridiculously time consuming. Now, assuming that the transport of massive armies from adjacent planets is possible, you obviate the need to build anything on that planet, or at least, the motivation. If you can send an initial army big enough to hold off a defender on his own turf, you can just send a second army completely wipe him off the planet.

I apologize in advance for my "steam of thought" ideas here, it's just how I work.

What if it was local economy, but you could (easily) ship energy and mass storage around?

Why bother? This only gets exceedingly more cumbersome in larger games (like the 40 player spread).

This could work.

What I've seen so far as possibilities are as such:

Global: economic pool is always available.

Mostly Global: economic pool is always available as long as you have a hub building on each planet.

Half Local Half Global: economic pools are local to the planet, but easily transferred at a limited rate (either through transport ships, a building, teleportation, or whatnot).

Mostly Local: economic pools are local to the planet, but can be transferred to other planets, through difficult means (slow transports, resource cannon, etc).

Local: economic pools are local to the planet, and the only way of transferring economy from one planet to the other is by sending the commander (who has some resource generation), engineers (who have resource storage, ala FA), and possibly storage containers, which have no resource generation, but are full of a fixed amount of resources.


Actually, there's a possible solution to the problem of having a hard time as the attacker: if you can send storage packs to another planet along with, say, engineers and the commander, you could have enough resources to effectively get a base up and running. And considering that we're invading entire planets, stealth is always an option.