Economy System

I actually quite like the endless economy found in TA and Supcom style games. The sense that what was once a game ending army is now little more than light cannon fodder is quite unusual in modern RTS games, which tend to have a more more limited scope in order to promote micromanagement based challenges. I want the game to escalate to insane levels. I want to see giant armies tearing through giant bases, in an endless nuclear-fuelled cacophony of destruction. I want there to be an endless robot meatgrinder, which despite the resources being thrown at it, isn't the whole game. It's a background noise as bombers aim to probe weak points in defensive lines, a distraction while the commander blasts off to the asteroid belt, and a sideshow while the nuclear launchers are being prepared.

Think a little bit more carefully about what you apparently disliked about an endless economy. In most cases, people get fed up with the fact in Supcom that once you hit a certain point, people just keep on churning out expensive units, and the game becomes more limited in terms of options. The reason for this is that T3 units are objectively better in every way than an equal expenditure of lesser units. Once your economy can support the "better" units, then there is no need to build anything else. The interesting choices available earlier on collapse down to just a handful of optimum approaches, as the economy expands.

This isn't anything to do with having an economy that can constantly grow. It's about having limited strategic options in the late-game. Consider that in FA, most T3 land factories only had 3-4 offensive units. The growing economy allowed a section of the game that was less well developed to dominate over other areas.

Having lots more late game units and structures will help remedies this, along with increased interactions available between the different theatres of war. I think you'll find that if the number of viable strategic options available to a player increases as economies grow, then many of your fears about an endless economy will not come to pass.

this is exactly what im talking about... i completely agree with your idea. An i hope they change it.

its all about the overlap. it allows for turtling at the cost of power efficiency.

A suggestion.

The first factory of any type have an extra cost (twice the price for example), the second (the third, the fourth...) factory cost the normal price.

With this mechanism, the exploration of the technology tree still have a cost (which is interesting in term of choices for the player). And in the other hand a player can invest into build power by making several factories at a moderate cost.

what do you think about ?

Could work, a sort of "prototype" cost.

Before every fluff person starts screaming "But the technology isent new, a prototype shouldent be needed" remeber that different worlds often require tech adaptation, the "prototype's extra cost" may simply be adapting the standard template to a new world so that it functions as intended, for example: Just try to consider what difficulites may be found trying to make the same factory work on planets with a large difference in gravity.

You don't need arbitrary pricing like that, the cost is already inherent in that a single factory of any given type would likely not be able to produce the required number of units to be effective.

Think Of it this way, Imagine there is a specific Anti-bot Tank, and lets say it beats bots 2 on 1(per metal cost), a single Tank Factory wouldn't be able to counter 5 Bot factory's worth of Bots, you'd need at least 3 Tank Factories.

Now that's exaggerated to provide an example. But the premise that we are playing with large armies in a factory focused(as opposed to SupCom Assist Focused) unit production you don't really need arbitrary rules for stuff like this.

Mike

Unless you assist the single factory you have with a big bunch of cheap builders - the cheap builders are adding more build power into a tech that is much more expensive.

I like the idea of the cost being lower by how much you've already built. However, I can't conceive how that could be implementer in an intuitive way (as in, extremely easy to understand by a player just playing the game without far-fetched info given from the GUI or info read from outside the game).

Well part of the idea of PA is to stay away form Assist Focused Production with the emphasis being more so on having More Factories.............as I said in the same post.

Mike

Which, as has been mentioned, gets countered by the unit roll off time. An unit with a build time of 20 seconds and a roll off time of 10 seconds can have as many assisting builders as one wants but it can never build more units then one every 10 second.

This leads to diminishing returns very fast with additional assisting builders.


(Btw. I consider having long roll off time an ingenious way to make multiple factories more efficient. Its not a solution I'd have thought in a long time. :mrgreen: )

I had the same thought, well put.

???
I didn't get the point.

maybe due to my bad english. could you explain a bit ?

The premise of whats trying to be said is to try to counter some assumptions you are making in your OP when you call certain things in the economy system unbalanced or 'a problem'. Specifically;

These two things mean you are looking at PA through the lense of Supreme Commander. You are assuming that having 10x factories instead of 2x assisted by 20x engineers is bad, when its merely different.

Secondly, you are assuming that teching up in this game is intending to be Supcom as well, where T2 makes T1 extremely weak, and T3 makes T1 obsolete entirely, and Experimental makes everything but en masse T3 obsolete.

The Devs have stated pretty strongly that the intent is to have as few units as possible ever become obsolete during a game of PA. Therefore the 'cost' to tech up to advanced factories doesn't really need to be very large. They will provide more stragetically specialized units, rather than just direct upgrades to normal units. There is no direct 'power creep' by teching up.

Actually i never played SupCom (just once). I'm influenced by Balanced Annihilation (BA) gameplay.

I don't judge it bad. I don t mind to build several factory if the game is designed in that way.
From my BA experience, i know that factorie's cost is related to the blueprint that they provide to the player (T2 factories in BA are really expensive). So in this game building several factories was a waste of resource.
I don't claim that PA should be like BA.

Yes you are right, i m assuming that teching up provide an important advantage. Because it was the case in BA, where teching up gave you access to a powerfull economy (fusion plant, moho, adv metal maker), strong defense line, capability to harass enemy with big bertha / nuke, better units...

I agree with you.

conclusion
If PA tend to have a "flat" tech tree, and if the game is balanced that way. i agree with you that tech tree exploration should not have any cost, and factories cost should be related to their production capability and not their blueprint.

out of scope
But i have nostalagia for this teching up race, when fighting 8vs8. When i was on the front line fighting like a dog against enemy with poor economy and T1 tank, as long as i can in order to give enough time to my teamate at the rear of my base to reach T2 tech. And when he did he gave me 1 T2 constructor and assistance to enhanced my economy and my frontline ... epic teamplay

Fair enough. I do apologize for making assumptions about your thought process.

There is no perfect way to achieve complete 'T2 specialization vs T1 generalization'.

For example, Resource generation. Currently T2 mex's are strictly better than T1, as are power generators. I hope we'll figure out a way to make t2 a 'choice' over t1 rather than strictly better, but we may not find such a balance.

Same with air. Specifically bombers. You cannot really not have a T1 bomber, and T2 bomber has to be better in some way. Since they only have one function, its difficult to find a balance where the same metal worth of T2 bombers wont be > the same metal of T1 bombers is all situations, since bombers are only really used in a few different ways.

There is definitely A LOT of work ahead of Uber. I can't wait to see the ideas they come up with to tackle these issues.

Great points. I'm sure some enterprising soul will come up with the appropriate balance mod, assuming Uber isn't able to do so itself.

There are advantages to t1 eco - smaller footprint, easier/cheaper to build, only need t1 fabber, harder to snipe etc. I don't think the t2 eco is even that much more efficient is it?

In PA it is. I think the numbers were a 300% increase in efficiency for T2 Mass Extractors, and a 20% increase in efficiency for T2 Power Gens, but I'm probably wrong on these accounts.