energy storage gameplay suggestion

1) wouldn't you want comebacks to be possible; 2) you don't have a problem with storage as long as somebody spent the time to make storage? I'm not really following here. This isn't simcity the game should be about the battles not making storage; 3) if you have storage gratis wouldn't you just make less power ergo not have saved ridiculous amounts of power?

@Veta
TA & Supcom always had units & buildings that contributed to mass & energy storage, the storage buildings just stored more... because that's what they do. Having your energy & mass just accumulate over time seems to me to be asking for balance issues, at some point you will have generated so much mass & energy that you could run without any resource generators for ridiculous amounts of time.
Have you ever played with that infinite resource gen in FA? thats what i could see end game looking like without resource caps & storage.
With your proposal to do away with caps the game would require you to balance your economy so that you are using just under what you are producing to increase your stockpile, rather than just having a hard storage figure that can be increased with storage buildings.. it just seems to me to complicate the economy rather than make it easier to learn & manage your economy which is what the aim is in PA.

I use storage buildings in FA to counter enemy intel. Allow me to explain...

If I can store up enough that I can pop an experimental onto the field using max engineers, I can get that experimental up and out with almost no chance for my opponent to harass it in-build. So I lie in wait for the enemy to throw a scout past, then immediately start the experimental build (or nuke launcher, or large arty... insert large/expensive thing that takes a long time to build typically) and they won't know what's coming until it is nearly too late to stop it. I still have the experimental on the field in nearly the same time I would have were I using a streaming income to accomplish it, but I'm doing all of that in under 1 minute (in some cases under 30 seconds, late-game with SubComs) and keeping them guessing.

Yes I'm well aware engineers and factories could store an insignificant amount of resources (specifically it was equal to their build power). Nobody competitive actually built storage for storage's stake in Forged Alliance, I'm sure you agree on that.

This is not the case. Not spending resources as soon as possible is suboptimal in this type of game. As I have already explained in previous posts the optimal way to use resources is to spend them as soon as they come in and short of that as soon as possible. This is because of the inflationary nature of the economy in this type of game - because destroyed units can be reclaimed, total resources available never decrease. Because resources never decrease the resources you have only diminish in value relative the total number of resources. There is a word for this: inflation.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the necessity of dedicated storage structures. That's a game ending unit designed to be so powerful that victory quickly precipitates. You may be familiar with other types of game ending units: T4 Nuke, T4 Artillery, T3 Rapid Artillery, T4 Rapid Artillery. Furthermore storage wouldn't help you when you are already producing infinite resources. I assume you are suggesting that if you didn't win the game and your infinite resource generator was taken out, infinite storage would mean you would have infinite resources for the rest of the game. This is pretty simple to address from a design perspective, either 1) you don't have an infinite resource generator or 2) all resource producing structures have lots of storage for free. If you spent the time to read the previous posts you would know 2) is something I do advocate for.

This isn't a proposal at all. I asked the OP why he feels storage is necessary versus unlimited storage or free storage on all resource producing structures. So far I have heard no compelling evidence.

How does it complicate the economy? Resource production actually does what it says instead of being arbitrarily capped? The game doesn't function any differently, only as if you have a lot of storage available. If you are suggesting having lots of storage available breaks the game, wouldn't storage structures break the game? I don't see how storage whether in the form of resource production, separate buildings or unlimited would greatly change how the game is played. Albeit, as I've noted in other posts you could forcefully make storage structures important. But in my opinion making storage important wouldn't improve the game, if anything it would increase the burden of economic micromanagement on the players for no additional depth.

Strategically, assuming your opponent is playing optimally and not saving resources, why ever attack storage when you can instead attack actual resource production?

I know about of the marginalisation of storage in the supcom series, TA implemented it as limiting factor, much the same way as finite resources at in other rts's. storage was far more important in TA due to special units having a more significant energy impact then in the later games.

Yes & no, having your resources automatically increase relative to your income would crate an enormous strategic advantage if capitalised on. the uncapped method you suggest would make it optimal to "waste" a portion of your income to increase storage.

I'm saying that if played right you would find that "good' players would not find it at all a hindrance to their economy if even all their resource generators were destroyed due to them having accumulated an almost infinite amount of sorted resources. (something of an exaggeration but making a point)

i know you would like to streamline this aspect of the game but i think it takes away from the game on a strategic level. it removes a, at least what used to be important decision on how to manage your economy. the way that energy & metal are being handled in PA benefit more from a separate building for each aspect than one dual task building. it crates more decisions to be made in regards to your economy & your enemies, should i build some storage for my artillery to use or bombers or will some reactors be enough to counteract their drain effectively. should i attack my enemies storage & reduce their capacity to undertake large scale construction operations or cripple their supply.

It's not arbitrary, it plays a critical role in the game-play mechanics, it is the difference between an economy that has truly infinite potential or not. There was a really good thread on board game mechanics & how they relate to RTS's, if you haven't read it i recommend you do. (i don't have the tie to go searching for it right now but will like later if i find it)

I assume you mean by optimally that your output is always equal to your input.. i don't know anyone who is able to manage this type of economy that efficiently there is always some waste.
attacking your enemies storage dramatically increases the value of each generator destroyed as well, it reduces the potential energy they can have wile increasing each individual generators value due to that reduced potential.

Supcom made poor use of energy. In TA, generally you would need an energy storage to fire a bertha cannon (or to a lesser extent multiple lasers), due to them needing 1000energy upfront to fire. Weapons should use energy to fire if they are energy based just like they did in ta. And thus, a use for energy storage. For example, what if the unit cannon took 500 energy per unit to fire them, and you had a cap of 1000e with 100 income, if you had storage, you could fire all the units rather than waiting for the stores to charge up again.

It was never cost efficient to have the power to constantly run a vulcan or buzzsaw, but building mass amounts of storage costs less than energy producing structures and gives you a viable option over spamming generators.

Instead of saying it was different explain exactly how it was different. SupCom also had units that had significant energy demand (Shields? Artillery? Omni? T3 Air?). So elaborate.

It is not yes & no. The optimal use of resources in an inflationary environment is expenditure not savings. That's basic economics. It's possible to make the opportunity cost of marginal spending so high that temporary expenditure breaks for higher tech units become viable but that still isn't a justification for dedicated storage as this can be achieved with unlimited storage or free storage on resource production.

Right and if you had read the previous posts in this thread you would see that this has already been addressed.

In PA the energy drain of Aircraft and Artillery will be softened up such that it functions like a normal energy drain. That is to say instead of draining 1000 energy every 5 ticks, it will drain 200 energy every tick and then fire. Even if this were not the case we saw the former mechanic in SupCom FA and energy storage was not important. The reality is any mass that goes into energy storage is mass that could have gone into energy production. What is more important to your economy is energy rate not energy storage. Energy storage is secondary to energy rate because if you are already in a position where a few grace ticks would stabilize your economy you are vulnerable to energy production attacks and therefore should invest mass into additional energy production. In such a scenario building storage only exacerbates your problem because it spends mass that could have been spent on energy production.

This is why it was a bad idea to make energy storage in SupCom beyond what you needed for Overcharge. In my opinion things would be more strategically deep if you did not have to invest mass into energy storage. If energy storage only costs energy, why even make it a separate building? At that point it's just economic tedium, additional micro for no depth. The same is true if energy storage costs a trivial amount of mass.

I'm not sure you understand what arbitrary means. If energy storage is 5000 in SupCom, why can't it be 6000? 4000? 10000? That's what arbitrary means.

But instead of claiming storage plays a critical role in the economy why don't you demonstrate it? If you want to do a better job of conveying your thoughts I would suggest you start by reading this entire thread because most of your points have been discussed. For example, if you had read the Game Development thread you suggested to me, you would have seen I was quite prolific there as well.

IMHO, its somewhat immersion breaking with unlimited storage. Where does all the energy and mass go? How does it occupy null space? Things, even stored resources, need to be represented by tangible objects and be physically present so a play can chose which parts of his enemys base to attack. Game or not. Supcom 2 ignored this and paid the price, or didnt get paid, either or.

Strategic options, in short. (and these will show depending on how the eco is built, I fear that its going to be too soft and easy thus just turning into build units and position game surrender when units dead rather than fighting to the last) For both attackers, and defenders. Depth and complexity is not a bad thing. Once you start min maxing in alpha well why even play games for fun?

You insane man. Build less power, NEVER! I need all of that power, for my 12 support commanders equipped with overcharge (Supcom FA). Or for my Commanders D-Gun (TA). BTW Commanders D-Gun in TA had 0 cool down, it was spamtastic.

Building to many power gens in excess (+2k energy is my minimum) with no cap = a lot of metal being produced by metal makers if I decide to do that later on. (not as efficient but still effective if you can handle your units in a fight). Alas, my main use for storage was the extra metal extracted from metal plots and energy storage for Overcharge use.

12 support commanders can drop a galactic colossus before it can leave the water , I quite certain the number is less, but I had 12 overcharge commanders building the seraphim colossus [name?] and another 4 resource commanders building Soul Rippers. With unlimited storage I would be banned from playing seraphim or at least banned from my combat teleporting sup-coms. I'm sure you can imagine 15 over charge commanders teleporting into your base and overcharging the crap out of you units every time it cools down.

Personally I don't think I should be able to have unlimited storage if I decide to build stupid amounts of resource gathering. You don't have to build storage if you don't want to. As far as I can tell Veta, you don't waist mass or energy so why do you care for having / not having storage?

SimCity? wth is simcity

Right, it's easy to create a value for a minimal amount of energy storage. For example in Supreme Commander you need some energy storage to fire Overcharge and it can help if you have particularly heavy air production. This is what you would call associative value though. Energy storage isn't valuable in it of itself the way energy income and mass income are. Using your example, energy generators could have an appropriate amount of energy storage and there would be no mathematical need for unit-based energy storage requirement. This removes economic micromanagement for no real loss in depth. You may miss having to place an energy storage every time you build artillery; I'm sure a lot of people will miss the adjacency bonus of SupCom FA too.

As has already been noted and addressed multiple times, limited mass storage can limit how quickly you reclaim mass. In SupCom FA however this was not true because you add a great deal of control over how quickly projects drained mass, e.g. an experimental could drain mass 3 times as fast as a T3 factory. However, simply having additional engineers/factories available to spend mass also increases how quickly you can reclaim mass. Presumably in PA you will spend income spikes with such additional unoccupied engineers and factories. So, how much mass storage you ever need will be directly proportional to how many available engineers/factories you have to spend reclaimed resources. This means additional mass storage is redundant with additional build power, why invest mass into mass storage structures when it could be invested into additional build power? I'd rather mass storage be on mass producing structures and not force economic tedium on players. I do not think there will be much loss in depth. I would rather fight my opponent than fight the game mechanics.

This is called a soft lore argument. You could make the same argument about anything in PA. Specifically, how do resources transfer across planets faster than the speed of light in PA? Does that not break immersion for you? StarCraft II is the most popular RTS is history, do you hear about immersion complaints from StarCraft II players? And if you have a problem with unlimited storage do you have a problem with all the storage you would ever need on resource producing structures i.e. MEX and PGens?

People will min max no matter how convoluted and complicated the economy is, check out how the economy works in SupCom FA. And tell me that isn't min-maxing. If you want a game where you don't min-max maybe you should play in sandbox mode - because otherwise you will be competing against an opponent and every possible advantage will be important. If you don't want to spend the time to learn those mechanics that's fine, but don't force competitive players to learn mechanics you won't even spend the time to understand.

What is fun for one player isn't fun for another, that's understandable. Some players will not enjoy playing competitively. Some players enjoy learning the complex tedium of systems like FA's adjacency bonus. The reality is these types of high-complexity little-depth mechanics are not conducive to an approachable game in the long run. They are interesting on the first play through but quickly become routine and lose their novelty e.g. building 4 MEX storage around T2 MEX in FA.

I think you're misunderstanding the point here. You will only build as much power as you need. If you need less power you will build less power. If you overbuild power and your opponent does not you will be at a disadvantage.

Any strategies that are currently possible in SupCom FA are already possible without great amounts of storage because of the way the economy and build power between projects works. If you would like to demonstrate how that is not the case, feel free. But I would suggest you read the previous posts.

How do you feel about storage on resource producing structures e.g. MEX and PGens? Did you know engineers and factories had storage in FA?

Routine and no novelty, like the first 5 to 10 minutes of every RTS game ever. Right? You can type how ever may words you want, your still wrong. Storage is important. Adjacency at T3 for mex's in supcom was important. Gives you an edge over your opponent that they either match or lose. Same with expanding. You are writing out core economical concepts far before people have even had a chance to test them. And that is dangerous to gameplay. If we are going to simplify that far, we may as well have one tech level, one tank, and one resource on one flat planet. Throwing units at bases is fun but you know what else is fun? Building bases, on planets, with things like storage being necessary to enable the most efficent firing rate for their units. The more unique structures and methods of economical dominance we have, the better for the game. Balance for these structures comes after alpha, but with the waves of 'make it easier' I don't know how the longevity of this game in out of box form will be. I disagree with the 'charge' draw system. It should be upfront and immediate when concerning energy, adding a level of depth to the game that aids both in unit selection and what to target when attacking. Worked fine in TA.

I mean, you can call these things useless and unnecessary. But so is pretty much everything at that level of argument.

Units of energy are not important. Energy rate IS. A tiny energy storage means that energy can not be stockpiled for some kind of emergency. It has to be used AS it comes in. Extra storage helps to buffer the gains and losses when a player is toeing the line of their demand. The more stable a player's demand is, the less useful storage becomes.

So clearly, the way to make storage useful is to introduce exciting and unpredictable spikes in energy demand. These spikes have to be such that:
1) It is not feasible to run enough generators to satisfy peak demand.
2) It's easier to build storage for the rare time extra energy is needed.
Even then, the real benefit of the storage is to give the player some extra time re budget his demand.

Incorrect. Storage demand is based on the amount of wreckage on the field. It is nearly impossible to spend a good chunk of wreckage no matter what game you play, making storage useful for holding the excess.

The ability to spend resources depends on the overall cost of production infrastructure. If it is expensive, then income surges have to be used up slowly. If production is cheap, then metal storage becomes less useful.

We are more likely to see the former, where production is costly and should not be left to waste.

Extra income is important. Supcom storage gave income. If it didn't, no one in their right mind would have ever succumbed to building them, even if they were wasting thousands of mass cleaning up an experimental. It's just one of those pride things. "Well herp derp, you wasted mass so spend it better!" It is mostly true... mostly.

Indeed I did know this and I'm not against it at all. Also available on the support commander. Just finished playing FA for a week with 2 friends of mine. Got to a point, in one game, where I had lost my base due to a 2 way attack from both of them, had a handful of sub-tanks and my commander left. Tried for a come back got so close to building a nuke sub in the bottom corner of the map. Fully upgraded resource and T3 commander is so good.

Had I have had unlimited cap on resources that nuke sub resources and enough for a nuke or 2 would have been up by the time I waddled my way to the edge of the map. That kind of comeback shouldn't be possible, you just got face rolled, you shouldn't be able to nuke back within a few minutes (exaggerated few minutes, more like 20-30). But your enemies are focused on killing each other while you hide (counter-intel boat)

Also, firing 12 overcharge guns is not cheap, and with a balanced economy you would never get that energy back (unless you had +x energy thus the +1-3k). My extra +energy is also a buffer to stop my friends attacks. He goes straight for the resources before attacking the com (unless he can get a good shot), so an extra resource sup-com or t3 plant is a must for me.

My standpoint is a cap on resources with storage available if you want to use it. If you are efficient enough to not need it, don't use it. But yours is not the only way to play.

I'm also not opposed to extra bonuses on storage (such as the adjacency in Supcom)

Indeed, though it would have to be more than "Artillery spends 1000 energy ever 5 ticks" because that is a predictable expense, requiring 5 ticks of grace power generation discrepancy at most ever. An appropriate example would be solar panels shutting down when an enemy is nearby or units requiring energy to fire in combat. In Evo-RTS all units require power to fire and therefore your power demands are irregular enough that a storage mechanic adds depth. Evo-RTS however had to separate unit power from energy demands to keep combat from stalling your economy though so it's somewhat different. I'm pretty indifferent to such a system but storage in the normal TA/SupCom sense is complexity for little depth.

Hmm, let me communicate that point better. The upper bound on how efficiently you can make use of reclaimed resources is not in fact storage but build power. Assuming you are not limited by how quickly you can absorb these resources, build power and not storage is the limiting factor on resource efficiency in an inflationary economy. I also don't understand how the same people advocating for the stream-economy "because it's more realistic" don't understand that arbitrary storage limits are not realistic. I've never heard a bank say "we're running out of capacity, you should take your money out and spend it," but I digress.

I do agree that the marginal value of storage will depend on the cost of increasing marginal spending. However I'm not convinced of the strategic depth this actually adds to the game. At best players would need to build mass storage in anticipation of large reclaim. What does that really add to the game besides additional tedium? It seems more elegant to have significant intrinsic storage on resource production or anything with build power like SupCom.

OK you are making some misassumptions here. You are applying a hypothetical mechanic in your mind to a game you already played. If you had played that game under different constraints of course it would have developed differently.

If you have enough resources on hand to produce a nuke after losing your entire base you have been playing suboptimally. This isn't about what playstyle you prefer. This is about what is optimal. That is how you properly design a game. You could produce nothing but LABs in all your games but you cannot then argue that T2 Point Defense are unnecessary and should be removed because that's how you play and my playstyle is just different. That would be a fallacious position.

Commander with "Resource Allocation System" .... 16 mass 3k energy, if you are running away under water the most optimal thing you can do is not die. I guess you don't use this upgrade since it would be sub optimal. Not to mention the "Advanced Resource Allocation System" with its delicious 32 metal 6k energy.

Yes, I agree that having a balanced economy is optimal, but when you have the ability to store unlimited mass / energy (as the commanders resource generation example) then comebacks are mean, nasty and nuke-tastic. Since this game probably wont have huge spike weapons (see FA's seraphim support commanders and their 1k+? cost overcharge) having a huge bank of energy would be less optimal then using it wisely.

Having 15 support commanders firing their overcharges into 15 different enemies costs 15k+? energy (and only energy), usually results in a 1 hit kill on 15 targets (that would have cost both mass and energy). Producing energy is much easier then mass for me and having unlimited energy with my super + of energy would either 1. allow me to have fewer energy plants as I prepare for battle or 2 allow me to over charge 15 enemies then teleport out or even in before without draining my economy to much. So basically teleport at the enemy commander, over charge its defences then engage in assassination.

Ok so i understand that you feel that the economy would be better served by not having a structure that you don't use, nor feel, is useful because you should be focused on consumption meeting your production constantly.

Having the storage capacity of a specific material increase with every producer is something i'm not totally against, though the cost to produce that combined building would likely have to increase & i think it does take away from the game because it reduces decisions on the economic side of the game & tactical options while increasing the value of resource production buildings as targets.

I am however entirely against your suggestion that an unlimited storage system would be good for the game, for reasons i've already stated & because it then removes a game mechanic that required you to expend resources, time & an engineer to increase your total storage of them & it also removes a way of attacking your storage capacity. It would encourage you to "waste" your resources instead on increasing your resource stored, with no limit on how much, versus a limited amount of land to build on, & makes it much easier & less costly to store resources.

That's all well & good if you min/max like a pro but it will break the very mechanic that is being considered to limit the effectiveness of aircraft & has been historically use to limit the big bertha, vulcan & buzzsaw in TA, by making it relatively cheap to increase your energy storage, all you have to to is spend less then your making & then you will be able to (for example's sake lets take the Buzzsaw from TA, a rapid fire long range artillery) fire it constantly for longer, potentially for minutes on end.. it has now become virtually impossible to balance such a unit so now your limiting the kinds of units that can be featured in the game.

Having unlimited storage would crate too many opportunities for abuse, it just makes it too easy to store more resources.

On a side note maybe we should wait to see how things are actually being implemented in the alpha before we continue on with this discussion see as at the moment we are all making very broad assumptions. I for example am assuming that the economy will be playing a lot more closely to TA, which was more balanced & predictable than SupCom let alone Supcom2, with some tweaks & changes made here & there.

So what stops a player who has the Resource Allocation Upgrades from simply building storage? Or underwater storage like in TA? What you're describing isn't prevented by having viable dedicated storage structures.

Furthermore what about a situation where resource generators or build power are the main source of storage? Instead of trying to find a hole in one possible alternative why not argue why dedicated storage structures are actually necessary? Storage as a concept has merit but I'm not convinced dedicated storage structures actually make the game better.

I've more or less addressed this in my previous post but i think i should state that it is necessary to have a structure contribute to the storage capacity, dedicated or not, well that seems to be less clear.