Extractors

I generally don't like to micro new extractors or the upgrades the way TA or FA worked and a gradual improvement to T2 levels over 10 minutes would make map control a stronger goal than it has been in the past.

I think one of the key elements of Star Craft that Annihilation games are missing is a feeling of gradual investment. In Annihilation games either you upgraded your mexes or you don't, but there isn't much in between. Infact, its a burden to invest in T2 and expansion is cheap and profitable.

Basically, it would put more pressure on players to protect their economies without putting in all the micro of removing and replacing pre-existing extractors. Players would be encouraged to raid even if they enemy would quickly rebuild. They would rebuild at a disadvantage.

Also it removes the 'chore' of building T2 which is distracting from the fun battles and raids and scouting.

Anyway, I can see this being a hotly debated topic. I just don't think T2 extractors fundamentally add any functionality that T1 don't. They are just bigger, better and more expensive. I could very loosely argue this doesn't fit our T2 model.

T2 energy generators on the other hand are explosive and therefor provide a cost associated with their advantage. Geothermals require select locations. Carriers required water and were less cost efficient than thermals in TA.

A couple nice compromises would be that extractors would not stop extracting while upgrading to a Tech 2.

Another nice compromise would be to ensure that engineers could be qued to build T2 extractors directly over existing extractors thus enabling an easy method to que upgrading them in series. This is important because upgrading them in parrallel is less effective in a flow economy. Although less obvious, this would make it relatively easy to command a single engineer or group of engineers to go upgrade each of your extractors one at a time while giving the command to do it all at once. Thus, T2 would be less of a micro intensive burden that is a relatively bothersome chore.

Thanks for reading my thoughts on metal extractors.

Bast

The SupCom extractor upgrade system was, in my personal opinion, a bad idea. However it is necessary in order to maintain the three tier system with increasingly expensive units. Which was also a bad idea.

I suspect PA will have exactly one type of metal extractor. Not even a Moho extractor type additional extractor structure like TA. Game state development will mandate capturing more space and extractors, and not upgrading those you have.

However you are mistaken about the possibility of gradual investment being absent in TA style games. A metal maker or fabricator economy is a gradual exponential growth economy. I also think this dynamic was overplayed in SupCom (especially pre-FA) as it is fundamentally less dynamic than capturing territory for metal and requires less player interaction.

I do think some system allowing for increasing output from a limited area should exist. But PA's system should preferably use some method of diminishing returns, which will greatly help gameplay by encouraging player interaction out on the map, and making turtling on a small land area viable but limited in maximum potential gain before costs become prohibitive. Zero-K's overdrive system is a great example of such a system, but by no means is it the only possible implementation. The key is that it encourages both expansion by capping more mexes and conquering more territory, and also economic investment in increasing your metal yield without needing additional territory, with diminishing returns.

A increasing effectiveness extractor is a good way to promote holding ground.

So rather then specific upgrades, why not just let the extractor get better over time?

Extractor upgrades were one of the biggest pitfalls of Supcom. Bugs aside, the combination of lost income AND paying for the upgrade was too much. Everyone's learning curve had some point where their economy was completely destroyed by attempting too many mex upgrades at once.

That being said, I think that a high risk, high reward resource is still good for keeping the game's scale. Such an option is not new to RTS games. Starcraft has the gold minerals. TA had the Moho extractor and metal maker, which worked from different angles.

Actually, huh. Not many games explicitly had high value, high risk resources. For the most part, these scenarios were put into map design, mostly by putting lots of resources in the middle of the map. But PA doesn't really have a middle map, does it? Creating that "high cost, high reward" mechanic is going to be pretty difficult without explicitly making something for it.

We've seen several of different systems of "beyond extractors" in PA's predecessors. Bigger extractors, metal makers, overdrive, and even veterancy plays a role in their respective games. None of those worked terribly well, but IMO bigger extractors probably caused the least amount of trouble. If you want more income, risk the money on a bigger extractor. It's more to gain, and more to lose. Not too difficult to work with.

PA will also have asteroid belts and various forms of destructible terrain to work with. Perhaps these mechanics can find a way to bring economic growth to the late game. After all, when planets are blowing up you'll need to find SOME way to keep the conflict going!

Wreckage is an obvious economic mechanic to work with. Each successive game gets a bit better at both including and integrating wreckage as a part of the standard economy. We'll have to see what PA does with it.

Other than it making no sense this seems like a very bad idea.

You seem to not like things that require action on part of the player. No offense.

Economic charts are going to be absolutely devious to work with. On the one hand you want a quick start, big bases, lots of robots and lots of scaling. On the other hand you don't want everyone to sit back and do nothing but build their economy all game.

Well. Uhm. Good luck! :lol:

IMO, the problem with FA's extractors was the balancing of the numbers, not the process itself.

Indeed, I actually take pride on it.

And upgrading extractors was never really a choice of should, but when, so why not stretch it out and make it do the job it's self?

And besides what's wrong with extractors getting better over time? If they don't then keeping extractors alive doesn't have as much incentive past losing a few minutes of resource generation, where as if they get better then raiding an opponents puts a much greater economic dent then the time to replace the extractor, as they also have to let it upgrade once more.

That recent supcom2 patch changed the game by adding veterancy to extractors (Working with what they had mind you, as it is a little strange) making ground worth more then before, so holding it was more valuable to a constant moving battlefield.

Actually, it does kind of make sense. The extractor keeps digging down, reaching deeper deposits and richer resources. It's really like a form of veterancy. It's not so much that the extractor is getting magically better, as the extraction point is becoming more accessible and valuable for anyone that grabs it.

How can a T2 extractor fit into this? I dunno. Maybe the bigger extractor has a higher max limit. Maybe it increases the extractor point's value more quickly. Maybe it runs a straw straight to the juicy metal core, which is bad news if the extractor gets blowed up.

Unfortunately, such a system naturally makes contested extractors the weakest points to deal with, as the least used points end up the least valuable. That is why I favor the diminishing system, where an extractor starts at 100% and decreases to something like 35-50%. It's fast early on, where early game resources are needed most, and it softens up later, after most things are established. The most valuable points are also the least used ones, directly where the most action is. It also opens a role for T2 to always work at 100% or something like that.

Could the T1 extractors have diminishing returns, but the T2 ones not?

We already know there will be 2 levels of Metal Extractors -
http://ddljyg67bmw3p.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/03/PA_units_02_public.jpg

+1

Why not? Building eco is fun. I know people who basically play supcom in sandbox mode to just build eco.

How about automated upgrades with a "metal tax" slider? If you've got way more metal than you need, grab the metal tax slider and drag it all the way to the right and your mexes will start plowing all the metal they extract into an upgrade to T2. Need metal? Drag it all the way to the left and they donate all their metal to the economy. Something in between? Some proportion goes to mex upgrade, some proportion goes to the rest of the economy. I think that this is a generalization of just about every single thing suggested above, so everybody should find it more or less acceptable.

I don't like any of the proposed systems that involve a time-related constant change in mex metal yield. Whether it increases, like mex veterancy, or decreases like resource depletion. Both systems just make your economy opaque and arbitrarily provide more or less resources in early or late game.

How about a mex has a base yield of 1 metal per second. Each mex may spend 1 energy to increase its yield to 2 metal- one level of overdrive. Adding 1 more metal costs 2 energy, adding 1 more costs 4 energy, and so on. Each additional +1 metal per second costs twice as much energy as the previous increase. The game would automatically take all your excess energy and overdrive your mexes as evenly as possible to maximize metal yield.

Suppose you control 10 mexes and have a surplus of 10 energy, then you evenly overdrive all 10 mexes by +1 and your total income is 20 metal.

You then construct 60 more extra energy production. You overdrive all 10 of your mexes to 4 metal per second using all your surplus energy and now have a total metal income of 40. You are spending 70 energy (10+20+40) per second to get 40 metal per second.

You conquer some territory, giving you 5 more mexes than you had before for a total of 15 mexes. Your surplus energy is unchanged at 70. 15 energy overdrives them to +2. 30 more energy overdrives them to +3, for a total of 45. But you don't have quite enough energy left to overdrive all 15 to +4. You have 25 surplus energy left, enough to power 6 mexes at +4- the rest are left at +3.

However this is a total of 6*4 + 9*3 = 52 metal. You capped 5 mexes, but are now producing 12 more metal than before. This is because your highly overdriven mexes are now less overdriven, with that energy being spread across more mexes, reducing the inefficiency of diminishing returns from high overdrive.


This means that it is possible to get quite high metal yield from overdrive on relatively few mexes. However you have to build quite a lot of energy producing facilities to do so, and it gets increasingly expensive to improve your metal yield. This is especially important considering energy producing facilities have a fixed cost, and as your economy grows they become increasingly affordable.

The real beauty of this system, however, is the way it encourages expansion. The more highly overdriven you are, the more incentive you have to capture more mexes to distribute your overdrive and make it more efficient.

Well, no power costing extractors.

Or we could just have non-upgrading non-veteraning extractors, because unbridled economic growth caused Sup1 to be about managing your economy instead of commanding your army and few seem to be remembering that.

One of the downsides of... simplifying extractors is that it punishes people who turtle (who are already using what in all likelyhood will be a suboptimal strategy).

Obviously we don't necessarily want to encourage people to turtle, but if you punish them you begin to move towards a game where as soon as someone chooses to turtle they have already lost.

So the more you talk about encouraging expansion remember that for every time expansion is encouraged you are forcing people to only play in that one style and all other options of how to play become irrelevant.

Yes. Because hardcore turtling is silly. The strategy of "I will sit on a tiny base and build turrets" is straight up silly.

Serious turtling should be discouraged because it is unreactive, un-interactive play. The turtle is lost in their own little world, and the non-turtler is basically by themselves out on the map, until they macro together some weapon to end the game. I see no reason to incentivize players too passive to build mobile units, who would rather the AI control their turrets because they want to kill a lot of units without doing anything. It is boring gameplay, it is obviously contrary to the idea of fighting a large-scale war, and it should be discouraged.

Defensive play is of course fine. Even "metropolis" and "colonial" styles are valid, where a player focuses static assets while still expanding for resourcing. Defending your metropolis sounds like your thing. You would also need outposts, or some sort of highly mobile force to defend mexes, while concentrating the bulk of your production on a major economic/industrial area, which you heavily defend. That is a style choice compared to being largely distributed, and both should have advantages and disadvantages.

But turtling without expansion is just bad gameplay. Do not ask to be able to sit on just a couple mexes and build defenses. It's just laughably ridiculous to request the devs to endorse as a gameplay style choice.

T2 Extractors providing more mass but being much less energy efficient is a thought I've seen a few times, it would make sense after all. Another option is MEX Veterancy alla the recent GPG SupCom 2 patch.

Metal depletion could be good or bad depending on implementation but it isn't very reminiscent of TA. It would be neat to blow up your own planet because your side of the map is depleted and theirs is not though.

I'm against things like "overclocking" MEXs or any other such economic micro mechanics. The premise of excess energy automatically overclocking MEX is interesting though.

An RTS should not emphasize eco micro as much as SupCom did, battles are far more interesting. So I agree with the concern in the OP.

I also agree with ledarsi, turtling shouldn't be encouraged in any way.