Extractors

Wow, you so miss the point entirely.

I wasn't saying make turtling good, in fact i purposely didn't say that.

What i said was don't make turtling completely ****. It is already sub optimal, which means most of the time its probably going to lose anyway. Why make it worse?

Something i forgot to mention is that every time you stress expansion, turtling might be hurt the most, but it also hurts every other tactic possible. Rushing? well by the time you got here i had enough metal to outproduce your rush. Teching? i had more metal and could tech faster. Just trying to play balanced? to bad not enough metal.

Because it's actually complete garbage? You simply cannot neglect to expand. And you should not be able to do so, either.

You do have options for how greedy vs how safe you play when you expand. How many mexes you take how quickly as opposed to how well you defend them. But if you expect to ever win without capping more than just a few mexes, then you will always lose. It's not just "suboptimal." It's suicide. You cannot beat a very large economy with just a few mexes. And you should not be able to do so.

This is completely unrelated to rushing and teching and such. For example, rushers are trying to exploit overly greedy expanders who are neglecting defense.

But isn't that more of a reason to shift emphasis away from it? If it's already suboptimal, we have 2 options, remove it because it's not aligned with the game, or realign either the game entirely or the idea of turtling itself to shift it away form being suboptimal.

It's like playing Call Of Duty for the Melee Mechanics(ie hoping to play a Hack and Slash), it's clearly not the intent of the core gameplay.

Mike

The more extreme you take any tactic the stupider things get. You are right, if a turtler only takes 4 metal spots he should lose, just as a rusher or a techer who only takes 4 should lose.

My point was that when you make expanding more important, you make every other aspect of the game less important. That's not something that's open for debate, that's fact.

Your point seems to be that if someone turtles at any stage they deserve to lose. Doesn't matter that (although this is old data) 74% of people felt that turtling should be a viable strategy.

But did all those people have the same definition of Turtling? As Already said, one can still defensively expand, while they may not have as large of an Economy they are able to more easily defend themselves, it's still technically turtling, but is actually fairly well aligned with the Core Gameplay compared to more extreme views of it.

It's not that we don't want any kind of defensive strategies available, but that the core idea around turtling(and generally if they say turtling, it's fairly likely then mean something more extreme than simply being defensive in general) isn't well aligned with the scale of the game, you want to throw armies around? Great! But you need to build those armies first, and for that you need resources.

Mike

Thats all true mike, i still stick to my point though that the more expansion is stressed, the more homogenized the game becomes, in this instance it effects turtlers the most (as in most circumstances they will have less area under their control). Its the natural counterpoint to stressing any single aspect of the game.

While looking at the one thing in a void can come up with some good ideas looking at how that effects the other aspects of the game is also important.

SO.... Yet another topic that has devolved into the fact that in the real world, economy is not the End-all-be-all, so it shouldn't be in RTS games either, because it obscures really awesome gameplay... But this time Ledarsi's on the other side? So... I guess that means that Ledarsi values expansion over all else, because expansion represents economy... And not because expansion and concentration need to have a multiplexity of options on both fronts. Concentration should be a fatal idea in general. But it should be supplied with tactical options, especially since someone may want to just turtle the **** out of the first 30 minutes of the game so they can make a rocket to get off that rock to open up new strategy and economy options while their enemy is just thinking about the ground game.

And in the same token, if my only reason to expand is to drop down more mexes because metal is paramount, then I don't want to expand on the planet my enemy is on, I want to put my metal generation out in the asteroid belt and on moons, much safer, much less to worry about. Which, means turtling with high defense is valuable to me just because it would allow me to expand in new ways. But, economy should never be the sole deciding factor in battles, because economy is just one aspect of strategy. I want more reasons to expand BEYOND economy. So, to turn back to the real topic, I do support upgrading mexes, and tearing them down to build them back up does seem like a pain. But since the option of putting up Mexes out on smaller, safer stellar bodies is a viable, and powerful economic strategy (depending on how many will be implemented), if it can be tapped, so, I'd say that an automatic vetting system would reward turtling (minimally, and most likely with only short term effectiveness), and reward outsourcing your metal front to safe locations even more than it already would be. So the least you could do, to poke back against that, would be requiring the user to make the choice to upgrade their mexes.

On balancing, I have no clue what I'm talking about, but recalling a lot of what was discussed in the economy topic, if regular mexes are power free, they could have a slowly diminishing return, and upgraded mexes could require power, but have a constant return. So turtles can rely on fewer mexes, but they have to worry LOADS more about their power generation, and they would eventually lose out to expansionist ideas if their plan wasn't simply to expand upward before they expand outward, but expansionists are forced to play a slight balancing game, constantly needing to expand more as they start to get diminishing return. And that seems like that could potentially be a fun set of mechanics. On how to get T2 generation, I don't know, Neutrino has expressed some dislike for upgrading tiers when talking about the footprints of the different fabricators, so I suppose, you'd just have to choose between placing T1 or T2, upgrading would be a pain unless there were a lull in the action, and choosing the higher tier would be dangerous for expansion, and the reverse for turtling.

I have to agree with the OP. On so many occasions when upgrading to T2 (or T3), my battle plans have totally and utterly stalled, or had to be curtailed.

Sure, there is an element of strategy to when the best time is to upgrade etc, but its not really fun strategy, and I can't help but feel it does little more than encourage micromanagement whilst preventing me from doing the fun stuff (smashing massive armies together)

Though it was to refine build orders and set templates, I am definitely guilty of doing this.

Economy building is fun.

+1

On a small level if you wanna see how this works out then look at supcom2 a recent patch made it so extractors upgrade over time.

The promotion of holding-ground is good and all, but using automagic extractor upgrades/vet is a bad way of doing it.

If you lose those extractors, then get them back, you still have a worse income than if you hadn't lost them in the first place.

That becomes a slippery slope to economic spam victory for whomever can kill a few of their opponent's extractors. People will be incentivised to devote the extra resources from those extractors into turtling them up so they aren't easily killed. If you're spending your bonus cash on looking after your cash source, then you're not spending it on tanks and fighting and fun stuff.

Pick your poison; slippery slope economy, or redundancy which requires management.

Because TA is not a Sims game. It's an RTS game, where you play to kill your opponent.

I can totally understand practicing the Supcom economy in sandbox mode. It's a very brutal and unforgiving system, prone to stalling at the worst of times. It takes a lot of practice to get right.

And overdrive isn't equally opaque? It takes a normally exponential economy, and tacks on a logarithmic one. It also changes the purpose of energy to be just another source of metal. It's an incredibly weird system, one where the player has no real idea what they're going to get until they get it.

It's one possibility. It increases the value of holding extractors, and it increases the damage of raiding enemy extractors. However, it decreases the value of grabbing new ones. That's a bad thing. The most valuable resources end up in your base, and not out in the killing field where you want players to fight.

Do not think of depleting resources so much about slowing down the late game, as it is about speeding up the early game. Consider for example, a mex location that has 500 bonus metal, and it produces at double rate until depleted. The first player to hold the spot is going to get a big boost of metal. The early game becomes faster, as initial bases are easy to build. The early mex rush becomes more important, as it is critical to deny bonus resources to the enemy. Expansion becomes more powerful, as virgin worlds/moons/rocks become amazing boosts to the first player to grab it. It also allows for earth shattering events to release more bonus metal, as earthquakes and asteroids stir up juicy deposits from the planet's mantle.

Similar results can be achieved by placing initial rocks/wreckage on the planet. Unfortunately, these resources get used up VERY early in the game, and do not encourage too much mex contesting.

Lets talk about economies in RTS games for a moment, and see what kind of engagment they can produce in players.

In my experience, most RTS games have one or two types of economy. I will refer to these as the primary and secondary economy.

Every RTS game I have ever played has a primary economy. This is a way of gathering a resource (or multiple types of resources) that is based upon territorial control. Players must use military units to hold territory, from which they get a resource, whether it is from an ore field, a capture-able strategic point, a minerals deposit, or whatever territory related mechanic you could care to think of. This encourages players to expand the territory they control, encouraging conflict with other players.

Some also have a secondary economy. This is an economy that it only loosely tied to territory, such as building resource producing structures or some sort of efficiency bonus. The key aspect of the secondary economy is that it allows a degree of economic expansion, without gaining control of more territory. In SC and TA, this was handled by mass-fabs and metal makers. To a lesser extent, upgrading existing extractors can also be thought of being related to this as it accomplishes the main goal of expanding the economy without expanding territory. Traditionally, the secondary economy is less efficient than the primary, otherwise there would be little direct incentive to engage with other players.

However, a secondary economy is, in my opinion, absolutely vital for a good TA type RTS. The reason why becomes apparent when the majority of the territory in the game is claimed. In the vast majority of games I have played, as soon as one player claims 51% of the available resources, the remainder of the match can become a forgone conclusion. All things being equal, a player with more resources will best a player with less resources. Indeed, I have seen a large number of Zero-K games when players simply quit after the first 5-10 minutes, because they feel defeat is inevitable on loosing the initial resource grab. Thankfully, ZK does have a secondary mechanic, in the form of overdrive, which allows players to hunker down, turtle a little, and come back with a strong counter before things become too grim.

This is why PA does need some way to boost your economy, without capping new mex spots. Upgrading existing mex points is a perfectly good way of doing this, as it does not scale forever. There are only so many upgrades you can build. Overdrive is another way, but given the economy simplifications that Scathis has revealed, i don't think it would be terribly conducive to an easy-to understand game. By coupling mass production so strongly to energy production, there can be some quite interesting and horrible occurrences if you ever stall.

Here is another suggestion. What if you could just build additional extractors adjacent to a capped deposit? Each one gives you additional metal production, however it scales sub-linearly as each successive extractor is further from the deposit.

How very shallow.

TA is in fact, as much of a sim game as it is an RTS. This is one of the things that cause it to stand out. Where would we be without simulated projectiles and such an indepth flux economy?

Sims != Sim.
Sims is actually short for...
Actually bobucles is just confusing The Sims with SimCity.
I'm sure he mean SimCity.

Fun fact: playing the new simcity got me back into supcom.

Zero K tubro extraction is actually very elegant. It does not stall easily, in fact it encourages players to build a mother load of redundancy, because overdrive replaces mass conversion and overdrive runs on excess energy (more the merrier with diminishing returns).

I have expressed that I liked Zero K before. I think that mechanically it is well developed, and visually hardly developed, which would make it perfect for a company like Uber to pick it up. In particular the power grid visualized as textures of circuitry on the battlefield between buildings is very compelling, especially at night.

However, an exact implementation of turbo extraction precludes Mass Conversion.

I am not sure that Uber is ready to give up a living manifestation of E=MC^2 in our super awesome video game.

Note: It would be nice to have a mass converter with an automation feature to only run on excess energy (like turbo extractors).

All excess energy going into Overdrive MEX is an interesting economy feature. Only T2 MEX can overdrive and are already less energy efficient than T1, voila 2 types of useful MEX.

I could see Uber not wanting to give up Mass Fabricators, this just seems much more elegant, especially for a new player - as long as Overdrive was automated to not cause energy stall. Players would then only ever have to focus on not mass stalling and that would really improve the most difficult aspect of these types of games to grasp: the economy.

From the units and structures revealed so far, there don't appear to be mass fabs. Obviously this isn't proof there won't be, or that there wont be some other mechanism for secondary mass.

We do know that T1 extractors do not upgrade to T2.