Its Just Too Massive!

I agree. There isn't any anti-blob mobile units. All the units are spammable, small and they all have tiny pew pew guns. For example, why not make that flamethrower unit 3 times bigger and more expensive and make it literally fry those blobs to dust if it gets a change? I wanna see units that make nice holes to those big unit blobs.

You are correct in the sense that a good player will always find something to spend his attention on. The issue right now, is that because of the 'economic singularity' (I like that, heh) you can only reasonably spend it on expanding.

Its really not that hard to fix, though. Just like when you are getting tons of mass and very little energy, you cannot spend all the mass for lack of energy. In the same way, because spending mass also requires attention, if mass is the limiting factor, then after we spend all the mass, we still have attention left over.

To you know, fight with and do fun things.

No, that doesn't really work. Energy is most similar to supply depots. It adds an initial cost that throttles expansion, but it is something you only need to pay ONCE.

The only way to prevent an absurdly large economy is to not allow it in the first place. This problem was largely solved 16 years ago in TA. The vast bulk of early game growth came not from extractors, but from the commander's decent starting resources and wreckage. The early game was boosted with free range metal when extractor income was anemic, while late game income capped out after those deposits were taken. Wreckage was clearly the intended way to play TA.

(The metal cap was not very high in TA if you remove metal makers. MMs are a separate economic issue entirely.)

The trouble with basing PA's early game growth on extractor resources, is that you only start with a fraction of extractors. The only way to boost the early game is to have those few extractors be very lucrative. A very lucrative start with few extractor points leads to an absurd amount of income with many extractor points. It's a straight forward cause ==> effect.

I also support idea of reducing granularity of structures/units in PA. Main reasons are:
- Tactics are right now more like "i will destroy bunch of units/buildings to defeat opponent" rather than "i need to get rid of this certain units/structure to achieve advantage in this and that, to counter this and that", from what i see all tactics are around sniping emeny commander.
- Watching game for most of the time is starring at dots moving here and there disappearing from time to time.

In case of metal spots more granularity doesn't mean they will be concentrated in few areas but still distributed around whole planet so there still won't be "fighting for empty space" rather fighting to capture 1 very important metal spot instaead of fighting for 3 less valuable at once.

Same case with power plants now they are most of time scattered through whole base cant be a good subject of tactical operations.

In case of units there is of course aspect of microing dependent on granularity (less units better to micro) but micro management is probably less substancial to PA than f.e. Starcraft games its more about macro and strategy than micro and tactics execution (like it was said already).

However i do understand that for some higher numbers are considered as "epicness" of game.

Slowing the rate of economic growth will not only slow down the rate at which a player that chooses to grow their economy can do so, it will also make non-economic expenditure more appealing. Adding compelling options for military expenditure of larger amounts of metal and energy will also tip the balance in favor of building pieces that do things on the board, and not just economy that lets you build more economy faster and faster.

I think the underlying issue of this thread is the prodigious rate of economic growth even from the beginning of the game, which forces very high APM in order to manage your economy efficiently. Slowing down the process of increasing your energy income will slow down economic growth, and leave the current rates of production and combat unaffected.

Bobucles raises the very important point that on many of the best maps in TA, the relatively slow-paced early game was greatly accelerated by the presence of reclaimable rocks spread across the map. These rocks were consumed in the process, and so their huge increase in the rate of economic growth is limited in duration, and also drives competition over terrain even before mexes are capped. PA could easily add procedurally generated reclaimable rocks or metal objects on the map to speed up the very early game, while still greatly slowing the exponential curve of "autotrophic" economic expansion.

I think the best answer is to make it significantly more expensive to build energy. However the current energy generator is rather large at 450 metal, so it should probably also be downsized and have its yield reduced, with the resulting generator costing more metal per energy produced.

I don't know where to start... I'll be back to write my response.

@bobucles

I dont think I did a very good job of explaining that, and you misunderstood me. Im not suggesting that we use energy to cap the economy at all, people have suggested that, and like you say, you just build moar.

I was giving an example. IF you have a huge amount of energy, THEN you run out of mass before you spend it all.

IF we have a huge amount of mass and energy in-game, THEN we run out attention trying to spend it all.

We do have too much, I think, so the game boils down to 'who has the most attention to spend on building more units'.

Increasing the cost of energy structures will slow down the rate of growth, yes, but we will still eventually run into the situation where I can literally cover my entire moon with advanced factories, and still be making metal faster than I can spend it. Its not necessarily the rate of growth that is bad (though maybe it is to fast as well) but where that growth eventually takes us. They are two separate issues, and we need to make sure we don't get them confused.

Anyone who played early game TA knows that it is slow. It is DAMN slow, and it's made that way because you do not depend on extractors for the early game. Why? Because exponential curves are vicious. But don't take my word for it, just start here. A pure exponential curve can NOT start fast, without ending up way too fast. That's why TA used an ADDITIVE resource to start the game.

Get some bots, reclaim the rocks, use it to build a base and fight your early battles. After that phase, you were established. There was enough extractor income to begin the resource game. That's how it worked.

Energy is already somewhere between "ridiculously expensive" and "stupidly expensive". It is NOT the answer. The energy tax only works ONCE, and it only throttles the EARLY GAME when it needs to be built the most. The problem is not with too much or too little money early game, it's with absurd growth curves late game. Energy (at least the current system) can't fix that. The growth curve itself has to change.

That's a second thing. I think I accidentally dared Uber to make construction more energy demanding than anything else in the game, and then they went overboard on it. Something about proving that construction can have absurd energy expenses while magically not rendering other energy consumers irrelevant. Haha. How'd that work out?

Absolutely correct about the nature of exponential curves- if it starts out fast, it explodes. Therefore, I think we agree that it makes more sense to have a slow economy growth curve, and use reclaim to jumpstart the early game.

Increasing the cost to construct energy will have the effect of slowing the rate of growth at all points along the curve. True, this has the effect of making the early game very slow. However, by adding an additive resource (such as reclaiming rocks) to greatly accelerate the early game with a limited influx of resources, the mid/late game exponential curve can be slowed down while still having an engaging early game.

Jumpstarting the early game can be done in a variety of ways. A ways back there was a significant amount of discussion about having an "egg" that generates resources, and can be reclaimed for a large influx of resources right away. As well as seeding the map with reclaimable metal. Reclaim allows a player to quickly collect enough resources to rapidly expand an economy, until the reclaim runs out. Then the economy expansion should be much slower.

if you wanted to implement these ideas you could mod them in, just like you do in minecraft.

Just reduce the amount of metal spots on planets.

I like Uber's sentiments of making the game about broad strategic decisions rather than micromanagement, and I think it has already made great strides in fulfilling this goal.

In my opinion some people want the game TOO slow, to the point where they're better off playing a turn-based strategy game or SimCity. Real-time strategy games have always been fast paced, even true strategy games like Supreme Commander. Lots of people here seem to want to casualize the game into oblivion.

Well also this is something that needs to be balanced so people don't only win with the most APM. There is way more micro management since the last build (because of orbital units) . Before the last big build I would agree with you the game pace was pretty decent.

I would like to see multiple screen support soon like in supcom. This would really help managing multiple planets. Too bad its not a priority at Uber.

The game is designed so people with the most apm will win, even more than in Starcraft. You just need more speed to expand and spamm and micro/macro everything at the same time. There is almost no limit for getting better.

Removing this would mean to completely redesign the game. I dont see how multiple planets, Orbital and a round planet can be played by 1 person. Even supcoms limit was mico/macro speed but due to gamespeed/sim problems it was noob frienldy.

Like the Sheller?

Also the flame tank has a roll. It's anti heavy stuff that can't move away. It's also cheap health.

However, I don't see the point of the Vanguard, in addition to the inferno.

@arachnis - we need that game of Sins sometime. Check out my post in pounders and levellers too, I'd like your input on that because I clearly am not a Sins expert.

A flat tax does not overpower an exponential curve. Nearly nothing does.

Infrastructure demands can be made in multiple ways. It is partially necessary to give players valuable targets worth attacking, but if it's TOO expensive the game takes forever to get anywhere. Uber already made energy about as damn expensive as can be, and the only result is you spend 80% of your game building generators to keep up with the absurd demand. That isn't fun, that's just stupid.

The end result doesn't change. Exponential growth still happens, and energy plays no significant part in changing that.

We are also waiting on a economy patch, as we are still using a old economy version.

With income rate multipliers and metal density settings for planets we're going to have a massively customizable economy, but the growth will still follow the same curve it does now.

If we sharply reduce the metal per MEX we stall the early game, but raising it to a fun to play early game we are looking at run away economy in the late game. I think the trick to balancing the economy will be to make the early game less MEX dependent be giving the commander a larger base income, larger starting storage, and adding high value recyclable dodaads to the terrain. MEX could have then have their income sharply reduced. They would still mater, but they will add to your economy at a much more controlled rate.

I think any balance that is viable for playing on a single world will always lead to runaway growth in a multi-planet game. For the late game we need money sinks to pour our excess resources into. These same multi-planet excess economy games are the same ones that end in stalemates once the planets are heavily fortified. We need super expensive planet vs planet siege breakers. They don't need to be super universal experimental Mega Fat Monkey Cyclops Boy Planet Breaking Super Units! But they can be ultra expensive game changing heavy units, and lets be fair, endless stalemate needs some game changing.




On a related note, right now T1 --> T2 MEX is a very linear upgrade. What if we made T1 extractors far more durable and maybe even added some simple defenses to them. They would be a much more sensible choice on a contested planet and would aid in expansion. Then, when we have secured the planet we can upgrade them to frail high income T2 extractors and use them to finance our super expensive interplanetary war.

Also, does anybody else have problems with stalling early game?

I always try to build fabbers and just end up stalling my economy.

I never have issues with the my Econ. It's very easy to try to overproduce and that's just a habit you're going to have to check. Mastering the economic situation isn't very hard, since its just some basic maths at this point. If you're good at on-the-fly arithmetic the economic model is rather trivial thanks to the sheer speed at which it expands.