Its Just Too Massive!

Very true.

Nano, I think the concern most of us have is the opposite. It's really easy to have a huge economy, too easy even. None of us are having trouble supporting our costs. Instead we are spinning our thumbs looking for things to spend our mega money on.

We should look at ways to slow economic expansion without stalling the early game, and ways to put our economy to use in the late game.

EDIT: Apologies, on my phone I didn't see the post before yours about stalling in the early game. Your comment seemed oddly out of place until I went back to my PC.

Yea, my reply was purely towards igncom1's response. I'm firmly of the opinion that the Econ is borked. I'm interested to see what Scathis does with it but I'm reserving judgement on it since he and I don't see eye to eye on several points. I'm not sure that, what he has in mind and what I am expecting, will line up.

I totally agree with the first post. This game requires far more APM(micro) than any other game I have ever played to win. It is a constant clickfest to keep expanding to metal and to use fabs in your base and also manage strategic things.

Well, since the last patch the game got a lot easier to handle. Area commands are awesome and take a lot of micro away. You can now fix damaged structures, scout, defend and build easier.
The only problem remains, nothing available (yet) like a mini-map or for example sound notifications that the enemy launched a nuke...
Area commands and camera capture (shift+1 and so on) are awesome.

For me the game is about growing the economy and entirely relies on APM's. Their is no other style of play catered for, its grow or die. I could just be bitter though, as the Hard AI keeps getting to nukes before me

area commands and endless production ques help a lot to minimise micro on eco and production
but yea the game is a ever expanding race on productionbubbles until one eats the other smaller bubbles by overgrowing them unless you poke a needle or throw a rock into it

I expected the units to be more self sustaining. As an example: building metal extractors.

Right now I have to click a builder, select the metal extractor, and then click every metal spot. The bot starts to build the metal extractors at the designated spots.

What I expected: I select a metal extractor, give the number of metal extractors I want and select the area where I want the metal extractors to be build. What happens is that the AI waits for a builder to finish his current queue and gives it the order to build metal extractors in the designated area.

Basically I do not want to deal with single units and arbitrary stuff like where the building is exactly placed. I want to be a commander and only micro manage stuff like exact locations of buildings when I can get a strategic advantage.

• Click on the construction unit
• Click on the metal extractor icon
• Click and drag on an area of the map to order it to build extractors on every metal spot there.

What about factories? Defense? etc.. I mean.. maybe it wasn't the best example I used, but I still have to find and select the construction unit to give it a direct order. I just want to give an order without me having to micro the units to execute the order.

so you want it more macro with just putting in numbers?

The latest patches added a bunch of micro reducing tools. Every major patch seems to make it easier to handle larger and larger games in general.

The integration of area commands in most parts of the game have drastically reduced the amount of time spent on lining up structures, building metal extractors, patrols, moving troops. The new window within a window "minimap" is super useful as well. Allowing you to keep your eyes on two places at once. The way they've added a preview window the the notifications is also very nice and helps with information management.

Daddie, what you're suggesting may work for a few things, but would limit the player choices of where to place stuff far too much. And then to allow for those additional choices would require more effort on the players part than the current system. I've seen games that have universal build menus that when you queue something up to be built, the nearest construction unit goes and tries to build it. That isn't a bad system, but it is slow and makes the player feel like he has little control over the game itself.

I'm looking forward towards adjustable amount/output of metal spots, this would be perfect to experiment with game pace, also I disagree that it would made territory control less important, you would had less metal spots, but they would be still dispersed all around the planet, making harassing metal even more important.

EDIT_1: also I agree that energy generators could be bit more expensive, this could slow down the game during first minutes of game-play.

I have a plausible solution to the MICRO/MACRO mass issue that would perhaps not be the easiest to implement for the developers, but might perhaps be the most unique feature ever put into a game like this.

What if each planet or celestial body was artificially split into six regions: two polar regions and four equal regions around the center of each planet or celestial body.

Within each region would be a number of metal resource points that players would secure and mine from. Let’s say 20 resource points per region for the simplicity of this example.

The resource points within a region would actually be a set of grouped resource points, each drawing from a single resource pool. This would mean players would only get a “percent” of the available resource for each resource point from the overall resources available from that regions pool. So let’s say that at two (2) metals per second from each resource point developed, you can obtain a total of forty (40) metals per second from any given region when all resource points are developed.

Now here is the catch! To make the game competitive for regional dominance, the player with the most resource points developed in any given region will get a bonus 0.3 metal per second from each resource point he has in that region.

So let’s say that Player one (1) has captured eight (8) out of twenty (20) resource points and player two (2) has captured seven (7). Player one (1) would generate eighteen point four (18.4) metals per second while player two (2) would generate fourteen (14) metals per second.

I think with some tweaks to this basic example that I’ve given; we could overall reduce the overabundance of resources players have available while also insuring that dominating a region at a time would be beneficial and both threatening.

Your thought please?

I was suggesting it as an extra option for the player. The PA UI should be able to handle this. One button to switch between micro and macro for example. Basically as your army grows, you shouldn't be dealing with little trivial stuff like placing a turret. Sure, at the start of the game the turret placement is important but later on I just want to give the order to place 100 turrets in an area and the AI should be smart enough to place them a bit strategically.

I think that placing construction orders without having to select the individual constructors will take you far.
I don't know if I would trust an AI to place the turrets for me. I can't really tell before I have tried a specific implementation of it.

I don't see how dominating a region is different from just dominating more metal spots and more territory.

I agree that there is way too much metal currently. When I play myself or watch other players play I always see the same thing:
Lots of wasted metal although the player didn't even try to get all of the metal points that are available.

In Supreme Commander there was a constant fight for metal which made the whole game strategic and less stressful.
Because there were less metal spots. Way less. This doesn't really limit strategic options, because those were spread out across the map in an interesting way. If the terrain was generated in a way that allows for this in PA, too, then the gameplay would greatly improve, maybe even giving some distinct -high metal- spots to fight for and creating a few bottlenecks that are easily defensible, making the terrain a more interesting part of the gameplay.
This could also be influenced by the planet type which is just visual flavour right now.

I really hope the current gameplay style of having too much of both resources and only being limited by how fast your construction units can produce more stuff goes away. Else this game will have lots of wasted potential.

I actually thought it was logical to assume that all of this will change as the game progresses but it seems like there are people who like the way stuff currently works.

...meh

Less mex will lead to FIGHTING over what resource points there are. Strategic points on the map would actually matter. It wouldnt be just *oh I lost it. whatever. I've got ten more*

It will FORCE people to attack eachother. Dog v dog, see.

Dominating a region under the system I suggested would earn you more income by a margin more than your opponent in the same region. Overall, metal would be more scarce under the system as well. This would put a focus on being able to dominate regions of a planetary body why two or more players are fighting for control! It also makes taking out or protecting these resources more necessary when competing for dominance in a region.