Metal, Energy, and Build Time

Metal, Energy, and Build Time should be the same for a given unit
For instance the cost of an A.K. is 50 metal and 50 energy and the build time is 50.

Metal and Build Time but not Energy should be the same for a given unit
For instance the cost of an A.K. is 50 metal and 100 energy but the build time is 50.

Energy and Build Time but not Metal should be the same for a given unit
For instance the cost of an A.K. is 50 metal but 30 energy and 30 build time.

Metal and Energy should be the same but not Build Time for a given unit
For instance the cost of an A.K. is 50 metal and 50 energy but its build time is 30.

Metal, Energy, and Build Time should be independent for a given unit
For instance the cost of an A.K. is 50 metal, 100 energy, and 30 build time.
This is what TA and SupCom used.

I vote for the last one, if only because it should be a matter open for balance, rather than trying to make up some arbitrary rule that A=B=C= ?

Just build an interface around the system so players can see & manipulate their economy as easily as they move their units around.

Its very important that build time be independent from resource cost. Sometimes you want a unit to not cost a lot of resources, but you want it to take a very long time to build. In our supcom mod, we had a teleport network where there was a unit that represented a teleport node. We didn't want it to be a drain on the economy to build them but we wanted it to take a fairly long time, even with a team of engineers. Thus, a long build time and low cost. It worked nicely. Keep it independent.

The poll should make a distinction between explicitly linking the three and having the three linked in general principle, but allowing for exceptions.

What about having build time half that of metal cost?

What about a quarter?

Just as long as the build time is made explicit. Make them all different, like in TA and supcom.

Why would you do this? You can renormalise the entire system for a 1:1 ratio.

Actually regardless of whether the ratio is fixed or not I would love it if the costs were normalised such that the average ratio is 1:1:1. It would be easier to manage for absolutely no gameplay change.

I also hope that whatever happens the values are separate within the engine.

It would not really matter as we do not know the builder power of the unit in question. What really only matters is that if the resources are directly related. 1x:1x:1x is the same as 1x:10x:1x or 1x:0.5x:1x.

I think the completely separate values for mass, energy and build time led to more interesting gameplay.

The high energy cost of air meant you could focus on air if put in a position where you had less access to mass.

High mass costs for navy meant that naval units were precious and few. It also forced active reclamation of hulks to continue fielding larger vessels.

Also with larger units requiring massive amounts of build power, you could pull engineers off of a project and keep a small trickle of mass/energy going to it to keep it from regressing. With a more equal system the ability to dynamically change your expenditures is diminished.

The game could be balanced around a 1:1:1 ratio and would probably make the rate based economy easier to understand for new people. However I would rather see a good tutorial system to explain things rather than reinvent the wheel.

Before playing ZK, I'd have said the last one. But metal=energy=buildtime works surprisingly well. You still have enough unit variety to balance things (speed, movement type, hp, weapons...) and it simplify eco nicely. And apparently, people have a hard time understanding the eco.
The difference between mass and energy would be that energy is required for many other things, like powering superweapons or boosting mass production.

That said, having variable costs could also work, but then they should be fixed for each factory : all ships costing more metal, all planes costing more energy, for example.
And buildtime should then always use the same formula, be it metal=buildtime, metal+energy=buildtime or something else.
In both cases, it should be made very clear for the player.

I chose having energy be independent.

Now that I think about it, this could help differentiate tech. Having build time and mass line up in cost can help balance building requirements/time, and having energy be independent can mean you increase the power requirement to build something if you want the player to be about there in terms of how many generators they have. This also requires the player to have to choose between base options, like shields and artillery, and tech options, which is another balance option.

Just a thought. There's lots of ways to go about it, obviously.

Costs should all be normalized. There really is no reason to have variability in both production and costs. Any variability factor you want to introduce, you can implement by adjusting the cost and rate of production of resources, while leaving the costs 1:1:1.

If an AK costs 50m/50e/50BP, and a mex produces 2m/sec, and a solar produces 2e/sec, and an engineer builds at 2BP/sec, then we have true symmetry.

However, even if we leave the AK's costs entirely untouched, we can change the significance of the cost by tweaking the supply side numbers. For example, a mex produces 2m/sec, a solar produces 4e/sec, and an engineer builds at 4BP/sec.

There is absolutely no reason to have variability in both costs and sources.

You vary the cost to balance the unit as you want it to be. You vary the sources to change the gameplay dynamics on a given planet.

Independent metal, energy and buildtimes arent that clear. You dont know instantly 'oh this engineer is gonna suck 5 metal each second' and there really isnt a need to have independent costs. Especially for new players this can be very confusing. Zero k works just fine and there the metal, energy and buildtimes are equal.

So just do it KISS and dont ad uneeded complexity.

When an engineer mouses over something it can build it could simply state (next where it states the cost normally) what the cost per second is.

I'm not adding it, it was part of the games that PA is a successor to.

Does the build time affect anything other than the amount of engineers you will need to devote to the project to make it build at a certain speed?

So doesn't increasing the build time just increase the cost of the unit by the cost of how many extra engineers you need assisting? (And the build time of those engineers, I suppose)

It would be nice if the build time was closely related to the sum of the energy and metal cost, or at least a consistent equation:

Code:

# a, b, c are arbitrary constants
BuildTime = c * (a * EnergyCost + b * MetalCost)

Then you don't have to think about much about how long something builds, you would generally know based on how expensive it is. You would also know how much your resource consumption would go up by adding extra engineers to the project, without having to know what they're actually working on.

If you disagree with this, could you come up with some examples from TA or SupCom where it was favourable to have the BuildTime / Cost ratio vary between units? I don't even know if the build time varies in those games, so I can't come up with any examples.

The obvious example would be nukes/anti-nukes in supcom and FA. In supcom once a nuke/anti-nuke launcher went up you could assist it with a vast swarm of engineers and pump out missiles incredibly quickly. In FA the build power of the nuke silo was dramatically increased and the build time of the missile was increased the same amount. This change meant engineer assistance was a far smaller proportion of the total build power so if you wanted to spam nukes, you needed multiple (expensive) silos rather than just throwing engineers at it.

It also has the opportunity cost of what those engineers could otherwise be doing (for example repairing units, reclaiming derbies) and what the factory that would build them could be doing (building combat units).

I think that they should definitely come up with some sort of guidelines for how units should be prices but I do not think it should be any sort of rule.

You can achieve absolutely any desired ratio of metal-energy-buildtime value just by tweaking the sources that produce that resource.

In fact, I would strongly suggest that for simplicity, PA normalize costs around some fixed, normal mex generation amount. Make all mex spots produce exactly 1 metal/second, and if you want more metal in one spot, simply have more spots.

Thus, a unit that costs 50 metal will always cost 50 mex-seconds. So if you have 25 mexes, you generate enough metal to produce one of that unit every two seconds.

Similarly, let's normalize energy. A solar generator could produce, say, 1 energy per second. Or, if we want some non-equivalent balance of energy to metal, we define that balance with this ratio. Say, 2 energy per second for a solar. The same simple calculation becomes possible.

And finally, I strongly suggest build time be directly and exclusively dependent on the resource cost of the unit, instead of an arbitrary number. There is virtually no gameplay gain from having different values for every unit, but greatly increased informational complexity to doing so.

If a unit costs 50 metal, it should cost 50 BP, and normalize the sources of build power around this type of fixed cost setup. Ideally, metal=energy=BP, and sources of BP have standardized values (i.e. Factories have 12, engineers have 6, or whatever). It is a much simpler system, and there is very little to gain from having a random collection of arbitrary values for each unit.

I do not like this as it limits the ability to differentiate planets. If all metal spots produced the same amount of metal, and you wanted a low metal planet, you would have to have a small number of metal spots. As metal spots are important control points, this would mean you can not creating a low metal planet with a large number of metal spots (as control points or for starting locations).

I do not like this as it limits the ability to differentiate planets. It means there will be no close to the sun, tidally locked, (fake) planet Vulcan (or early theory Mercury) like planets to use as high solar energy production bases.