Metal worlds & balance

I am not worried that much about balance (because I know that will be corrected overtime, and with one faction it should be a bit simpler), but I was thinking of these metal planets. If they are like the ones in Total Annihilation, you will be able to extract metal from anywhere on the world.

So, when you give a normal player the choice to chose a planet in a galaxy to start on, aren't they going to chose the metal world simply because you have one of your resources infinitely available?

That would eliminate some of the fun if everyone always chooses metal planets to start on. But why wouldn't they? It would be the logical choice.

In addition to this, what if you aren't picking, and one player starts on a metal world and the other on a earth-type/water world?

Like you said it comes down to balancing.

But to be honest, it is waaaay too early to start asking questions about these type of gameplay mechanics. It's good if you have like a suggestion on how to balance it right. But we don't know exactly how metal planets are going to work, nor how spawn locations will be chosen. So it's far too early to comment, really.

I think a good idea would be something like.. every planet should have its chance of lots of extra resources.

Lava world: Geothermal steam coming out everywhere. Energy. little wind, and average metal. Geothermals are more expensive
Metal world: metal! no wind. (no climate duh)
Desert/Ice world: high winds, low metal
Lush world: medium wind, medium metal
gas giants: many asteroids which have lots of metal and movement. geothermal something for energy. NO metal on planet.
Water world: tidal gens, medium to medium low metal


Hows that sounds to everyone?

No climate for metal planets?
IIRC, the hangar where they prepared the space shuttles is big enough to have its own cloud system. So a whole metal planet would probably have its own climate.
Though if they built something as stupidly massive as a metal planet, they may well have built it with climate controllers!
On the other hand, moon-like worlds and asteroids won't have wind, due to the lack of atmosphere (duh).

And you forgot stars : orbital layer only (immense circumference), increased solar efficiency.
Come on, it would be fun!

Wind (or any other form of energy resource) will never be balanced against metal unless massfab farms are viable, and we don't want massfab farms to be viable. And even then it implies some kind of ridiculous fusion windmills.

Wut. I guess youre right. They can have a climate because of metalworlds+water and all controlled, but lets say its so precisely controlled that there are no storms, hence no wind, hence no tidal gens. Just barren

Well lava worlds may end up being hazzard to your HP, and with molten lava bringing up good deposits of ore.

I would go for:
Lava world: Geothermal steam coming out everywhere. little wind, But lots of metal. Buildings are more expensive to fortify them against the environment, a protection units do not have.
Metal world: Access to highly advanced metal fabricators accessible via capture, little wind but advanced fusion and anti-matter reactors but possible automated defense.
Desert/Ice world: high winds, low metal but good hydrocarbon deposits for energy.
Lush world: medium wind, medium metal and amazing amounts of bio-matter to reclaim.
gas giants: many asteroids which have lots of metal and movement. geothermal and insane wind, no metal accessible.
Water world: tidal gens and medium wind, medium metal and good geothermal.

I completely forgot about reclaimables! I loved the city maps in Total Annihilation, that were usually located on lusch worlds. Id love to see a frozen city map or a water city in PA!!

I personally thought that no one would be able to start on Metal worlds and possibly not even gas.
With Metal worlds being a giant space station every one is likely to rush them. and I Thought the thread was going to be about how to balance the game after some one has activated them.

In terms of planetary differentiation these are just some ideas that I'm throwing out there to add to the discussion, I'm not particularly attached to any of the them so feel free to analyse and tear up any bad ideas.

Lush planet: Standard planet type. Medium wind/metal/light and bio-matter to reclaim.

Lava planet: Lots of Metal and Geothermal Power - I would like to see some element of risk on a lava world (low areas of map periodically fill up with lava maybe?) but balancing that...Topic for for another thread maybe. igncom1's idea of having buildings/units cos more due to the heat protection is interesting. Might help balance lava planets if environmental conditions aren't going to impact the player in the form of damage risks.

Desert/Ice planets: high winds for power, low number of resource points but in high concentrations (high rate of production to balance the low number of them?) in the form of hydrocarbon deposits on both planet types. High light on desert planets.

Water planet: No land/floating start platform. Possibly further floating platforms to build things on. Maybe have old rigs/hydrocarbon deposits balanced the same as in desert/ice planets. Tidal energy/medium sun. Maybe even Hydrogen for fusion energy through the splitting of water.

Gas giants: Asteroids to battle between on which to build bases and mine metal. Lots of Hydrogen for use in Fusion power generation. High winds. No metal accessible from the gas giant itself.

Metal planet: Access to numerous mass points. I would have them airless to differentiate them from other planets, after all if they are artificial planet sized battle stations it is unlikely the creators would have bothered with giving it an atmosphere? Have the option to reactivate old planetary defence systems on the planet (turrets, factories, powerplants?). Maybe there could be old and damaged automated systems that were running said facilities in the past. They could offer resistance in order to make it an effort to capture them.

It is a bit hard to comment on as we dont know whether they will be like deathstars or regular planets with defences to reactivate or some combination of the two..Which gave me another idea. Maybe if there was some kind of automated defences on planets which you had to overcome in order to capture it and THEN you got your death star. Again it is hard to think of ways to balance metal planets when we don't know Ubers intentions for them yet.

I agree, with the possible exception of fusion on gas giants. I could see the amount of energy you get from those planets maybe balancing out. But I do agree that massfab farms should not be something that is easily achieved or viable over obtaining mass resources.

I find it laughable that Uber wouldn't consider the potential for players to gain an unfair advantage simply by where they start. Particularly if it is also given up to player choice - which as of yet we know not if this will be the case.

At any rate, I think that it is not unreasonable to assume that there will always be a number of planets in the solar system that is proportional to the number of players in the game. Furthermore, there will be an equal number of planets of the same type -or resource value- so that each team has access to the same over-all resources.

We have also three options for a game start:
1.) Players start alone on their planet.
2.) Players start with allied commander on their planet.
3.) Players start with enemy commander on their planet.

Admittedly there is scope for combinations of the above, but just to keep it simple I'm going to limit myself to these options.

In condition 1, the potential for imbalance here is if there is not a similar planet on the opposing team. And the opposing team could be just 1 other player in any case. Obviously, if both players start on metal worlds then there is no unfair advantage.

In condition 2, the potential for imbalance comes from the same direction of condition 1. If there is not another similar planet on the opposing team, there is an unfair advantage. I suppose we are talking about symmetrical solar systems here. In terms of balance and not necessarily layout.

In condition 3 things are a bit more complicated. Let us approach from the perspective of a 3v3 where there are 3 different planets and each planet is occupied by two opposing commanders. It is now a case of each commander is on a equal terms with his opponent and therefore stands the same chance of 'winning' his planet. Assuming that each skirmish finished with a loss/victory the end result is a 2v1. The team who won the metal planet arguably have an advantage. This is different however, to if the two teams started off in this situation. Therefore the match was still fair, with each team having equal opportunity to win the metal planet.

To summarise, a solar system is a bit like any single map from a previous game. We need to stop thinking of planets in terms of maps and expand our scope with the scale of the game. A solar system can be asymmetrical in terms of layout and still be balanced; provided that resources are equally distributed between teams in terms of abundance, availability and distance from the player. These are the basic rules of map creation.

The part I put in bold I think is an important thing to remember. This is pretty spot on and I'm also sure that Uber will consider balance when putting together their procedural map generator. If there was any imbalances in the way that solar systems are generated, we will find out pretty quickly in the Alpha/Beta and it will be adjusted from there.

I think it will be quite interesting to see how the generator will produce maps with balanced gameplay and then arrange them in a balanced solar system.

I hope they don't do that. That creates stalemate situations, and is boring.

Have an imbalance... an extra metal planet, that nobody starts on. This will give the teams something to fight over.

Sure, I omitted neutral planets in the game from my example. It didn't really serve the point I was trying to illustrate but I didn't say they would not exist. I was talking about 'start' planets where players spawn into the game. Uber have also talked about metal and relic worlds. I am sure that they will be in the final game and will not be 'start planets' for players. In fact, the way it came up my interpretation might be that they are initially hidden to the player and you may need to scout to find them.

So the point of my last post still stands. And to correct your response - If it's a neutral world it's not an imbalance because each team has the same opportunity to colonise this neutral world. This goes back to what I was talking about with respect to the positioning of these worlds relative to the players.

EDITED: For clarity

Yall are assuming that players will just be able to choose any planet they start on. It'll very like not be that case. Or if it is, it won't be to that same extent. Gas planets, water planets, metal planets, will all be special planets that games would not normally be allowed to be started on. Without some user created mod of course.

I honestly don't think it's worth worrying about. Metal planets are likely going to be so extremely rare that we'll only see chunks of them or maybe an occasional full-sized metal planet during Galactic war. Any creative team knows not to make an almost infinite resource available at the start so I'm sure it's something that will be addressed in the future. There's a chance that 'Metal' may not be a resource as it was in TA, and instead it may just be mass and energy again. Which means a metal planet would be abundant in mass, but not to the point where all metal everywhere was a valuable resource.

I'm wondering more about how resource distributions will occur. I was hoping for more of a system where points of high-resource extraction like metal or mass nodes peaked at the point where the actual node was, but was still distributed in areas around the node. In other words, if you built an extractor to the side or near a node, you would still get some of that resource even though it's not the 'optimal' place to extract (TA sort of did this, if anyone remember, but I was also thinking of the old C&C games in this regard).

Its also a possibility that the metal/mass from metal worlds wont be from the actual hull of the world, but underground mass fabricators leaving players few but plentiful 'deposit' locations and possibly even mass fabricator structures to commandeer.

They should consider a game mode whereby resource collection rates drop as time goes on to break stalemates. This forces a "use it or lose it" mentality and should be able to upset stalemates.

Y'know, another consideration is that metal planets may be undetected in the beginning of the game - similar to how in TA you had to scout the map, you may have to 'scout' the solar system to find suitable asteroids and a possible metal planet / ancient asteroid base.

And if you use it to build defense, then you win because nobody will be able to break you.

Possible, but that means you need to either send things into space and have them float about (which as best we know isn't going to happen), or build a telescope to look for them. I don't like the idea of having a building just to find another patch of dirt (metal dirt) to fight on. Even if the telescope had usefulness outside finding metal planets, everyone would be rushing them to get to the metal planet first.