Nanogel: Economy & Logistics at Unlimited Scale

Look, this kind of thing makes me think you are a little bit confused. "Time is a resource" is a proverb that you appear to misunderstand, or at least are misapplying here.

If a depot is manufacturing nanogel at a rate of 2 nanogel per second, and you wanted to build something that costs 200, then you can spend all the nanogel that one depot produces as it is made and finish the structure in 100 seconds. This means with just two 1 build power engineers, you can finish a project that costs 200 in 100 seconds.

Or, you can wait 100 seconds and have 200 already stockpiled when you begin construction. However two engineers are still going to take 100 seconds to build a project that costs 200. Added to the 100 seconds you just waited, it is now 200 seconds later and you have a finished project and 200 nanogel in storage. To build it faster (and spend more than you are manufacturing), you are going to need more engineers. If you had 200 engineers, you could finish the same project in 1 second with 200 nanogel already stockpiled.

Each base is its own flow economy with income, expense, and storage. If your income exceeds your expenses, your storage fills. If your expenses exceed your income, your storage depletes until it's empty- and then your production stalls.

So when you say that "you are paying more for the same building (time wise) than if you had the correct amount [of nanogel stockpiled]" it simply appears like you don't know what you're talking about. It's simply not a purchase economy.

It's also not even remotely close to Starcraft or C&C in any way.

Or 4 extractors and 4 power plants to a factory?

We really, really don't need a middle man in this.

Compared to the local-global debate your's goes one step further.

This type of economy is more like a "house hold economy", braking away the use and point of engineers even more and solidifying the economy into any one particular location.

I would love to see a mod of this, I really would

But not for vanilla PA, that go's to far, even a proper local economy (Planet bound) I could ultimately settle for, but this take economy management all the way up to eleven by making it into a per base economy.

So what's the point of engineers? if the only way to generate nano-gel required for construction is via these deports then why not just make the deports your builders?

Why not just have a deployable unit like an MCV that turns into a deport where ever you want a base?

Because the idea of engineers is to have a builder unit that can build anywhere, but the limit of nano-gel means that engineers attempting to expand would be more like a convoy, making them far too hard to manage on the larger scale.

I disprove.

Yes, and when your engineers run out of nano-gel in the field that would drop off into being completely useless, so unless a single engineer can build a deport then you are going to get situation where the only way to expand is with huge amounts of engineers.

The availability of nano-gel is the problem in a flow based economy, but by making it only accessible via a single building then the game stops being a flow based economy, but more the amount of deports you can support, then the build rate you can achieve.

At that point then you might as well replace energy and metal entirely with deports built of metal deposits.

There is a mod where your unit factory's can only be built on deposits, and it is more like an arcade game then a TA game.

other then that you become leached to where your deports are, meaning that mobile constructors are pointless.

But this is the part I want to know.

Why? Why "govern where these resources can be spent, and to what degree."?

What is the problem with the current set up? It is managed with the availability of build power at a location, making that your 'control' system for resource spending, so what would nano-gel actually improve from that?

Because I can't see any evidence that this improves the game or solves it's problems in a way that doesn't dominate the game.

Edit: OK so if the purpose of it is the whole "govern where these resources can be spent, and to what degree."

Then you are tackling this from the wrong side, you are going from the resources side, but I think you should be take ling this from the build rate side.

So any change to be made is there, I still don't like the idea of a house hold economy, but on the level of local or per planet then I think that this idea could be good.

I would go from the angle where on any world that does not have a commander or 'deport' that the build rate of engineers and factory's would drop in effectiveness, making stuff build much slower, but for the same cost per time, making it difficult to build on new worlds without throwing away a massive amount of your economy.

I should really direct you to the OP as I spend the majority of a fairly lengthy document detailing gameplay reasons justifying the idea. However as a concise tl;dr list:

Economy
1) Economy distributed over space; prevents universally-consolidated serial production
2) Economy is positional; limited engineer reach, encourages building assets across map
3) Economy insulated from engineers; crash-resistance, simplified
4) Economy is localized; abstracted bases, scalable to arbitrary map size
5) Populates board with influence, targets, and scoutable/reactable pieces
6) Adds extra linear cost to consolidated runaway exponential economy
7) Reduces independence of buildpower; reduces cost of industrial power (moar units)

Logistics
1) More unit roles; more designs with logistical properties, strengths, weaknesses
2) More unit states; armies' logistical status independent of damage
3) Creates territory control; base as resupply location, extends reach+effectiveness
4) Creates tactical play; cut off supplies to weaken, force expenditure of supplies, etc.
5) Counter to snowballing; large force logistics cost resources


I suppose I could come up with a few more, but I believe that covers all the major bases.

I for one prefer the idea of replicating TA's ground engineers to prevent mass stacking, and the use of more factory's over direct factory assisting.

So removing the independent nature of engineers?

I do not agree on that basis.

I would say that this is much harder then normal, and is defiantly not more crash resistant then the normal economy.

And the insulation of engineers again, make them pointless.

Economy is base localised, making it much more strict then previous proposed changes.

Abstracted bases?

and this is only as scalable to the amount of resources...like the normal economy.

Influence?

And all this does is add to the target able parts of a players base, other then the power, metal extractors, storage, production, radar, engineers, defences and the commander.

But it doesn't, because you can just cluster a huge base of deports and mass build an army to kill everything on a planet.

This is not a solved problem....if it is even a problem.

Now that is a point I can agree with, but not the way you are attempting to achieve it.

Logistics like this does not improve game play, trust me, managing all of the logistic elements while also trying to function a world war is best left to a TBS for a reason.

No person can manage all of that and play at an acceptable pace.

You were okay until you mentioned serial production. Your nanogel idea does nothing to address serial production that couldn't already be accomplished in TA or SupCom. Since it is likely that metal or mass or whatever they call it, is going to be spread out it, it accomplishes the same thing

Nothing like Starcraft huh? Basically you need to build in range of of a Pylon, sorry I mean nanogel depot.

I wouldn't call it simplified, 2 pools of resources to draw on seems simple to me, having to keep track of 3 (mass+energy=nanogel) streams in several bases is not simplified. Economy insulated from engineers is a ridiculous argument, If you have too many engineers, put some on idle, or set them out to reclaim stuff.

You could do this without the nanogel mechanic, you could restrict to power or metal

again no need for nanogel, simply protecting your resource points or strategic positions accomplishes the same thing

problem is very quickly that linear cost is going to get insignificant to the exponential growth, so adding linear cost is pointless once you get to large enough economies, so either the economy needs to be restricted to linear growth or the the costs need to be exponentially. That's if an exponentially increasing economy is a problem in a game.

Huh? how does tethering an engineer to a pylon create more unit designs?

I don't even get what you mean by unit states. But it seems the idea of the army being independent of damage kinda contradicts your below idea of key tactical structures to take out.

So basically we got another variation of your Command Centre idea, this time without the guns but as a linchpin economy structure

Basically the same thing you can do anyway with just killing extractors, or power facilities, or other key structures. Instead you've just created a really obvious one.

I don't think you know what those words mean. Snowballing is simply the idea that something gets bigger. It can be in control or out of control. I'm still not sure what you mean by the second part, it's not exactly English, well the words are but not the way they're put together.


Long story short, I'm pretty sure you're following the wrong project. You really wanted PlanetCraft. Most of the ideas I've seen you present seem to be Starcraft ideas, with minimal changes to show horn them into the gameplay style of TA and SupCom.

Igncom, what exactly do you think a player does when they are playing a truly large-scale strategy game?

Do you think they target fire individual buildings in a base? Like you suggest as a possible advantage to having depots? Do you think players just smash blobs of units together and see what happens? Or crash armies against defenses, which is essentially the same thing?

What is it players are trying to do, in your opinion? Because you seem quite internally inconsistent, or at least lacking in a consistent system you actually support. It seems you're fixated on a very small-scale TA or Starcraft type RTS game, yet at the same time repeatedly ask for less micro and larger scale. In the self-same post you suggest target-firing depots, and later on that logistics of all things are too much micromanagement.

What is it that makes an army's actions significant? Because just fighting another army doesn't give a fight significance. There needs to be a board composed of player-created strategically significant objects and features that gives meaning to military actions. Economics, logistics, intelligence, etc. are the real war- not the combat units smashing into each other in the field. If anything, capturing territory for economic and logistical strategic purposes is one of the most important elements of grand strategy, and there is no reason to assert it would create tremendous micromanagement.

Players shouldn't even have to pay attention to the actual bullets; they have to make big decisions about where to move armies, where to build bases, and why. And non-military concerns like logistics and localized economy are the only real candidates for this type of gameplay; without them there's nothing but troops walking around a vacuum of a map.


Frankly your arbitrary build rate penalty is a categorically inferior system. Did you seriously suggest that build rate be reduced, but would cost the same? That is broken, arbitrary, and stupid. Moving the commander could throw your entire planetary economy into disarray from the added inefficiency. Having one depot present on a planet mitigating this huge inefficiency effect for the entire planet... ye gods just no. It is inelegant, does nothing productive to good gameplay, merely creating inefficiency with the same incentives in place, and is just quite obviously terrible.



And with respect to Dusk's post before I posted the above- I really have nothing more to say to you. Read. More. Most of your nonsense has already been addressed. I will correct a few of your more egregiously silly comments.

First, things being close to other things is sort of a simple idea. The fact that it is present in Starcraft is irrelevant. But if you insist, there are obvious differences you are ignoring: you can build anywhere (unlike pylons). Oh, and they don't increase your supply limit to a max of 200, like their main function in Starcraft.

Yes, a linear cost quickly becomes irrelevant against an exponentially growing economy. That's why it's a feature. Exponential costs would be stupid. And you're stupid for suggesting it.

Unit states is unit statuses. Like having full HP, but no ammo.

Snowballing is when the rich get richer, and the strong get stronger. If units cost resources to resupply, having a larger army means you have to spend more resources maintaining and supplying it, instead of spending those resources on more units. So logistics tends to resist snowballing.

Your PlanetCraft comment is forgiven because I was playing TA when you were in grade school, if that.

Targetting a single building for a surgical strike is not micromanagement. Having to worry about distance to depots, whether you're wasting resources making gel in a depot that isn't building anything, etc., is. Not only that, but these "Pylons" make a base VERY brittle - take out the depots, and you can no longer construct anything and have lost the game (if all depots are dead) or lost the ability to build anything at that location until you can cart in resources from elsewhere to re-build the depot.

It sounds like you want a slower, much more complex type of game - sort of like a real-time civilization. Nothing wrong with that, but that's not the same genre as TA/Sup Com, and PA is.

Fights army's.

I did not suggest it as an advantage.

Essentially yes.

or do you think that you don't?

Even starcraft does this, command and conquer does this, TA does this and SupCom does this.

I am fixated on small scale? umm how?

And logistics like you suggest is too much to manage properly and still have time to properly micro your forces.

Management of resources and tactically attacking an opponent are two things that cannot be compared.

The type of economy management you suggest would be too complicated when with the type of tactical management that the game will have. You cannot have both without simplifying one or the other, and I know quite a few people on the forum who will not shift out of favour for their tactical management for something like this.

Have you ever played a RTS game? Killing enemy forces is kinda the whole point, draining your enemys resources in a way that doesn't drain as much of your own, or in a way that will give you an advantage.

Face palm.......did you really mean to say that? really?

This isn't grand strategy, not by a long shot.

:| What?

Seems to work well in 4X games, and the simplicity of the malus means that there isn't much to work out, making it very user friendly.

The economy would slow, but not drain any faster, just longer.

And it would become apparent from a tutorial that a 'planet manager' would fix that.

It focuses the conflict of an player to defend a central location that is vital to holding a planet, much like your

, so I would have thought you to have been familiar.

And considering that it is a far simpler solution to yours that would indicate that it is far more elegant.

Quite the time machine you have there, can I have a ride it it? I'd love to go back to the eighties and show my younger self all the cool stuff that's out now. Or hell even Total Annihilation, I'm sure I would have been blown away by that. For the record, TA came out my final year in high school, and yes I played a lot of it.

I've also played quite a few other RTS games, Including all the warcraft ones and starcraft. I can recognize the Nanogel Depot and a protoss pylon, I can recognize the Micro Infantry as a Protoss Carrier. I can really clearly recognize the Command Center as a Terran Command Center + Planetary Fortress. And you wonder why I make PlanetCraft remarks?

Nanogel is even at the core just a bad idea. You take 2 resources, mash them into one, but still leave the player 3 resources to manage and oversee.

Most of what you mention can be accomplished in TA as is. Depots were a building type, you could build them, they stockpiled the resources. Nothing your nanogel resource accomplishes unto itself does anything that wasn't already in TA with just metal and energy. If you desperately need to limit resources to local bases you can do it with just power plants. In which case once you've removed the nanogel aspect, you've basically duplicated the Protoss Pylon but with energy instead of supply/food/unit count.

I can say decisively that just building blobs and smashing them together is a very silly way to play strategy games. It's more suitable to just messing around vs the AI which will gladly suicide impossibly large armies into your impregnable defenses. There's no move and countermove, just lots of units shooting at each other for no reason.

Killing enemy forces is not "the whole point." Not by a long shot. That's like saying the point of chess is to capture all the pieces.

Although I see now I am going to have a very difficult time changing the way you look at RTS games in such a short amount of text. Long story short- if seeing lots of units fighting is fun, by all means play whatever RTS is fun for you. But there are players that want a battle of wits first, a highly complex chess match with many pieces, and many different pieces. A game where strategic decisions made with limited information in real time determine the winner, and where both players are simultaneously building and destroying the chess board.

Dusk, just read the posts about which you write. Infantry are similar to the Protoss Carrier? Just stop. Maybe if you said they were similar to IFV's from Wargame: European Escalation. But carriers? Really? In a game that is going to have ACTUAL aircraft carriers?

Tactical management, how and where blobs should shoot at each other.

Assassination mode vs supremacy mode.

And your suggestion does none of that.

Yes there is, and I'm sure there's a game out there that caters to you. But you're suggesting changes that alter this game beyond the current expectation of the genre.

At the heart of all logistics is the movement of resources from the area of production to the area of usage. This could be moving mass from extractors to factories, or it could be moving tanks from the factory to the front line.

I agree with the principle that logistics need to be implemented, but I believe this proposal has lost a bit too much in an effort to streamline.

If you look at the proposal just a little bit differently, you can see that Bobucles is correct in his analysis that this proposal is a way to make buildpower more complex. Nanogel (as proposed) is essentially build power - the only difference is that you insert a unit (supply depot) between the construction project and the engineer. So imho, it really doesn't do enough to make the gameplay different, and you do end up with a heap of complexity with little purpose.

I've been thinking about this a lot, and I love the thought of logistics, but I've come to realize that there are better and more intuitive ways to work with the concept within a global economic framework. I've always loved the game Harvest: Massive Encounter for the way it visually represented its main resource as something physical that moves around: Like this. So the nanogel idea is inherently attractive, but it raises a lot of issues, and at its core, it’s a mechanic to restrict build power.

The key to it though, is to think of your MOBILE UNITS as your logistics resources. I know, simple and stupid isn't it? (I know, I know Bobucles etc you're gonna tell me you've been saying this all along )

If you think about it though, Supcom / TA / Spring / Zero-K don't deal with troop movements as a strategic logistics problem, which is why, I believe, people are searching for alternatives. Strategic troop movements involve the question of ‘Where will my troops fight” and “How many of my troops will fight”, whereas tactical troop movements are about ‘How will my troops fight”. Too often the answer to the first two questions is “In one place, with all my troops”.

There are two reasons for this lack:
1.Mobile Engineers Buildpower To Economy Ratio is unbalanced
Mobile Engineers carry way too much build power, which makes it more economical over long distances to simply establish another base, and use the mobile build power of a large group of engineers to pump all the resources of your economy into building units near the front line. So there is little incentive to transport your units across the field of battle, and the tools to do so have been neglected.

2. Lack of Strategic Level Troop Movements:
Supcom / TA / Spring / Zero-k are all built around a small map experience - the 20 minute 1v1. Unit speed is more a factor for considering their combat capability, not their ability to reach the battlefield. In fact, any kind of attempt to expand the maps size by 'slowing down' the units (I've tried this in a mod) is met with feedback that the combat feels less punchy and exciting. Which is true enough – when in combat you want your units to be fast and responsive. On the other hand, you should have to make a choice on where that unit fights - the average base size and unit speed combined to make it fairly easy to use a single force to defend both the front lines and the flanks, and it’s even fairly common to have a ‘front line’ that goes across the entire map. So our entire experience is based around a tactical troop movement paradigm, and little attention is paid to the tools to make strategic level decisions.


So I propose two things:

1. Bring the build power of mobile engineers down so that it’s very hard to drain your economy output by using mobile engineers. Increase the build power of your stationary units (factory, nano towers, whatever) so that the focus is on producing units through structures rather than mobiles.

2. Recognize and account for strategic movement above and beyond what we have so far. What would you need to be able to effectively move units from one side of a 40km map to another? Air transports work ok but are a bit limited in scale. I would suggest things like trains (set up pylons between bases, hover trains zip along them), inter-planetary teleportation pads, drop shuttles, and space elevators. I also suggest a system for quick transport within a base – perhaps a crane system (remember the hover transport from TA?) that can move units quickly around the interior of your base. The key is to be able to give units a massive boost to their movement speed at the cost of needing to build infrastructure to do so. And obviously, we need a UI system that supports this so you’re not babysitting your unit transit system.

@Pawz so you are suggesting an economy system like perimeter, or possibly just based off of it?

Very well my mistake, that wasn't your interpretation of it, but someone else's. Still don't like your nanogel idea, you're making a complex system, rather than simple systems that interact with complexity.

Um no, actually I'm suggesting that the economy is the wrong spot to look for answers to the logistics issue. Mass, Energy, and Buildpower as the three pillars of economy is all that is needed.

Rather than trying to localize any one of those three, I believe we should focus on localizing the production of units. Make it so that it's more economical for the player to build a strong industrial base somewhere and produce units at that location, and make the logistics choices be based on what kind of infrastructure you want to put down to make your units move around the map faster. Cheap quick roads that give you a 5% overall boost to speed? Or more expensive hovercraft that are limited in cargo space but can carry those heavy slow units at a decent speed? Or a high speed rail system that requires stations and pylons but can carry huge numbers of units very quickly?

The only thing it really depends on is map size. If it takes you 30 seconds to get around the planet, you'll never do more than tactical movements - positioning to fight. This is where PA has a chance to really shine compared to Supcom, and that's why I'm proposing that rather than modifying the economy, we simply add that strategic level of infrastructure and production to deal with larger maps.

I agree with Pawz that strategic scale unit design and positioning based gameplay are excellent ideas for PA, bordering on absolutely necessary. Making the map huge compared to unit speed so units aren't omnipresently mobile means you have to choose where to send units, and where to fight. And other units you control might be too far away to help in any particular fight. Map size relative to unit speed is the key here.

The danger is that the units might be designed in such a way that it is optimal to just stack them all together so you aren't defeated in detail by someone who does the same. In this event, all the size of the map does is make large battles less frequent, and these deathballs take longer to cross the map. Careful unit design to discourage deathballs is necessary, and encourage players to actually play spread out across the large map.

I do think that there should be economic and logistical factors in addition to the scale and unit design. Some system is necessary to create points of interest spread across the map- and honestly just factories won't cut the mustard. Especially if any factory or construction project can accommodate your entire economy at once with enough assist.

Question: would these nanogoo makers create nanogoo from anywhere on the map? Or does it need to be near a mass and energy to create it?

Unless things have changed since, mass and energy are still a global resource. You can build goo makers anywhere (out of goop).

This is why the system won't work. You NEED to have a way to transfer this nanogel around, otherwise it literally is just adding a step between the engineer and its construction project. Once your engineer has run through the available supplies, the depot becomes the build rate limiter, so you're basically just taking the gameplay of Supcom and making it required to plunk down a supply depot first, then start building.

And once you want to add moving nanogel around and managing it better, it becomes clear that it'd be a heck of a lot easier to manage moving the end products of the nanogel around (units).