Nanogel: Economy & Logistics at Unlimited Scale

Yeah. As in, a unit with a nanogel reserve, but no lathe? That should certainly exist. It would be a supply truck, or a supply helicopter, or drop pod or what have you for all and sundry logistics units. Heck, you could have a mobile nanogel maker if its cost, effectiveness, and mobility were carefully measured.

The primary issue here is that if you have a global economy, why not just focus your entire economy's resources on one place for maximally decisive production, and therefore force? Rather than transporting units, what is to encourage you not ship over engineers and build whatever in a big hurry, since you have a potentially arbitrarily large economy behind you?

Why have a large map if the vast majority of it is going to be empty space, with no player bothering to develop or defend it? Economic, logistical, and also military systems should encourage players to spread out, and localized variation across space then creates a map with texture.

A few highly developed ultra-dense points of interest on a large map which produce everything and ship those units out to one of the other points of interest is not as interesting as a map that is filled with assets.

By making ground control worth it. FA was a big improvement in this over Vanilla Sup Com - make resource generation via fabrication very inefficient, while mass deposits are spread out but far more efficient. The player who expands and protects their expansions will have a decisive advantage. The trick would be a middle ground between unit mobility, and the need for forward bases to reduce the time of transit. Aircraft probably also need some more tweaking to prevent them being the best/only real way to protect the resources.

Am I right I saying that your nanogel idea is a way to have a start on another planet without having to put down other resources?

Need to make sure before I lay my thoughts out.

You can accomplish the same basic thing as the nanogel depot without the extra steps in production. All you need to do is leave in or up the energy cost to run a metal extractor or fabricator, remove the energy cost for constructing units and buildings, and require that buildings be built near the metal extractor and localize the metal use around the extractor or fabricator. Basically the extractor becomes the new pylon, you've accomplished the same ends, but rather than make the system complex you've simplified it. All the other important bits are still there, you're basically on a one resource economy, you have vulnerable keystone buildings, and you can't build without expanding your economy first. The interactions are still in place but the redundant steps are out.

That's basically the root of my disagreement with ledarsi. I would rather subtract complexity from systems or units to accomplish goals, they seem to enjoy adding complexity to systems. I suppose we're never going to see eye to eye on theorycrafting for a game we actually have no direct control over. Oh well. That's basically my non-apology for not being as nice as I could have been.

As for spreading out your economy, isn't that what asteroids and nukes are meant to encourage?

If I'm going to have large maps/planets I'm going to naturally spread things out a bit so I can reinforce my resource spots, which are going to be far away from my death blobs or central manufacturing area.

For movement infrastructure we've already seen the concept of a unit cannon, so knowing your opponent can eventually strike anywhere will mean that clumped manufacturing bases are bad. I'm going to assume that transports are going to get an overhaul, I seem to remember something from a live stream about Mavor being unsatisfied with how transports have worked in the past.

Clumping or spreading seems to be something that will be more affected by the terrain, weapons, unit mobility, moons, asteroids, land scarcity, defensibility and many other variables we actually have little to no idea about at this point. Having a Pylon like mechanic maybe redundant. Honestly it would be nicer to see an actual alpha before getting into in depth discussions on tactics, strategy and logistics of planet annihilating warfare.

The only thing that resolves that problem is to make it much more cost effective to build structures for build power instead of engineers.

My solution would be to have mobiles and structures have a magnitude of difference in build time. So an engineer can build a 50 mass turret in 10 seconds, but a 50 mass tank in 100 seconds. A factory would build with 10x the build power, so it pumps out a tank every 10 seconds. (Numbers obviously subject to balance considerations)

Then I would make something like upgrade buildings that have to be physically connected or within a particular radius of the factory to increase the buildpower of the factory. You could even make it a boost that applies to each factory in range of the upgrade building, which would increase the efficiency of grouping factories together.

As far as unit transport goes, I would argue very strongly that most transportation of units should be linked to infrastructure. If you can plunk units down anywhere, easily, then you seriously reduce the value of controlling territory. Control of territory should give you resources, early warning, and time to respond to any incursions.

Agreed. The best system for designing factories is to have cheap factories with very high build power compared to mobile build power. This is a very simple numbers-only design feature that will encourage making more factories instead of assisting one factory en masse.

However your idea of a production-speed boosting upgrade structure is probably not good. Production speed boosting exists as a mechanic; assisting. A lathe tower increases one factory's build speed, and an adjacency bonus or aura to that effect would be very bad, as it would encourage mass-stacking factories around the booster.

Even with well-balanced factories as compared to mobile engineers, the issue of mass production from a single location remains. Players will build many factories in the same location instead of many engineers assisting one factory. Certainly an improvement, and should be done as well, but still not as interesting as production spread across the map. How do you encourage players to spread out over a map with stuff?

I favor localization to accomplish this goal. In general, localization encourages investment in many places that doesn't give advantages everywhere. Localizing production will mean the player will want production infrastructure in more places, since production capability in one place isn't useful everywhere. Other types of localization are similar.


I very much like the idea of fixed infrastructure that greatly enhances unit mobility. Any type of structure that functions as a fast and long-distance overland transport will work. However this idea has the most impact when there are many points of interest to travel between. Significant enough points of interest, with enough traffic between them, to warrant spending resources to accelerate transit. This distribution of points of interest, and travel between them, needs to be established by some means. Localizing economy/production and adding logistics is one method that is likely to work, but it does involve adding what some people seem to perceive as a fairly major change.

It sounds like you are suggesting a fixed rapid transit system like a rail or a magtube or something along those lines. Which is a great idea. Unfortunately I am sure the peanut gallery will descend upon it with the exact same complaints they bring on everything. My own comment on it is that this would be a very useful tool if we already were spread over a map, but the availability of the tool won't necessarily incentivize players to do so. The same possibility that a single massive economic/industrial center may be most efficient remains.

I would be all ears for other methods of achieving the same goals of distributing players' structures and units across the map, and of creating positional play. I bet you have a solid proposal Pawz- let us hear it.

[EDIT:] Ledarsi ninja-posted while I typed this, so it's now a little out of place since he said a lot of similar stuff me.

How do we make ground control worth it with a global economy?

I'm not talking about periodically driving tanks over the ground, and putting up a few unprotected extractors. I'm talking about really staking a claim on a patch of dirt.

I don't think FA encouraged control of territory at all. The only reason why you'd go somewhere was to shoot an extractor, or some tanks. After that, you'd about-face, and drive off to the next target.

IMO, Bulldozing tracts of land isn't territory control.

Spreading factories out, with a global economy, isn't a bright idea. It's more beneficial to clump them together so that you can concentrate defense.

Ledarsi if this was implemented it would discourage expansion due to the fact that each base you own takes more babysitting to create and maintain.

It still sounds like this idea takes a lot of good concepts (like local economy and crash resistance and providing tactical targets and a few more) and then tries to implement them in a far too complex manner to ever make it fun and interesting to operate in an actual game.

If you keep your current goals in mind, but come up with something 90% simpler, it'd be a good idea.

How much effort does it take to maintain?

In theory, a base should operate indefinitely without maintenance until it's attacked.

If it's attacked, then of course you should be expected to click a bit and tend to it.


Now you have a fair point about setting up an expansion, but I think it's unreasonable to set up expansions without the player having to do something. The advantage you get with expansion is more tanks, or a place to build artillery or nukes, so I think you'll find people will pony-up and click a bit to expand.

Quoting this to stroke my ego. Aww yeah.
Yes, engineers already count as everything the nanogel facility tries to do. And they can move. And they don't have all the other layers of suck that come with individual storage.

Some interesting stuff here. Generally, factories should excel at their task of building a specific set of units. Engineers are primarily used to build more structures and factories. So it makes sense that each unit excels at its role. There are many ways to do this-
A) making structures faster to build, favoring the lower build speed of the engi.
A2) Making factories produce faster. (they are literally the same thing)
B) Providing an assist penalty on factories, not like Supcom2 but rather a flat 50% or so to favor the factory. (think of it like the ZK system of "flat production, except for...")
C) Adding deliberate lag time after a unit is built, such that faster production produces more wasted time for the assisting bots. Diminishing returns.

I've never really liked nano towers. I like repair towers and reclaim towers for base maintenance, but the other lathe abilities encourage too much tower spam. Engis already perform assisting roles, and they can move. More factories already make production better. Towers only worked in Supcom because factories were overpriced and difficult to develop, so spam assisting was most effective. Towers also tried to cheat their way around the lag time of production, so that they didn't suffer diminishing returns. Naughty, naughty.

1) You can't build all your extractors in one place. It is impossible. Extraction points are everywhere and can not be moved.
2) The challenge of moving units to the front still exists. What good is an industrial power house that takes 20 minutes to cross the sector? You need stuff ON SITE, so that the best units can be built when they're needed and not 10 minutes from now.

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There is a problem with players building all their energy in one location and never risking it on the front. That is one possible reason to justify a local resource. But you can still have the "fun" of local resources without having a system that's soul crushingly complex. From the backer's lounge:

That's not the problem. We don't care that extractors are everywhere; we care that factories and engineers are all in the one place.

Playing that reactively happened in Sup1. We all realised it was bad when you could power build a SMD and fuel it in the time that a SML could cross the map.
Guess what happened in FA? I'll remind you; GPG made the sensible decision and nerfed the crap out of build power so you had to plan and preempt your opponent.

There's nothing wrong with being asked to build units ahead of time, especially if you've been scouting.

This idea doesn't fix that however.

If anything it would be made worse by the inability to build anywhere.

Yes, there's nothing wrong with that. However, if you have a monolithic production, you can't react in time, even if you scout everything immiediately. At least if the place where you need the change to arrive is closer to your opponents base than to yours.

If you want to be able to react appropiately to a change in your opponents unit composition, having a base somewhere near the battle is a must, no matter whether the economy is global or localized.

Your example is a simple balance issue, with the time window for reacting being way too big. Quite honestly I don't even know what you wanted to say with that, other than "Scouting should be important even in later stages." which pretty much everyone here should already agree with.

On a small scale RTS this would work perfectly. However there are two main problems.

1.
There are already 2 resources that you cannot replace as they are so well dug in and cannot be changed.
2. One word -bridgeheads. How are you expected to build up a whole new system of factories and mass pumps to just make this 'Nanogel'. It is going to be complex already to launch an assault, much more so now you are suggesting to add an entire new resource.

This system just adds more complication simply to add a more complicated economy, not to mention more needless clicking. Not only that but it won't do many of the things you think it will. Most of your posts now include various gameplay changes that would need to be made to balance out nanogel, or talking about advantages that don't exist!

A strong front line means putting every egg into one basket. So flank him. Or nuke it. Or drop an asteroid. Singular pushes will always be sacrificing land, so take advantage of it.

Local energy does a lot to mitigate this, as extra time and money is needed before an engi swarm can go nuts. It's not much of an obstacle, but it demands a secure foothold and it is a target worth attacking.

Strangely enough, that problem only existed with SMD. It was fixed by limiting the ability to assist SMD (in this case with a huge change in build power). I think nuke assisting also had a similar problem, but that was clearly fixed with the SMD.

Mass building other projects did not become a big problem. Besides, any player can do it, so it's not a unique advantage.

Expanding does, and should, take some attention because where you choose to expand is a very significant decision. Why in one location and not another? The player has to make a choice about where to build another base.

Any system that successfully makes bases significant will create this kind of decision, and the player's choice will obviously need to be communicated to the computer; using the mouse and keyboard.

Needless clicking? I specifically said nanogel will need to be transferred automatically from units with reserves to units that currently have less. And engineers will need to automatically be able to move to a nanogel source to refill, and head back to production. A base can perform your orders without supervision, and once set up, should be able to produce indefinitely without supervision. Decisions like where to build a base, what buildings or weapons you choose to build, etc. etc. will all obviously require input.

Input into the game is the only thing the player actually does. If you seriously think players communicating their decisions to the game is "micro" then go find yourself a game that literally plays itself, or where player input does not matter.

To capture the entire gameplay principle in a nutshell, with a universal economy, your production is a function of resources and time only. By localizing economy and production it creates a spatial dimension as well as a time dimension; projects built in certain places can be finished faster. And, very importantly, there will be areas of the map where you can't build effectively because you lack influence/infrastructure.

If you wanted to build a beachhead, you can send a large group of engineers. However this will be an expensive action with limited utility, and you should probably build depots to allow you to build more. And then factories because they are more efficient military production than engineers. And then a base springs up to create your beachhead.

Frankly this all this system does is add unnecessary changes to the game that do not solve the problems you have outlined.

I am sorry, but this idea is not suitable to this type of game and should not be included.

Then how do you propose you deal with the problem of sending a deathball of engineers to make a factory **** out air or land like its no big deal? How do you propose to avoid the problem of having your mass extractors or our energy farm on a hidden asteroid far away, out of danger?