No more: 100 engineers around a factory

Fark, I hate coding and browsing. Ctrl-W made my reply go away. Sigh.

Zordon is right, there needs to be a window of response time. My point is that the window gets bigger and bigger as the game continues and you accumulate more and more engineers.

20 minutes into a game the monkeylord might be a tough opponent to defeat and you may need to know of him 10 minutes before he gets to your base. 40 minutes later, you may need only 1 minute to be prepared for him. 60 minutes later you'll feel confident about responding to a monkeylord that surprises you from an unexpected direction.

The only way this makes any sense is that you stop building engineers at some point. It's an exponential economic system, if you kept up with expanding your response-time will continue to shrink. The solution of 'Build the bigger units' stops at a certain point - there just aren't any more powerful units to build, whereas building more engineers never gets old.

Supcom 2 had a terrible and as you noted, arbitrary way of trying to solve the problem. Diminishing returns is a good idea but I would prefer that it be implemented as a 'maximum assists allowed' system - if you want to expand, you need to run more projects, which take up room, which you'll run out of eventually.

True, but compared to the total build time the roll off time is almost insignificant. It's less diminishing returns and More a Hard Limit.

Uhhh, that's kinda what I described to a point, with that I put forth you have 10 'slots' of full power assisting, and everything past that was diminished, but with the right diminishing value the cost needed to push that one Fac to the Hard Roll Off Limit would be much more expensive then building more Facs.

It also has a kind of emergency value too as you can pool all your engines into 1 project, it's not not nearly *** effective as it was in FA.

Mike

I've yet to see a diminishing returns concept that is obvious and intuitive.
You should not have to read a wiki to find out what the assist formula is.

What about mine? It is easy;

First 10 Engineers at full power
All other engineers are X% power.

With proper tutorials it'd be a breeze.

Mike

I dunno, I just hate the idea of 'this engineer is assisting and looks just like the rest, but he's number ELEVEN therefore he's slower'.

I would prefer a clean cutoff point.

You lost me at 'tutorial'...

Oddly enough while stalking Scathis I came across this over in SMNC land:

Yeah, like I said it's rather arbitrary, but at this point we do gotta think of the game first you know?

The problem I have with a hard limit is that it's not flexible, with my system if you have 1 Fac left and 50 engies, you don't have 30-40 being useless.

I can see where he's coming from, but at the same time I have to ask for examples, because Tutorials are hard to do well/right, so it might be possible his experience is tainted from poorly done tutorials.

Mike

To my mind if something is not intuitive enough to be picked up without the aid of a tutorial it better have a damned good reason for inclusion in the game.
If there is a viable alternative that doesn't need a tutorial then take it.

Dare I say that you are creating awesome, not realism. TA did not limit this build speed option therefor it should be as it is in TA. Why limit the choices you have to enhance your production? I still remember to this day playing Gow for a big Bertha race, or Vulcan race, and that was only able to be competitive because of the building speed enhancement.

The way I see it is if you want to dedicate your time to massing out con units for this purpose, and you have the adequate resources to make it work without draining your war-machine. Then by all means let it be.

I would be very disappointed if this limit actually became part of the game the way Dota has diminishing returns. That's silly to limit the capability to create armies or special weapons faster, retrospect to making your one unit stronger. There was a reason they had to have diminishing returns in Dota, and that reason was to prevent one unit from becoming too powerful. In rts you are not Imbalancing the units abilities to do it's job, that's why it is balanced. Please use the TA model. The TA model does so many things right, use that example when in doubt.

TA's /Supcom's model was good until it got too big. It's that simple. Putting mechanisms in place to manage the scale of the game from the beginning is required in order to make the grand scale of PA work.

I don't really disagree, I mean Megaman X's intro Level is an amazing Tutorial(NSFW Swwearing), it teaches you everything you need to know to play the game. But this isn't Megaman X, this is an RTS and there is waaaaaayyyyyyyy more going on.

Something being easy to understand doesn't (always) make it the best option from a gameplay(and in this case balance) perspective.

Mike

Also I'm not going to vote on this because it doesn't give the option of an unrestricted amount of assisting cons. That is how it should be. For further opinion read my previous post as to why. I've never felt so emotionally attached to a game being made than now. I just hope my opinion and those of others that played TA for the years we have, will have a heavy modifying and guiding effect on which path the game takes.

IMO, the only restriction should be assist range. The range could be different for different construction units, or better yet, higher tier construction units would have higher build power, but equally limited range. Construction planes could be unlimited, but since they're so clumped up they would be very vulnerable.
You can only have up to x ground based assisters since if you add too many they wouldn't be able to get close enough to actually do anything. Going above that, you risk losing 30 planes to either friendly fire from your own defenses trying to take down incoming fighers, or the enemy fighters themselves.

Well, pretty much the way TA works I guess.

Dr.

Nope. Because as your exponential economy grows so does your enemies. So you start off raiding with a couple of LABs and a scout. A minute later you might be using 5 HABs an arty and a scout. This continues escalating until you finally launch the first experimental at them. A bit more time passes and now you're using the top of the line experimental bot. Oh no, we're out of bigger units, whatever will we do now? Multiple experimentals. Or nuke saturation. Or experimental artillery. Or one of the real game enders. Build a Yolona Oss and if you can defend it for a fairly short period you have won, there is simply no viable way to endure that level of fire for any length of time. Or build a Paragon and you have the resources to instabuild experimentals (though the horde of engineers required to do that will break the pathfinding and even if they didn't they wouldn't actually be able to get in range to start assisting, still it won't take too long to put together a squad of galactic colossi).

Your thesis is that engineer assist gives you the ability to instantly counter anything the aggressor could do. In reality assistance gives you a a certain amount of economic flexibility which opens a window of opportunity to counter the lesser threats. The other thing to note is that this flexibility helps when you're attacking as well - it lets you shift strategy to take advantage of a newly discovered weakness. Oh look, they've built a mass farm near the cost with no navy, time to rush a cruiser.

Then at the very end of the longest games it makes it possible to build the insanely expensive and utterly unstoppable game enders. In years of play I saw very, very few Yolona Oss or Paragons successfully constructed. I saw very few even attempted. Lesser weapons are almost always enough to break them.

On another note, no to arbitrary restrictions. Assisting should be limited by range, space, and the speed at which units are able to exit their factory.

+1

The "instabuild a response" thing is limited by your resources. Either you're floating metal (which means you're not building stuff fast enough) or you're capped to the production rate of your economy. Even a hundred engineers don't make building instant if it takes you 100 seconds to produce the necessary resources. Without the exponential growth of metal makers there's no way to get enough resource income to supply crazy huge swarms with resources anyway.

This is the easiest way to get reliable, visual feedback about what is happening with regards to construction assisting.

This principle of "clear construction feedback" was present in Supreme Commander, because there were no aircraft engineers and the amount of land engineers that could assist a factory was limited by their range. Total Annihilation violated this principle because an unlimited number of aircraft engineers could fit into one space, so it was hard to see how many were assisting for both the player and his enemy. The diminishing returns of unlimited assisting were still preset due to the time it took for a constructed unit to clear the platform, but it was still hard to understand that effect with it being hard to count the aircraft engineers.

If hovering-type aircraft had collision detection such that they couldn't occupy the same space, then this problem will be solved for Planetary Annihilation because assisting with unlimited aircraft engineers would no longer be possible. Of course, collision between hovering aircraft should be as harmless as bumper cars, and when too many aircraft are told to assist a project some would just automatically refuse and tell you there isn't enough room before even attempting to squeeze in.

Talking about arbitrary: it's totally ridiculous that the equipment of a few toy cars trumps that of a huge building. Like it's totaly ridiculous to have 100 construction aircraft hovering through each other.

This supposed flexibility is, as mentioned before, a mere consequense of the total (arbitrary) disproportionate distribution of construction capabilities and required resources.

Why don't we just drop the notion of factories altogether and then we can have endless engineers swarming like never before?

If factories would have a reasonable output capacity (which is in fact their sole purpose of existence) then you wouldn't need to swap engineers because "omg you saw something important has changed!". You just change the production queue, the factory does the work. I'm not even talking about all the obvious unnessecary commands, clutter, pathfinding issues and delays.

That's a factory. It looks like a war machine, not like a beehive. Let engineers be engineers and do something suitable like repairing and building a base instead of milking one cow by injecting it with 100 needles full of hormones until you need another one.

It's perfectly reasonable to let engis assist a factory as much as you'd like, but only if the factory is a proper factory and not a can of tuna from which you're trying to pull a whale.

It might not look that great, but it does serve a purpose in that it makes for exponentially increasing expansion, while maintaining flexibility. You get to increase your manufactering capacity through engineers (and an increased manufactering capacity = even more engineers), and engineers allow you to rapidly divert that capacity, since they're not limited to any particular variety of units. If you spent a lot of time building naval factories assisted by plenty of engineers, and suddenly find yourself wanting to switch to air (or any sort of high-tech project, such as a superweapon), your already formidable force of engineers can be instantly diverted to that task.

That said, there should be a trade-off for this flexibility: A greater number of factories should be more efficient than a smaller number of factories assisted by a great number of engineers, when both cost the same.

Also, engineers should definitely fly, it just becomes cumbersome and ugly, otherwise.

All of this presupposes that engineers have a way better cost/production ratio than factories.

If you have a factory worthy of being called a factory, then engi production capacity wouldn't bear such weight on your gameplay, hence, wouldn't be worth turning your base in a cluttered processorpower munching beehive for.

If you want to move from mainly air to mainly sea production, and factories are not lame shoe boxes like they were in the past, then it would be better to build additional harbours which produce way faster than rampant engis. Or, since their production capacity is very high in comparison to their cost, you'd probably have some extra capacity in case of emergency, like our power production, and you only have to get it rolling.

All of the assumptions on flexibilty and whatnot presuppose costly factories with very low production output compared to an army of engineers. And that's as ridiculous as arbitrary.