Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

He means luck outside of the game I think. Reaching your audience, convincing them to pick up your game, hoping that somebody else doesn't launch the same type of game a few days earlier, or announce a much bigger title a few days later. A lot of the launch proces is left to chance. Planning and making a great game can only get you that far; in the end you're launching a project into the world and hoping the world likes it.

Only problem I see with this system is that you link build time directly to mass required. This might make balancing more difficult.

Ted Stevens talks about the streaming economy.

Tell me a single situation where the player WANTS to have less metal. Seriously. Something that's not an edge case, something where the player deliberately decides "I don't really need more metal than my opponent". It is counter intuitive for a player's economy to automatically sac metal, in a game where players endlessly struggle to get the most metal possible.

I have seen plenty of situations in other games, where a player might sacrifice his growth or temporarily cease gathering resources. They fall neatly under 3 categories:
1) Oh shi oh fu crap crap dammit defend... defend!
2) Allllll in all day every day. Don't need these guys anymore!
3) Well, I have more money than god. I don't even care anymore.
All 3 are deliberate choices to place resources at the lowest priority towards some greater purpose. If your game is running down to the wire, then turn the extractors off. There could even be a pause-all button next to your metal income, explicitly for these kinds of emergencies. It's that simple.

Also, overflowing on metal is a catastrophe. Don't do it.

What? I'm not denying that the inefficiency is there. It can certainly mean a lot if there's a huge waste of resources, or if the player is depending on having his energy available. The actual physical cost, in terms of metal, is very small. An ongoing cost of energy is a fixed cost of metal. At the worst, you lose a few tanks to build a few extra generators, oh and you spent too much money on fabbers.

While an inefficiency may be representative of a low skill player (who can certainly lose for many reasons irrelevant to this discussion), there's no increasingly dire penalty beyond that.

It is not about having max metal income, it is about being able to build as much as possible. When mass extractors need energy and you run out of energy. You may want to pause some mexes to have enough energy. To build stuff again. Probably energy generators.

You can only market a turd so much. While just designing a tight game/sport and literally doing nothing else doesn't equate a market hit(although, this worked for Notch), a poorly designed game/sport will just fade into obscurity. For examples of enduring games, see Chess, Football, Pool, etc..

And you don't just launch any product into the world, hoping people like it. You do market research; find out which tastes humans most demand; how serviced is it already; and try to reach the biggest demand to produce maximum sales.

You're thinking about this with the wrong head. It's "Do I momentarily need maximum economic growth, or more military focus? Which will benefit me the most right now?".

Togglable priority states let the player do this much more efficiently. And you aren't at risk of forgetting to turn your metal extractors back on after you manualy turn them off.

The combined energy usage off all my factories and engineers ten minutes into the last Forged Alliance match I played which was a 2 v 2 on Theta Passage 5 was 349. That amount of energy output is not cheap to have around.

Regardless. The game can only go either one of two ways:
* The inefficiency loss is so diminished that it's just not worth anyone saving it.
* It isn't. Therefore it becomes compulsory to constantly shut builders on and off to remain competitive. And this sets the bar for all games.

Pick one.

Although, I already know the answer. I've been providing you examples of my real experiences in practical games, rich in context over the course of this thread to back my point. What have you been providing?

Do you have any idea how eratic the Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander economy is? This is just from constantly gaining and losting metal spots and accumulating new wreckage fields, which Uber Entertainment's proposed economy changes show no indication of change to. Do you realise the absurdity of your claim that players should always calculate in their head the precise amount of buildpower they need to build in the unforeseeable future? And doing that fot a metal economy that rolls over to three digits is just a nightmare. I'm already punished for investing in too much build power during a low metal windfall by not having it pay itself back. I don't need it uselessly sucking up my energy because I'm not microing it too!

Why anyone thinks this is compelling gameplay is beyond me.

Yes, and it's irrelevant for PA. If you read the system, you would already know that metal and energy drain is a fixed value per device. It's practically the Zero-K system, where usage is known up front and is easily predictable.

Are you trying to say a Zero-K economy is too difficult to manage? Because that's the only reason the system would screw up.

No. An inefficiency can deal economic damage with a known value. That value can ALSO be absolutely insignificant for most skill levels, as there are countless ways for a player to secure an edge.

You have failed to understand exactly what KIND of damage is being dealt. I've already done my best to explain that lost energy efficiency is paid with extra generators. It is a flat expense only as significant as the player's ability to waste his energy, which is an increasingly big challenge when he knows exactly how much he needs. I won't continue repeating it. Now perhaps PA might be a game decided by the power of a few extra tanks, and if that's true I'll eat my words. It would however be highly contradictory to PA's emphasis on mass robot battles, where the individuals are not terribly important.

I maintain that some amount of energy overhead is a small penalty, when compared to the advantage of safely reclaiming metal with a 0% chance of energy stall. Having your game ruined by a metallic windfall completely contradicts the primary goal of getting more metal.

The economy is streaming, and a properly handled metal storage has ZERO surplus. Tell me when this situation can possibly happen. Because as it stands, income and expenses are VERY stable. A player who wants to spend more money, must first get more money to spend. A player who anticipates free money, will have more generator power to support it. This is true because the alternative scenarios are economic failures that can not viably use their resources.

The numbers are largely irrelevant to the discussion. I've already explained how number shifts will impact priority, reclaim, base defense, and probably some other things as well. There's a bit more stuff in the backer's lounge, to boot.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No matter what system there is, the player ultimately gets the final say on where to spend his energy. The only thing the game can do is recognize what these choices will be, and make the UI access to these choices as straight forward as possible.

The more I think about Uber's proposed econ system, the more I'm liking it.
The more clear, transparent and above-the-table a game is, the more it lends itself to fair competitive play.

It's like chess.
A 10 year-old could tell you how each piece is supposed to move.
But that doesn't make him and instant good player, it just means that it is a game system that is built well.



So when you say "It's practically the Zero-K system", what part hasn't been adopted?

Zero-K uses energy as a build resource in addition to an upkeep one. So a Zero-K builder builds at 5m/s and 5 energy/s and if it isn't fed enough metal, it'll also use less energy. It's also fixed so that every builder uses metal and energy in a 1:1 ratio. And Zero-K doesn't have guns that use energy, instead some defensive systems need to be hooked up to a power station (but you can use transmitters to increase how close the powerstation has to be)


I think those are the primary differences.

Just gonna' leave this here.

So far, it appears to be 1Time : 1Metal : ## Energy Upkeep.

It does not allow for build time to play any independent role. This is a bit sad as some trends are desirable. TotalA bases were faster to build than units, giving an inherent bias for constructors to focus on base construction rather than factory assisting. Supcom missiles were slower to build, making engineer assistance a poor choice over getting more missile facilities.

In PA, a unit's cost will exactly correlate with the time it takes to build. An expensive thing can not build quickly, and a cheap thing can not build slowly. The current system can not make any device less efficient or worse than the base build power of fabricators, without completely removing the ability to assist the structure.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If desired, build power can still be implemented with simple build penalties. For example a constructor may have full construction rate for structures, but only works half as fast when assisting. This has a dual effect:
1) It reduces the fabber's efficiency on factories, such that huge differences in metal/sec. won't needed to establish proper balance.
1a) Base building becomes inherently easier, as fabber efficiency for base building is increased.
2) The energy cost of units can be better separated from the energy cost of structures (and each other), allowing for units that differ more in these areas.

No, it is not different from Total Annihilation, because it took the long way around to accomplish the EXACT SAME THING. Potato, potato.

I'm liking this system a lot.

I have seen endless amounts of SupCom battles where people simply cannot balance their resources properly. It is a very difficult and erratic system that requires planning ahead a billion steps and when you also have enemies, constant waves incoming and 40 buildings that need to be kept updated, its kinda impossible to not mess up.

Zero-K system, that bobucles explained very well, is amazing and I can already see that people will be able to manage their production much better than before. It gives much better control over your buildings and statistics.

I hope I will be able to play it better than SupCom, I sucked at competitive battles cause of the damn resources.

(didn't read all the comments so sorry in advance if I repeat somebody)

I think that global economy is too simple, and there should be resources destitution systems.

For example: two buildings that are near each other will connect automatically,
but building a out-camp solar panels should be connected with wires/lasers/radiowaves to the base if you want to get the energy from them.
If you want to store energy or metal you need to have a place to store them... if you want to transfer the resources you can build transfer vehicles/space elevators/wires/etc.
Or you can just store energy in batteries and pile them on a spaceship and move them to your target.

But think about this: sure, the idea is neat, but does it add anything to the game? Is the price of more micromanagement and having to balance all this out really worth it in the end? Does it make the game more fun to play, or would it just get frustrating?

Way to fail to read.

Nothing has been proposed to suggest such a drastic change to what we already know.

Equalising consumption rates only reduces number crunching players have to do regarding what factories and construction units are building. Overlooking multiple dozens of them to constantly crunch how many you need to shut off would still be a royal pain in the ***.

There really is no threshold that allows the inefficiency to both matter and not. If it matters, players who don't bother with micro to min-max their energy wastage have a definite disadvantage against those who do. There is no way around this.

And I keep telling you that power plants are not cheap, and a typical build power fleet represents a serious energy investment. And I keep using real game examples to show you this. Also, in a typical Balanced Annihilation or Forged Alliance match you can't foretell the exact build power you will need even one minute into the future.

Force multiplication from concentration of force is a staple concept of ever RTS game to have mattered.

If Uber Entertainment doesn't want individual units to matter, we shouldn't be allowed to build and select units individually. The Civilization games play straight to this appeal--an entire army or city(or base in this case) is represented as one unit. Although, you still get the same situation where the power of a few extra 'armies' can determine games.

What is with people thinking because Uber Entertainment have built a really scalable engine that it's going to suddenly change everything we know about playing RTS games?

This is terrible gameplay. It's forcing the player to react to an inadequacy in the user interface. I shouldn't have to fight the user interface; this isn't 1990's computer gaming anymore. I want to fight my opponent.

You really think players will always be permitted to peacefully accommodate their economy in a live match? I guess it's impossible for my opponent to hit my power plants, creating an emergency. Or to forego building extra power plants if I'm trying to expand fast over my opponent.

Already read it. Nothing I haven't heard.

Funny, because your suggestions contradict this.

I have to agree with ayceem on this one bobucles. There is no way that your economy is anywhere NEAR to being stable in a game like PA. There are way too many factors - rolloff time stopping factory production, weapons draining energy, engineers arriving at location and beginning construction, engineers reclaiming wreckage & trees...
While it's somewhat safe to say your extractor and power gen output is stable (sort of), it's most certainly incorrect to state that your income & expenses are stable, and you're certainly not going to want to make build decisions on ONLY your extractor income. Not only that, but any kind of energy shortage is going to make your metal usage fluctuate dramatically.

Fact of the matter is, with the new system, as soon as your energy shortage affects your production to the tune of 1 engineer's worth of production, it's going to be more efficient to stop that one engineer. If that needs to be done manually by the player, it's an extra layer of work for the player. If it can be handled automatically by a priority system, why wouldn't we implement one?

That fluctuation is why I have a lot of metal storage...
I'm not playing competitively, so kind of as an aide to me not being able to perfectly balance my metal econ, I use metal storage to increase my buffer.

Then we'll just have to disagree. You think that energy waste is a crippling mechanic that will turn the tide of games. And I agree that it WILL deal damage to a player.

BUT.

The damage you claim is vastly over rated. The numbers don't show that. The core economy design won't allow it. Players won't be vastly overproducing by mistake, so they won't be wasting huge amounts of energy by mistake. It's just not going to happen. You're going totally bonkers over the concept of ANY wasted resources at all. It must be an OCD thing or something.

HOWEVER.
Under the hood, the idea of workers burning energy for their "construction overwatch" represents the most pitiful waste of resources one could possibly manage. That's exactly why I like it. The player is paying an in game price for an in game convenience. The price is a fixed metal investment. It is easy to calculate. It is IMPOSSIBLE for it to spiral out of control without making tragic, fundamental flaws in one's play(even then, the cost to production output is not that great). On the low end, it protects against a much more lethal noob killing hazard. On the high end, it provides a near unattainable goal of scraping up that last 5-10% efficiency towards perfection. Because honestly, a player's production is going to match his income 90% of the time. It will not happen any other way.

NOW.

The big issue at hand deals with hiccups in metal income. Without overwatch, a surge of income will cause a respective drop in energy. Losing energy, even for a moment, represents such a huge potential cluster of hazards that it could kill the player outright. It is literally death by money. What is your solution to this?

All I can say is while I enjoyed Supcom1/FA the economy kills me everytime, i constantly stall it building.

I hope I don't have these issues in PA!

Why not just make mexes take zero power? Disconnect them and be done with it.

What you are effectively asking for is the ability to program your unit responses before events happen.

Anyway, I've made myself pretty clear on this issue. I think dealing with the economy in real time is an important part of the game, not something to be automated away. We can agree to disagree.