Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

I like your chain of thought, but consider this: the competitiveness of a strategy that focuses on eliminating power producers depends on the lack of power impacting operations. Any reduction of dependency on power reduces the viability of such a strategy.

If a player want to keep full production on his mexes in SupCom or TA he can manually prioritize to avoid stalling by pausing construction and turning off energy draining stuff.
It takes alot of clicks but considering that mexes only drain a small part of the energy consumption it is in many cases vital to keep mexes at full production while you turn off other stuff.

Decoupling mexes from energy would at least make the economy easier to manage even though the players lack a more general prioritization system.

Anyway. Anyone modding an economic priority system yet?

I would, but without even an alpha to work with, it's hard.

Sure, but the debate was around how much it should impact.

I would argue a priority system that eliminates the penalty would be even worse because it would almost eliminate the mechanic completely.

Just don't do anything paradigm-shifting and we'll see how things go in the Alpha. If it works out fine without drastic changes we'll be fine but if you go into it with too many big changes it might be hard to backtrack to a good spot. Sensitive stuff like economy needs incremental changes.

So this is a good point. Luckily I'm inherently conservative on a lot of these issues.

Just to be clear, if we are playing the game and the community really thinks we need a priority system then we'll try it. Everything is subject to alpha/beta feedback from the real world.

Remember, we are here to help you perfect the game, once the Alpha is out, the feedback will be magnificent so get ready :mrgreen:
Most of us are TA and SupCom players who want an epic successor that the games deserve(not the putrid SupCom2 garbage) so you can't have a better audience to help you test the game.

The difficulty, of course, is in figuring out which feedback to actually implement. Sometimes things are obvious and unanimous. Sometimes. Most of the time someone has to make the actual call one way or the other.

I'm sure we will be able to give reasonable feedback that would benefit the game(at least most of us).
Add some bacon in the Alpha and that will be enough.

Your decisions are always been good so far. Take suggestions, but... "Too many cooks spoil the broth." You know? Or...

"Willst du es allen recht machen, so machst du es niemandem recht."

Which means: If you're trying to do everything right for everybody, you're doing it right for no one.

Heh, yup, you're exactly right - I figure that the more you can 'set up' and then run, the easier it will be to manage multiple planetary battlefields.

Which is a big assumption, and I'm perfectly willing to see it get disproven in an alpha build.

But... if we can mod it as a UI mod (toggle things on and off), then to depend on it as a gameplay element...

The basic preset unit reactions (patrol, A-moving, unit stances) do improve the game experience, I don't see why the more advanced ones can't do that too. Zero-K (sorry if you are annoyed by it) has some of them and in this forum the most people who tried that game like them.

As for where to draw the line on automation, I think googlefrog has some pretty good insights:

And in my opinion this feature crosses the line and destroys a major part of the gameplay of the game. I don't want to waste my day arguing about this but apparently I do need to spend time going into more details on my thoughts as to why this would be a terrible design decision.

Let's go through some different situations. Let's assume in these cases that we can set the priority of classes of units with regards to energy usage.

Let us also assume that we want an attack that destroys energy production to actually cause damage that requires the other player to react and/or that makes it worthwhile to spend your time attacking them. There needs to be a real impact to combat operations and we have stunningly few mechanisms in the game that can be exploited.

Case 1: The priorities default to something useful (e.g. mexes get energy first etc)

If we want player distraction level X that means that we now have to basically balance the game so that even with the priority system damaging energy production still has an effect on the player and his production/defense. So in effect we need to either lower the hit points of energy production facilities or up the power requirements. If we do those balance changes we now have a wash, we might as well have not implemented priority because we still want losing power to hurt. In this case a newb player gets the benefit of this without even know about the system because we've defaulted it to something reasonable. Even worse advances players will never even bother with the strategy because they know the priority system will blunt the blow. Unless of course we change the balance to make it matter, which would just make the system pointless. In other words by automating this we seriously blunt the usefulness of attempting this strategy unless we rebalance the game to make it matter again.

Case 2: The priorities default to everything equal.

In this case the first thing a good player is going to do is make sure their priority is setup in a reasonable manner. This is rote work that has to be done every game session, likely in the same way. The newb player is now at a serious disadvantage just because they aren't following "the script" that we've basically forced on them. Advanced players again won't bother trying to hit energy because they know they would have to get a lot of it to make a dent (and they'll assume any other good player has their priority all setup correctly). So we are back to changing the balance of the game to make it hurt even with priority system in place.

Case 3: no priority system manual on/off for units with proportional distribution

Advanced player gets an advantage because they understand and react to the situation when it happens. Smart ones have grouped high power items so they can be quickly toggled. Newb players slowly learn over time how to turn off their stuff manually. They also start to learn and take into account power needs when building stuff and planning builds. When getting hit *you* need to react.

Now all of this assumes that you are ok with damaging energy production as a game mechanic that you think works well. I want people to have to scramble when they get hit, that's part of the point of the game.

Now I'm sure people are going to write pages and pages of analysis. Don't expect me to write pages back I'm trying to get some coding done today.

So tell me, am I just crazy here? Should we *always* err on the side of making the interface more powerful? Should we make the units smarter and the decisions even higher level than I'm comfortable with? Personally I think at some point it changes the nature of the game into something that is so meta that it's no longer fun. Maybe I draw that line sooner than zero-k fans?

I don't think you're crazy, I think you have a better nose than most for good and fun design decisions.

Just write the economy the way you envision it and put it in alpha. If people really want an economy scheduler I'm sure someone can write a mod.

well, will there be a restriction to how many resource towers/extractors, or will it be just limited by how much energy you are making? beacuse if i can easily just expand into 10 asteroids and mine minerals there, then wouldn't this conversation be over? also this would also be nullified depending on how easy it is too destroy eneimes bases on other planets/asteroids, and also locate if a enemy has set base on another planet/asteroid. beacuse why would i set my mineral extractors and power generators so close to my enemy when i just simply can have them on another planet.

Also will there be a way to nullify a cometstrike, beacuse otherwise i would feel that it would just be a race too see who could launch the first asteroid onto the enemies main base

Man what a read, 26 pages

I like the steady mas expenditure in-depended from the cost of a unit/building. I also understand the way power is consumed fully for building. This should help new players intervene before the fiscal cliff.

Concerning the entire discussion on micro of eco I would stand with Neutrino. It is quite simple, if you spend more that you have incoming you get burned. You should always prevent spending more mass than you have coming in (especially if this is costing you more power than you produce) . One thing I am thinking about this, say if you have more engies on stuff than there is mass for and you were to pause 10 of them to free up power. How would you use that power anyway if there is no mass to spend?

What I would do is have power generation match the amount of mass you can spend plus some more for storage. That way when there is a temp mass buildup you can use stored energy to spend that mass.

I do understand that the better players want to strife to optimal mass/energy consumption but I think we are just going to have to accept that having a bit of energy surplus is going to be a requirement in the game to deal with fluctuating mass income.

Another point I would like to make here is on what Uber should do with opinions and comments on threads like these. There has been a every elaborate discussion on this subject here but it has been fueled by no more than around 10 people is my estimation. The emphasis on this subject was put there by a number of people of who have (or make) more time to discuss these issues. That does not mean that these issues are necessarily ones that require more attention or are more important. They have simply been advocated more elaborate.

It is obvious that people that make more time to be involved deserve to be heard more but lets not forget to look at how many people feel a certain way about certain subjects.

Cheers,

Dude

-- Edit some textual stuff

I remember a ZK dev (Licho) having a similar argument when the following very similar situation occurred:

1. Radars in ZK require 0.8 power to run (this is just under half a solar collector)
2. Radars in ZK give critical tactical intelligence that no good player would *ever* do without.
3. Radars in ZK shut down when energy stalls (ie. production takes priority over radar)

What happened was that someone repurposed a different system, the Reserve, meant to play with the build priority system and used it to make their Radars never ever stall even if they were meeting with an energy crisis (ie. radar takes priority over production).

How this worked was that only High priority production would draw from Reserve, the rest of production would never reduce your resources below your set level (set by clicking on your resource bar). The intended purpose was to allow players to reserve some amount of metal for emergency production / unit morphs.
If you have enough energy to run all the non-production drains, only whatever was leftover would go to production and since High priority was used rarely (often only on commander) and that keeping a reserve of metal was usually suboptimal as it meant less actual units, this effectively made Radars never turn off even if E income was less than maximum expenditure.

Licho objected and said he wanted to remove the system, arguing that if you lost a fusion reactor you should be forced to spend a few clicks redoing production in order to not have your radars shut down. Essentially the same argument that Neutrino is making now.
A number of people (including other devs as well as me) disagreed and the Reserve system that keeps your mexes and radar running in a non-critical E stall still exists. The Reserve system has not been removed.

To this day, I begin every ZK game by setting a 20 resource Reserve after the first few frantic base building clicks.


I have tried to keep this tale neutral. Readers should decide for themselves what to support.

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Now for actual arguments.

RE Rebalancing in the face of automation:

I disagree with your claim that after an "automation advance and rebalancing" cycle, the game has gone nowhere. IMO, all that happened was to remove the need to make trivial decisions. Decisions that are not exciting or interesting to make/think about.

Would you like to slow down unit production to keep your radar and mexes running? Why yes I would! (in ~90% of cases)

If a simple rule of thumb can do something satisfactorily, I say it should just happen automatically. Otherwise the game (when you look at the decisions) gets the equivalent of yes/no dialog boxes that you always click yes for (yes please, pause production) and go back to thinking about the hard problems. (where should I build my replacement solars so he can't reach them?)

My view in general is that execution skill should not be a factor in an RTS.

I am more on the side of a manual economy (Turing things off personally), And In the past I have made suggestions of automation that could be done, but shouldn't necessary be done.

That could has gotten me in trouble before when people mistake my could with should, so I will apologize for not making it clearer.

That being said how are we to determine how much of the games different toggles, and on-off states should be manual, automatic or priority based?

We all seem to have different opinions of it here, and we all have different levels of what we think should and should not be done this way.

So in spite of what I have suggested in the past, I feel like any level of control that is between Total Annihilation and the spring game Zero-K Is a system that I am going to like.

why not both, if we could set manually how the system should operate when we run out of energy. so we manually make our own automatic on-off cases. but this option should be optional, ofc.

In practice I do think the game would end up getting balanced so that you still have to pay attention. Why? Because it's an important mechanic.

And in those cases my attack fails because your defenses automatically stay on. Do you not get that you are severely nuking a game mechanic that drives player interaction and fun? Now I can attack your base and you literally don't have to pay attention at all. That's boring.

It's not about execution skill, it's about actually having players interact and make decisions in realtime. Turning off a bunch of stuff is easy, it's the act of paying attention that's important.

Honestly the vibe I'm getting here is that people like to play these games in a very clinical way. Just be clear I'm not a fan of enforcing extra clicks for the sake of it, I'm just against removing opportunities for player interactions and making strategies that are interesting weak and ineffective.