Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

In some ways they are led. units now have a metal cost which is effectivly build time as well.

That all sounds great, but I have a question. Are resources shared between planets? By that I mean, if you want to start a base on a new planet, can you just use the resources from your original planet, or will you have to start over? Or, would you be able to use resources from the original planet, but have to wait for them to be packed into a rocket and sent to the new planet?

They are currently working with a global system, whether that will change via testing we don't know yet.

As per: viewtopic.php?p=695117#p695117

Mike

Global might not be the best word. While we mean global to the simulation, the simulation also contains worlds. Universal maybe?

System would be the most correct (on a technical point of view). But that word is going to be confusing as hell!

Universal has implications of working across more than one solar system (which we've believe won't happen, even in GW).

Gah! Damned if we do, damned if we don't.

Ok I’ve read about half the thread as its big.

Firstly I love the system, and whilst some concerns have been raised these can neither be said to be unfounded or very serious without testing on larger scales, so lets worry about that later.

My thoughts are that manually optimising the exact number of metal makers etc which are switched on to avoid crashes and still be as efficient as possible is all well and good as its a skill. BUT on a Large scale Both the complexity of this increases (more units to run through and more time consuming) and the benefit will also increase, This can make it very hard for new players or those who don’t enjoy micro managing. The best solution therefore is to have a degree of control available at a single click which the player can then tweak to near perfection if they so wish. So I'd like to +1 for a simple prioritisation system (which as mentioned above can be tweaked on a unit by unit basis if desired) obviously I agree with Neutrino that this would have to be visibly in EVERY case (like seeing metal makers turn off).
I'd recommend a simple selection of 4 or 5 types of unit/building with slide bars to determine the proportions of energy/metal to be sent to each in times of a shortage (similar to that in The Settlers). The best way to make this analogue control visible to the opponent is a colour spectrum affecting maybe things like Lights or Nano-Beam particles etc that reflects how close to optimal rates of construction they are. Obviously for those who choose to leave the priorities evenly balanced any shortage would be visibly universal across all the players’ units/buildings (like the interrupted beams in TA) and would reflect an even portion of income going to each. Or conversely It would also allow for knowledge that a player is utilising prioritisation adjustments as well as provide info as to what it is that they’re focusing on.

I feel such a tool would maintain game flow (not result in large scale 'maps' requiring the game to consist of hours of micro), leave attainable rewards for competitive tweaking (at a level more detailed than the 4 or 5 'Sectors' provided for), and ensure that The scale of the game doesn’t result in ability to micromanage resource consumption becoming an all-powerful victory determinate.

Stephen

The whole reason I didn't bother to buy Supreme Commander 2 is that it was announced to have a normal RTS gathering system, which is such a fundamental part of this series' identity. I am soo happy that you're going back to an economy system. At the same time, it was hard to grasp the math as much as I loved not ever hearing "you must mine more minerals." So, if you're going to take the glory of economy-style resources AND make it easier to deal with, I am most pleased.

P.S. the Scathis was the coolest thing in SC.

Supcom 2 has almost the same system as all the other games. The implementation is just a little different.

It really is very similar in practice as far as strategy and gameplay goes, even though it works completely differently.

What most people don't realize is that SupCom2 got an update several months after release which allows you to queue buildings and units that you can't afford yet, and if, when the queue gets to that point and you still can't afford it, the queue will stall. It's really the best of both worlds - like a standard RTS, it's easy to understand (if you can't afford it, it won't get built), and like SupCom, it's light on micromanagement.

I'm still excited to see how PA handles a flow economy; it looks like they have a simplified implementation that will be a lot easier to grok than SupCom's. As long as they display overflows as bad in the UI (i.e. not a happy green "+10" when you're wasting resources), it should be a good system.

I like how they are already considering how to present the game to first time players of it.

They learned from the MNC series.

MNC taught us all that huge skill level games played by those who elite at the game tends to kill the game's popularity and playability and playerbase size. We need volume of players more than elite MLG kidz.

Tutorial. Please for the love of your God tell me you are going to have a tutorial. None of this again.

If they make a tutorial explaining how to build the structures to start the economy, and then produce constantly at the income's speed to make that steady cruise-control of war-production flourish... then everyone who played Red Alert 2 or Starcraft would stay, instead of playing 2 games and never running PA again because they aren't familiar with how to play a game with a non-collection economy.

I honestly have no idea how this works.

Lol

I think:

Creating a player-adjustable priority system is a bit too much.
Creating a fixed priority system is not too much at all.

Energy priorities should be like target priorities- create some reasonable defaults and then only change them if necessary. This should also be true for metal.

Particularly, the priorities should be something like

If metal is going down, then divert as much as necessary to mexes (prorate if it's still not enough, obvs). Else, prorate them down until mass is stable.
Radar and similar units that the player already has the ability to manually turn off. If the player chooses to turn them on in an energy crisis, then that really implies that he wants them to be functional to the detriment of other things that need energy.
Everything else.
Mass fabricators if they even exist.

Hell, should consider not having fabs turn on in the first place unless the player is wasting.

I dislike the idea of a self-managing economy.

Obvs a player adjustable prioritisation system adds a degree of complexity to the game, but given that many buildings/structures can be manually turned on/off on an individual basis anyway, much as in TA (i believe this has been confirmed), the question is not whether we should have player adjustable prioritisation but rather if structuring it, to mean that the larger scale doesn’t result in unit-by-unit tweaking taking hours and being the only viable route, is a good idea. Otherwise ultra-micromanaging becoming an all powerful force.
I still believe adding a simple form of interface-based structure to it will add to player enjoyment, and make it possible for a newer/non-micro-loving player to win on the larger scale, without removing all incentives to try your hand at tweaking your economy.

Stephen

Honestly it's too little, too late. Stuff like that should be resolved in the beta, not after release.

No, it's not. The first item that CAN be built gets the resources. Big ticket items can be trapped in the queue all game long as the game will not let construction start without the money. It pretended to be the TA system, but it wasn't, which is what happens when you don't use the same system.

Eh. There is some personal preference involved, but often times what you want to do with limited resources is just pure cold robotic logic. You want X to work, Y to shut down, Z to share the rest, and many times these decisions end up exactly the same.

Besides, if it doesn't go in the base game then a UI mod will take it over, and you don't want UI players lording over vanilla. As long as the really important points are nailed down there won't be a problem.

I really don't understand some of these 'players' here voicing their opinions on automation.

The skill of this game comes with being able to react effectively, efficiently and reliably to situations.
Yes you may always have a plan for when your power goes down, its up to your skill to bring the situation back under control. Having an AI do it for you is just a plain stupid idea.
These 'players' seem to want to remove any possibility of their error from the equation.
If Uber cave and include some silly priority system, then ill be disappointed.

Another point i was reading about this priority rubbish, was that these 'players' want all of their important systems to run at full capacity during a power shortage... WHAT!?!?
You mean you want all of your important systems running fine during a power shortage WITHOUT your intervention? PLEASE! Why even bother playing the game? If you aren't going to disable less important systems yourself to maintain production/ heavy weapons, etc. then you shouldn't have access to these systems at 100% capacity at all. Having an AI do this for you is ridiculous.
I don't care if this is a 'tedious task' that "will be done anyway" when being attacked. Doing it anyway, reliably and effectively separates the good players from the average players etc.
I actually cant believe that some want to remove human intervention from such an important aspect of the game; POWER MANAGEMENT. If you want to pre-program your game so that you don't have to do anything, then go play Zero-K, or program your own AI like Sorian. This is planetary Annihilation and i really hope Uber ensures that it is a worthy successor to TA and SupCom, NOT Zero-K.

Moving on from this ludicrous priority power distribution mess.

I think it would be interesting if planets had their own economy, requiring interplanetary supply lines to be established (before forward bases became self sufficient) via orbital elevators to supply depots in orbit. Im not sure exactly how it could be a streamlined experience, perhaps delivering 'battery bots' which could deploy on a planet (similar to that of the Rising Sun from RA3) and then produce a certain amount of energy per second until they're drained and then can be reclaimed. Same goes for 'mass bots'.

Meh, just an idea. Would be quite a drastic feature to add if Uber haven't included something similar already, so i don't expect it to be in the game. Maybe that's something that should remain in Industry/City Management games such as Anno as opposed to War Games. We'll see ^.^

As long as PA isn't dumbed down for players who cant play it properly (like alot of games today are) I will be totally happy

I quite agree with comments above.
There is just one thing that I think is really boring, it's to reactivate all the building you've deactivated once everything is back to normal. You could have deactivated buildings spread everywhere.
So I think it's important to give a way to the player to easily reactivate these buildings.

Perhaps select-all units then followed by activate->'on' would work. But it should be clear that it will set every units 'on' and not put by mistake units 'off'.
Another way would be to add a state to the on/off button 'off until full power' so you don't have to do the boring cleaning task after the intense battle.

Or as StarCraftII has a button for idle workers, have a button (icon) that shows your deactivated structures and lets you activate them again.

Speaking of idle worker button... I want one for idle constructors. :mrgreen:


But other then that, I'm too against automation if the automation means it automatically reacts to changes in the games situation, ie. a power shortage is a serious situation that needs the commanders attention and its decision how to solve it. And failing to solve it should be punished.

I would like it as a turn-off-able option. Like, can be turned on and off in single player, and can be allowed or disallowed in multiplayer.

This would simplify the game even more. I mean, look at all the people who are terrible at racing games playing forza because it has a drive-path and auto-braking to make them do nothing more than steer and accelerate.

That being said, there is also gray area here. Like setting buildings to repower after more energy production is achieved. Is technically the game managing the building's use. Yet, it is only doing so selectively of the player intentionally knowing it needs done. Options like this are even okay.

I think I would feel pros and cons of having mexes consume a variable amount of energy for production, in order to keep a player from achieving too much power or too much metal.

Maybe you like turning off factories/MMs when your front line energy defenses spool up, but for me, doing that over 7 different planets and going back and reversing it afterwards whenever say a small enemy patrol tests my defenses is not my cup of tea.

Try playing TA and running energy defenses + MM economy and you'll see what I mean. You're mostly fine for a while and suddenly you E crash.

The way I think is that the skill in an RTS should not be in your execution of your orders, but in the execution of your strategy. Anything that can be automated, should be. You'll find that very few things qualify to be automated.