Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

Remember this is about the Economy... not mobile units. Stay on target.

But if you're running your script in the background and doing that all automatically, you've robbed the player of the choice to even MAKE a decision mid game.

If a certain strategy beats yours you now have to completely adapt your strategy, which will be harder, since that script is still running in the background... or you've turned on a new script... at which point the basis for your "win" was not Commanding your forces flawlessly, but activating the right background script at the right time.

Not only that but since everyone will have access to these scripts there will reach an optimal point at which everyone is using the same scripts and not willing to deviate from them because the "AI" is able to manage your entire economy across every world simultaneously that no human is able to keep up with.

You've taken one type of busy work; "Managing a strategic economy in-game while also managing your armed forces." ... and turned it into another; "Writing and rewriting your scripts after each battle."

You've stagnated the game because, as you say, there's only so much a script can do and it'll eventually reach an optimised end-point... and everyone will be playing with the same handful of scripts that work.

Where does the emergent strategic gameplay innovation come from if players are utterly outmatched when it comes to economy management vs. a script?

The script is not permanently on and hidden in the background. It adds a state toggle to the UI which lets you set the priority for each structure. Just like changing firestates.

Scripts which completely unchanging behaviour would indeed be a bad idea. If such a script is actually optimal in all situations then the situation did not add to gameplay in the first place. If an important gameplay mechanic is to be automated by a script it has to be easy to configure on the fly. Otherwise the script just limits a player's options in a different way and makes them predictable. This predictability can be used against them.

Say for example you made a script for Rock Paper Scissors that always threw Rock. It would be very easy for an opponent to figure out the pattern and beat you. The same applies to inflexible scripts.

So let's say you decide mid-battle that letting the radar turn off before factories was a bad idea. So a good script for energy priority would let you change the order, you check a box/press a button and suddenly radar is prioritized over factories and the factories pro-rate to let your radar turn on.

Like I argued in my previous post, scripts will NOT be advanced enough to have counter-scripts. They will be low-level tactical tools.

If you say, had a script that given a plot of land, would automatically build a wind-gen farm as your metal income increases, and enemy raiders decide to play hide-and-seek in it, that's your fault. Your script didn't get countered, you didn't invest enough in raider-defense or it was just in an indefensible location.

If you had a script that would salvo TMLs in a specific pattern to overload TMDs, and the enemy had an extra TMD site you didn't see before, that's your fault for not scouting. Or a risk you accepted when you ordered the attack.

The actual skill of commanding your forces 'flawlessly' by having millimeter-accuracy clicks and 400 APM is not a skill I feel is necessary to make an RTS a fun game.

A 'handful of scripts found to be most useful' is where the game STARTS. Although this would obviously evolve over time.

Script writing is not busywork most people would do, and those who would do it (eg. like me) don't consider it busywork.

Information, positioning and risk-reward assessments is where the emergent strategic gameplay is. And the scripts, whose execution of strategies and internal logic is expected to be part of player knowledge, add the low-level detail to the overall battle. And unit characteristics add even lower-level detail to the blow-by-blow tactics.

There will be no script that can tell you if your opponent is sneaking round your back. They only see what you can see. And even a mediocre RTS player is better at out-guessing an opponent than the best AI (most of which don't even try).

Sorry jseah, but the game you seem to want isn't the game I want to play ever.

I don't want to fiddle with scripts, I don't even want to have to scour the net for the newest scripts and I don't ever intend to write scripts. I want to play the game.

And honestly I highly doubt that your vision of the game fits with ubers vision of the game (it doesn't fit the vision of TA lovers, that I can say for sure).


Besides that, automating energy consuming buildings doesn't only affect the player using that automation to deal with shortfalls, it also heavily affects the one causing the shortfall, usually the attacker.

Attacking somebodies energy producers to force them into an energy shortfall has various rammification. One is that energy based defenses don't work until the attacked one fixes its problem. This gives me as an attacker an opportunity to, for example, attack elsewhere which was heavily defended until defenses went offline, or exploit all the other problems the attacked one suddenly has. The window of opportunity is naturally limited until the defender fixes its problem.

If you automate this, there's no way to exploit such a victory, you'll only lower the enemies metal production indirectly (over metal makers most likely). You've just removed a valid and effective (but difficult to pull off) strategy to deal with heavy energy based defenses.


That's the issue with automations. Its not the desire to make playing the game hard its because a lot of automation removes strategic elements from the game as collateral damage, because a lot of strategies relies on the fallible elements of the enemy human player.

Kinda offtopic examples:
Ie. multiple drops in various enemy bases. It works often pretty well because the enemy player can't react as good to each one as they could react to a single larger one. Automate defending unit reactions to a drop and boom. No point in dropping anymore.

Or sneak a force around the enemy flanks and because they can't scout all the map all the time they will be suprised by it. Automate scouting behaviours (which is easy to do with scout planes) and you suddenly have a much much better map control which allows you to disable enemy sneaking manouvers.

Etc etc.

I know it doesn't fit Uber's vision since Neutrino said as much.

But some of Uber's statements (sorry, I don't remember which dev) do indicate that UI scripts and some automation, like kiting, would be included.

So... it's a timing game? Press so-and-so button/click sequence as fast as you can to reduce damage?

Um, but that sounds like a really really bad mechanic to me.

An interface is how a user sends commands to a program, regardless. Timing and elaboration have no bearing on what makes a user interface function.

You are wrong.
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Holy sh!t... people seriously play by binding metal makers to hotkeys?

The metal maker manager became one of the most widely adopted widgets of the Spring engine shortly after its creation. Players realised how fu©king pointless and boring it was to manually overlook the on/off state of every metal maker.

Your assertion that those who want powerful interface functions don't want to play the game is a lie. No one expects the game to play itself.

You should read my earlier response to this concern.

And at no point did I ever say that people using scripts don't want to play the game. I never said those words and I dislike you calling me a liar and then trying to put words in my mouth. Thanks for dragging out PMs into general chat though. That's sure to garner good will from those that sent them.

I think I'll be ignoring you now.

And cry me a river.

Context isn't one of your strong points. I can tell.

Yes forcing to enemy human player to divert their attention is a valid tactic. Why thats supposed to be a bad game mechanic is besides me.

Sometimes the window of opportunity is small, but if you put on enough pressure, it can get bigger. Forcing the enemy player to do many things at once which leads to them making mistakes is a valid tactic.

Imo thats why playing against a human instead of the AI is fun, humans make mistakes and aren't easily predictable. Exploiting such a mistake for victory is great fun, at least for me. :mrgreen:

Also, it will always be the case that split reaction actions can reduce the damage done, unless its turn based. (And even then, in the latest chess tourney in London, the eventuall winner had to do 10 turns in 20 seconds (go over time and you automatically lose) which lost him one of his matches since he ended up making mistakes. Guess even international chess tourneys have bad game mechanics. :mrgreen: )

Seeing as how using the interface is how you can play the game at all, how else could that possibly be interpreted?

I question whether such a mechanic is a good idea in the first place. There is no shortage of interesting gameplay mechanics to put in a strategy game to make it deep. Why resort to using the ones that force a clickfest? Surely there are ways to implement the game mechanics such that the same energy stall strategy occurs without the reliance on poor player input. For example in RA2 spies could sneak in and disable your power. Once that happens no script can bring anything back online.

So if your idea is to move as far from a clickfest as possible you should examine all the strategies which can be invalidated by simple scripts. To me the fact that a simple script can manage an action means that there is no decision being made by the player when they execute the action. I'm not going to change any minds here because it hinges on how much you value execution in RTS games. Most people already have a preference.

"That which can be destroyed by automation should be."
(Except for the whole really smart AI issue but we aren't at that point)

Because it is attention spent executing something you already know should be done.
If you distract your opponent by presenting a big threat that keeps him worrying about his flank and a sneak attack on the moon succeeds, sure, that's great. Distracting your opponent by forcing him into a "click 30 times NOW" situation is, IMO, bad. Especially when doing the clicking is a routine thing that high skill players are expected to drill until they can perform it in half a second just so they don't get pushed into having to do that.


People make the wrong decision or value information too lowly/highly and so make bad decisions with erroneous or incomplete information. You have to *guess* and anticipate your opponent. You, sometimes, have to gamble.
You don't need to make executing a decision hard to make people trip up. It is almost guaranteed that in the course of a match, people will have screwed up somewhere.

This automation idea is still floating around >.>

*sigh*
In Skyrim , would a mod that automatically drank a Health/Stamina/Magicka potion when these resources reached 10% enhance the game ? No.
Managing your resources to maintain efficiency and effectiveness is part of the game.

Why do you think its different for PA?

'if it can be automated it should'
yet you draw some imaginary line when the automation stops suiting your ideals. And therefore shouldn't be in the game.
What if i want to program my entire bases function so that all i have to really do is command my army?
The UI Shouldn't limit me, because then it would be BAD! right ?

I dunno where this "click fest" idea is coming from.
If you don't want to have to deal with power shortage, then you defend your power generators.
You don't have some AI do the 'click-fest' for you. Because your opponent , caught you in a position where you have to 'click-fest' in order to remain functional, and that deserves a response from the defender, not an AI.

Jseah has a valid point. It is a good idea to stray away from overly punitive economic design. The goal for an RTS is to have players kill each other, not to have your society implode on itself. That honor belongs to the dwarves.

Streamlining the interface is not necessarily bad, because most of the time there aren't any choices to be made. If a 10 line script and a button can handle the most damaging aspects of an energy stall, then use it. It's effective because the situation has already been analyzed, and the best solution has been found. It's a game about robots. I think they can handle it.

That being said, it is equally important to let players deal good and meaningful damage to each other. A loss of either resource means a loss of ability to fight. Losing metal means losing raw infrastructure and units. Losing energy means losing everything- construction, radar, cloaking, stealth, turrets(if powered), shields(if used), abilities(d-gun), artillery, and even extra resources. That is an obscene amount of damage, FAR more than you could ever possibly need to win! After looking at all the things it can screw up, it's perfectly reasonable to tone it down a bit. A crisis that deals less damage can be justified to happen more often and become a more central point of the game. That is a good thing(tm).

A player having his economy destroyed is absolutely taking damage. Less resources == less options. There is no point in RTS gaming where this isn't true. The only difference is the degree of pain incurred. Anything that eats into core infrastructure like mexes is very bad. Anything that shuts down intel or production is moderately damaging. Anything that shuts down the Comm is a potential game ender. For everything else, it doesn't really matter how good or bad it works, because they're all mooks. There's more where they came from.

The loss of power production is bad and needs human intervention to rectify.
It is not as bad as people, wanting automation, make it out to be.

Losing power is not a click fest.
Restoring power is not a click fest.

If you anticipate power loss, you don't get an AI to manage your bases power distribution. You build power storage.

End.

Hehe, if you think you can do that, go right ahead.

Too much automation without effective tools to control it restricts your options. It is totally possible to build an automation script that restricts your interface. A General Base Manager is going to be one of them.

Besides, if you can't answer the question of "how do I know where to put my stuff and what stuff to build" in such a way that it will cover >80% of the situations, you have no hope of building such a script.

I call it a "click fest" (well you did, but it fits) because it is a set of actions you need to perform. And the faster you perform it, the better your situation. And at no point in the middle of the action are you thinking "do I click off the next MM" when I know I have to take another 4 more offline to balance E.

There are no decisions being made, it is raw execution without thought. Or worse, turning into a "hunt for my stealth tower so I can turn it off".

And by the way, I did play the first mission of TA: Core Contingency on the arm route recently. And it was full of "turn on/off" MM that was clearly unnecessary to making the game work. Especially when I started building seaplanes and suddenly had to power some down due to energy drain.

Actually, no. You build extra generators to avoid a power loss. Energy storage is only meaningful for surviving spike demand. It is not useful if there are no spike demands.

For example, an active defense grid may suddenly increase your energy demand by 100%. Well it's not worth building double generators, because gens are expensive and defenses are rarely active. Most of the energy will go to waste. Instead you build an extra 20% generators, and stuff the excess energy into storage. When you're under attack the energy gets drawn from storage, and it recharges after the battle. You saved money while increasing your damage output at the same time. It's Win/win.

Not only that, but this simple scenario makes SEVERAL valuable targets. The storage is worth attacking, to shut down defenses. The generators are worth attacking, to KEEP them offline. And the player has to decide what he wants to sacrifice in order to stay alive. None of this had ANYTHING to do with the interface. These choices were possible because the game itself had energy as a tightly run resource.

Personally I would be happy with button A shuts off/on all metal makers, and B does radar towers, I was never suggesting a fully automated economy system that corrects all your errors and prevents any kind of crash. I agree not having a decent economy should be punished.
But just because player involvement should be mandatory, doesn’t mean they should have to manually turn on/off each and every unit on all the planets within this resource-group. Having to know to turn off /reduce some areas of your consumption is an essential part of the game, but requiring 1000 clicks to do it is just pointlessly
punitive IMO.
And this is a REAL issue on a larger scale.
That’s why I suggested making it easier via a UI based player-alterable prioritisation system. It requires all the same economic knowledge and skill (maybe even a bit more) but after you’ve reacted to an event/decided on a strategy, it allows you to move on to fighting a war rather than spend 25 mins manually de-powering/re-powering all your units.

I think of it as like pre-set economy sector command groups, that don’t need to be manually extended each time another building is created of that type.

Stephen

I never played any of the Elder Scrolls games before, so I'm going by hypothesis here.

If the optimal play is to always drink health potions when near death, then activating a script that does this would, because it's pointless busywork when the player couldn't do anything else.

The real player decision then came from how many potions to carry before venturing off, along with planning the adventure; not how quickly you activate them.

RPGs don't typically emphasise skill in player dexterity like FPSs do, and from what I can tell, the Elder Scrolls series is true to course.

All this of course depends on how potion abundancy; potion potency; player maximum health; inventory space; enemy damage levels; and powergrowth all scale against each other. And how the internal mechanics impact the game's pace.

Is using a potion as quick as a hotkey press? Or does the character have to drop everything and equip the potion to use it? If so, then relying on a script probably isn't a good idea, because it inadvertently changes your character's pace in combat, leaving it vulnerable.

If potions are rare, and you think you can reach a safe spot before dying, then it's a good time to turn the script off.
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Also, 'bots' are a common phenomenon in MMORPGs. Player characters are programmed to move along the game world; attack enemies; activate spells; navigate shop menus; and sustain themselves all on their own. Frankly, the fact that a bunch of scripts can play the game sufficiently shows that RPGs suck.