Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

Note: Everything here is about metal.

No, it doesn't. The current system is built so that the ONLY way to spend more than your income is to DELIBERATELY do so. A hundred consumption is a hundred consumption no matter if it's building turrets, tanks, or gens. It's not easily screwed up. Even if there was an "build time" layer where engis could only assist at half speed (thus having a high and low level of consumption), it would still be difficult to screw up.

Setting a construction priority is as easy as bringing in in lots of workers and building lots of factories. The area with the greater demand automatically gets more. It's that simple. Having a reserve of metal helps the task even more.

Using resources across worlds isn't that big a problem. The greater challenge is moving resources to the front line, where it can fight against the enemy. This is not a problem that can be solved by the economy alone. Some Ctrl-K will be involved.

That's a lie. Misplacing your existing workers is as damaging as they are expensive. It may have been easy to spend 3x your income with 5000M worth of engis in Supcom, but this isn't Supcom. We don't have engineers that are cheaper than peewees, stronger than factories, who spend their entire lives on assist duty. Being weaker than a factory means having an overall higher cost than a factory. Given the extreme utility of any single engi, it's no surprise that they wouldn't come cheap!

Adding extra levels on construction will not solve the problems of a bad player who can't manage his income on a vastly simplified economy. That can only be solved by building healthy bases and a non excessive amount of engineers. Pausing construction can deal with any issues beyond that.

• Select a facrory
• Shift+slelect a builder unit
• Select all
• Unselect builders you want allocated
• Pause

There!... 'requirement' to move builders all gone!

Your stupidly proposed 'requirement' doesn't exist. Anyone who realises this will vastly outperform players who actually try to move builders. This is the very definition of a newbie trap.

We've been through this before, bobucles - there is no way your overall metal income is going to be stable - certainly not stable enough that you are only going to want to accommodate your current input. You will constantly be gaining and losing metal spots in fights, overturning wreckage fields, and taking unexpected losses in builder units from attacks(which necessitates the building of more of them).

It doesn't matter if you are stalling on metal or energy. Your production will be reduced anyway.

Like ayceeem said. Even metal income is unstable not just energy income and expense.

This means that you waste buildpower and if you store metal for such occasions it means that you need even more energy in store or more energy production to keep with the sudden spike in energy demand.
If you move some extra workers to a project in your base everything else will suffer. You can't really keep your workers or factories at the frontline keep running at their maximum buildpower capacity unless you micromanage your economy to not stall.

A priority system makes this much easier. You can turn your frontline workers, projects and factories to high priority so that your frontline production is prorated before other projects that you deem less important.

Pausing is exactly how Zero-K does build priorities. Low priority projects gets paused first when a stall occur, default projects gets paused next and high priority projects never get paused by the priority system. Making it excessive buildpower and wasting it is a punishment in itself.

Why have such a convoluted system when you have to set low-medium-high for every single engineer you build (or a factory you built to build engineers), that's absurdly complicated.

I understand you always want to be running a slight metal deficit, and therefore everything you build will be somewhat pro-rated. We have two different opinions here on how to deal with a modest metal deficit (when at 0 metal)


What I am expecting this game to do;

If you are currently draining at 110% of your metal production, than all of your factories and engineers will apply metal at 90.91% of their normal build rate (and use 100% their energy cost).

So if I have 15 engineers/factories building 15 things, and I want one prorated to go faster just assist with another engineer. So now instead of 15 things being built at 90.91% speed, I have 14 things being built at ~85% speed and one thing being built at 170% speed. I just pro-rated (or prioritized) a certain building/project.

This is a spiritual successor to TA. We have a slight change in the fact that there is no build time or variable cost to building each unit. We also have no reduction in energy usage during metal deficits. These are interesting (and likely positive) adjustments, but theyare merely adjustments to a system we are all familiar with from > a decade of TA awesomeness.

What you are suggesting is adding an entire new system that I have to keep track of in my head (is that engineer over there low priority or high?). If I am constantly running a slight deficit (to eat wreckage salvage) and not currently salvaging wreckage, then I may assign a big group of build orders and nothing happens cause that engineer was low priority. That means every single time I click an inactive builder, I'm going to have to go into its UI and fix its priority setting before assigning it a task.

That is a terrible idea in my opinion. Learning such a system would be agonizing and drastically increase the "APM" issue that has been discussed in the last 10 pages. Lots of us don't want this game to devolve into that.

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Actually now that I think about it, this is 100% already doable through hotkeys. If you want low-medium-high priority engineers, just do it yourself. Put all your 'low' and 'medium' engineers into a numbered group and 'pause' them with three key presses whenever you want to prioritize during extreme deficits.

Why are my views on energy and metal different? Metal is a very STABLE resource, with TA storage lasting on the order of minutes. It is easy to use and easy to predict its use without causing any hazards. Energy is a very UNSTABLE resource, with TA storage lasting seconds or less. It is difficult to manage such a short lived resource that carries dire consequences for any slip up, especially when the enemy wants to destroy it. Players shouldn't be expected to overhaul their entire economy from a disaster that happens in seconds (or less!), so a bit of cushioning will go a long way to reduce rage and keep the game moving.

With Sorian's system (and a few small tweaks) it is very easy for a player to get most of their money's worth by following simple rules and making no major screw ups. The game should get players to that "pretty good" spot as quickly as possible, and with as little interference as possible. Priority metal is a HUGE and COMPLEX system for very little gain beyond what already exists. At the very best, it might work as a way to quickly manage entire planets (as the biggest challenge is juggling resources between worlds). But as an individual unit setting it will not be missed.

It does work to an extent, but only because Supcom builders were pathetically cheap. You wouldn't run an excessive amount of factories just to shut them down, and the same problem applies to engineers. It's simply a waste of resources that would rather be tanks on the field.

Metal income is absolutely more stable, and with Sorian's system it will become more so. Unstable metal was a Supcom hazard because extractors stalled during upgrades, reclaim was insanely fast, construction power was unstable, and energy was brutally unstable. These problems did not apply to TA and there is no reason for it to apply here. A small amount of storage can go a LONG way when the income is easily matched to the demand.

This is not a problem. The metal provides extra generators, solving the crisis. Wasted build power is a minor problem at best, because the metal can still be used afterwards. And PA won't have the same insane power spikes that Supcom had, because worker energy use is ALWAYS consistent. A surge in metal will not cause a surge in energy. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. It simply does not happen, and you need to read the first post again if you don't believe it.

A metal stall is nowhere near as hazardous as an energy stall, because Sorian's system does not allow players to double their metal demand(1/2 production) except through extreme error. Blatant player errors are not something that can be solved by priority, and are not something the game should try to encourage. The player simply needs to manage his units and economy better.

Priority is NOT a better solution than handling the projects yourself. In fact it's a complete downgrade, because now you have to track hundreds of units with multiple layers of priority, instead of just pausing or reclaiming the things you no longer want.

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TLDR: The only priority system that makes sense is to help distribute metal consumption between worlds. It is a stable enough resource that players can go to their solar system map and adjust some sliders or buttons to favor their most important battle fronts.

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This is also one of the reasons I do not like the idea of sector wide energy. Energy is fragile enough and is already a hazard without screwing every world at the same time. Players should not be expected to juggle 5 seconds(or less!) of energy storage between worlds. If players build energy on site, then they will naturally build a stable economy wherever they go. Also if you played TA and remember the bouncing energy bars, any individual world in trouble becomes instantly identifiable as a bouncing energy bar.

You don't have to set priorities for anything. Priorities as seen in Zero-K is just a tool which makes it easy to prioritize projects when your economy is stalling. If you don't touch it, everything will have the same priority.

You can do this fine with a priority system such as the one in Zero-K as well. If you just have the default priority the project will be built at 170% speed. If you enable high priority that project will be built at 200% speed while other projects gets slowed down. Power to the player!

Also if you only have few engineers or factories on the frontline you can't really boost their production by sending an engineer from your base to the front. That would take a while.

Priority is just a state toggle like Movestate(Hold position, Maneuver and Roam in TA) and Firestate(Hold fire, Return Fire, Fire at will in TA). Does this really increase the need of APM? On the contrary. It decreases the need for micromanagement and makes management on a higher level easier.

And this doesn't increase the need of APM?
This is almost exactly what a priority system does except that you only have to set the state toggle once and it is handled automatically after that.
You can make the same argument for metal makers. You don't need them to turn off automatically. You can bind them to hotkeys and turn them off manually. Needless busywork in my opinion.

You shouldn't make excessive buildpower. Check.

I agree. Metal is more stable than energy. Is metal still unstable at times? Yes it is. A priority system helps you manage both metal stalls and energy stalls.

What does wasting buildpower mean? Wasting buildpower is when you don't use the buildpower of the unit to the maximum. At a stall if your workers are only building at 50%, half of that buildpower is wasted because you could as well have less workers producing at 100% if you are not stalling while the other workers go off and reclaim or do whatever. If workers still drain their full energy when they are building at 50% rate you will effectively waste just not buildpower but energy as well.
A surge in metal usage will cause a surge in energy usage if you are using your buildpower correctly. Otherwise you are wasting buildpower by having workers idle next to the factory waiting to be used.
Anyway. How useful a priority system would be for the PA economy I don't know but it will most likely be useful.

Wait... Wut? You mean building extra energy generators just in case? Well that isn't free.

And a priority helps the player manage his economy better. It is a useful tool in my experience.

You can still handle the projects manually. Arguably keeping track of which builders that have high or low priority is about as hard as keeping track of paused construction except it requires much less player input once it is set up.
It is a state toggle. Much like Movestate and Firestate in TA.

I have 5 idle engineers. I don't know if they are set low, medium, or high. I click my 'jump to idle engineer' hot key. I now have to look at what its priority is and change it if desired. A whole new step and mousclick every single time I cycle through an idle engineer. That happens HUNDREDS of times in a game.

If you are able to keep 'priority' states straight in your mind that well I believe you, but use the hotkeys. It'll actually be fewer button presses.

This is my argument for metal makers. Assign all (or half, or thirds, or whatever you want) to hotkeys. Click to select, click to turn off. Move on.

Hotkey's are player input. Player input is a game. Priorities and reactive automation isn't really gaming. People who have epic APM can gain a slight advantage by not using hotkeys to reduce 30 clicks (turning off 10 metal makers) into 3 clicks (turning off a group of 10 metal makers bound to a hotkey). They have the advantage when the better move was to only turn off 4 or 5.

This supports all play styles, while permitting people to make errors and play the game. ALOT of these type of games strategy is fool proofing your base. (Is it better to spend that 250 metal on another tank to keep them from ever getting to my base, or another energy storage so my ten T2 laser towers can fire for 10 seconds longer without drain?)

These are IMPORTANT aspects of the gameplay and strategic depth that you are attempting to script away. Reducing manual dexterity thresholds(APM) is important, attempting to eliminate it entirely is harmful.

How about elimiating mass storage?
Just a question.

Only because energy production/consumption numbers vastly outscaled energy storage numbers.

Regardless, making constant tweaks to match your storage is a royal pain in the ***.

Balanced Annihilation's construction units aren't cheap. The same scenario would apply in that game too. Individual builder and factory cost is a technicality - overspending is a constant. You're not helping your case here.

bobucles and shandlar, I look forward to beating you both in games. You two will waste the effort shifting builders around; bobucles, you will also build excessive power plants so you never have to energy-stall from running an excessive construction fleet, along with radar, defences and other power consumers; meanwhile, I will have the sense to pause my builders when I need to shift build power around or am in a metal deficit, and beat you with the extra fighting units I pumped out from my extra efficiency and energy savings.

You have Fixed Metal and Energy Storage of 1000. Let's see what happens:

Say we're in the extreme early game; you have 5 Mass extractors running and they are supporting one or two factories and your Commander. Income for Metal is at +10 (+2 per Mex) and you are using between -8 and -12 (variance of 20%). Your economy is almost completely stable and you hover at about 75% of total mass, or roughly 750 Metal in the bank at any time.

You lose 25% of your Metal Production (1 Mex) to an early raid. What happens? You're now at +8 Metal per second and spending between -8 and -12 per second. You begin to lose mass.

It takes a whopping 187.5 seconds (just above 3 minutes) to lose all your metal at a maximum production of -12. Though it is possible for you to survive without that single Metal Extractor by toning down your usage to a bare minimum of -8 (for a balance of +0 Metal per second)

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Say we're in the Mid game; you have 50 Mass extractors running across a handful of worlds and they are supporting factories, multiple engineers and your Commander. Income for Metal is at +100 (+2 per Mex) and you are using between -80 and -120 (variance of 20%). Your economy is fairly stable and you hover at about 75% of total mass, or roughly 750 Metal in the bank at any time.

You lose 25% of your Metal Production (25 Mexes) to a rather nasty surprise raid that sees you losing quite a few Metal Extractors. What happens? You're now at +75 Metal per second and spending between -80 and -120 per second. You begin to lose mass.

It takes a rather brief 16.67 seconds to lose all your metal at a maximum production of -120. Even at your bare minimum of -90 you still bottleneck on mass within just shy of one minute (50 seconds)

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Say we're in the extreme late game; you have 150 Mass extractors running and they are supporting scores of factories, dozens and dozens of engineers and your Commander. Income for Metal is at +300 (+2 per Mex) and you are using between -240 and -360 (variance of 20%). Your economy is fluctuating quite a lot... but is stable (sort of) and you hover at about 75% of total mass, or roughly 750 Metal in the bank at any time.

You lose 25% of your Metal Production (38 Mexes) to an Earth-Shattering attack that sees an asteroid take out an entire planet under your command! What happens? You're now at +224 Metal per second and spending between -240 and -360 per second. You begin to lose mass.

It takes just 6.4 seconds to lose all your metal at a maximum production of -360. Just Six and a half seconds for you to be totally dry. At minimum production you are not much better and bottleneck in about 30 seconds.

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187.5 seconds, compared to 6.4 seconds.
The time it takes you to microwave a TV dinner... to the time it takes you to sip your coffee.

That is what happens if you have no metal storage.

No in general I mean. No mass storage need. Global storage at its best. Unlimited.

As soon as I start over producing Metal you can almost never drain me dry?

The Rich get Richer.

The Problem I have with that is that it's too hand-hold-y, it basically can encourage bad gameplay. "It doesn't matter if I don't spend all my metal because I have infinite storage"

Mike

This will be a problem if you:
1. Are currently stalling on resources.
2. Have actually used priority state toggle.
3. This is no different from how state toggles were implemented in SupCom and TA for Movestate, Firestate, Cloak and On/Off for example.
We will have to see if PA will be able to improve the readability for state toggles or are you completely against state toggles in general?

It doesn't just stop there. You have to turn them on again before your energy bar is full. Constantly turning metal makers on and off is in my opinion needless busywork. It doesn't qualify as depth either. It raises the skill ceiling and skill-level-entry-point and mechanical requirements like these should in my opinion be left to Starcraft.

You just said that a priority system would require more clicks. More input = better RTS game?
That is not my opinion. I think strategy games should be about strategy not how fast you can give input to the game.

A priority system as seen in Zero-K doesn't prohibit any playstyle unless it players are actually forced to use it(which they should not be). If you use the priority system will you get an advantage? You seem to say a priority system doesn't give any advantage because it is hard to keep track of so in your opinion a priority system wouldn't be useful at all.
I disagree. A priority system is useful.

Manual dexterity thresholds(APM) should not be that important in PA in my opinion. Leave that to Starcraft.
Manual dexterity thresholds(APM) is definitely not something that defines strategical depth.
I would like to see a deep game where APM is not important.
Having to practice a lot just to get fast at manual dexterity is not depth. It is called execution skill but has nothing to do with depth per say.

Read this if you are interested in the difference between execution skill and depth:http://agoners.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/complexity-depth-and-skill-good-games/

We are now arguing almost entirely the same thing.APM thresh-holds ala Starcraft is horrible and should be avoided at all costs in PA. We are in complete agreement on this point.

I contend your proposed level of automation is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Instead I am proposing a lesser level of reduction in required clicks through an extremely robust, fully customizable hotkey system.

That permits player customization while still insisting on playing input, while drastically reducing manual dexterity requirements.

To be extremely specific.

APM > 300 required to be competitive (ala starcraft) = not what I want in PA
APM < 30 and still be highly competitve (ala your excessive automation) = not what I want in ANY game (cause its no longer a game, its a script writing competition)

Designing game mechanics to fix the problems in TA/SC that were physically incapable of being done manually is perfectly acceptable. The example given earlier was the auto-targetting of all your AA to a single plane in a group making SAMs useless. This should be fixed cause the solution (manual attack with all your SAMs) is impossible to do.

Which probably end in you losing the game. though its more forgiving then with mass storage.

I want both customizable hotkeys and a priority system. One does not exclude the other.

I still haven't seen this on the Spring engine which allows players to include any script they want. When I play Zero-K I have no custom scripts enabled and only my custom keybindings and I manage to be one of the best players. Of course scripts that enhances the control of the player have already been included in Zero-K but Zero-K is still a pretty micro intensive game where the ability of the player to focus their attention on important parts of the battle is very important.

This is a very flexible line. I'd say that you can't keep kiting on several planets at once. So should auto kiting be included in the game? What about dodging projectiles? Should units jinx automatically?
What about metal makers? Should the player be forced to to turn them on and off all the time?

Mm...
So you want the player to turn off Metal Makers manually, kite with units on several different orbital bodies, find production units and manually pause production on several different orbital bodies?

Although if APM heavy mechanics like kiting are rare in the game then PA might not be that heavy on execution even without automation. We will have to see.
We simply have 2 different views of how much execution should matter compared to strategy.

It sort of works itself out in the end. Not spending your metal is just awful, and will lose out to players that do spend their resources. Storage is still a nice system because it reminds players to spend what they have, and can be very punishing if a player's ability to spend or store his resources gets destroyed.

TA's metal storage was fairly generous. It was easy to have enough several minutes worth of metal storage without much investment. It's not very intrusive, and worked very well before.

I do not believe an individual metal storage is needed for each world. A single, fairly large, all encompassing one can work just fine.

FYI an engineer can not work faster than 100%, not even in ZK. You speak of witchcraft. The ZK system merely determines who is the first to get metal in an overdrawn economy. Energy management did not matter because ZK encouraged excess generators and overdrive did not allow any to go to waste.

What's wrong with that? Different resources are different. Metal is more valuable because each point of metal is hard fought and produces things. Energy is less valuable because generators are a one time investment that work indefinitely. It doesn't matter how the scales are represented, because that outcome is always going to be true.

TA introduced a system where metal was very easy to min/max, but energy was not. It created a dynamic where surplus energy was the norm, as a way of making sure no factory, turret, or d-gun was left wanting. Too much or too little is bad no matter what game you play, but an energy surplus is always preferable to the damage from coming up short.

Gigantic energy storage would alter that dynamic and drift away from what made TA energy unique. Hell, not even the TA mods dared to change that! The beefiest energy storage remained a tiny blip next to the voracious appetites of super fusion and mega guns.

Not on the tiny scale, and not for metal. It's too many working parts for a dubious gain that can be better realized by not screwing up your resource management in the first place.

If the best argument for implementing a system is "well you don't have to use it", then it's not a good system. It should help players at all levels, by making things simpler on the low end and easy to manage at the high end. ZK's priority system failed at that, because the low end solution was to simply ignore it and improve your skills.

If you had included the context you might have understood that 200% and 170% are at what rate 2 engineers would contribute to finishing a project where 100% is the buildpower of 1 engineer. Energy management is very easy in Zero-K mostly because of the 1 metal to 1 energy ratio when you build something. Otherwise energy is mostly used for special abilities like cloak, radar and shields.
Context:

Priority definitely helps me manage my economy both on small scale and large scale in Zero-K.
The desired state of a flow economy is that your expenses match your income with nothing stored so that you use don't waste any buildpower and all systems get their desired upkeep cost.
Early game any extra drain can cause my buildrate to go down on all my projects.
Usually I want mexes to be built as fast as possible since that increases my income while most of the builders time is spent going from metal patch to metal patch. By setting high priority on my mex builders they can build at maximum rate so my expansion isn't slowed down.
If the enemy is raiding me I can easily set the turret under construction to high priority and it will be built at maximum rate.
If I plan to build a wind generator power farm to overdrive my mexes and can set the builder to low priority so that nothing else is slowed down because of it.

I really can't determine how easy or hard it is for a new player to use such a system because I am so used to it and the flow economy but I think that a priority system is fairly easy to use and learn.

T_T
=S

Disagree. Completely. Skill at controlling the game is worth very little to me for an RTS.

Why should we not have a game that <30 APM is still highly competitive? (note: rhetorical, does not require a reply, I know you consider it important)

I've heard Skasi claim the better ZK players can completely destroy the less skilled even if restricted to a 60 APM cap.

Actually, the actual low end solution is to use the priority system.

Commander out front and enemy about to attack? Drop a basic laser tower and set the *tower* to high priority. It's done quickly from the commander's full build speed, and after it's done, you can forget about it since the commander's priority hasn't been touched (target project priority overrides constructor priority unless it's "normal").

I played with the ZK priority system and then never bothered to learn to hotkey builders and spam wait commands (like you are supposed to do in BA).

"one of"? You're number 1 in ZK ranking and 200 elo above the next guy! You ARE the best player.

We have a thread about "Godde-mode" for those who didn't know. No, it's not serious. =P