Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

Agree to disagree until we get our hands on alpha then? I may end up pounding salt, but I read the OP description of the changes to energy use and it seems to me econ management will already be improved markedly from TA.

'Load' energy consumption will be directly proportional to your build power, which is fairly easily controlled.

'Peak' energy consumption will be directly proportional to your energy consuming armaments. We don't know yet if our units will require energy to fire as well as fixed defenses, so I can't be sure of the specifics, however it seems we should be able to find a great balance between oversupply and storage to deal with this peak consumption.

There wont be any engineer induced energy free-falls due to this non-variable usage, so why mess with them at all? Simplicity is its own complexity. Strategic control of your energy production and storage is quite important, as is leaving it somewhat vulnerable to offensive action (with real consequences for misteps)

I risk rehashing arguments we clearly dont see eye to eye on however, so I'll quit there.

Livestream this week(hopefully), here's hoping for a glimpse at first playable!

Don't worry, Shandlar, you've allready won this argument before you even started this discussion. :mrgreen:

To quote:

(emphasis mine)

And since he's making this game...

(Also this was on page 23, so 30 pages about stuff that won't happen anyway. :mrgreen: )

Such trivial facts would never get in the way of an argument on the internet. Who does this... "Neutrino" fella', think he is? The Lead Game Designer? Pah! What does he know?! Surely some random guy on the internets opinion matters infinitely more than his!

:lol:

I came back to this thread because people were starting to claim that a priority system would not be useful. I'm pretty sure that a priority system will be useful in PA after that I have used one in Zero-K.

Ultimately I'd say it comes down to execution skill versus strategic/tactical skill. Economic management could require high execution skills but I say this in the same vein as ayceem; I'd rather fight my opponent than the economy.
In my opinion the economy should be as simple as possible to manage while still providing strategic targets and meaningful choices that you can make pro-actively and reactively in real time.

++

Completely disagree. The economy / military balance is and always has been a crucial feature of RTS gameplay.

If the economy were easy, surely each side would simply get factories online and pump out endless lines of units? How would one overcome them and eventually win?

Define 'easy'. I think there are two confused definitions.

Definition 1: An easy economy is one which the player has control over. As in the interface allows them to implement their simple intentions.

Definition 2: Easy as in trivial. There is a simple path to maximise your economy which can be followed with no thought.

These are not equivalent definitions. For example you could have a trivial economy which is hard to implement in which case the skill is in execution. You could also have an economy with easy implementation but with deep mechanics.

I'd say consider Dawn of War 1 or possibly Command & Conquer (though I'm more familiar with DoW 1). The economy was very simple with a clear cut path to create the strongest and most viable units. Management of the economy was more something that you had to keep in your head but only as a baseline. Instead of both sides just pumping out the same high powered units though the game was much more complicated by the way those units would interact with each other on the field. If you chose to make deep striking assault terminators you didn't need a delivery system but you DID need enough fast and light units to be able to teleport them to a useful location. If you chose to make tanks and transports you could afford to make less heavily-armored ground troops but if you lost any of your tanks it was a major blow. Both (and these are just two strategies of the myriad volume of them) were perfectly viable and it was up to the player to figure out which was most effective against the chosen opponents taking into account terrain, upgrades, depth of the player's research tree (and how far along he or she was on it), and more. This isn't even getting into the nitty-gritty details during combat like switching a unit's stance from ranged to melee or vice versa which in certain situations would be game-altering.

I'm not going to argue for an economic type since the folks at Uber have more than likely already made up their minds about how they want it to work. I'm just saying that a simple economy doesn't mean an RTS can't be extremely complicated, it just means that the game has to make up for it in other realms (such as tactics and overall strategy).

Skipping the different engineer/factory efficiencies.
Do you find the Forged Alliance economy to be overly difficult?
Build mex, upgrade, storage to increase your buffer.

I like that there is a risk/reward of upgrade now, while perhaps giving up more map control and putting yourself in a army disadvantage to gain advantage later.
The exponential system works brilliantly.
That is, up until you Support Commander Resource generators I think? So we skip that?


I don't see why it's a bad thing?

We build games using play testing and iteration. We have to start somewhere but that doesn't mean we'll end up in the same place.

As far as I can recall nobody has focused on this particular rule of the economy. I did read the whole thread as it was generated and up to this point is was "Ohh this is better than Supcom" then "I don't want my Mexes to prorate" followed by 30 pages of arguing about priority. Correct me if I am wrong, this may have been discussed.

Also this post has nothing to do with priority. Priority is only a system for choosing where to spend resources. This post is about much more dire consequences of the economy as laid out in the OP.


In short I think this economy rule is bad, it harms the player or forces them to a lot of micromanagement. There is good reasoning behind this rule, it makes the economy more predictable. Each working constructor always drain the same amount of energy. If a player has X power income they can run Y constructors. It is simple. Unfortunately it punishes such players.

With this economy you will waste energy for no gain unless you micro your workers. This is added micro which no TA style economy game has had before. So while overall the economy is much easier than Supcomm this rule has added different types of micro.


Here is an example:

A player has 8 constructors (and nothing else) which each drain 1 metal and 10 energy. They are split evenly between two projects. They have 6 Metal income and no metal in storage as well as 60 energy income and some energy in storage. Each constructor will drain 0.75 metal (because prorated) and 10 energy adding up to a total of -6/-80. The effect on your storage is that they lose 20 energy per second.

At this point the player can do one of three things:

• Ignore the problem - This will result in them losing all their energy although when it hits 0 nothing bad happens.
• Build power plants - Noticing that they are losing energy the player makes some power generators. At this point in the game they are not needed so creating them just wastes time and resources.
• Micro workers - Manually stop one of the workers working on each project. This changes the economy drain to -6/-60 with no loss in productivity.

Note: There are 8 workers instead of 6 because workers do not spend all their time building. Factories have rolloff time, workers have to move between tasks.


Here is a situation with even more micro:

A player has 2 constructors which each drain 1 metal and 10 energy working on a single project. They have 1.5 metal and 20 energy income and nothing in storage. This exactly counterbalances their drain. But the player can gain 5 energy per second on average with some simple yet tedious micro. If they make sure one of their constructors is paused half the time they can gain energy. I'll demonstrate with a pause time of 1 second.

• Constructor paused: -1/-10 drained. Storage gains 0.5/10
• Constructor unpaused: -2/-20 drained. Metal is not prorated because there is 0.5 metal in storage in addition to 1.5 metal income. Energy storage does not change

Anyone who has played any type of 'common' RTS competitively should know the importance of small resource gains are at the start of a game. In this example every two seconds you spend microing your workers gains you an extra second of "not needing another power plant" after you gain more metal income and build your third worker. This could be very important for your build. Maybe you just don't have anything else to manage early on so you may as well toggle pause on your workers. People will call such the gains from such economic micro tricks far too small to be worth considering. But I think pro players would do a lot more to for such a boost to their economy.

This is basically a way to turn micro into energy with no other cost. It flies in the face of the "deincentivising micro" philosophy.


The proration system of the flow economy from previous games fixes this issue completely. Builders which were draining less metal due to a metal stall would also drain proportionally less energy. This is still an easy system for players to manage. If a player has X power income they can run Y constructors - this is still true. A more advanced player knows that they can get away with less power plants in many situations. But this is the case whether or not energy usage is proportionally decreased. The only difference is that applying that knowledge either takes a lot of micromanagement or very little.

Love that thought.
Not the micro itself but the thought of converting micro to energy.
The thinking you have here.

It was brought up by bobucles in this backer forum thread:http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=682443#p682443

• If metal production is prorated because of an energy stall then this will cause the player to lose metal. Because of this very reason it was suggested that mexes should be decoupled from energy production and not drain energy at all.
  Anyway, an energy stall might have bad effects on any other energy drain that will be prorated like radar and weapon systems for example.
  
  I'd say this comes down to how bad an energy stall should be for the player. Simply put: the player shouldn't stall at all because nothing, as far as we have seen in TA or SupCom, runs better when you stall. However, with perfect prioritizing, stalls can pretty much be completely avoided. As to practically avoid a resource stall the player need to plan when and where to devote attention to his economy. You might be able to run your economy near optimally having a very small buffer, very little resources in storage, by micromanaging it constantly. However, once the player needs to divide his/her attention, the player might have to increase the buffer to avoid a stall.
  This "attention management" or multitasking put a huge strain for the player in execution skills and raises the skill level entrypoint. The player is weighing attention versus real in-game resources and that is common in RTSes. However I'd rather see PA strive for strategical management rather than "attention management".
  When players are forced to multitask I'd rather see this caused by their opponents however it is questionable how much this should be inferred by tactics such as kiting and projectile dodging which also raises the requirement of execution skill.
  I, probably like you, want this multitasking to be about what your opponent is doing rather than a constant upkeep of the economy. That's not saying that the economy should run itself but rather saying that any changes you make in the economy should reflect your plans and your reactions to your opponent.

Godde that problem is not related to what I am talking about here or my example. I just picked an example with nice round numbers. I said that the economy only included these 8 constructors and some magical source of income. I say this because you're going into priorities territory again and that has already been discussed.

My post is not about priorities at all. It is about how you can turn micro into energy with no other cost. Priorities is unrelated.

Your situation is only a problem if you stall on resources. You can avoid stalling on resources by prioritizing between different projects so that you shut off resource expenses before either your metal or energy is completely drained. This prioritizing can be manual or automatic.
So the question is how the players should be able to deal with resource stalls and how punishing they should be by design.
Personally I think that a player should be able to prioritize as easily as possible and I agree that construction that drain the full amount of energy even when metal is prorated makes stalling much worse.
Anyway. I think the intention with this rule was to move away from the varied energy and metal drain that differed from unit to unit and make it more uniform so that an engineer or factory would always construct at a constant drain no matter what their current project is. This is most likely a thing that makes the economy easier to manage by design.
I agree that it would probably be better if construction units would drain less energy when metal is prorated like in TA and SupCom.

You have completely missed my point. I probably agree with your other point but that is not what I was trying to discuss.

Well I agree with your first point. It's just that this discussion has been had in the backer section pretty much. I'd just like to frame it as a question about execution skill(micromanagement and multitasking) vs strategic/tactical planning(mostly macromanagement and planning ahead).
We just have to wait and see how important it is to micromanage construction in order to not waste energy and buildpower.

Energy is cheap. Generators are a one time payment and they last a lifetime. Wasting power in either direction won't be a huge deal, because it is resolved by having the correct amount of generators on hand.

It makes sense that any player will run SOME amount of surplus power. The penalty for having too much is nowhere near as bad as not having enough. But the cost of extra power is just metal. You build another generator, and the problem is solved forever. The penalty is not that severe.

You can't just assert this and be done with it. Energy is not cheap, it is not yet anything, it has no balance implemented whatsoever. Don't assume that the economy will have the same balance as whichever game you decided to pick. Anyway, I'm not aware of being able to turn micro directly into energy in any previous game.

The micro cost of running an energy efficient economy is not ridiculous. Constructors will drain energy predictably so it will be easy to calculate how much energy you need. People will micro their economy for free energy if they want to play well. These people will have spent less on energy production so they will have more tanks. Sure, it may only be a few tanks but that will make a difference. Not gaining those extra tanks will be poor play.

I agree with you. Personally I don't want to be forced to juggle my attention between low level tasks that directly increases my economy.
Although those things are present in most RTSes I know. In SupCom manual reclaim on trees and small rocks is about 2-4 times more effective than Patrol or "Attack-move". This is almost a direct conversion of player micromanagement to ingame resources.
Your scenario can be avoided by not stalling which can be avoided by prioritizing with micromanagement or making more powerplants. If you make an additional powerplant when you don't actually need it then you are effectively trading ingame resources for attention. However this is mostly busywork for the experienced player.
I worry more about the newb that have too much construction going on at the same time. Once his metal runs dry his builders will still drain full energy. If the energy is drained his metal production will go down, his radars will shut down and energy weapons will fire at slower rate just because he is wasting buildpower and energy for nothing at his factories.
The newb might even be allured to build more powerplants in order to avoid the energy stall when he could just pause some construction and avoid the energy stall.