Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

Metal does not translate into units of energy. Metal translates into energy income, which is something that can last the entire game. Units of energy are not important, because energy waste ultimately boils down to building extra generators, which equates to a fixed amount of metal waste.

A player who wastes energy and needs more reactors is losing out on some number of tanks. Is that bad? Of course it is. Is it terrible? Not really. Missing a few tanks won't necessarily make or break the game. Running dry on energy will.

Yes, I can. A functioning economy is going to have enough energy to spend all its extractor metal. The player who can't spend all his metal is awful and going to die. The generator's price tag is largely irrelevant to the discussion.

The base cost of generators is going to mostly control the pacing of the game. Expensive generators make the early game slower(which can be compensated, but yeah). It makes surges of metal more difficult to spend(slowing down the turnaround with reclaimed metal), and high energy units become more difficult to get. It doesn't really change what a player fundamentally needs to build his base.

I am realy curious how my logistics mod deals with that.

If it ever gets done. Sadly we wont have server access before alpha :-( .

After 55 pages of economy i get the feeling that maybe Chris wasnt so wrong with wildman.

BTW I think your analysis here is pretty good. You are correct in that it's a direct tradeoff to make the economy slightly easier to understand for newbs. This particular point isn't one I'm terribly attached to so it's possible we may change it.

There's a hard choice to make with either system. If energy usage stays consistent, then metal reclaim can not cause a brownout. If energy usage varies with metal, then a sudden metal boost can destroy your game. The former is consistent and easy to manage but will be a constant hassle as players toe the line of maximum efficiency. The latter punishes players for getting the most resources. Pick your poison.

IMO, the fixed energy demand will have less issues in the long term. Energy waste is the least dangerous economic problem to contend with, and will not interfere with a player's success. The maximum damage is a few tanks worth of metal to build extra power, for every degree of failure in managing the economy. Like it or not, it is not a big deal because everyone else has the same fault and the same penalty for waste. Minmaxing construction energy will create a greater issue of destabilizing a player's economy from reclaiming metal. It is bad design to let the player be punished by doing the right thing.

Forgive me if this was already discussed, but this thread is too long and quite unenlightening to read the whole thing.

These above two points work against each other, since you can change the mass/energy cost ratio of a factory by applying a different number of engineers to assist.

In other words: Anything that you can viably assist with engineers will have the exact same mass/power cost ratio, determined by the preset ratio of the engineers.

There are two limiting cases:
A) You can make engineer assisting of factories useless. Is this really the plan?

B)You have effectively removed the difference between build capacity and power resources that exist in Supcom FA. This takes two separate resources and turns them into a single resource, that somehow requires two different units as relics from a previous game. i.e. The PGEN/engineer are built in parallel and serve the same purpose.(except for power necessary for weapons and engineers being necessary to move around the map)

If we forget about factories, this still creates huge problems for engineer assist during ACU upgrades and structure construction. Will the nuke and walls have the same power/mass ratio when they are constructed by engineers?

As by now it is worst mass energy ratio for engies. Problem solved.
Also no acu upgrades planed, afaik.

It sounds to me like defenses are going to cost a not insignificant amount of power like in other games of this ilk. If you want your advanced PD tower to attack at max speed, you need ALOT of power to do so.

So yes, by doing it this way they are 'locking' build power to metal income and pretty much removing energy from the base building equation to a certain degree, but I'm fine with that.

Actually this should work out exceedingly well. In the case above where you save a VERY small amount of energy by not running a metal deficit, that is balanced out with the fact that by spending every single point of mass the instant its procured will get your generators/factorys/tanks done faster. Obviously running a severe metal deficit will be inefficient energy wise, but shouldn't that be inefficient?

Also you sayyou have 6 metal income and 60 energy income and 8 engineers use 8 and 80 energy. Then you say a player in this situation doesn't need any more pgens and building one would be a waste. I think thats the wrong way to look at it. This player either shouldn't have 8 engineers because he doesn't have the metal income for them, or two should be reclaiming, or he should build pgens for the total build power he has built.

So the normal paradigm is unchanged, the absolute best economy management will be to run a very very slightly metal deficit at all times and have a modest energy surplus.

We will have to wait and see just how expensive energy wise weapons are in the actual game. For all we know Uber may decide to make TANKS cost power to fire, they may have artillery with no max fire rate (fires all excess energy), or some other mechanic that will make us all extremely grateful that we can easily predict exactly how much energy we need for our economy.

The inefficiency is already present because the player has invested too many resources in constructors. But this is not quite my point. I don't say whether the inefficiency should or should not exist. Just that it doesn't exist if the player puts enough micro into preventing it. This inefficiency is a mechanic which is only present at "lower levels" of play. At "higher levels" the difference between winning and losing would be small enough that this efficiency is worth paying attention to and using micro to prevent.

There are two main differences between the "normal" resources (metal and energy) and buildpower.

• You cannot save up build power.
• Buildpower is spent locally. It takes time to move your constructors around.

If you are expanding then your constructors will spend some time not building. To counteract this you must make more constructors than can be supported by your income. Additionally factories tend to have rolloff time during which you stockpile metal and energy but you do not stockpile buildpower.

The other changes to the economy system (with respect to FA) will already make the economy much easier to predict. The system described in the OP is the upper bound of energy that can be spent with a system which prorates energy. The difference is that during a metal stall you would drain less energy without the requirement of a lot of micro. More energy is a good thing to have, this is better for most players. (The exceptions are that new players could be a bit more confused by prorating energy (but I think this is a minor problem) and that high level players don't care whether energy prorates because they have the micro skills to prevent waste).

I just had a stupid idea that lets the new players use the less confusing system. Give them an option in the menu called "I want to needlessly waste energy when metal stalling" and set it on by default.

On "wait and see". I think this issue would take a long time to show itself in the metagame. Microing your economy like this is probably low on the list of ways to improve your overall proficiency. But with a large enough community and enough time this tactic would become necessary (initially for the first few minutes, think of worker splitting and micro early in SCII games). I think this type of mindless economy micro (there are no decisions or player interaction here) is boring and shouldn't be a barrier for people who want to become good. So while it is a minor issue which won't come up for a while I think it may as well be dealt with here.

Maybe stockpile a little amount of build power will help?

That would be quite a dramatic change which nobody has experience with. Many constructors which each have a bit of stored buildpower would be able to create things instantly. It adds a lot of unfamiliar things and is more complicated. I don't think anyone would seriously consider this system.

There's at least two approaches. One is to make engis blow through more energy than Factories. This effectively nerfs their assist without hurting their field function too much. Another option is to make engis absurdly expensive when compared to factories. For example:

Code:

Factory:
Costs 100
Build power 10
Energy drain of 500 (100 mass of generators)

Engi:
Costs 250
Build power 5
Energy drain of 0

In this case, the engineer is more convenient to use but will always be more expensive than the factory.

While energy waste will exist, the economy will also become VASTLY easier to predict as well. It's not as bad as you make it out to be. It has a HUGE bonus of making it impossible to run short short on energy unless you really screw up. A little waste is a small price to pay for a more robust economy.

What the hell? Putting a little metal in storage is not that big a deal. If it can't be used it can't be used, but it's not exactly burning a hole in your pocket. Rebuild your energy and everything is solved.

It is, and provably so. Energy waste equates to more generators, which equates to an arbitrary amount of metal. Players have bigger problems to deal with than their ability to min/max a handful of gens, which they're going to need sooner or later anyway.

If you find someone who can get 100% from their gens, give them a gold metal. Hitting 90% on energy is good enough and not a difficult target to hit with the current system. (Oh no, 2 extra generators! I'm gonna looooose.)

Any unit that demands energy will act as a form of soft unit cap. While energy may be effectively infinite, secure land space is not. Bigger bases become bigger targets, and bigger targets are harder to defend.

Energy use is a nice way to put diminishing returns on something you don't want spammed (like say... turrets). More turrets means energy becomes more difficult to manage. There's nothing wrong with using that as a down side.

TA did have tanks with their own energy values, but that amount was largely insignificant. It was never possible for tanks to use more than they provided, nor was it possible to shut them down for any reason. The tanks just worked.

Whoops, that should be "I want to needlessly waste energy when metal stalling" I'll go edit that now...

This bonus exists independently from energy proration. With proration as well as the current system there is a very predictable upper bound on how much energy your construction will drain.

This energy waste is not like normal energy excess when you have too much storage. You could have very little energy in storage and waste still energy to this economy system. This is vital because it could be very important for you to build up your energy buffer.

You don't know how large the impact will be so don't say it is insignificant. I am assuming it will be small until high level play but I don't really know. All I know is that wasting energy like this is always suboptimal play.

The energy inefficiency can actually be arbitrarily bad. You might have the construction capacity to drain twice your metal income (say you used to have reclaim field, or you lost mexes, whatever). If all these constructors are told to build then they will drain much more energy than they really require. It could depower vital systems and would be quite a large trap for new players. This situation goes against our intuition. In previous games once you were using all your metal income no harm could be done by adding more constructors to a project. Here they cost you energy.

Perhaps, but keep in mind that metal income is not stable. It fluctuates with the action of your reclaimers in the field. Your energy demand can either hold steady (wasting energy when reclaim is slow), or it can go berserk(because stalling workers can now go full speed). Neither way is pretty.

Perhaps the UI can help here? While saving every ounce of energy is nice, players also need to know the upper limits of their energy demand. In Supcom, this was not visible. While the excess metal demand might always be there, the accompanying energy demand could not be seen until it was too late.

I think you are overstating the effects of reclaim bobucles. I think the point at which players learned how powerful reclaim was in SupCom came pretty late. I can't even remember being told to reclaim in the campaign.

We also don't know how powerful reclaim will be in PA.

Upper limit during a metal stall? I mean. That is pretty much only important if you are stalling on metal and draining less energy from construction in TA or SupCom because your construction isn't using their full buildpower and their maximum energy drain.

I don't think obscurity is going to justify this one.

Previous games do share some fault in ignoring reclaim, and there's really no excuse for skipping it. Reclaim is a pretty fundamental mechanic that makes or breaks your ability to succeed. Resource-laden wreckage is practically unique to the TA series, so it's up to the game to teach players why it's important and how to use it.

One thing is for certain. If the game does not make reclaim well understood, then nothing about it will be properly tested.

Which is.... most of the time, isn't it? You're going to be hard pressed to find a single match where someone perfectly matches metal demand to their income. The typical play is to over draw on metal, as a deliberate means of using intermittent reclaim income. When metal comes in, energy usage spikes. It happens with EVERY predecessor, for better or worse.

It seems we are all looking at it from different perspectives or different skill levels.

GoogleFrog is saying that this energy rule forces more micro during an energy stall in order to save energy. Personally I think such economic micro is a hassle that I'd rather do without and it is something that the experienced player would have to do to save energy.
But more so I think that this rule is bad because I think a newb that keeps increasing production when he is currently stalling might make powerplants to compensate for energy that his construction is wasting.
I think that at the point at which the player learns to reclaim in large scale he will already be experienced with balancing energy and metal.

I'm well aware of that. The wasted energy is also not THAT big a deal. Energy comes from generators, and generators cost X metal. So even if you're wasting 100 energy/sec the entire match, the real waste comes down to a single payment of X metal. It's noticeable and fixable, but the endless hassle is ultimately not worth it. Pay for the extra gen and move on.

Players should not be afraid of energy waste, especially since it gets even more severe and inevitable as the game goes on.

It's possible, but learning about reclaim so late seems more a fault with the game than a proper player progression. It's something you should be hit with early and often, because it integrates into every aspect of the game as a whole. The extra resources have to fit in the budget and be seized before the enemy can take them for his own. More money increases growth early on, and limited wreckage creates heavy conflict very early in the match.

Hell, a dedicated reclaimer should probably be your first unit off the factory pad! All those trees and rocks and ancient ruins aren't there for looks, ya know.

I dont know you guys, but I like hard games and liked the hard economy system of SupCom FA. SupCom2 was so easy I didnt like it.

And what, may I ask, does that have to do with anything anyone is discussing in this thread?

This just means that quite a few hardcore Supcom FA fans, who are a large fraction of the Supcom FA community, are not likely to appreciate the fact that three completely separate parameters, build time, power, and mass, are not longer available to balance the unit costs against each other.