Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

Indeed, it's an interesting use of Ammo, so air units could have a "Burst DPS" that lasts as long as they have ammo, then a "Standard DPS" that is based on how long each ammo unit takes to build.

[Arbitrary Numbers]So a Missile gunship might have 10 Ammo, it has a max fire rate of 1 shot a second, but to 'build' ammo takes 2 seconds so once the ammo is 'depleted' it only fires half as fast.[/Arbitrary Numbers]

Obviously I'm not sure exactly how that would pan out but it's interesting to think about.

Mike

Or it could just use energy every time it fired off a bomb.

But eh only thin that does is makes you scale your energy eco with your army, which you'd already kinda need to do anyways, overall it doesn't change how they function.

Mike

Yeah, it is interesting to ponder. It's hard to understand all of the implications without trying it. My suspicion is that a system like this could really help with air balance issues.

Reminds me of the missile destroyers from Homeworld 1.

that leads into another question, would planes in flight consume energy? on zero they might go into the same slow movement from no fuel in supcom and it could lead to some potential start stop issues, but its a thought.

Probably not because all that does is change the ratio of required power gen to units slightly. The recharge mechanic is more to create that burst DPS and force attacks in waves. Again though it's just an idea, I can think of downsides to it as well.

I'm probably going to come off as the biggest noob ever, but can someone please explain to me how this is different to the TA economy?

I haven't played TA long enough to see what is the difference here.

TA and Sup com both use a system where units and structures have a construction time, mass cost and energy cost. engineers and factories have a build rate which they contribute to the construction. that sounds complicated but i'll say this

a structure that had 10 mass cost, 100 energy cost and a build time of 50.
an engineer has a build rate of 5 starts working on it, so each second he contributes that 5 build rate (10%) in the form of 1 mass (10%) 10 energy (10%).

Now factories will contribute their mass output towards the cost of the unit.

a structure costs 10 mass
an engineer can output 1 mass and requires 10 energy to run. each second it outputs that 1 mass (if available) to the structure and consumes 10 energy to run its fabricator.

The only difference in this scenario is that if you run out of mass the engineer in the second one will still cost energy.

if you wanted things to have disproportional costs like the air being more energy heavy in the old games, you increase their energy cost. in PA these will be handled by the efficiency of the builder.

Ah, I see.

Thanks.

I think the most important difference between this and TA is in the clarity (which was the goal). In TA, if you powered up a factory, for one unit it could drain 10 metal, while for another it would drain 30. This was hard to predict. Likewise, if your engineer assisted a tank it could drain 5 metal and 10 energy, while in assisting a plane it could drain 1 metal and 30 energy. Again, hard to predict.

In this system, it's easy. If you build this engineer, it will add 5 energy drain to your economy, always. That means that unless you have +5 energy, you will stall, always. And you'll know this as soon as you click it.
Likewise metal, you know that if you put this factory to work, your metal drain will go up by 5. No matter what it builds. And putting that engineer on assist, no matter what factory or what it's building, will make your metal drain go up by 3.

It should be really easy to keep an eye on your economy this way. I really love the idea.

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Regarding priority, I can see advantages to having it, and while the advantages of pulling engineers off projects are clear in terms of visible/vulnerable, there are situations where you want to prioritize and they are usually when you don't have time to go to projects and pull of units (ie; in the middle of a battle where your opponent is taking out resource infrastructure and you want to keep building the nearby defenses but stall production on another planet)

So why not make a clearly visible and vulnerable priority system? Here's some suggestions:

1) the color of an engineer's lathe is its priority. Green lathes go first, yellow go normal, red go last. Easy to see, and basically the same system as current in all ways. You can toggle lathe color on the unit.
2) a dedicated priority unit. Call it the Overseer, and give it a priority toggle. It locks onto an entire project, casting out a green/yellow/red beam to show priority. Shoot the overseer, lose the priortiy. Would be great for the enemy to slow down critical projects by sniping the overseer during a stall. Added advantage: if you assign it to an engineer, it'll travel with that engineer and extend its priority to all projects that engineer works on. Visible, and vulnerable.
3) the Commander is a walking priority button. Any project it works on has priority. Might even incentivize some players to keep it near the frontline if it's the only unit that can do this.

I suspect that possibly if nothing gets implemented for this feature, players will introduce their own UI elements for them as well. Possibly something along the lines of a toggle button on units that says "if metal stalls, stop building". Whether that would be as effective and interesting as the above I don't know.

I think you came up with a very good system, Scathis!


Can't wait to put it to the test in alpha!

exactly. It will already be easier for new players, but if you make it automatic, where is the challenge of becoming better, to master the economy? If a player is low on ressource, maybe he doesnt want to put everything he has in more eco, but maybe he wants to finish a most important big unit or defence building.

btw, did I understand correctly, that an engineer will always stream the same amount of metal/sec?
e.g. 10metal/sec
=> building a defense tower for 150 metal needs 15 sec for one engineer, 7.5 s for 2 engineers
building a interplanetary cannon for 10000 metal needs 1000 s for one engineer, 500s for 2, and 250s for 4?

And while doing that all engineers will need X energy per second.

this problem again xD its still a big problem on Setons Clutch in FAF and all tries to fix it didnt work so far. even if your factory has 10 times the build power, its still effective to let 100 engineers assist. What is really important is build power/metal cost.

One quick suggestion here...

Rather than making engineers less efficient than the most inefficient production building (which would make the cost of building a base in the first place horrendous)...

Why not just make it so that an engineer cannot assist a factory if the factory is paused? ie the factory has the blueprints for the unit it's building and the design plans etc, and adding engineers simply allows them to follow instructions from the factory - they can't autonomously "download" the unit schematics and continue unsupervised?

That'd get around the whole "pause your factory and let your engineers do the work for less cost" problem that could arise, but without making it awfully painful to build your initial base...

Hmm, im optimistic.

Cant wait to try it out in the alpha/beta/gold game.

Unless I've misunderstood then assisting a factory past the point of 0 total metal in/out will result in everything building more slowly. This will discourage engineer spam in itself.

As for the idea about planes needing to generate their ammo over time, I like it a lot. My own explanation (or 'fanon' as I've heard it rather embarrassingly described) has always been that all units have built in mini-engineering rigs that generate their ammo. It's entirely plausible to my own invented explanation that planes are more limited in the amount of ammo they can carry (due to weight), and also that they would need to use external energy to make more ammo due to the extra strain caused by overcoming gravity and travelling so fast (a tank has comparatively less drain on its internal power source so gets effectively free ammo).

Plausibility aside, it would work as an excellent limiting factor for air dominance.

Gentlemen, please proceed!

I cannot see a problem with this system and I am eager to try it out.

to kryovow, because of the difference in efficiency between a factory and engineers assisting, while possible, will make things cost considerably more energy.

if a factory outputs 10 Mass/s and its fabricators cost 30 Energy/s to run, an engineer might output 1 mass/s and cost 8 energy/s to run. So to double a factories build speed with 10 engineers, you're 50 energy per second down.

From what i understand I like the system, it greatly simplifies the streaming economy system without taking away it's appeal. It is certainly a deviation from the TA und SupCom Systems though. It's hard to evaluate the system without actual simulation so i'll be back to comment more once i've tried calculating a few simple setups.

What seems to be apparent though is that you take away two degrees of freedom that the SupCom system had for unit balancing. Instead of modifying Mass, energy and build time you now only have mass as a balancing screw to turn. That is a huge improvement for transparency but might make your job a little harder, but i guess that remains to be seen.

One other thing: About the introduction of priorities.
I think priorities are a great idea. Not a tiered type of priority that someone already suggested but a simple one: Things either have priority or they don't. I envision it something like this: Make a dedicated button in the unit interface. So along attack, move, patrol and more dedicated buttons like autobuild and launch buttons, there also is a button "priority" that every unit that requires energy to function has.
This button might have a preset for certain buildings (e.g. massfabs always off), but in the end it's up to the user if he wants to use it or not. This isn't complicated, so it doesn't put off new users and it also doesn't offer a huge simplification so experienced players can still tweak stuff for minute advantages if they so desire. What it does though, is save you the trouble of having to create a control group for all your MassFabs and possibly your engineers for the sole purpose of pressing pause on them if you stall. Buildings that don't have the priority button enabled will get prorated and switched off before the ones with priority get touched.

So if you for example disable priority on all your massfabs and assisting engineers, if your big t2 pgen gets blown up the system only does what you would do anyway. Namely switch those off...

No energy drain on low level defenses? Aww man. I hated Supcom PD. Energy drain is a very effective mechanic to limit turret rushing, deny insane porcing, and make the early game more exciting. With great power comes great weakness, etc. Smash generators, watch turrets burn the last of the energy and go offline. It's all good.

The current system implies there will be leftover energy after a base gets constructed and metal usage gets maxed. That leftover energy ideally fits into base defense.

Ammo doesn't necessarily have to demand energy, although it might work well for heavy bombers. The big thing is that ammo forces strong ties between aircraft and their support pads. When a unit runs out of ammo, it loses effectiveness and has to return to base to rearm. The attack is over, and air units have to be prepared for the next wave.

I can only see 2 major types of priority:
1) Extractors, which provide your primary source of resources. Prioritizing their function is a good idea to keep money flowing in. They should only stop working in the most dire of emergencies and perhaps when storage is full(which is an emergency all its own!).
2) Metal makers, which mostly burn off excess energy. Putting them at bottom priority is a good idea.

Everything else is fungible. Some players may favor defenses, some may want construction, some may want radar, there's really no telling who wants what. The best bet is to divvy it up evenly.