Planetary Annihilation's Economy System

In my opinion the energy drain from extractors should be substantial or else none at all.
In TA and SupCom the energy drain from basic mexes was 3 and 2 energy respectively. This cost is very small compared to the output of solar generators and T1 power generater that produced 20 energy. 1 solar generator could support more than 6 TA mexes and 1 power generator in SupCom could support 10 mexes.
What effect did this have?
The only effect I can think off is that it punished players for stalling on energy.
If their energy drain was twice the amount of the energy production their mexes production would halve.

Comically when players stalled on energy and forgot to turn off their metal makers(MMs) or mass fabricators(MFs) their metal production would go down the same percentage on both MMs/MFs and mexes when the energy spent on the MMs/MFs could be much better used on the mexes.

Considering how energy efficient mexes are in TA and SupCom you generally never want to turn them off to save energy. You rather pause construction, turn off a radars or shields instead.
If extractors require a considerable amount of energy in PA then you might see players actually switching off extractors because they badly need energy to finish a project, cloaking their commander or firing their heavy weapons.

Sorry if my post came off long and sounding mad. I know nothing is final yet. I just had concerns to share to the discussion.

As for how much automation should be allowed... I like to think the job of a user interface should be to translate the player's intentions as finely as possible(barring conclusionist statements like "win the game"). Also I ninja-edited that paragrath while you were replying to give it a bit more clarity.

Just helping the discussion along.

Yep, I'm being serious. We know nothing about what the scale of the game will be.

The planet we saw in the kickstarter trailer was something equivalent to a 3x3 map in FA. Combined with the even smaller extra maps, it essentially became equivalent a 10x10 island map.

Games with dozens of worlds sounds like a 20x20 island map to me. And unless you're a dev and you know exactly what PA's planning to be at this point, there's no real argument you can make either way. Indeed, my own words are pretty meaningless.

I'm just amused that there was a bunch of discussion that hinged on the fact that PA's scale will be greater than that of past games in the TA mould.

There will be larger planets than what was shown in that video.

viewtopic.php?p=510915#p510915

Oh and for anyone that hasn't seen this helpful list of stuff that's been confirmed, here is a link.

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34022

Yeah, I take that the key points about the system is that it is very clear for the players what things costs and how long it will take. And also that the balancing will be different as metal will be the main build costs. Makes much sense.

Exactly what I was asking for. Please don't forget to call it "Energy Demand"

everything i've read by the devs sounds awesome. nice work guys

There are several factors that are going to allow us to have more units and more territory. The goal is for the scale of the games to be much larger on the high end.

- Client/server vs sync sim. We are now not limited in game size to what a client can do, we can have beefy servers running large games and not be slowed down by a slow client. Sync sim inherently limits the number of peers pretty quickly.
- 64-bit sim support to take advantage of machines with many gigs of RAM
- multithreading of the sim which is very tricky to do in sync sim will allow us to take advantage of these larger machines
- more attention to the per-unit performance per clock cycle (by for instance decoupling complex animation from the sim)

We are also trying to pay more attention to scale which should allow the terrain to feel bigger.

Some other tricks as well. For example we only generate a grid locally when there is something interesting going on instead of always having a grid for the whole world. We have developed better algorithms for some of the things that were slow in the past.

Now give that I've worked on all of these games and was the tech directory on SupCom you can believe me or not

Final conclusion - much larger scale.

Nuetrino, can you please respond to my 2 posts on page 13? Thank you.

I don't know that I have a specific response. It's simply a different way of distributing the power that is going to make the game play differently. You'll need to explain why you think it's superior not just what the idea is.

Aah excellent, that solves it. Thanks.

That's not a bad thing. You are basically paying for the build power up front. A typical economy burns more metal than it makes, because reclaiming metal will make up the difference. So you're paying a bit extra to not worry about reclaiming metal.

In TA and Supcom, reclaiming metal on a huge deficit could lead to severe energy stalls and cause a lot of problems. That won't happen with the current PA system.

Players who use too much build power also have their fabbers wasting energy. It's not a major penalty(energy is cheap), and it provides a nice mechanic for good players to optimize their play.

Reasons why the per-unit split is better:
1. More intuitive: Higher drain devices naturally shut off first under low power conditions.
2. More functional: A slight dip in power doesn't cause everything to have degraded operations simultaneously

Reasons why player designated priorities work:
1. Allows power distribution to follow strategy: If your strategy absolutely needs intel, you can prioritize sensors to ensure they never shut off (except for catastrophic power loss)
2. Allows players to limit the effect of energy-crashing: In a catastrophic power loss scenario, a player could use a group of engineers to rebuild power generators, set them as priority, thereby ensuring everything else receives 0 power until total power production exceeds the priority group's own need for it. (Emergency optimization in a only a few player clicks.)
3. Could potentially be used offensively if, for example, a hacker unit/ability allowed you to designate specific energy structures as priority within their own power grid. Hit half their power, prioritize the enemy's highest-drain devices, and cause everything else to shut off completely.

How can you call it a nice mechanic, bobucles? I don't want to have to have to go back and pause my builders for every fluctuation in my metal income as part of a competitive routine. And doing so for hundreds of builders everywhere is just hell. Stuff like this should manage itself. I want to conduct a war, not the optimal consumption rate of my build power, especially when there's only one optimal strategy, and that's to never use more energy than you should. This is the very definition of metal maker 'micro'.

Also energy was not cheap, in either Zero-K, Balanced Annihilation or Forged Alliance. Power plants were some of the most costly assets. Building more than was necessary could lose you the game because you weren't building units to fight the enemy.

All swapping the player's burdon of energy stalling with energy wastage from build power does is make for even less conspicuous newbie traps. This is why I hate the claim that streaming resources detracts newcomers.
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One more statement on unit priority toggles, as featured in Zero-K. The only reason it would seem necessary to include such function is if a game is already inherently min-maxingy. In which case, hiding the tools that let players manage the game's mechanics won't make the game less so. The whole reason for including them is to alleviate the frustrations that arise from said mechanics.

Guys, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get better feedback in once the Alpha and Beta start

Right you are! Let's close the topic then.

Hmm this is a good point, although...

It ties nicely into arguing that metal makers should NOT be included. With metal makers, wasted energy = wasted mass. Without metal makers, energy becomes much more of an 'build as much as you need to run your base' type resource.

I'd love to see no metal makers at all - it would really make the differentiation between metal and energy complete.

I believe that if it CAN be successfully automated, it SHOULD. The key is successfully though - if it were so easy to replace the player, AI wouldn't be such a difficult proposition and Sorian would be out of a job. There is a distinction between automation that takes decisions away from the player, and automation that reduces the number of repetitive actions required from the player.

In the case of this economy, if it gives you an economic benefit to manually turn on / off fabbers, and you do this repeatedly over the course of a game, it should be automated. The better question to ask is how do you bring prioritization into the game so that it's represented on the map, rather than via a menu.
Or even, SHOULD you be representing this information on the map, or should you perhaps have a strategic overlay / view that gives access to the underlying complexities with icons, charts, and informational diagrams?

With the new economy system, the consumption of metal is 'constant'. If you have a spike in your metal consumption, it's because you've explicitly decided to add a fabber to a construction.
It should be really easier to have an even balance for your metal production and you have no excuse to be stalling more than a few percent of metal. Even more if you play competitively.

I thought energy was the constant?

Metal being spent based on the fabbers and factroy's working on different costing projects.

And energy based on the amount fabbers and factorys actively working.

I'd like to climb on my favourite hobby horse now and ask Neutrino if localised (single planet) resources are being considered?

Obviously I'm in favour of localised resources for reasons of cross space supply lines which require protection from attack, and also the prevention of an uber-build location where all your resources from across the solar system are used to churn out T2 bombers at the rate of 5 every second...

Furthermore, I don't believe that the demonised 'micro' will be too much, nor will it be impossible to attack enemy planets. The arguments for this have been gone over many times in other threads...

I would also argue that a game of the increased scale being touted requires localised resources in order for the scale to not be limited and to be meaningful.

Finally, consider this table:

Economy model. . . . . . Ease of modding the alternative
Localised. . . . . . . . . . Extremely easy
Universal. . . . . . . . . . Extremely hard

So Neutrino, throw me a bone, last I heard (this was 2012) you were going to start with Universal but maybe try some alternatives. Have you had any further thoughts on this contentious issue?