You know what would be cool? If your resources were not Metal and Energy, but Mass and Energy. You can harvest any kind of matter and turn it into robots, even the world itself! As a game progresses, even if you don't blow up a planet, it will slowly be ground into pieces as your war machine disassembles the very ground under its feet to feed itself. To escape such a fate you either have to harvest more slowly or expand to new worlds. It certainly fits with the concept of ruthless swarms of self-replicating machines devouring the universe in their quest to annihilate each other! :lol:
The economic balance would have to only allow for limit growth if something like this were implemented (but it would certainly be cool). What I mean is, in total annihilation and supreme commander, there were maps were you could build extractors anywhere. These maps weren't very well balanced because because they turned into macro-management unit-spam fests. But, they two games were designed based on metal/mass deposits being located strategically around the map, an a basic mass extractor in supcom pays for itself in 18 seconds (36 mass to build, 2 mass per second income). I think to balance something like this out, you'd have to greatly reduce the income/cost ratio of the resource generators. Supcom 2 had mass extractors that cost 200 and provided 1.2/sec income for 167 seconds to pay for itself. This was a decent balance, where you really had to consider whether or not you could defense your investment in resource generation, and on resource-dense maps, it was simply beneficial to build fewer extractors than the map allowed for. A good balance would probably be a mass extractor in planetary annihilation generating 1 mass/second and costing 150 mass to build, and being constructable on any flat surface, not directly-adjacent to any other mass extractors. If mass is finite, then the extractors would, presumably, dig themselves into the ground as they continue to extract mass, but I don't think this would reduce the total mass of the planet (unless you were transporting units away from it, or firing rockets away from it, or etc). Destroyed units and structures would have to create wreckage/rubble where they were destroyed and create sort of a hill.... else the planet would visibly get much smaller but it's weight/mass wouldn't, and that just seems silly.
Dear god NO. I want to be able to spread mex everywhere just like in SupCom. Fighting for mapcontrol is the factor that makes supcom so much fun. metalmaps and such expensive mex would break the game, just as it broke supcom 2.
All good points. I must admit I've only ever played the original TA, but it doesn't seem to me like a resource limit would ruin the game. It would actually fit very well with the theme of machines depleting everything. Of course it would need to be properly balanced. What do you think of limiting resource extraction methods by tech level? Say: T1 - mines: You can extract mass at full efficiency from ore veins and scrap heaps. You can also extract from other materials, but it's extremely slow and inefficient. There is next to no visible effect apart from a few asteroids disappearing. T2 - Boreholes: Average efficiency extraction from any mass. Whole asteroid fields start to disappear and enormous cracks and holes are visible in planets and moons. T3 - nano disassemblers: extract mass at full efficiency from anything, giving huge returns but rapidly grinding down planets to moon-sized and then to asteroids and then nothing. But you need that kind of output to build the biggest T3 units: Unicron and Death Star-sized robots! And how about a giant mass harvester that can swallow moons and planets whole? It all feeds into the concept of a brutal war economy that has to keep ravaging new worlds or collapse. Games that last this long might degenerate into spacebound robots fighting over a void around the nearest sun, cannibalizing each other for sustenance as every last planetary body has been annihilated! From the pitch video PA seems quite a bit more cartoonish than TA/SC. Not that those games ever followed the laws of physics anyway. I mean, you already have robots and factories orders of magnitude bigger than the Himalayas, cartoonish orbital mechanics etc. I think visibly grinding up planets into armies would fit the game's mood very well. Most importantly, it would be awesome, and that's all the reason we need to disregard such trifles as physical laws
I think sticking with Metal is just fine. I also think that metal maps can be a fun break from normal maps, and let you go wild with base building. It leads to some very interesting games, and I missed them in Supreme Commander. Obviously there wouldn't be a ton of them, but some of the Core Prime maps were a lot of fun in TA.
I'd like finite/infinite resources to be a toggle-able option... that said, depending on stretch goals etc.. maybe if you depleted an entire star system you could resort to stored-resources and ultimately solar power as your primary source of energy -> matter conversion. I think mass-fabrication should also require enormous amounts of energy, to the point that they'd basically be impractical short of having clusters of fusion power, or otherwise directly harvesting the star itself. As for mining types, maybe the final tier could be something similar to the "planet cracker" ideas from Dead Space? I also really liked the metal maps of TA.
