Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building types)

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

Why a user friendly economy system? The way I understand it Uber did this through kickstarter so they won't have to compromise and so they can give the backing community (probably mostly TA and SC1 fans) as well as themselves what they want. And because of that it is already desided by Uber that the game will feature streaming economy.[/quote]

Why would you not want a user friendly system? The idea is to get lots of customers so the product makes money, not alienate anyone who is not familiar with how it works and relying on the people who have already paid for the game to cough up more once the game ships.

That would be insanity from a business stand point, and would be suicidal for the company.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

What kind of self-entitled, intellectually-backward kids do we have these days that can't figure out something so simple as a streaming economy? Back in my day, it took me about 10 minutes to figure out what was going on in TA, and about 20 minutes to start playing it effectively. And that was after playing Starcraft, C&C, Warcraft, and a slew of other RTSs with a non-streaming economy. I'm not exactly the brightest penny in the toolshed, and slow to adapt to new things, so unless the quality of intelligence amongst gamers has dropped so much nowadays that we need a "win" button for every game, let them suffer for about 10 minutes while they figure out that a full bar is better than an empty bar.

But in all seriousness, I do think that it's interesting to consider that unit queues in a factory can result in a factory demanding varying amounts of resources, and that could cause an issue when it comes to stalling your economy. Personally, I never ran into that issue, as I always played with a buffer amount for my metal, rather than running my metal to 0 as most good players do.

I hadn't thought of the effect that ZeroK's unified costs method had on situations like this, but Thorneel does make a good point about it. However, I do feel like it reduces some of the potential unit variety when it comes to cost. A better solution, I think, would be to homogenize the unit costs across a factory. This means one can depend on a factory that will not take an amount of resources outside of its specified range, whether it be more or less. Obviously tier 2 factories consistently cost more than tier 1, and vehicles consistently cost more than bots, etc.

But I'm sure all this can be balanced out during the alpha. As long as the streaming economy is left intact.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

It is not that I cannot figure it out, in fact its very simple having as it seems as much experience with it as you, but putting it into practice does however make the game much more challenging in a non-fun way.

This is a strategy game, not a economy game and quite frankly the economy side of RTS games is often the worst part, you ability to micromanage the income and outcome of your base should not be the deciding factor on the battlefield.

Frankly its rather elitist to think that because someone can't manage an economy and a world war at the same time that they are "self-entitled, intellectually-backward kids".

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

TA and Supcom have a very specific kind of niche. It's never going to as popular as StarCraft for reasons I don't fully understand, but the simple fact is that SupCom2 was an attempt to dumb-down the TA/SupCom model to make it more accessible to more people.

RTS games are effectively a dead genre and have been for a while. My own belief is that the reason is that nobody managed to improve on the formula after TA, and people drifted away from a genre that was doing nothing new. The exception is StarCraft, but frankly everything Blizzard do is such a statistical anomaly that they must be actual wizards or something.

SupCom caused a massive surge of interest amongst TA fans, and was a brilliant game. SupCom 2 upset the existing fans and didn't bring a lot of new ones. Excuse the quality of this crappy iPhone photo, but what's on these boxes that isn't on SupCom2's box?



Uber already have enough cash to make this game, and by making it good enough they will naturally entice new players. SC:FA is attracting new players at a faster rate than ever, and the reason is that the multiplayer experience on Forged Alliance Forever is much better than GPGNet ever was. With all the lessons learned from TA and SupCom, PA can win awards AND be a no-compromise, full-on RTS game, the sort that we would expect from the ten years of genre development that sadly never happened.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I love the economy side of things, one of the reasons I prefer Grand Strategy and streaming economies to wallets like StarCraft or Red Alert.

I'm going to change that to "This is a strategy game, not a tactics game". Logistics should be an integral part of how the game is played. A streaming economy is on the whole much more suited to the macroscopic side of things than a wallet-based econ, which is kind of what PA is.

I don't think they can't so much as they won't. Which would, in fact, make them self-entitled, intellectually-backwards kids.

While yes, the end goal is to make money, the funding for this game is now at uber. It's like we already bought the thing. Technically, all they have to do to stay peachy with this project is to satisfy us to the point we don't go loot and pillage their office for our money back. They have no publisher to pay off; they can get away with making a niche game.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

I cannot find any major flaws in your argument to me.

In the end as long as the economy will be at least as good as TA and not stray into the one of SC:FA then I will continue to 'deal with it'.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

What the hell are you on about? You've really got no fuckin idea what you're talking about.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

There are those among us who have no clue about SCFA economy.
I suggest reviewing this video and playing the game on FAF, then getting an opinion about how PA should do things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCrWm1LRBEw

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

I've also played since TA was born, and my favorite game was TA with Core Contingency.

To me, the streaming economy is what makes this game unique.
While to new comers it might seem complex, the idea of queuing unit building, and settings patrol points on factories, gives you flexibility to keep your attention on the combat.

Of course you spend some time building your economy at first, but I find my self doing much less micro in TA/SupCom/FA, then I do in other games like Starcraft 2.

On FA, you can build a factory, queue a scout and then engineers, queue building some resources, and you'll have a lot of time til that finishes that you can spend scouting.

The ONLY problem with streaming economy, especially to noobs, is handling resource stalling. Unless you can stop everything and fix it quickly, you get overwhelmed by your opponent.

To remedy that, that best thing I saw so far was the primary/passive categories that you could assign to builders/factories in SpringRTS Zero-K.

Essentially active builders can hog up resources, while passive will only try to use them if you have them available. And you can switch categories of an unit with a simple switch button. This is the kind of added complexity that I really expect from PA. That could be even further refined if you could drag a marker on your mass/energy to define a threshold for hogging (like you could do it for sharing in TA). And at least if it's not included in the core, at least I expect that hooks in mods can implement features like these.

By the way, if you guys haven't checked out Spring RTS (with Zero-K), you really should. There are tons of cool widgets (LuaUI) that can be added to the game that further reduce the micro management required, if you know how to use them.

Like for example, dragging an area where your constructor automatically builds mass extractors. Or the central build AI, which you add constructors to a group, and any queued building with any unit of that group, get handled by all units of the group. That really minimizes that amount of engineer collisions you get when you tell 15 engs to assist another engineer. That's something that REALLY REALLY bothers me, finding out your economy might have stalled because your engs decided it would be more fun to play bumber cars, then actually building your T3 power gens :evil:

Ohh yyeahhh, bring back the air constructors and we'll be golden!

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

To be fair, I would much rather be playing bumper cars than building an explosive power plant for a warlord.

He's trying to be a martyr. He posted twice about nobody caring about his opinion.because it's totally the fault of the opinion holder, not the opinion itself, amiright?

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

We can make the streaming economy of SupCom and TA more user friendly without getting rid of the basic model it uses. A lot of it's been said so far in the thread. Just even basic things like making sure every factory and engineer has a build capacity that causes it to not use more than a certain amount of resources when building things.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

How is it hard to understand. Instead of unit requires X resources it is unit requires X/time resources. Having to use your brain to figure out if your income is 10 mass per second that on average you can spend 10 mass per second shouldn't be that taxing. I'm seriously wondering what some of you keep between your ears.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

TA's economy was easy for me to understand 15 years ago. When I was 10. What the **** is wrong with some of you?

Zordon - They keep facts on Kim kardashian and the cast of the jersey shore in that space of air between their ears.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

Actually, one thing that may help is giving a better visual indicator of costs, instead of just straight numbers, maybe accompany it with a bar or something to show visually that this is a fairly expensive unit, or how much of a negative delta the unit will contribute. This can even be made dynamic, giving units that would cause your economy to stall a red indicator or something, until the economy is good enough to handle them. (Experienced players should be able to turn it off though.)

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

In SupCom there was this overlay that you could turn on that would make little input and output numbers float over anything that was using or producing resources. That was nice and all, but maybe a heat map or something would be easier for people to understand and read from a distance.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

+1 to this, and I think someone also pointed out in a previous post that this could be applied to planets in a similar way, to show which planets were the biggest economical drain.

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

this explains everything :lol:

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

Im assuming by your "lol" that your dismissing him as someone that dosent know what hes talking about and not agreeing to it? (Otherwise i would have to argue with your statement).

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

I do think supcom 2 was a simplified version for the masses. Chris Taylor admitted it, Less tech levels, spending the resource, building xps really quick. And because everything was cut down so much and the tech levels were removed is why I hated it. This is most probably true for the rest of the TA community.
The point I am making is that I hope PA is not another example of this simplification. Its cool they are coming at it from a new angle (multiple worlds with units to look after) but if that comes at the expense of all the things that made the previous games great then it wont be considered a sequel (just like supcom2).
For example why is every1 saying 2 tech levels was enough?? Supcoms tech3 units are so diverse from t1 and t2 and having them soo expensive introduced a load of more tactics. Ie when to upgrade from t1 to t2 and this goes for planes and navel too. And also getting to t3 so u can have a t3 constructor the make t3 buildings!!!!!
Mark my words, I cant imagin supcom running on multipule worlds and the only way to achieve it will be to remove features that the original games had. This would be **** IMO. I would rather have a better TA on 1 world than a **** TA over 6.
Don’t u guys take my units away from me!!!!!
Also I would think the majority of the fan base has not heard of this yet, so wait for their comments.1
Not happy at all about 1 faction, fair enough if it cost money and u can save a bit here but this will take a lot of character out if every1 has the same units.
Either way I am sure u guys will beat starcraft with one hand behind ur back =)

Re: Please dont simplify the game (tech levels, building typ

You do recall that TA only had 2 tech levels, don't you? Also, TA had greater unit variety than FA, and half the factions. So did that move to FA simplify the gameplay at all? Hardly. If anything it made the game more complex.
But by going to 1 faction, unit balance will be easier, as now only balance between units needs to be considered, rather than balance between factions. It also allows us to return to the TA style of a larger number of units of a wider variety.
Likewise, in FA, the different tiers were only really differentiated by the power and cost of the unit. Also, higher tiers made lower tiers obsolete. By returning to the 2 tier system, the lower tier remains useful by being a general fighting tier, the meat of the army, while the higher tier is the specialist tier, the backbone of the army.