Should resources be tracked per planet/moon

Apologies if this has already been polled but I couldn't find it.

I've made the poll simple (Yes/No) in order to get a general feel of what the players would prefer, but I'll describe further what I mean below to cover anything that could possibly cause confusion.

I want to know if people would prefer a form of localised resources where you could draw instantly on resources produced on the local planet/moon, but you could not draw instantly on resources produced on remote bodies. There could be some form of unit or alternative solution to facilitate movement of resources. This would be 'Yes' in the poll.

Or would you prefer a single economy that covered the entire solar system where you could instantly build from a factory on a planet or moon as long as you were collecting resources somewhere in the solar system but not necessarily on the local body. This would be 'No in the poll.

let me put it this way

the reason this idea would fail is because lets say your sending out one of those enginer shuttles to another moon or something and when you land oh look i have little to 0 res to build anything with.... this is fun...

this also means that if you were invading a planet that had alot of defences you would have to build a resource base to then start up factory and defences it would make invading alot more difficult then it would be to begin with

I would love to see at least an option to have per-planet resources to add an interesting logistic challenge to the game. I can imagine you would also need some way to transport resources across planets ... and then I mean other than simply crashing the asteroid into the planet, adding its resources to it. :twisted:

On the other hand I can totally understand you would want to turn that off, if you want to focus on the combat element and get to the bit where you can obliterate things.

Per-planet resource tracking would only add unnecessary micro and difficulty to the game, since you'd have to not only manage a complex rate-based economy, but you'd have to manage multiple spread across multiple celestial bodies.
Not to mention it would make it nearly impossible to attack another player's planet, since they'd already have an established resource infrastructure there as well as their army. Invading will probably be hard enough already.

It should be per-planet with transport supply ships, IMO

Global streaming economy. Anything else would be an utter mess.

Afaik the devs haven't decided upon this one.

while it is easier to manage when having a global economy, it also has a drawback. It makes snowballing incredibly easy, possibly starting a spamfest from the mid-game rather than the end-game:

if a player colonizes a bunch of asteroids and keeps that a secret, other players cannot disrupt his economy effectively and win a local battle.

Of course you will say that you shouldn't let that happen, but we don't know yet how easy it is going to be to scout/monitor all the asteroids.

Edit: transportation of resources should be pretty easy though. Maybe building a single structure can link it to the rest of the economy. This way you have the best of both. You can destroy this building to cripple his economy when he has no local resource control.

Yes, but then you're just opening up a whole can of worms with tracking resource locations and multiple economies to track. To say you need to launch "storage" at a planet so you can build a foothold fails to take into consideration that if you need storage, then everything would need storage.

I think that, if any opponent is on a planet that you are not on, this will already make it difficult to establish a beachhead. And while an engineer swarm can build many things very fast, swarms typically are held close to main bases because they aren't easy to replace. Launching a hundred construction units to a beachhead to quickly throw up defenses already strikes me as being risky and difficult enough to needlessly complicate it with multiple economies. Not to mention that if you can throw those resources between planets, then your opponent also has as many resources, but with a far smaller distance to cover to repel yours.

I can see where this is a thorny question.

What about a compromise? What if you can stream resources anywhere, but if they are going to a different planet the rate is reduced. So you can build that on the moon, but at half speed because all your resources are coming from the planet below.

And here's what I think about the extremes, streaming vs no streaming.

With the pure and simple stream everywhere and anywhere, first it feels a bit fake to me, but mostly I am worried about snowballing. Once you get a sufficient number of planets, resources become somewhat irrelevant since you have so many of them. You see this in Sins of a Solar Empire, anything much past 3-4 planets starts getting repetitious and largely irrelevant since you already have a maxed army and can replace any losses more or less instantly.

With no streaming, the startup cost for any new planet moon or asteroid is going to be very severe. This also leads to annoying repetition as you are basically building a base from scratch multiple times in the same battle. And it also bogs down the game quite a lot when you have to start from nothing like this each time.

Well, I'm totally against about resources being tracked per planet... I wanna use some moons/asteroids to be like farms, where I just build some resource extractor things on them to use this same resources on my main base...

Universally shared resources sounds less frustrating, but there's an opportunity in trying alternatives. I trust Ubers judgement, and hope they test a few dramatically different methods during development.

So, I just thought of this, and may have missed accounting for some details. Hopefully you can all review it.

This idea takes the global economy, but alters it to reflect how you go about colonizing a planet. It can also be expanded to include any potential 'rare' resources that come from the different planets (being discussed in another thread here). It prevents rapid early dominance of the entire system, and makes taking over a completely hostile planet more difficult (as it should rightly be).

Sounds good? Here's the explanation...

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When I say 'planet', I mean all solar system bodies. It's tedious typing it out.

As we've seen in the KS video, to colonize another planet, you send engineers to start construction projects.

Why not instead have a 'galactic gate' that you send from one planet to another. This gate provides the link between planets to share mass and energy and any rare resources if they exist.

Let's assume these devices can only teleport the most basic elements of mass and energy, and thus cannot be used to transfer units across the system.

The commander acts as its own galactic gate portal, so whichever planet the commander is on will have access to the resources.

You can build a galactic gate with:
a) Construction units already supplied by a galactic gate, to act as backup to safeguard your economy from attacks.

or

b) By building them in the silos shown in the KS video. When built, a destination could be chosen, and the gate launches towards the planet. It then either orbits the planet or anchors to the ground and opens the gate. This allows you to either begin building orbital structures (which should be useful since we did reach the gas planets goal) to start an invasion, or land directly on a planet and build there. In orbit, the gate will obviously be more prone to attack, so anchoring would be encouraged.

This works for all cases, whether landing in a neutral or hostile planet. If neutral, you simply just anchor the gate with some construction units and get building. If hostile, you keep it in orbit and land an invasion army before dropping the gate.

Also, to prevent rapid early expansion to every planet (seems a little ridiculous to have a land grab early in the game) the cost of these galactic gates could be fairly significant, since they are acting as portals through which your entire economy is run.

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I think this could be a great compromise between global and planet based economies.

(I was thinking of making another thread just for this for the poll, but seeing as the faction thing got a little out of hand, I'll refrain)

The idea on this which I've favoured most so far was that more resource generators on a planet should lower the cost of building structures and producing units on that planet. The reduction in cost should be moderate and give exponentially diminishing returns (perhaps to a maximum threshold of ~50% of the 'raw' cost).

This is to reflect the idea that resources not produced locally have to be transported in, adding costs. However I don't want to see actual resource supply ships etc. because it would add tedious micro.

The ramifications of this would be that setting up a new base on a moon would cost slightly more than continuing to expand on a developed planet. It would also mean that when setting up a new base, it would be more cost effective to build a rudimentary economy first before constructing a factory or major turrets, giving a choice between cost efficiency and rapid defense.

As an example, a factory built on a barren moon with no resource production might cost 700 metal, while a factory built on a moon with 3 metal extractors might cost 535 metal, and a factory built on a fully developed planet with 25 metal extractors might cost 350 metal.

instead of ressources tracked per celestial body i would propose something different:

Have small not controllable space ships flying between planets of one player. This would give an explanation how the ressources of one planet could be used on the other. just a gimmick, that would nto have an impact on gameplay.

I dont think limiting resources to the planet they are harvested on, is any good for this game.

Hmm, this is a tough question and a mid ground may end up being the best solution. Snowballing is a problem that could easily happen with a completely linked resource system. If all players need to expand to asteroids, other planets and other systems as rapidly as possible to keep up with the economy of their enemy, not to mention the possibility of a difficult time mobilizing forces to attack those distant and defensible resource areas, than any advantage that one player would get would snowball as was mentioned. The other side is the problem of increased complexity of separated resource systems.

There are many solutions and my personal take on this problem would be that only certain engineers could be sent to newly colonize an asteroid, like a sub commander unit, which produces its own resources, and it can construct things using its personal stores and its resource generation. And like acey195's suggestion of a building to connect to the main resources once the local base is set up. And to avoid the theavatarofwar's posed problem of the difficulty of establishing a beachhead the transport of the engineers could also hold resources, and basic defenses such as trenches/walls etc could be incredibly cheap like in supcom. This would allow for an assault on an asteroid (or constructed orbital platform) with the rapid construction of a beachhead without the instant base without more resource devotion, and makes it harder to snowball and it would be cheaper/or faster to assault the asteroid instead of establishing a permanent resource outpost.

This sounds really cool, not sure how it would pan out in-game though.
The cool part is that it allows your opponent to cut off your resource sharing by sniping that building.

obviously you will want to know what your planet are worth once you have more then one and are not in sim city mode.

At least the data should be there, even if your resource pool is actually combined.

See giant attack incoming, decide to defend or not... having no clue what the production and income value of that rock actually is... that doesn't sound right.

also:

building production next to extractor/generator is not a new concept that does pretty much exactly the same thing.

Let me say the following:


KEEP. IT. SIMPLE.

Example:
Look at Sins of A Solar Empire. All the resources you get from the planets is seen on the top.

No. Just no. Adding resource gates is just busywork for player and transport ships just cost performance(look at sins and trade ships).

Or that.

System-wide economy. Planetary economies benefit the defender too much.