Should resources be tracked per planet/moon

I think when people say that if a an enemy player has established a base on a planet that is not made of metal, trying to set up your own economy on that planetoid is going to be next to impossible due to the fact that by the time your forces arrive your enemy is more than ready to kick you off. That being said, we do have orbital installations, that giant gun that can shoot your units off of your planet and onto your enemy's and the smashing of planetoids into one another or simply having a big enough army. All of which can be counteracted by the enemy players own defenses and armies. Even if it was a metal planet you were invading, trying to build up your economy on it would still be next to impossible because both you and your well established enemy have an abundance of resources.

If planetoids must have their own individual economy unique to each player that has an engineer and/or factory present on the surface or in orbit, than there should be a creative and intuitive method for transporting resources or your forces. Like having deploy-able buildings that you launch into space and send out. Or I heard in one of the live discussion that there will be teleporters so if you set up two of them, one on each planetoid you could share resources between off world bases. That would be faster than using transport ships (although perhaps not as fun) and would be much better than using some stupid handicap gameplay element.

I agree, it wouldn't work well. Because if the resources were traveled in ships it would be a pain to protect them.
When I imagine this game I imagine space combat just flying around in asteroids. And invading planets with heavy AA guns. Thousands of pods dropping down and only a few getting in. Wit this money thing it wouldn't work as well as it could. Although, a system to tell you how much money each planet is making would be nice.

The game taking place across multiple planets is a nice way of stopping a victory cascade, and I think at least metal being limited to one planet goes really well with that.

I really can't imagine playing this game with out having some way to transport good across planets. And some even more creative way across solar systems in galactic war. Large rockets that take time going planet to planet or even some sort of scheduled drop ships or even Star Gates (yes I am actually thinking of the movie and tv shows and how they used them) in Galactic War.

Or you know what, once resources are produced all robots have energy and metal transferred from mines/plants to them for weapons or engineering units/production plants over the same method the commander uses to control his army remotely, throughout the galaxy.

Well maybe it would be more realistic but if you played Supreme Commander or Total Annihilation you'll notice that even though you only played on one map at a time there was no transporting of metal and energy between buildings, factories, engineers and separate bases. Its not like there was power lines between buildings and long conveyor tubes between bases. You mostly see resource transportation in civilization games. Like Pharaoh, Rome, and the game "civilization". Even "Age of Empires" didn't really have anything like that. It would fundamentally change the nature of PA to have a gameplay element like that. I think it would divide your attention between planetary annihilation and civilization, Which I don't think is quite what the boys at Uber Entertainment originally had in mind. I think if we had to manage resources like that it would really slow the gamplay down, matches would take a long time and "galactic war" would last for ever. Players would spend so much time and effort protecting, expanding, and managing their total economy that planetary annihilation would not happen nearly as often as it would without that economic element.

The most important thing to note is that resources are "streamed" in this game, not "gathered".

Taking huge sums of metal and energy with you is not going to help if you don't have anywhere to store them, and you would probably have to take a lot with you the first time you settled on a celestial body just to get your base and economy started. Which would probably put pressure on players to just harvest what ever is available around them. Rather than rely on one of their home and/or off word bases.

Deep down, even though its all supposed to be fun when its all put together, resource management is a headache and "blowing **** up" is where the real fun is.

Also, do you think it would be fun if someone destroyed all the money by driving a small asteroid into your ship?

I agree with you guys... I think we should be able to stream resources across planets and think of it like my second paragraph in my previous post. I think it will ruin the game if we can't. As a worst case scenario (and I can see it being a fun way to play the game) we would have to transport resources manually our selves.

And also destroying a large ship transporting goods would be a a feature of the game. Sure it sucks but you can do it too. Think of battle star galatica... We just need space battles for that to be possible and for now, is not going to happen.

How would that ruin the game? It would ruin the game if we had to....

I used to be very opposed to tracking per celestial body, but i'm becoming more in favor of it with some kind of ability to stream in resources via a structure.

You can still send a massive army to a planet to take it over, you don't need a base there. and if the base defenses are too strong, destroy the planet!

I just don't want to see a single engineer sneaking onto a planet and immediately start construction on a megabot, or building a factory that streams out units at breakneck speed right away since it has your galactic resources to pull from.

but at the same time be able to build a "metal/energy" transport hub with some very high initial investment that would hook that planet into your galactic pool, not something you do on every planet you land on, but when you find that metal planet, oh boy, do you ever rush to hook it into the network.

But for balance changes they would HAVE to add a good way to destroy asteroids hurtling at your planets. And if they have great orbital defense cannons that destroy the asteroids then you have to get a base on the planet to really do damage. But they will shoot down all the transports. It's just never going to work right. Also you will probably be able to get something to warn you of enemies on your planets.

There could be limits to the amount of resources that can be steamed to a planet, but also another method like a rocket to send massive amounts of resources later. Or even create another special building like a resource beacon (or whatever) that allows you to send and receive resources.

What if its a gas giant or a metal planet, you probably don't want to destroy the resource bonus. That would be a waste of a good planet.

Also if a single engineer sneaks on to your planet and starts building a base, thats your own fault for not using scouts to constantly watch for that sort of thing. That being said, it would be nice if scouts warned you if they spotted anything! That way you wouldn't have to constantly take brief peeks on all of your planets and their appurtenant celestial bodies.

Having a limit "handicap" on your subsequently conquered planetoids is a terribly discouraging idea! As well as using a rocket to transport resources, it will probably be already hard enough just to get one engineer to another celestial body let alone massive sums of metal and energy! Assuming that all the players are using the same strategy in one skirmish everyone would be trying to spend their hard earned resources trying to harvest more from other worlds (unless their all on or lucky enough to be on metal planets surrounded by gas giants). All it would take is one player taking the risk of using a different strategy by destroying an enemy player's resource transport and that would mostly just stifle gameplay.

My stance is still to have all resources stream (if you need a reason) either by the same method used for the commander to control all units or by some special building/fixture.
I have just been throwing out other ideas. Also I can see these other ideas being done right and being fun once space battles can take place.... Witch is a long term stretch goal I would like to see...

I don't care if planets have differing resources. As long as we don't have SHIPS taking them along. Just one easy to get building on a planet and it can send resources to other planets instantly. Or almost instantly. Then allow the ability to automatically send resources when gathered, leave behind certain amounts. That kind of thing is fine. SPACE SHIPS CARRYING MY INCOME IS NOT!

Alright guys, I understand that in real life maybe 50-70 years from now we will most likely have to use ships to transport our building materials from one place in space to another but in this game things are different. Don't get me wrong, you can make this "resources be tracked per planet/moon" a well working gameplay element that makes sense and works in ways that we all agree on, or least most of us. However:

This is "Planetary Annihilation" not "Planetary Civilization"

Maybe I'm wrong but as far as I know none of the boys at Uber Entertainment have ever worked on a game that has this kind of thing.

Why should resources be streamed the same abstract way between engineers, factories, commanders and bases but not between planets?
If you have your metal and energy transported between planets then you should probably have them transported between resource harvesters/generators and engineers/factories!

To me it only makes sense.

Lets see:

Becuse of the Snowball effect perhaps? Whats the point of multiple maps if the resources are shared? Win one world and you have a great advantage for every battle after that (a whole planets economy), win again and the advantage grows even more.

Theres no point in having multiple maps in a system like that (Sure winning should allways be a good thing, but its no fun if the whole game is decided from one win or one lose).

Some sort of limit is needed on resource sharing between worlds to prevent this. If its local but you have options like building a link or sending rockets then theres plenty of ways to fix the problem (Making rockets expensive, or making the link easy to destroy, etc, while winning will still give you a advantage its much more limited).

Production still needs to be scalable and effective no matter the size of a map. There's nothing wrong with making transplanted resources expensive, but the system should also be simple and robust. If it can't hold up to battle, then invasions will be too difficult with normal units. There won't be anything to do until super weapons show up to break the turtle.

It is a very good idea to take resources off of captured worlds as easily as possible. Resources that can't move will only be used on the planet itself, building up huge turtles with no alternative. That makes invasions more difficult for everyone.

Resources are already limited by a player's ability to construct a base and bring in engineers. That's the beauty of local energy. It makes construction power difficult to acquire, without limiting a player's ability to throw resources at an enemy planet.

Problems between maps will be an exercise in map design. If one planet has more resources than another, there will be a huge advantage for whoever starts on the bigger map. That's not something which can be easily fixed by unit design.

As if a streaming economy wasn't complicated enough.......

So not up for this kind of economy management.

making it like this would make it like anno 2070 where you need another island to support your main island and then you have nothing to give to the other island and then people get mad and you loose