Should resources be tracked per planet/moon

I think people are mixing up shared with tracked. You can share resources between all planets but have each planet have eco tracking in the solar view.

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Main Point
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When thinking about resource availability being tied to planets you have to carefully consider other aspects of the game. So lets break this down into some key points.

1) Players may move between planets.
2) A players objective is tied to a single unit not there whole base.
3) Players cam cause Planet wide destruction.

These three things are key because people are focusing on how hard it will be to take out a fortified position rather than focusing on the negatives of setting up that defensive position. The commander who has spent time securing his planet would not of been able to invest as much into expansion, this puts them down on account of not moving between planets. Now being limited to this one secured planet means they have limited the places there command unit could be where as there opponent could be on any one of the planets they have captured, this puts them down on the second point. Now there ACU is stuck on one very secure planet but his opponent just sent an asteroid flying towards it, this just put him down on the third point.

People need to remember Turtling planets will have the same major downside it has in any TA styled game, you limit yourself and put yourself in the responsive position.

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Beyond This Point Is Speculation
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Now lets pretend you've got awfully attached to your asteroids and don't fancy using any of them as WMDs, then this is how an invasion may pan out.

So firstly you would not just send in a big lump of engineers to build up a base, your first port of call would be securing orbital control or at least an orbital presence. This would mean wiping out anything they have floating around the area of the planet you want to control and it would also mean scouting for any orbital deference stations they have ground side (Perhaps sending a small contingent of units to snipe these installations). Now once you have a small section of the planet covered by your orbital units you could send in a contingent of engineers to construct a structure that would allow you to transfer or share resources between planets (Your orbital units would be protecting this structure from attack). Now with a presence in space and a presence on the ground you can begin expanding.

Remember this works in both ways however, for example when you are attacking a players secondary planets you would aim to take out the resource sharing structure to secure the planet. If you managed to destroy the structure you would suddenly have leveled the playing field in your invasion.

Now hopefully from this you can see I want a separated economy that you can link together with a single structure (I think the command unit should also function as this structure for whatever planet he is on). I believe this because it allows the most prominent player to gain momentum as he builds up his empire but it also allows any player the opportunity to fight back. Limit the sharing structure to one per army on each planet and you will have a very dynamic battle field as players lose and gain control of planets rapidly.


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Further Reasoning
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Remember everyone loves depths in games, what they don't like is complexity. This single resource sharing structure would compliment current mechanics to bring a large amount of depth for a relatively low cost in complexity.

To bring it fully into the game it would require a few things.
1) An layer of units higher than Aerial, the current orbital units would work.
2) A way to track individual planets economies as well as your overall economy.
3) A unit/structure for accessing your global economy.

Addressing point 1.
Essentially what this would mean is adding three or so units. There would be a unit designed to fight other orbital units, a unit designed to target below orbit units and there would be a unit designed to gather Intel from the ground. Lastly there would be a turret that could fire from ground to orbit however this unit would be very limited with its cone of fire as to make it a way to defend a base rather than the entire planet.

Essentially you would build these units to orbit your planet and then you would send them to attack an apposing planet. They would be your strike force, unable to take out a planets main base due to ground to orbit cannon but able to punch a whole for your ground forces to build a base.

Addressing point 2.
For this to work you would need your combined economy in sight at all times.

I would propose while viewing a planet you have it's separate economy and the galaxies shared economy next to each other. The economy the planet is currently using would be shown in green while the other is shown in red. So for example, if a planet had a share resource structure on the planet the shared eco would show up in green while the single planets economy would show up in red.

I would propose while in the system view you have the shared economy in the centre of the screen and under each planet you have its individual economy (it would be in red if the planet has shared resource available).

Addressing point 3.
So the last point is very easy. You would need a structure to place to gain access to your shared economy, I would put my vote in for a resource portal. I would also put my vote in to say the command unit has a resource portal built in allowing for it to have assess to the global pool on whatever planet it is on or perhaps even provide assess to the pool to the planet itself.

I believe if players wish they could turn off these resource sharing units, just as you could turn of nuclear weapons in FA. However I would do it by offering three options.
1) Full Share (In this mode every engineer would function as a resource portal allowing for a full shared economy).
2) Partial Share (This would be as above with the Command Unit and shared resource structure).
3)No Share (This would be full separate economy planets with no way to share).

This lets people choice what they want.




(Side note, sorry for any spelling mistakes as It's rather late at the time of writing) :ugeek: I'll probably draw up some concepts and go further into this tomorrow as I'm on break from my design course.

Should resources be tracked per planet/ moon

Maybe another compromise is the fact of ships that transport ships from one planet to another, say i want to build a base on my enemies planet, I wouldn't be streamed in but i could send extra resource ships into the midst of the landing part and once they hit the atmosphere adds to the total amount of resources on a planet. Also another way to think of it is that you aren't starting over because you can always send in more things. And once a tele is done and set up it could be possible to have an option to tele metal to your new base. Or say as people have suggested add small uncontrollable units that give the idea of moving resources from one area to another just that you are able to attack them, there by making the idea of a resource line.

same

Exactly!! I can't see how a system where not being able to attack your opponents economy could ever work.

Also True!! And even if you are just using your asteroids for resources when you zoom out to solar (or even Galactic) scale you will want to see the +/- resources use of each planet (or solar system). So planetary body resource tracking is a must.

Now back to interplanetary resource sharing.
The commanders should always be able to pull from the global resource pool. However unit production, turrets and the like should pull only from that planet. That said there could (and probably should) be some sort of energy/mass transfer station that links the pools or shuttles resources, and also has some amount of storage, but as rmj said it shouldn't be too cheap. You could even make that a feature of T2 storage.

Voted before I saw the description.

You should change the wording. By tracked I meant literally tracked, as in it showed you the income per planet. In no way does this question imply that resource income is limited to each celestial.