Should resources be tracked per planet/moon

Galactic gates only had metal transfer in mind.

Build a local energy supply (so you can't just rush in and build only the metal "source") and then use the gateways as an replacement for the metal / mass makers from TA / SupCom, with the only difference that the metal is not created out from nowhere but instead transferred from your other planets which have metal excess.

Flow rate is limited by the amount of energy available in the local economy, possibly by the number of gateways and the amount of metal excess available in your "global economy".

Keeping at least one resource restricted to local economy with hard limits (it would be energy in this example) is necessary to counter the exponential growth or at least limit it to one planet at a time.

A fully established base has the required resources to grow exponentially faster until it covers a whole planet. If all resources were global, this speed would carry on to the next planet you are trying to establish a base on, causing your empire also to grow without limits once you have finished your FIRST base.

But slowing down colonization is essential, otherwise the first player reaching interplanetary phase (i guess that would be around 30-60 minutes) would gain control over the whole solar system within 20-30 minutes peek, reducing the whole game to a single, final battle for the homeworlds of the inferior players.

Establishing a new base on a new planet may never be easy. YOU are the invader, cut short on resources, and if you want to break the local defenses, you either have to take over the local economy or rely on risky and expensive unit transports from already established bases. And even then, having a bridgehead is still far from establishing a permanent base on the planet.

I really like the Idea. A simple build could link the plannet economy with the global economy. If the enemy have destroyed the link(s) in one planet, your production would stop.

Anyways, the enginiers could bring a packed with some recourses and start working.

This is mostly what I'd like to see. But you have to consider some more things.

The best solution would be having "interplanetary engineers" that bring a certain storage of mass and energy on the celestial body, that is included in its costs. If you want to have more ressources, but did not yet install a permanent connection, you can send more interplanetary engis.

A simple exchange structure can connect seperate ressource storages for planets/moons/asteroids. (Displaying different storages makes the GUI more complex.)

Problem:
Selecting the amounts of exchanged ressources maually or even selecting ressource exchanging rates would be too much micro, as it requires permanent adaption and may need too much time before you can build anything.
Solution:
Connected planets just share all ressources. The only thing you can adapt should be the percentage of ressources that remains on every planet if the connection is disrupted. The connecting structures would always adapt exchanging rates automatically in a way, that the storage of every planet equals its designated percentage.

Problem:
You will build such an exchange structure at a well protected place on every planet. It would hardly make a difference to having only one ressource storage.
Solution:
The exchange structure is built at land and sends a satellite in the orbit (like the uef sata). If the sata or its station is destroyed, the connection is disrupted.

I've finally caught up with this thread (though it seems to be slowing down), and I have to say I'm in the 'yes' camp.

The one thing that seems to really be hamstringing these debates is that there's very little clarity about how the underlying game concepts will really be expressed or reflected in the resource management/economy side of the game. The OP has put a good post up that mentions the mass-driver, and some of the more recent posts have got something with the whole 'building that shares resources' thing, but I thought I should add a new angle to this thread.

That angle is gravity. The whole point of a game that simulates multiple celestial bodies is that gravity dictates who has the strategic advantage in any particular fight. The higher up a gravity well you are, the easier it is for you to throw mass down the well to hurt people who are lower down. This is the idea behind kinetic bombardment: it's not a weapon that allows planetary bigjobs to hurl rocks at each other, it's a weapon that allows Asteroid Johnny to hurl rocks at the stuck-up planet-dwellers (I'm thinking The Moon is a Harsh Mistress here, sci-fi fans).

The system-wide, unrestricted economy makes a mockery of this. If mass mined on a planet is simultaneously available on the planet AND at the very top of the solar system's gravity well, why have a gravity well? Why model gravity at all? And in fact that's the game you'd have: the map would be essentially flat, with islands that could be fired at one another. Fun, but... not very interesting, to my mind at least. It wouldn't be very different to FA, really, except that invading the islands would be a bit harder, and the game consequently a bit more frustrating.

If you separate the economies a little, though, you get a new strategic dynamic. Moons and asteroids are on the high ground (think: the ball-bearings on a rubber-sheet model of gravity here), but they are probably much harder to get resources out of. Planets are rich, but their very mass, their richness, makes them vulnerable. Effective combat becomes about who can best exploit the resources of planets to get a foothold at the top of the gravity well, where it's much cheaper to attack the rest of the solar system due to the reduced energy cost of working against gravity. Bridgeheads aren't necessary when you can safely eliminate a player from orbit with unit drops, nukes, kinetics etc, unless you want to capture a planet to exploit its resources for further conquests (i.e. you're thinking of a galactic campaign; I'm assuming that all skirmish/ladder pvp will all be on 1-solar-system maps).

On the other hand, you don't want to be building a new base on every damn lump of rock you plant your flag on. Hence I'd suggest that with separated economies, you need a good way (that isn't micro-intensive) of getting resources between the economies. I like the idea of a mass driver (there's a thread on it, but I'm not that far into it), but it does need to take into account the whole 'energy cost vs gravity' problem that is at the root of this whole mess. Much more useful (and this is a good idea that's already come up) would be energy transmission via satellite relay: you could have a building, launched from a planet with an engineer, with an energy relay and a mass fabricator built in, to give you a sort of prefab economy. This would then siphon energy from a planet (or a system-wide network) and turn some of it into mass. And maybe you'd be able to build more to siphon off a planet's resources faster. This would also mean that you could cripple a local economy by cutting its links, rather than having to attack a player's home base at extreme range.

I also don't see the problem with local economies in terms of display/interface: a system-wide view could easily show the local economy totals (with bars over the tops of the planets, say), and the links that feed resources between planets could also show up as simple lines with the rates over the top. Likewise, I don't see this as being necessarily overcomplicated: an important part of the complexity of the game would be managing your control over planets whilst keeping your strategic moons and asteroids supplied and defended (and using them to strike at other players). There are obvious ways of keeping it simple, and just because it's new to the genre doesn't mean it's a bad idea. This is a game that could define a genre, and I'd be very disappointed to see at this early stage, or indeed any stage, stale preconceptions of that genre cut off its potential to be great. As a few people have pointed out, Sci-fi authors have been playing around with these concepts for more than 40 years, and I think it's about time that gaming caught up.

The "link" idea being trown around wouldent prevent or even slow down the "snow ball" effect. I do agree that it would solve some problems (Making it aloot easier to take down one base by cutting its reasource link for example).

I prefear a non shared economy, possible with some functions/units to transport a certain amount to jump start new bases (Those rocket thingies being sent to astroids in the video, perhaps they can hold a certain amount?). And possibly with some function to send resources to another base using rockets or supplies, but that are limited (So that resource farms on astroids still give you something, but wont make you into a billionare without having a resource building on, for example, a enemy planet your trying to take).

There should also be some functions to transport armies between worlds and bombing worlds from other worlds (Making it possible to take a world without building a base there first). The amount of troops being transported at once and the amount of bombing being done can be limited as needed to slow down the mentioned "snow ball" effect.

Offcourse you shouldent eliminate the snow ball effect all togheter, if your winning the game shouldent hold you back to much, its more about giving the other guy a chance even if he made a bad move at the start.

^^

I agree, the linking wouldn't stop a snowballing effect. But then I can't see why you'd want it to completely prevent that; the whole point about making a game interesting to play is in maintaining the balance between rewarding players for good play versus allowing previous bad (or sub-optimal, or whatever) plays to effectively outweigh current good play.

The link would, however, create a bottleneck in a player's economy, reducing the amount of their resource production that they could bring to bear on moons, asteroids, and distant planets. I also think that game dynamics would determine the sorts of link available to players, and the corresponding widening of those resource bottlenecks. It might be that in 1-system skirmish and pvp, those bottlenecks would be reasonably tight - but that in Galactic War mode, you'd be able to much more efficiently link the mass and energy production of a solar system together, with instead the inter system Galactic Gateways (because you know that they are coming back, TA fans) forming a potentially more stringent bottleneck.

This also brings up the interesting possibility of new Galactic Gateways, when built into another player's system, being capable of disrupting the higher-level in-system resource links (possibly in both destination and source systems), to ensure that a galactic gate emerging onto a remote moon would have a good chance of starting a fight on a reasonably even footing. But snowball or no, preventing a player from magically collecting their resources into one galaxy-wide pool would be a very good idea.

I (as mentioned in my post at the end) dont want to "completely prevent" that, just make it so that a player get a second chance if he makes a mistake at the start.

If they add links and they work like that be the same as sending a limited rocket supply every now and then (Mostly atleast), as long as its limited (needs aloot of balancing offcourse) it could work just fine. (Offcourse i prefear rockets over some kinda gate but thats just the style).

Taking it down to the basics: Were in a agreement that the resources shouldent be collected into a galaxy wide pool but that there should be ways to transfer them, But that those ways should be limited in some way to prevent the snow ball effect going out of control from the begining of the game.

Right?

I hope someone from Uber reads this thread and agrees atleast to some degree.

^^

We are totally in agreement there. 100%.

I still think this idea should at least be considered. It's just a balancing question really. If you don't limit the resources flooding from planet to planet, it's going to snowball quickly making it really trivial to build anything and everything in short order.

Everyone seems to assume this is an all or nothing proposition. That bothers me.

Here is one way it could be handled to track resources per planet but still allow limited transfer of resources between planets. Add a building to serve as a resource transfer station. The entire purpose of this building is to send or receive metal and energy to and from other planets. Maybe that would actually be two structures, one to send, one to receive. Maybe there would be some buttons to adjust the priority of which planets receive materials first. The details can be hashed out later, what is important for now is that you now have a simple structure to handle resource transfer between planets.

By having a structure to handle this you have something more tangible people can more easily understand. It also makes it possible to adjust the balance by simply adjusting the cost and transfer rate available on the structure.

It all boils down to balance.

The concern I have and I am not alone in this is that free unlimited transfer between planets could lead to snowballing and ruin mid/late game play. Not allowing any transfer could also ruin mid/late game play by limiting expansion.

So I'm looking for a compromise.

Basicly speaking: You agree with the two posts above you? I wish it was a poll (Yes the poll haters is gonna hunt me down now). It could have 3 options 1:Shared resource pool 2:non shared pool 3:non shared pool but with functions to transfer resources (But those functions should be limited for balance).

Basically yea.

The thread has become so large and thorny I doubt many people have the patience to read it all. I know I sure don't.

As for polls I dislike them in general because they encourage you to limit your ideas to a list of options. I would much rather leave the option open for a bit of brainstorming. Don't limit our ideas with a poll. Let us come up with new ideas you might not have considered yet.

I have to agree with doctorzuber. I don't think the poll part of this thread has really been that illuminating: a lot of people just voted HELL NO (or left posts to that effect) and walked off. The actual discussion, on the other hand, has been pretty interesting. Gotta say some good ideas are coming out of the ways in which different celestial bodies can link their resource production.

Made the same observation.

Those who said "No!" mainly didn't actually read any of the suggestions or analyses or just brought the killer argument "Thats to complex [for me]!"

On the contrary those who voted for or supported local economies mostly performed some type of analysis on the actual problem, and most of them found serious problems with a global economy in larger scale games.


To be honest, even though the poll suggests otherwise, it's not an option to have a global economy. It's impossible for an RTS game to offer enough content for a >4 hour game session without either offering dozens of tiers (like Empire Earth or the Civilization series did) or at least trimming the exponential growth every time the player is about to conquer a new region (planet in this case).

Since it already has been confirmed that we will only have a 2-tier system whereby the second tier will not bring stronger, but rather support units, the approach with ongoing tech race (which also comes with exponential build costs to make up for the exponential resource gain!) is not an option.
So we are left with option B, stopping growth at the borders of the planet. Neither resources nor units may be shared in significant(!) amounts between planets until BOTH planet show to have fully developed economy.

The ultimate goal is to cut a new base of from the global economy up to that precise moment when the new base would be able to provide resources rather then just consuming them.




Lets just look at an example what would happen if we had a global economy or if the local economy would have been connected to the global network to fast:

We are playing a 1vs1 in a solar system with 4 large planets. Player A has just joined the game, he starts by acquiring nearby resource deposits. With every new deposit he captures, his grow rate increases linear. But that also means, that he is able to reach new deposits at a faster rate which leads to an exponential growth (if you don't know what "exponential" means, please ask Wikipedia. It's important to understand what exponential growth is!).
Once A has covered his whole start planet (which might have taken a full hour), he has so many resources and construction power at hand, that he would be able to build a precise copy of his planet spanning base on another planet within minutes(!). Once A controls the second planet, the third one falls even faster (in only half the time to be precise).
Now we also have player B who did the same as A, but only took mere 20% longer to reach interplanetary phase. Too bad, in those 10 minutes A was already able to turn one planet into a full size fortress and is already half done with fortifying the next planet.
It is now almost impossible for B to get off his planet as the little head start A had, was sufficient to win the game for him.

So what just happened?
A was able to carry over the expansion speed from his first planet, enabling him to fortify way to fast while B was only little behind.
Establishing a new base became way to fast paced. Having two players settling on a planet at the same time so they fight a ground war over local resources becomes a rare event since the time window in which a player would be able to build an opposing base on the same planet is far to small, it's only 3-4 minutes, just as long as it takes to start unit mass production.


How to solve it?
Force players to conquer the planet with the same or at least similar prerequisites as they had on their home planet, this means limited resources only!
Yet you want to connect it to a larger network later to keep the gameplay flexible despite the game field spanning a whole solar system.

There are now two (maybe more, but i haven't found any working yet) possible approaches how to "prove" the required dominance on that planet:

• Let the player build expensive portals and only allow to transfer metal in exchange for scarifying insane amounts of energy. Think of the gateway economy wise as something very similar to a metal generator, with the same or even worse energy to metal ratios. Only metal is "global" available, energy stays a pure local resource, but that's not much of a problem since power plants can be established on every type of planet in a sufficient number.
• Force the player to make his base span the globe first before allowing access to the resource network, this could be done by holding control points on the planet. Maybe some type of ancient structure which appears on multiple spots on the planet and if you have all of them under your control, quantum gateway becomes enabled. Though it still needs to be ensured, that the player didn't just rush towards the control points so capturing these needs to be time consuming (15-30 minutes per structure, capturing in parallel is possible) and it may not be possible to speed the process up.

TL;DR
Lazy ****.

My reasoning for allowing system based resources follows on from not letting players easily move their forces from surface to surface.

With the player requiring a new industrial base to produce their army's on every surface, the benefit from having a system based economy would be reduced.

(Furthermore, just because some people don't want to write an essay for their argument, doesn't make their point any less or greater then yours.)

Restricting their forces is irrelevant.

Just do me a little favor, start SupCom:FA, start a sandbox game, build a full sized base on one side of the map and stop the time you required for this.

Now send a SINGLE T1 engineer on the other side of the map and start by building 5-10 factories, nothing else. Now start mass production of engineers and use 5 per factory to rush to T3 and continue mass production of engineers. Now start building your regular base around it and compare the time required for that operation with the time required for your first base.

This will ALWAYS happen if you share the economy, a single engineers is sufficient if he just rushes to build factories which can produce more engineers. It takes less then a minute to establish an infrastructure which is capable of using your whole economy output!

(It's not the lack of an essay what proves you wrong, it's a simple observation of facts )

But is that a problem? The time it takes to actually build buildings will be the limiting factor there, and with players scouting their planets, you won't have much time for this to happen, this I feel is kind of a balance.

Needing to build new infrastructure every time is surly a better thing them people moving there entire army from world? I mean that would be the best example of snowballing surly!

But in the end, the devs might make a compromise between out 2 philosophy's, with planets only receiving 50% of the resources from the res of the grid.

(And what is a fact to you, might not be to me. )

Not talking about invasions on your planet (or any planet where you have scouts on), but about the initial rush for uncolonized planets.

Unless planet hopping becomes tier 0 (possible from the first second on), the first player being able to hop has a head start of 1-10 minutes. That is sufficient not only to scout but also to fortify the planet. Construction times for buildings fail as a control mechanism at that point, since (as i said) all you need to build is a single factory, then the base will grow at an insane speed.

Btw.: You need unit mass transport at that point. You can't attack a fortified base without either importing an army from another planet or using game enders like nukes or KEW. Also snowballs aren't that bad, you can shoot an army on an enemy planet and crush it, but they are stuck there for a while. It's not like you could set of an avalanche, raiding planet after planet.

On the idea of 1 player rushing towards unexploited worlds, I feel like the construction of a 'rocket gantry' and travel time should be a expansive thing until you start exploiting the resources.

Personally I feel like the 'Rocket gantry's should be a T1 building, due to their limited capacity and theoretical cost.

But towards a planetary invasion, I feel like people are overestimating their ability to fortify a world, you won't have 360 radar and sight coverage, and the cost of building enough defenses and troops to safeguard against any attack would be suicidal in terms of your economy and time.

And including a type of interplanetary transport would just put that snowballing effect to show.

But most importantly, my main reason for wanting a system wide economy while not allowing mass interplanetary transport is to allow a small group of engineers and the commander to quickly be able to establish new bases on demand for the construction of a new army.

Yes, but you don't want that to happen on planets where the enemy is not present yet...

Building an army which is capable of knocking out every single engineer landing on the planet within 20 seconds isn't that hard, just a few planes spread across the planet. If you don't have to care about "waisting" resources for p-gens and extractors, things become easy. Snowballing is not that much of an problem if the only efficient transporters were one-way, like the unit canon. Bi-directional transporters in terms of giant spaceships are more like expensive endgame solutions.


You just gave me an idea. What about opening teleport / global resource network on a planet to EVERY player once one player decided to build the necessary infrastructure ("beacon")?

That way you are slowed down by local economies in colonization phase, but once players decide to integrate the planet into their network (for sharing resources and transporting units), the planet becomes prone to assaults and enemy forward bases too.

While I am not sure to what you refer when you mean "the planet becomes prone to assaults and enemy forward bases too." when in regard to von neumann war machines, that would be a fair compromise between our ideas.

(And I feel it won't be hard to infiltrate enemy worlds with engineers and radar jammers, then to set up AA points for enemy patrol aircraft, the hard part would be how long can you hide before the enemy finds out and their factory's switch on.)