Should resources be tracked per planet/moon

Although I think both igncom and exterminans have good points here, I'm not sure I agree with the idea that seems to underlie a lot of the responses from those against economy separation. The whole 'beachhead too difficult' notion that has seen a lot of discussion here just doesn't strike me as very plausible.

I've played a good amount of RTS games, and a whole lot of TA and FA over the years. It was never really a workable proposition to try to establish a beachhead against a defending opponent in those games with actual construction units. No, it was always about being able to deliver enough (usually naval and air) firepower to control landing areas, then being able to transport in enough ground units to secure them, and only then would it be in any way practical to try to set up a factory or ten. Since most competent players would have their own unit production already set up, and a standing army waiting to meet units disembarking from transports, usually by the time you'd be able to set up your own factories you'd already broken the enemy's resistance in any case, and the best they'd contribute would be a trickle of units to help the mopping up. In my experience, unless you plan on being able to drop factories from orbit or some other crazy-awesome scheme, I'd probably see setting up bases on hostile planets as something to do after the dust has settled, not before.

Colonization of unoccupied planets, however, is a different matter. You want to reward players for getting there early, without making it either the only viable strategy (i.e you want to be able to punish somebody who overexpands) or a complete waste of effort. Supcom and FA had good balance for this: raiding was a very good strategy to punish overexpanders, and scouting to ensure that your opponent didn't put up ninja outposts was very important. System-wide resource sharing pushes the game towards easy expansion, so in order to combat this you'd need equally easy ways of punishing overexpansion. Unit cannons and other planet-to-planet weaponry would have to become ridiculously cheap, just so that you could hamper the progress of a player who'd chosen to go for a fast rocket to his moon, or the next planet over. This would basically recreate Supreme Commander, only with unit cannons replacing air transports; Supcom was great, but it doesn't need remaking (not while FAF is still alive!).

I do think that a T1 rocket gantry is a good idea, and I would suggest that a T1 and a T3 unit cannon could both be useful - the T1 for low-impulse payloads dropping down a gravity well, moon-to-moon or moon-to-planet, and the T3 with perhaps a laser-boosted projectile to carry a pod of units up through atmosphere and gravity to hostile planets. Then you'd be able to fire units from planets to other planets (at a greatly increased energy cost!) to harass players who overexpanded and exploit your own better-developed home economy.

With the introduction of orbital units, though, I really don't see it being very easy to make such a landing undetected. Who needs ground-based radar when you can just scan the sky top to bottom with a nice set of orbital radio telescopes? What with radio waves propagating freely in a vacuum, it's damn hard to hide up there - especially if you're propelling yourself with some kind of bright, scattering trail of radiation/particles. And that's not counting the hundred shades of fiery red you'll turn when your heatshield hits an atmosphere. Landing undetected on a planet as big as Earth isn't too hard (meteors do it from time to time) but on a planet that's the size of a, er, TA map? Much harder.

With resource bottlenecks between celestial bodies you make expansion a slower process, so the tools for harassing another player's home planet don't need to come quite so early in the tech tree. Instead of having to build planet-to-planet weapons at T1, you can now wait until T2-T3 because of the cutoff in an expanding opponent's resource collection rates. It also increases the importance of these expansions, since the time cost (and hence opportunity cost) of setting them up is significant, never mind what they're draining from your home economy by mass-drivers, beam satellite, space elevator, etc. You can either stay at home and rush for the T3 unit cannon, or travel to the moon where the T1 unit cannon can reach your enemy. Without resource bottlenecks, this doesn't happen: because you have to be able to harass an opponent essentially from the outset, going on the offensive is usually going to be a better use of your time.

Oh man I wrote waaaay more than I thought I would. This is getting good, clearly.

For me its due to the inability to completely cover a planet with radar and scouts, making it easy to set up a base without detection.

Well the general idea of TA/SC/SC2 is that your commander is supposed to set up insta-factorys for getting an army on the go.

This is far beyond a traditional war, with entire tank battalions being built in a matter of minutes, you could easily expect an lading force to build an army in time for the enemy to realize and send a response, it won't be easy sure, and any additional troops you can send is just good gravy.

I feel the best way to hit an enemy's 'colonization' is with either your own rocket launched engineer or to possibly have a kind of special rocket borne raiding party (You build a rocket with a warhead containing 10 super compacted attack scouts) Or something along those lines.

The hindrance suggested was that a new planet has no access to system wide resources till a special structure is constructed, possibly with a limited teliportation capability to warp in a squad from another planet.

Sounds like a good idea, but of course I would still love a "T3" transport rocket with a transport MIRV warhead for dropping 15-20 bots on another planet, with the risk of nukes/anti-nukes/anti-satellite weapons being able to intercept such a large rocket.

Well Realism=/=Gameplay he he, but who says these satellites are pointed out into space and not at the surface? and even then with them possibly being on the wrong side of the planet as well.

But what it may come down to is TA logic radar jammers, and rockets being invisible once the reach the surface.

Indeed, to invest or not to invest, that is the question.

And with resource storage and players having to focus on a possible multi-frount war, it may be more difficult then you think.

Indeed, it nice to have a gentleman's/woman's discussion rather then the usual aggression fest of forum life.

Instead of special resources affecting you tactically, how about they affect you strategically.

So if you capture a planet wit ha special resource, you might be able to build that jump gate between Planet X and the Moon of Ridny?

Have various super projects taht aren't tactical in nature, but have a large effect on the strategic "bigger than a system" game.

We have to destroy the Crystal Factories on Zebadnu as it's allowing Player B to develop an experimental. Even if it requires destroying that planet!

Or owning a specific resource allows you to "buy" a boost to your units (perhaps owning the Dalakian Obsidian Deposits gives a 5% boost to your close range robots melee damage.)

These rare "resources" wouldn't be tracked for single games, they'd be for campaigns. Each would allow you to buy one of several different improvements. Combining several would allow you to buy a SINGLE experimental. Lose the planet with the resource? Lose the ability boost or the work already done on the experimental.

^^
Wrong thread? There's a big thread on special resources going down, but this isn't it. Repost maybe.

I agree, that is totally the idea of the commander. But none of those games allowed you to throw your commander forward and start building on the enemy's doorstep (unless they were asleep!). If a group of units interrupted that construction project, you'd never get it finished. You could use your commander aggressively (the supcom commanders had all sorts of crazy veterancy and upgrades to specifically allow them to do this) but you couldn't build aggressively because even the weakest combat units could take down a factory you were building, and your commander couldn't really shoot and build at the same time. But if your commander died, you lost, and those things were pretty killable, even with low-tech units - so there was only so much leading from the front you could do with an ACU.

The situation you're talking about - quietly landing a commander or a pod of engineers on the night side of a planet and getting a base built while your opponent looks elsewhere - is really only going to work in two situations. One is that the planet-maps are very big, too big to effectively cover with orbital detection / ground radar / etc, allowing you to make an undetected landing from a rocket or projectile craft. The other is that your opponent hasn't bothered to put together an effective intel net and/or defense force.

The first situation would mean that planets are very, very difficult to defend effectively. I really do agree with you here - making planets moderately tough to defend is definitely a good idea, balancing the reward of its incredible mass output with a risk of defensive weakness. But I think it does need to be possible to stage an effective defense, or else there will be absolutely no risks involved in dropping a bunch of engineers and a resource link on an enemy planet to have a base ready before your opponent scouts it. It needs to be an option, but not necessarily your best option.

The resource link I see as being absolutely crucial to give your construction bots a means of getting started. Basically you need a ninja base to have a window of opportunity: if it's not scouted within the first 1-2 minutes (say) of construction being started, it will become a threat and start producing enough units to mount a defense, or at least a very painful sneak attack. With unrestricted global resource links, a base can just be thrown up and can start producing immediately (as with FA/TA expansions), which means that you have to be able to scout them and respond to them much, much quicker. This in turn means that planet maps have to be small or easily scoutable, and the idea of a stealth expand becomes less practicable, and also less interesting.

In short - the versions of the game that we envisage here have a very interesting overlap. My main concern is that global resource sharing will incline that version of the game towards simpler, less interesting gameplay (or at least, gameplay that other games have done better). But since neither of us really seem to support that idea, what instead we have is a very interesting middle ground between global resource sharing and complete economic fragmentation (which, btw, is also a bad, bad idea) which we should probably continue to discuss, even though some of its details can only really be worked out in testing the game!

FYI some of us did have a detailed chat about "Economy local to planets?" in the heady days of the Kickstarter and the thread ended with a discussion of streaming costs to move resources a large distance. So if you build on an asteroid belt any resources coming from a planet have to rise up the gravity well so you have to spend more resources to get resources to the build point, ie it costs more to build until a local economy is established.

I also made a mockup of a map mouseover indicator to instaview a location's production/demand, which I will relink below in case that interests anyone.

Looks like a simple way of displaying things. Could work, if the devs decide to implement a local economy.

Just out of curiosity, are you the same boolybooly that is on the KSP forums?

Ah, thanks for linking that thread. There's a lot of good discussion in there - I'm a bit sad I didn't catch up to it before (forum organisation ftw) so I'm still reading it. I have to say that I can't see the devs including both global and local - the decision will have a HUGE impact on gameplay (as I think both this thread and the previous one illustrates), and as I argued above, the reason this issue is getting a lot of discussion is because it will in many respects define how the game plays. It won't just be an optional, take-it-or-leave-it thing. It will affect the sorts of units the game gives you, their costs, and where in the tech tree they become available. Asking the devs to build us two games seems a bit much, imo.

And gravity, as a game concept, is as you say, right at the heart of things. Mass is subject to the cost of moving against gravity; energy, transferred as a laser/microwave/whatever beam, is not (or for the purposes of the game won't be). I'd say that the game will simplify the mass problem greatly by giving us mass fabrication and (in the late game) gateway/wormhole/teleport tech, but that in the early game mass will be subject to a transport cost, if non-unit masses can even be transported at all.

But why bother? Why bother having complicated mass-driving and ferrying when you can just use unit cannons or gateways to ferry the important masses in the game (PEW PEW-equipped lazorbots, in case folks had forgotten) to the places they're needed? Energy beams and mass fabricators (perhaps combined in one simple rocket-deployed structure), to allow for production/colonization beachheads will give the game enough complexity, without more complex mass transport being introduced. And the idea that your global economy would be subject to a tax, depending on where you are in relation to a gravity well, could get very complex very quickly, far more so than a simple energy-link network which would be very easy to represent in a zoomed-out interface.

I like the curvy bars, by the way. EDIT: I love the curvy bars. But where would you put those all-important numbers that tell you the exact rates and storage? They'd need to be straight, not curvy...

SO we are discussing a cost for moving resources from world to world?

That might be a little too complex for new players to understand (And me), So I still feel like a 'command center/galactic gate/teleporter' that can be build so a planet has access to system wide resources would be the best compromise.

Complex calculations regarding to gravity and the moment of resources is not fun.

No. Nothing about it is too complex for anyone to understand. Any more than how complex it is to understand that a giant nuke dropping bomber is more expensive than a tiny pew pew laser robot.

A good UI won't require you to do any calculations. You'll just see a line from one place to another saying "that is expensive" and the reason will be simple: it is farther away from the sun.

I disagree.

The idea of having each world producing less based on their gravity but then some how having that not matter when building on them because of a local economy is quite frankly mad.

I would find it frustrating to not be able to reliably know how much local production is going to cost if I attack a planet. Especially if transport between planets is relatively cheap, then local production seems to be pointless. But if transport is expensive, I may consider, to try to get around this, by sending a couple expensive units as reclaim stock, build some storage and be done with this strange economy system.

Yes it would be but luckily you have completely misunderstood the idea.

Then please restate them in a simple manner.

Seconded. Although I've spent a bit of time trying to read up on your ideas in the previous thread, Boolybooly, I'm still not certain I understand you properly as of course your posts were set up in the context of the debates ongoing in that thread, not this one. I for one would appreciate a clear restatement of those ideas, which I think would give everyone a better chance of understanding the thinking behind them.

From what I can gather, though, the idea focuses on adjusting the effects of the production of other planets relative to the current planet in view through multiplying their resource production by a factor between (roughly) 0.25 and 1, depending on the planets' relative position in the solar gravity well. So if a player has 2 planets, where planet A is Earth and planet B is mars (in terms of relative position in the solar system) with r(X) being the local resource output of planet X, then on planet A, the total resource production available would be (1 x r(A)) + (0.85 x r(B)), to reflect that Mars is higher up the system well, but still has decent gravity and atmosphere of its own for resources to escape. Conversely, on planet B the total production available would be more like (1 x r(B)) + (0.5 x r(A)), since Earth is farther down that system well. Obviously the scaling factors are just for show, but I think they give the idea.

By contrast, if planet A is Earth but planet C is an asteroid at the system's edge, then the resources available on Earth are more like (1 x r(A)) + (0.98 x r(C)), to reflect that it's not hard to escape an asteroid's gravity. On the asteroid, though, the resources available are (1 x r(C)) + (0.2 x r(A)), to reflect the extreme difficulty of climbing that well (yes, I know, I'm not actually doing calculations or indeed even good approximations of these gravity factors. It's my lunchbreak).

Is this anything like what you had in mind, Booly? I'm aware that it may not be exactly what you were thinking, but please feel free to correct/elaborate on what I've written. Also apologies for veering into a bit of mathematical language here - it really does help me clarify what I mean though.

EDIT: I've just realised an awful logical fallacy behind the above setup. This model has nothing to say about the cost of drawing on resources from different points in a solar system, it only talks about the resources available! Not what we were after, I think.

The basic idea was for no-micro localised economy. That was where the debate started, no-micro as opposed to micro-intensive methods, to avoid extra buildings or transportation units. There are many ways to do no-micro and we were brainstorming a bit...

Premise = You can create a sense of local economy by increasing the amount of resources needed to make builds as you get further from the source of the resource, so it is harder to build further away.

The best version (IMHO) gameplay goes like this, if you send a bot to build on the asteroids what they build will have the same resource requirement as on the planet and the bot will receive the stream at the same rate as any other engineer, but streaming resources to the asteroid costs resources. Like with the space shuttle, it takes a 2000 ton vehicle to get 25 tons into orbit. So the draw on resources in the asteroid is say (pick a number*) 10x as much as building the same thing on the planet, so there is a big drain on resources when you start a build in a distant place. It hurts but its a good kind of pain because you are making a bomb to blow up your nemesis' base, muhahaha etc .

Then you can get a little crafty by supplying the resources locally eg in Supcom speak it would be to build a power station and mass production facillity locally. That would be the first resource to stream to the engineer and it would have no cost to transport because it is in the same place. So the local resource would reduce the amount being drawn from the distant planet meaning it would reduce the amount of resources the 10x factor was being applied to and reduce the total draw by the engineer... or factory or whatever.

IMHO if you are going to 'Mars' it should cost more than 'the moon'. This is where eldorwannabe and I differed, he favoured a flat rate to export from 'Earth'. I like variable rate depending on how far you have to stream the resource eg to Orbit 10x, Moon 12x, Mars 14x, Jupiter 16x. Either way works and you have a way to build when you get there but it is hard to do (frontier effect) and you have an incentive to build a local economy (safe haven) which favours base development. I hope Uber will try it out and see if its fun.

*It could be 10x or it could be 5x or it could be 50x.

That makes a lot of sense - I do appreciate you taking the time to go over this again!

Warning - this is another really long post. I'm trying to be clear, and explain myself thoroughly, but I applaud the patience of those involved in these discussions in any case.

I completely agree with you in terms of the transportation cost of resources, especially in terms of mass. I think that in a game where so much of the interest revolves around (gravity-powered) KEW, making gravity into an important game concept seems intuitive, interesting, and indeed innovative.

I'm actually not sure where I stand in terms of resource transmission between the local economies. I'm not sure I'm completely on your side when it comes to the idea of 'no micro', not least because one game's micro is another game's fundamentals - take pro Starcraft 2 play next to FA, or even just compare DOTA 2 to Warcraft 3, for example. But I am with you 100% where you want things to be clear, intuitive, and well-streamlined. In fact, for me that's what separates 'good' and 'bad' micro: it's not about how many clicks you have to make, because good game players will always find something to do to occupy their attention. Hell, even in supcom you could get an edge (sometimes a game-winning edge) over an opponent through basic micro tricks like focus-fire, path-changing to dodge slow projectiles (T1 artillery, I mean you!), and splitting unit groups to maximise engagement frontage.

What defines bad micro for me is when you're being forced to give the game inputs that are repetitive, have no basis in the game's key concepts, and give no in-game reward for executing those commands well. Some people (especially on this forum, where TA/FA vets are drawn like bees to a honeypot) may think that Starcraft 2 is a bad game because it's full of micro - and on release I thought exactly the same. But then I started to watch professional Starcraft 2, and realised that the top level players saw the game they were playing very very differently to me, and that their game assumed that the important part of the game was mind-numbingly well-executed unit control, with the strategy and tactics of the game driving, as it were, from the back seat.

This is a very long-winded way of saying: I'm ok with the idea of a resource-transfer building that essentially gives a fixed-amount siphon of resources from one planet to another. It's easy to keep track of, easy to represent in a graphic display of the strategic level of the game, and only has two settings for players to manage, on and off. You could use them to kick-start local economies, or you could stack them up to rush-build an offworld project. This allows players to essentially separate their thinking on base-building/economies into two layers. You have the strategic/system-wide level, where you keep track of which planets are feeding resources to which, and you have the local level where you worry about the actual cost of things.

The problem I forsee with the resource-transfer cost being omnipresent, anywhere you build, is that it seamlessly combines these two levels in a way that could potentially become very, very difficult to track. If you start making the actual costs of what you build (or the costs displayed to a player) fluctuate according to where on the strategic map something is built, things start to get very complex indeed. In fact now that I think of it, the huge problem that I forsee here is in the three-planet state.

What happens if you have two planets, 'Earth' and 'Mars' say, and you start a new construction on an asteroid (which I will call 'Stanley')? If you follow the logic of the concept, that it costs to move resources against gravity, what is the actual cost of building on Stanley when some of your resources are produced on Mars and some on Earth? Do you pay the resource cost of shipping from Earth, or from Mars? Or a mixture of the two? Now you can easily make an arbitrary solution to this problem, and say 'it all ships from Earth' or 'they ship proportionally to their production'. But it's an arbitrary solution, any way you divide it up, and you can't reflect the physical decision of shipping the mass for that asteroid engine etc. in any plausible way. Your only alternative is to give (as I think was suggested in the previous thread) a fixed value for resource cost increase, relative to a position in the system gravity well. But this just feels flat, because it takes a logistics problem that is entirely to do with relative positions and masses, and makes it absolute. It blurs a concept that a direct resource-transfer building keeps sharply in focus.

I don't know if this is a clincher - but since I've seen a lot of really interesting responses to this problem on this thread, and read a whole bunch more in the previous thread, I'm keen to see what other people make of this line of argument. Boolybooly and others, are you persuaded?

You make some goog points silenceoftheclams. I don't see an easy solution to the problem of deciding where resources come from. I would say it should automatically get resources from the cheapest (i.e. closest) source, but then that easily has the potential to over tax that economy and then you'd need a way to manually adjust it.

I personally think it doesn't add too much micro for the resource transfer buildings to be manual. Sort of like transports, but you just click the building, then click the destination celestial body. Basically it acts like you built a power (or mass?) source on said planet. It is a one time thing.

I dont fancy the transfer building idea personally. We went through all this in the other thread. IMHO it meets the definition of micro because it disallows streaming which is already part of the local gameplay (also the genre) in order to oblige you to build a building to allow ... global streaming! You are better off with global streaming period. Plus you have the tautological problem of how you build the first transfer building in a remote location. You cannot solve that without making the transfer building redundant.

Divvying up the stream could be very simple.

You could simply use a first come first serve method and draw any surplus, from the nearest location first.

This obliges the player to regulate their builds to provide surplus, by having a rule that local demand is met first and surplus resources go to the lowest multiplier draw. That way two remote builds would compete with each other and the cheapest multiplier would be supplied first from surplus only and any remaining surplus applied to the next most expensive. This is easiest to code and compute.

Alternatively you could have a shared draw method where the draw from the remote build impacts all local economies and sucks them dry. To do that you have to solve which source supplies which sink location first. Then you have to find an average build rate for all engineers. The last is easy if you know where resources are coming from, you just work out the average. But that depends on the cost multipliers so you need to know which location the resource comes from first. So where does resource come from? I can say it is a matrix problem... it needs to work out the percent draw by all locations which are drawing excess from all sources producing anything at all, before anything else. So its tricky, I am thinking about it, but I am a zoologist not a mathematician. Once you have those ratios the rest all falls into place. It could be worked as an iterative problem, gradually approaching a global balance by tweaking its way through compute rounds, might lead to an interesting "settling" effect for resource streams when changing build assignments.

Any mathematicians around good with matrices?

Note: Another overlong post. But it involves interplanetary LASERS, so I'm more ok with it than in my earlier spiels.

The problem reminds me a bit of an old mechanics question I recall from my first degree (where I was in fact, a mathematician - but not any more), of calculating the forces acting on a metal ring to which a series of strings are attached. The strings run over pulleys, and on the other end of the strings are a series of weights. In whatever form, it is, as you say, pretty solvable - but I am more concerned about how easy it would be for a player to understand where their resources were going and more importantly how easily they could answer the question of how much extra production they would need to build on one planet in order to sustain production on another. Being able to answer that question, which is mathematically non-trivial, would be a key factor in players' ability to plan their economies. I'm not sure that, with the complex system proposed, that would be the case. In short I think the concept is simple, indeed elegant. But the implementation in game may prove to be less transparent.

I'm well aware that the resource-transfer building was discussed in the earlier thread. I didn't feel that the versions proposed there were very convincing, though. The version of resource-transfer I had in mind was not a 'global link' building: a global-link building is actually the worst of both worlds for a one-system game. It either leaves you in the 'no gravity' state, which breaks the gravity concept, or it is just a more fiddly version of the state you described in your last post.

A fixed-rate transfer building is, I feel, a far better solution. My suggestion would actually be that such a building would only transfer energy (perhaps by a cool-looking lazor beam?), but at a flat rate, and for a flat cost rate. It would also be well within the logic of the concept that the transmitter could be moderately expensive, but the receiver could be relatively cheap, could incorporate a small amount of mass fabrication - and could simply be delivered by rocket if necessary! This would overcome the problem you describe, of having no initial resources to set up the receiver. The whole thing could be delivered as a sort of 'colony package' with an engineer in tow. Mass would then only be transferable between planets in prebuilt commodities, as units, or as warhead payloads. The whole advantage of this scheme would be that, every time such a structure was built, it would be a fixed drain on one local economy and a fixed income for another. This would make it easy for players to reckon on, and correspondingly easy to plan for.

I'd also like to respond briefly to the initial comment by the devs at the very start of the previous thread. This system would not create the suggested problem of hydrogen-fusion plants on gas giants and of lava planets being unable to spread their valuable resource incomes across a system. Lava planets, as a source of immense quantities of mass and easily accessible geothermal energy, would simply provide the mass and the energy together to run massed batteries of unit cannons, making them a key asset in cross-system assaults. Gas giants, as ready sources of fusion energy, would be well placed to deliver high energy rates via beam transmission to outlying moons and asteroids, making them a crucial staging point for offworld construction projects.

Last post is good too. Shoot cash-rockets across the solar system. Or, also like he said, any sort of structure that draws a steady rate from another economy instead of instant resource merger.