Should resources be tracked per planet/moon

It's rather simple:
You want to empty the local economy first, any demands will then be satisfied by other economies whereby the rate per economy is calculated in such manner, that every economy will reach zero mass at the same time. Unless one or more economies are at the storage limit, in that case those economies will provide metal solely until they drop below storage limit. An local economy being at 100% full storage counts as "infinite" and will therefore support the whole demand. An local economy which is capable of satisfying the whole demand solely will count as "less then infinite" and will be used solely unless there is another economy with full storage.

This results in a state where all storages in local economies will be neither empty nor full as long as the global balance comes close to zero.

Btw.: I'm not sure if its such an good idea to share energy at all since every planet is capable of producing energy. What needs to be shared, is metal as there might be planets without sufficient metal deposits or even no deposits at all, e.g. gas giants. If both resources would have to be shared, then we would need to different mechanisms for those resources.
Energy can be transmitted over close-to-infinite distances, but sharing metal is a different thing as sharing metal is equal to transporting units of the same value.

silenceoftheclams read my mind. This is pretty much exactly the idea I had, except I think mass should be transferable as well; maybe at a lower rate, but still transferable.

I do not like this idea, while the concept is sound i still feel like this is a bad thing to have in a RTS game.

I agree, it's likely something that will need teasing out in testing. From my angle, I think that the problem I have with the desire to transfer mass is the underlying assumption that every planet needs mass or metal equally. There's no real reason for this to be the case, and in fact I would say that the game would be more interesting if different types of celestial bodies were good for different things. So long as finished products (units, engineers, payloads) can be transported/fired across the system, even at a high energy cost, you'll still have a dynamic and shifting game balance. I should also point out that even in supcom, building outposts was generally a low-key affair, usually just a few factories and some radar. If you started erecting elaborate defence lines rather than building units asap to open up new battlefronts and raiding opportunities, a human opponent would usually overrun you within minutes. I don't see why that should change.

Also, (reverting to Supcom-style logic again) actually preventing the transfer of mass as a resource, rather than as finished products, retains a sharp focus on the different roles that different celestial bodies play in a developing strategy. The more mass you have available, the faster you can build high-yield energy production; so by preventing the transfer of mass in resource form, you sharpen the focus on players' choice of aggressive strategy. Either you focus on expanding energy production to support outposts on more strategically important bodies (where it will cost less to shoot units and missiles at an enemy), or you plough your mass and energy production into direct, cross-system assaults.

Mass transfers can still work, but in order to make the transfer system transparent IMO you'd have to make it a discrete and elective system (i.e the player chooses to shoot a fixed amount of mass at a body they own). If you made it rate-based, it becomes complicated due to the variable cost of shooting mass against gravity. Now I'm fine with that happening for units because it's an important (and exciting) moment; shooting units is aggressive, it's thrilling, and it directly engages a player in the hilarious fun of ROBOT WAR. But shooting mass? It's like bureaucracy for the 31st century, where you pass mass from one planet to another - and even worse, you're not saving anything! If you're shooting mass up one gravity well, only for it to be shot down again in laser-wielding bot form, why shoot it up in the first place? Much better to have low-cost energy transfer and medium-cost mass fabrication, so that players can either focus on building armies at home or make energy production to support their unit production up in space.

EDIT: I am enjoying this. Talking about shooting robots across space is surprisingly stimulating.

Been away a few days and I thought this thread would have silently passed away. I'm delighted to read everyone's thoughts.

silenceoftheclams, I've especially enjoyed reading your posts, and its great to have such a lucid and intelligent angle on the debate!

Myself, I've not lost any of my enthusiasm for the idea, and I particularly like the suggestion that the strength of the gravitational force on the surface of each body should affect the cost of transporting mass away from it. It wasn't something that had previously occurred to me, but makes perfect sense!

Also, as pointed out, the concept video featured a working mass driver in the form of the unit cannon so the mass transport mechanism already appears. The gravity calculations would now naturally mean that asteroids lend themselves much more readily as sources of mass, firing packets down to the home planet via the unit cannon.

As for the economy calculations, I agree, discrete and elective is definitely the way to go, but this does not have to be boringly bureaucratic. You can build a unit cannon/mass driver and just instruct it to deliver mass as frequently as it can manage to a particular destination.

The underlying calculations are welcome to be monstrously complex as long as all you see is the UI representation which shows you how well each of your bodies is getting on. In SC:FA, nobody could hope to keep up with the underlying maths around how the separate shields/radars/mass fabs/power gens were interacting, especially with the various adjacency bonuses being factored in (and I did devote a number of spreadsheets to calculating the efficiencies of different templates!) But it didn't matter, you still knew what changes to make to move the economy in the desired direction. I don't see why the same shouldn't apply here.

I've made this point before, but someone raised an objection about a catch 22 situation where you wouldn't be able to build various buildings on a new body. This is basically the exact situation in which the game begins and is solved by your commander having resource stores, and what amounts to a small power gen/mass fab combination on board. As long as you can produce similar units for the purposes of colonisation, then this problem is overcome.

This is something I think a lot of the no votes come from. They hear separate economies and think "I'm going to have to manage a beuraucracy" when really, they are already managing an army and a hugely complex economy. You just don't see it because you let the computer do that and then a nice UI shows you what you really need to know.

I personally think there doesn't even need to be a destination building. It would make sense in the fiction, your mass just lands in drop pods ready to use. You point your cannon where you need resources, etc.

But maybe if you like the idea of having something to destroy on the destination planet to cut off resources, there can still be a receiving building but it's just really cheap and the builders (or commander or special builder) have some amount of resources.

I love the way you're all just ignoring the poll up top and congratulating each other on your terrible ideas.

How are they terrible? If you disagree with them, why don't you expand on your own ideas? What's the thinking behind your statement? Why should the poll be the deciding factor in this debate, since games are no more designed by committee than novels are? Your capacity to judge how 'terrible' ideas are isn't innate, you're not born with it, it's a function of how well you can express your criticism of those ideas and how well you can persuade the people who hold them that they are mistaken in their beliefs. You can be as clever as you like, but if you can't share your ideas with others you won't look intelligent to anyone.

You're not even pretending to engage in this debate, as far as I can see. While I'd welcome your input (as you suggest, some more scepticism might come in handy as it helps refine arguments and expose errors) I don't feel that your contribution so far is in any way a rebuttal to the ideas expressed here. In short, if you want to play, you're gonna have to step up your game, son.

^^ EDIT: Please ignore my previous post unless you're zordon, as I don't think anyone else here will benefit from a reminder of what it means to be an intellectually active adult.

I actually find this line of argument to be pretty persuasive. As you rightly say, so long as a complex system has clear outputs, humans can work with it. Although I'm definitely concerned that people may find it difficult to predict the outcomes of their adjustments to such a system, it's certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that in fact it would be reasonably simple to play around with. I definitely think that this would need to be tested to provide a final answer, but I do see good reasons for believing that a gravity-factored, globally streaming economy could work.

Most important I think will be the simplicity of the concepts underlying that factoring. If the underlying logic of expanding production to meet the demands of a distant construction project is simply 'the nearer the better', a player will find that pretty easy to figure out. Likewise, the exact production numbers aren't necessarily important so long as a player has a clear indication of which planets are producing surplus and which are in the red as they can just experiment (or indeed play) with the system until they have a feel for it - like learning to catch a ball, only a ball made of robots and awesome. It will rest, I think, on the transparency of the interface as much as anything - but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that this is a good idea.

I'm still attached to resource-link buildings due to the strategic importance of cutting interplanetary supply lines: I love raiding, harassing and skirmishing in games, and particularly loved that aspect in FA. So increasing the options for players to do that kind of thing is, I think, a very personal angle I will tend to push and explore in this thread (while it still lives!) and others. Man, I loved the strategic cut-and thrust of FA 1v1. But it's clear to me now that the position put forward by vectorjohn and others needs more careful exploring here as well.

Just to be clear, I'm not really advocating any particular implementation of the economy. I only believe strongly that there should NOT be a globally shared economy. And preferably, as silenceoftheclams said, it should involve some sort of target that can be attacked. Not only for people who like the hit and run strategy, but also for players at a disadvantage to inflict disproportionate harm with guerilla tactics to make a comeback.

Also, RE: patting ourselves on the back, the poll reflects the knee-jerk reaction of people who saw the topic, didn't read, and just voted without thinking much. I have been watching it and the numbers have been slowly creeping the other way now. As is usually the case, making a non-identical clone to a previous game takes time to explain and understand.

I've read every post. I'd still prefer a global economy.

I can't read every post. Every page kills me a little inside. It's not even a debate any more as most folks who are against the idea have just stopped posting and left. I'm losing the will to live as people ignore what the results of the poll are saying.

I don't think that it's even a case of arguing a more complicated system couldn't work.

I just think it's making it complicated for no good reason. I started off on the fence with this topic, but after the lengthy discussion why can people not see that it's unnecessary to make it complicated when the existing economic model has been proven to work just fine again and again.

While I personally don't completely agree with the existing economic model (TA/SC1) and would prefer one like (SC2), I agree with your comment.

I just don't agree with this sentiment. It's not a model 'that's been proven to work again and again'. This game is supposed to be new, and it's doing things differently to most other games I can think of. How can there even be 'proof' (a concept that's a lot more complex than people tend to think) in either direction when the game is already looking so different to what's come before?

People have mentioned games like Sins of a Solar Empire, and obviously FA and TA have seen a lot of reference. Sins of a Solar Empire had a global economic model, and in all honesty I've found it gets pretty tired after a while: its combat is basically a simplistic version of other generic RTS combat systems, and its economics, though simple, are also rather dull. Then people have talked about FA and TA as though the idea of a 'global' economy had any meaning in those games - when in actual fact the entire nature of a 'map' in those games already implies the sort of continuity that would make even the question of global versus local economies into a kind of nonsense.

What the 'global, for simplicity's sake' argument fails to grasp is that the differentiation that the transfer of resources makes between parts of a map isn't just a 'supplementary' question. It is a fundamental question. The reason I've posted more in this thread than in any of the other threads, and that I've worked to keep it alive this long, is because this is almost the only important gameplay issue being discussed in this forum at the moment. Whether, and how easily, resources travel across the borders of the planet maps serves to define, in game terms, the importance of those borders. If it's just as easy for a planet-based player to build on his moon as it is to build on his home turf, it means that the separation between 'moon' and 'planet' just isn't a very meaningful one: the moon might as well be an island on the planet's surface that you reach with a special boat. That, to me, is a good reason for wanting to explore localised economies.

Yeah, deciding on a system for the economy isn't adding complexity for the sake of it. It is adding a game mechanic because one is needed. Like others have said, with a global economy this boils down to a large TA map with different colored super weapons. And we already have that game.

The exciting thing about having a space based game is the different mechanics that space implies. The *fundamental* difference between fighting on a single large map and fighting in space *is* how you transfer materials between objects in space. This shouldn't even be a debate! It is like trying to decide "do we make a game that's been done a hundred times before, or do we make a new game?"

Does anyone honestly think the game is going to be any different than supreme commander if all they do is change the appearance of the map?

What I have been trying to discuss is how you transfer materials, personally I wan a type of structure that can link a planet to you resource grid, where as otherwise it depends on the local economy.

Moons also require this building, But asteroids can use one between them over a particular distance.

That's what I want, Possibly tie in a power requirement and abstract the rest however you want to imagine it.

That isn't a bad idea. It has most of the benefits of non-global economy. I would hope the building is expensive or something, otherwise it does essentially nothing.

The question at the top of the thread is should the economies of planets be kept separate, and I would put your (ign) solution in the "yes" camp. The specific ideas for *how* it is implemented are not that important to me since as long as there *is* a good way to do it, the professional game designers should have a good chance of choosing one.

Indeed, costly.

As towards a particular camp? I would be in both, and thus wish to enjoy the benefits of both.

People are complaining that the pro local economy camp are ignoring the pro global economy camp and yet I haven't read a single coherent argument why a local economy model is a bad idea.

The only criticisms I've heard either amount to 'because I don't think I'd like it' or more rational points around complexity, micro or the difficulty of planetary invasion.

I think the rational points have been well rebuffed and the naysayers have ceased their defence and left the topic, someone feel free to prove me wrong.

As for the 'I don't think I'd like it' criticism, well that is essentially undebatable, but smacks of someone being unable to formulate a rational argument.

While I'm starting to warm to the idea of local economy, I still haven't had the argument of planetary invasions "rebuffed" to my satisfaction. Having to take on an entire planet while limited to no resources is going to be very difficult at best. As I put it quite a few pages ago: It's like starting a supcom/TA game 30-60 minutes after your opponent. Even if they don't have units everyone, it'd be silly to think that they didn't have detection everywhere. Especially if you get yourself in to a standoff situation: Both sides have fully developed the planets they control but failed to expand into enemy territory. Are we reduced to slinging KEWs like we did nukes in certain late game supcom/TA matches? I'd very much like to avoid such a static situation.