So, snowballing resources?

Someone brought up a good point in another thread

This is a legitimate concern, once you get 1 or 2 planets under your belt, reasonably protected and covered in metal extractors, how are you possibly going to be able to spend all those resources? It'd be like having a paragon (infinite res generator) in SC, it kinda blows the whole economy aspect out of the water (...or orbit), and sure, throwing asteroids around would be one way to solve that problem, but that's kind of an instant end game and doesn't really solve the problem.

I might just be a nutter, but i'd propose having a separate resource income for every planet, or at least every planet&orbiting satellites. This would mean that you'd send a scouting party of engineers and maybe some troops to another planetoid, and they'd have a certain amount of resources with them when you sent them, much like your commander does at the start of the game.

This would help to keep the game fresh, avoiding the problem of not really feeling like you need to bother too much about a smaller outpost because you just have such heaped piles of metal and energy.

That's not to say that the other bases can't be of use, you can still send troops or maybe even a refill of resources to another planet if it's doing badly, but you'd actually have a nice feeling of "starting over" at a new base, rather than it being just another chunk of rock to build more droids from.

Of course, this adds to the overall management of the game, having to remember how each of your planets is doing and manage separate metal/energy balances, and it would negate the point of having gas giants and metal planets, unless there was a way for them to send the resources to other planets easily.

What do people think, any better ways to interrupt the snowball effect? I can imagine there probably are =P

Well, there's planet-specific rare resource types, with several different rare resources being required for the biggest & baddest units / superweapons.

That means no devastating meganuke bombs until you've built a forge on the lava planet, mined high energy radioisotopes from an asteroid, and extracted rare earths for the ignition mechanism from a comet. Want a Dr. Evil laser satellite? Not until you have those flawless diamonds from the crystal planet for the lens and a Helium-3 reactor on a gas giant to power it. You get the idea.

Snowballing resources would only realistically be an issue if expenditures dip on each planet.

For example, in TA, as the game progresses a player will get more and more resource production (energy/metal), and more and more unit production (constructors/ factories). Assuming constant pressure, those resources never really top out as long as the player is continuing to build units/guns/buildings that continue to draw a steady stream of resources to operate. I.E. the resource gain increases, but so does the resource drain. Snowballing can only ever occur if you hit a lul in action, or find yourself in a situation where the resource sinks you have are no longer necessary (you've killed the other bastard on your planet, now all your big guns are silent). This is solved by moving to other planets, and streaming your resources off site.

Distance could easily impart a penalty on streamed resources, making it necessary to also build production on planet. From a meta game stand point, everything you have as far as production goes needs to be duplicated or triplicated, otherwise when the next jerk comes along and blows up your whole planet, you aren't screwed.

TLDR: If you are still fighting someone, and you have snowballed resources, so do they. Build more factories, big guns, and other things worth big resources and hope you are doing it better, faster, and smarter then they are. Snowballing can only really happen in turtle type games where offensives only really occur when one side views its forces as sufficient to either completely kill another or cripple it so badly that it can't mount a counter offensive.

I know, but if you beat a guy on one planet, you don't have to keep pumping units out there, so in theory yeah you're all going to be on different fronts, but we all know it tends to end up as one big cluster**** in the middle =P
I think it kinda depends on whether you can get units from one planet to another reasonably easily, if so, you can just send droids in rockets through space, which would be cool and allow you to more easily spend all those resources.

Moons covered in factories FTW! =D

That's a good idea, would make it harder to beat an enemy on his homeworld too =P

In my mind, once i've cleaned a planet of another player, im going to leave those units there as a defensive force in case someone tries to take the planet from me. I wouldn't mess with trying to move them off planet. It's likely easier to just move constructor units on to a new planet and assist produce a sizable defensive force while you build up a beach head. A large scale landing would certainly gain attention, which is likely not what you have time to deal with if your busy micro managing a landing force.

One way to mitigate this would be finite resources. But that may have unintended side effects. Some say being reduced to cheap units and your commander in the end would ruin the game, but I find it almost poetic. Hopefully this will be a toggle.

No to finite resources.

That is not something I'd like to see and there is already an in-depth discussion going on here:
Resource system - suggestion to add rare resource types

I think that this (too much income) is not really a problem, it simply means that you have not balanced your focus on production to focus on economy. I know that when I saw that I had excess metal and energy that meant I could start building a RFLRPC or a few (maybe a few dozen) nuclear missile silos.

If you're having a problem with too many resources it means you're not building enough. I don't really see this as being a problem.

Something that seems to not be addressed in this thread is that for a normal sized map spread over two planets, well each planet would only have half the mass. having one or two planets under your belt is the equivalent of having half of an 80k map under your belt.

increasing the amount of planets doesn't magicly change the amount of metal that is available for use.

It does though.

If you have only one planet, you'd have, say, 20 mass deposits. If there are two planets on the map, each planet would only contain 10. That's what you mean right?

So what if there are 100 planets? Or even 20; 1 mass deposit per planet is a really bad idea.

my point was that on amap of comparative size in sup com, there would be the same amount of mass.

take setons, that has about 62 mass deposits over 8 players. A 3 planet map in PA may support 8 players and would have around 20 mass deposits per planet.

This, build more factories/engineer.

Simple solution is to just make sure that the tech tree gives you more and more awesome and expensive things to build as the game progresses. The logical conclusion of that is to have extraordinarily expensive game-ender units. Runaway resource problem solved. Supcom's idea of experimental units seems to have initially been for this purpose. I won't comment on how well that was implemented, but the idea does seem sound. There's a point in supcom I recall, when your resource income is simply too much to worry about building Tech 1 stuff, so you throw it into your experimentals.

A bigger problem than snowballing resources however, is snowballing construction ability. When you put your resources into construction units consistently, you eventually find yourself in a situation where you can build stuff faster than you can utilize it. Again, this is less of a problem if the tech tree is quite lengthy (like Civilization) and contains plenty of resource sinks that you can actually use.

I still dont see how the map being split up into planets is so different from islands on a flat plain (as far as snowballing resources is concerned). Namely that resources dont snowball any different than they would in ta or supcom

Because islands on a 2D map become obstacles which can project a sphere of influence around them. Build a few artillery pieces and lots of anti-air and nobody can do much without taking care of that island first. Why would I really care about waging a land war when I can just pulverize this crappy planet and its two mass spots from space? Why would I care about properly defending it when it only has two mass spots and will just get pulverized from space? Or worse, they just go around it.

What about your home planet? If you have lots of surrounding planets - and presumably you use a SOASE system where you have to planet-hop - what stops a player from just turning their home planet into a giant energy battery covered with metal makers?

Sorry, but it's just one possibilities over one hundred.

How can you tell that defending a planet will be easier or harder than defending an island? You don't even know what kind of orbital units will be in the game.

The issue does seem to say that resources could snowball if the game isn't balanced right.

But how do you balance it for scale, without actually balancing every system by hand (which would, in large games, probably result in very few mass deposits per planet). Local economics is the only way to actually fix this, though it isn't an ideal solution I'll agree.