Suggestion about how to handle the "mass" resource.

I was thinking about the water planets and the gas giants and how the mass/metal resource is dealt with. Normally energy is a building that generates it so that is something that can be generated anywhere. mass/metal is normally a tile that is exploited with a building that generates off the tile. My suggestion is to take out the building that generates income and have the only way to get "mass" is to reclaim it. The way it would work is that various terrain types(dirt/rock/trees/even water) would have a mass value and you would simply reclaim your mass from it. so in essence you could simply reclaim an entire planet if you wanted too, and as you reclaim the dirt it would deform the planet making huge craters and if possible just destroy it bit by bit.

Of course different types of materials would just have different efficiencies so that dirt(the planet itself) could be used in a pinch but would only yield maybe 1 mass a second per engineer but stone would give you perhaps 3 or 4 mass a second whatever the balance is to be determined to be. This way you could create as many types of mineral deposits as you would like and still keep just the one resource type. you could make rare resources much more efficient and thus more apt to be fought over and since everything gets depleted over time the battle grounds would be forced to change or at least force exploration to find better stuff.

Thoughts?

PLEASE, do not make all text larger...
Your way of managing mass would remove the ability to have infinite battles, therefore I oppose it.

Indeed. It's a cool idea, but I doubt it'd work well, and further, infinite wars are impossible, so yeah, that's a no for me too.

I like the idea of some mass deposits giving out more mass per second than other mass deposits...

...Yo dog I heard you like mass. So we put some mass in yo mass... anyway ...

but I hate the idea of them degrading over time, every game would end with a whimper and not a bang as the last apocalyptic doom battle is a slap fight between a half a dozen of the cheapest tier 1 units in the game.

Hey I could actually read his text on my tv-screen without Opera's zoom feature. xD

On topic:
I think thats a bad idea. There are maps in SupCom which try this and they just dont really work at all. However I think it might be possible to add the factors "amount of reclaimables" and "amount of mass-points" to the input of the procedural map generation, so that you could just put in a 10000 and a 0 and get what you want more or less.

I am fine with different deposits giving different amounts of metal/mass. Some planets may be poor in metal, others rich in it. It worked in TA. But I think there should definitely not be any limit, and we should definitely keep the mines/extractors.

sorry about the larger text, i didn't know how big it would actually be, usually the default is to small. To clear some things up, the mass while depletable would still be effectively infinite on a planet. Sucking up all the dirt would take forever so you would have your near infinite resources, not to mention if someone ever could deplete a planet there is more than one. you would be more likely to reclaim an entire moon than a planet. it's more or less added to make things more interesting.

What i am specifically talking about is the mineral deposits. such as copper or gold or some such thing that would most likely deplete on a planet. so that once all the good stuff is gone then all you have left is the soil on the planet which is not ideal, but only in very extreme cases of a game that goes on for 10 hours would a single planet turn into a dried up husk. i assume it would be destroyed long before that happened lol!

I do not think sucking up dirt is a good option even if it took 50 hours to deplete a planet (what would be left?).

TA had tiles that had increased energy or metal generation if certain buildings were built on them. We've also already talked about metal, lava and gas giants and how they also may have similar increased resource generation.

In a way we also have a concept of usable rare materials in the sense that there won't be an infinite number of asteroids.

@sal0x2328

Pretty much nothing i guess(perhaps the planet would shrink over time or the holes would get bigger) or maybe a burnt out blackened sphere. or maybe the dirt aspect has so much mass its infinite.

no no no no no no no nopity nope hell no no way not on your life not for all the tea in china no god damn it

ha ha ok fine fine it's not the first terrible idea i have ever had and i doubt it will be the last. I plan on posting many many terrible ideas in the future, SO BEWARE!

Well as long as one of them is accidentaly good you should be fine.