"The Economy Is Too Hard" <-- Lie

I have a confession to make: I never understood the controversy over streaming resources being hard to learn. I think the argument that it drives players away is bullsh!t. And I want to put everything to rest here once and for all.

I'm talking about the endless debates across these forums which assert to this day that that the streaming economy system is in any way 'hardcore', and thus needs to be more accessible; the idea that the basic task of getting resources, setting up a base, and getting to those much vaunted robot battles is too hard. My response to you is you're wrong. Even a child knows how to do this.

I base this on my own first time experience playing Total Annihilation as a newbie RTS gamer. I got the hang of how resources worked pretty well after the second ARM mission; which was incidentally the first mission the player is required to build stuff. These are the concepts I had to pick up on to learn the economy:

• Metal comes in through metal extractors.
• Energy comes in through solar collectors.
• Metal and energy goes out through building things.
• Metal extractors only work when built over metallic squares.
• Energy also goes out through powering things like laser towers and the commander's d-gun.

THAT WAS IT... That was all I had to learn to be able to have a good game. I actually couldn't believe at the time how simple the system was - and every resource flow was visualised on the map too, so it was easy to correlate everything going on. Command & Conquer had you deploying an MCV and building prerequisite structures, while resource collecting was done with these silly harvesters. But Total Annihilation stripped the build palette down to the most basic resource structures and factories and it just works™. Getting better at the game from then on was just a matter of optimising my management of these basic fundementals.

So the economy definitely isn't hard to learn - you can play a game sufficiently with just basic knowledge. What the economy may be however is hard to master, and I don't consider this a bad thing at all; all the best games in the world are described to be this way - like Chess.

I really blame Chris Taylor for starting this myth against the Total Annihilation economy, when he was marketing his upcoming Supreme Commander 2. Prior to this, nobody complained about how resources streamed, and the idea of it being hard wasn't a thought. But he needed something to convince the market his new game was where it's at - and give crap online players who post on message boards an excuse for why they were sucking - that it's the game's mechanics holding them back, and they too would be skillful players - if only resources didn't stream.

And that's the extent of this whole controversy - it's people on message boards finding something to complain about because they can. I never heard of a professional nor customer review score Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander poorly while citing streaming resources as a factor. Total Annihilation could not have won over 50 awards -many of which for best game- if its economy system, which is so crucial to playing the game, was thought of so poorly. Even then, why are the only two places on the internet where Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are mentioned you ever hear about it the official Gas Powered Games, and now Uber Entertainment boards? And the only magazine and gaming network publications being those interviewing Chris Taylor himself, and were about Supreme Commander 2? For what is supposedly such a huge game breaker in a high profile title, surely it would have widespread recognition - going all the way back to 1997 - contrary to what has actually been seen. Meanwhile, genuine game breakers like Civilization 5's broken one-unit-per-tile system and Simcity 5's wonky simulation are noticed everywhere - in every internet discussion about those respective games. When you realise the inconsistency of the reality they would have to project, you can see the wretchedness of their proposition.

Usually when you hear these complainees, their narrative for why the economy is hard is "I keep stalling against an opponent who manages their economy better!". Did no one get the underlying message? These are newbies going straight online where they easily get mauled by seasoned veterans. Play skirmishes with A.I. opponents, and you never have to worry about the game throwing you off balance, because it sounds like this is what they would rather do. Or better yet, stick to playing with friends and names you know - or newbie map settings with single choke points, no rush timers, no air, no nukes. I don't know why anyone bases their assessment of the entire game on their inability to beat a top percent of pros - they could just as well conclude that basketball sucks because they can't compete against NBA stars. Either way, being able to beat other thinking humans is supposed to be an accomplishment, not a prerequisite to playing a game - anyone who says it is doesn't know the definition of a game and needs to go screw themselves.

And really, anyone who considers the economy to be a huge barrier of entry underestimates the plethora of ways newbies can get lost in real time strategy games. For my first lan games of Age of Empires II, I tried to build everything from one builder, one farm, one fisherman, lumberjack, gold, and stone miner(try completing a wonder out of all that!). When I was entering Starcraft, I had no idea how to access the building menu, and then had huge trouble fighting off the first A.I. wave. They also underestimate the sheer determination and imagination of the human mind, because at no point in these games did I feel the need to give up - I actually had huge amounts of fun trying to figure the games out.

John Comes's proposed economy changes won't have the desired effect of stopping these complaints, because the complaints were built on a load of false pretense from the beginning - players won't be prevented from playing poorly. Game developers, as well as the community just need to stop pussyfooting around this entire lie, which can only screw up the integrity of games and waste everyone's time. Also, the idea that you can't stall a pay up front economy is rubbish. I watched casters back when I was searching for Starcraft II beta footage, and they would blurt out tips and strategies to their viewers - one of these was to never queue up unit production, because you're locking away resources which then can't be used in a pinch, and remain useless while the queued units aren't being built. THAT to me is not obvious information(why put unit production queues in the game if the player is not meant to use them?)... and represents a greater newbie trap than anything brought up over Total Annihilation's streaming economy. Yet games are full of these little tips that players are expected to know. So if the anti-stalling pricks were totally honest, they would make just as much of an issue over Starcraft's economy - yet they don't do this.

Then I suppose if there is one thing that can be attributed to the Total Annihilation economy, it is it does such a good job of informing the player of their inefficiencies -wheras other games don't bother to convey this game information to the player(until the player gets creamed by their opponent, that is)- that gamers who never had to play a real time strategy game efficiently before(except they do if they want to win online; they just have to find this out through guides) get freaked out over the numbers on their screen and then blame the game for how they were playing all along.

I agree. RTS games of late take much of base building/resource management out of the picture, deluding the product down to drone mind levels. Let's take away all the resource collection, we can cap player units to a 100, here, why don't you take this coloring book and go sit in the corner.

We're not asking for KaM economy here but this shouldn't be a welfare RTS

I think the main "confusion" that exists with the streaming expenditure model is that you also have direct storage. Like you I found the TA system easy to grasp, however I will admit that it took me a little while to work out that I can build up to my income and also anything cheaper than my current storage total before I'll stall myself. Prior to that realisation, I never really bothered with storage buildings, and always panicked when my build output was higher than my income. I was effectively always wasting metal.

I like SupCom 2 as a game, and I can see how people may be more comfortable with a "pay immediately" model, however in every direct expenditure RTS I've played, they also have infinite storage capacity so that players cannot waste resource. I suspect it is this aspect that jars with some players when they criticise a streamed expenditure model. It did not prevent them from making economic mistakes that could come back to haunt them (e.g. wasting 40% of your mass income due to not spending it or having the spare storage); in that respect it could be characterised as "more hardcore" than a direct expenditure game with infinite storage.

I didn't read your wall of arguments. However:

I 100% agree with this, so I don't even have to care for your arguments ^^

I had a new player try out the TA economy. He's not a major gamer, but picked up the basics pretty fast. He didn't waste metal, he didn't run out of energy, and didn't overbuild. He even learned the reclaim pretty quickly ("Oh, it's the same color as the ore spots."). The game was built well. I think if TA had a tutorial, any player could have learned the basics pretty quickly.

When I was learning the Supcom economy, it was HARD. It wasn't because of the system, but because of how it was implemented. Supcom's economy was plagued with inconsistent rules, bugs, glitches, adjacency autism, stalling nightmares, and flat out noob killers. If the issues were fixed, it would still have been rough because of the 1-click energy stalls hidden around every corner. It was by no means easy to learn, and was absolutely more complicated than it had to be.

A game economy can be fairly complex and still easy to learn. However, it can't be loaded with all the bull@#$t issues that the Supcom economy had.

numptyscrub, knowing how to maximise the efficiency of your resource spendage is an advanced player concept, which no one is expected to get right the first time round.

And wasting all the resources in the world shouldn't matter to you if you're in no danger of losing. It's not that important to the overall fun of the game. It only matters when facing other human opponents(which at this point, in any other RTS you would have to learn similar level concepts.)

bobucles, oh please do elaborate on these supposed rules, bugs and issues plaguing the game. What examples are you possibly thinking which haven't already been addressed in my post? Although I think everyone agrees adjancy bonuses in Supreme Commander was the most pointless mechanic(and done much better in Zero-K).

And in which context are we thinking hard? If hard as in against human players, then that's already been addressed.

This, that's a frequent complaint that Christ Taylor had received after he develop SC and FA. The over the top unnecessarily eco complexity kills the gaming experience for some people and makes it for others frustrating difficult to learn, due to unforgiving economy that seemly won't tolerate for making simple mistakes and stalling them that it seems that it takes forever to get anything done. Stall slow down the pacing ridiculously, that not good game design.

I stopped reading there. Variable production rates, variable depletion rates, and exponential growth are difficult to estimate but more importantly require micromanagement. Here's the typical RTS: linear growth, uniform depletion (instant usually), and consistent build rates. The typical RTS is far easier to grasp but more importantly it is far easier to micromanage. Rate based economies introduce a third resource in build power which by its nature must be micromanaged. Storage limitations for example also encourage micromanagement. It's important to note, economic micromanagement is the equally detail-concerned cousin of unit micro and should be minimized for the same reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromanagement

To make things more approachable Uber is normalizing mass depletion rates and linearizing growth. They could probably go a step further and combine resource storage with resource producing structures. These changes will shift the focus from economic micromanagement to actually playing the game for a minimal loss of depth.

So while I may not disagree with your points OP, I feel you're approaching this in the wrong way. PA should be about macromanagement not unit micromanagement like StarCraft and not economic micromanagement like Forged Alliance. I think Uber has the right approach.

I don't wanna make yet another post about Supcom's economy. Suffice to say that the biggest issues were related to the "resource vanishing" and "Haha, you have no energy" bugs. Some of them were patched and tweaked as time went on, but what players remember is how the game worked before they quit. Making the eco work, when the game was doing insane things you didn't even know about? That qualifies as HARD.

I'm seeing a lot of guys call Forged Alliance's economy complex. I agree with the OP it isn't hard to learn or complex. It was however off putting (unapproachable), required attention (detail-oriented) and took focus from actually fighting your opponent. You could often win the game by micromanaging the economy better than your opponent - instead of actually outplaying them. Let's leave the (economic) micromanagement to the scrub games and the macromanagement to PA.

I had T1 rush at me. Survived, but a lot of stuff got damaged. Sent one T1 engineer to fix everything: fixing factories - everything fine; fixing extractors - fine; fixing generators - fine; fixing static defense - fine; fixing damaged commander - MINUS 300 ENERGY STALL.
Few matches before it I had energy stall because of my own mistake, so I decided to build T3 generator. And, surprisingly, sa soon as I started building it, stall ended, through there was nothing else I did and at the time there was no finishing projects too. And the more engineers I assigned to this generator construction, the more energy I got. I have no idea why.
And re-assigning engineers between different projects can give you insane stall, or spare resources.
And if you're stalling, the numbers sometimes blink and change like crazy. And sometimes they don't, again, no idea why.
And this Cybran experimental that consumes 10000 energy every second or so.
And sometimes when I order T1 extractor to upgrade, my income only reduces by 1 instead of 9.
And I don't know, how much income will reclaim give me and how much time it will take, until I start it. And if only one tree or entire forest will be reclaimed (how they get metal from trees, by the way?).

I feel like this entire post was flame bait.

But the TA economy was far easier to learn then the SupCom economy.

And the economy management of SupCom is really terrible, and that's enough to make me like playing SupCom2 much more then the first, or FA.

It's more a case of I'd been playing RTS games for a few years prior to TA (Warcraft, Dune II etc.) so when I finally twigged, I felt a bit of an idiot for not spotting it earlier. I wouldn't have considered myself as a novice player at that point

I liked them. Prior to SupCom I hadn't seen an RTS with the same mechanic (unless you count Earth 2160 bases) so I usually go out of my way to take advantage of them when I play SupCom / FA. It can make a considerable difference in efficiency for some buildings

I think the "best" (subjectively) part about the TA style streamed spending model is that you do not have to amass a fortune first before being able to start on expensive builds. SupCom2 requires you to already have X mass to build an experimental, TA or SupCom let you start building immediately and just prorated the build speed if you were light on income. Since PA is going for the same model, I can't see anything to complain about there

I also agree that it is not somehow more difficult to learn, even players new to an RTS should be able to pick up the basics during the first play session. It does allow you to make mistakes, however like you I don't necessarily believe "dumbed down" equals "better" in that respect; learning is part of the fun for me, and I suspect quite a few others (whether they realise it or not) :mrgreen:

Check build rate numbers on info popup vs current income (or storage), decide whether to build or not. I never found SupCom / FA so complex that a stall was unexpected, or impossible to recover from. Possibly I'm some sort of idiot-savant in that sense though?

Actually, thinking about it some more I do always have "wasted mass" reported at the end of matches in FA (and far more wasted energy than energy spent). So I guess you could assume from that that I am a cautious builder, and am not in fact playing on the bleeding edge of efficiency where a stall would have such a knock-on effect. So 2 polarised veiws that could be drawn from that:
a) I am a bad player, so it doesn't affect me the way it affects top tier players, or
b) I'm a good enough player to adjust to cope with economy idiosyncracies, even if it reduces overall efficiency compared to a riskier spending style

I'm happy with either conclusion. I am not a top tier player, so a) is pefectly acceptable. b) is more flattering, and I can confirm that I deliberately and specifically try not to tank my econ, and ensure I always over-build energy production because of it.

Note: when your energy usage is fluctuating madly as part of a stall, it's because energy-using buildings are turning themselves off to save energy, and then back on when you have some in reserve again. Manually turning the expensive ones off yourself (T3 mass makers, shields) will help get you more energy back so that you aren't stalling anymore

I said it's difficult to estimate and that's not really the problem with the Forged Alliance economy anyway. If you read the rest of my post I go on to assert that the attention necessary to manage your economy and what you are actually managing (production and depletion rates that may not be visible because of assistance) are detail heavy. Please read my post.

This demonstrates my point, high economic efficiency is the result of economic micromanagement - which you yourself admit you can't achieve. Even if you were an economic-micro savant that still doesn't account for your opponent's active sabotage. The problem with Forged Alliance's economy was that it was detail-heavy and relegated actually playing the game secondary to micromanaging the economy.

You're missing a 'damn' in your title

It's not really that the streaming resource system is difficult to understand, I think it was simply how it was implemented in supcom. The problem was that it wasn't intuitive: the adjacency system was weird and kind of forced you to use it, mass and energy usage was based on the unit being built and not the constructor, the bug that made mass fabers being upgraded stop producing if you crashed your energy, even if you paused their upgrade, massing engineers onto an experimental which despite crashing your economy actually allowed you to build them faster...the list goes on.

And thankfully, Uber is trying to make it a lot more transparent. Each constructor is going to have a fixed output rate for both resources, entirely independent of whatever is being made: this alone will make the system much easier to get into.

Zero-K is the game with the easiest streaming economy in my experience if you don't count TA:Kingdoms which only had mana as a streaming resource.
In Zero-K builders and factories always drain at a constant rate with 1 energy to 1 metal ratio.
I'd say you doesn't lose much depth on a uniform energy to metal ratio.
However I'd agree that you lose some depth which manifests itself in air units in Zero-K as AA is forced to be strong and airplanes are forced to rearm after dropping their bombs.
Zero-K devs have stated a desire to remove dedicated AA so that everything can attack everything but they haven't really found a way to do it.

PA is going to have constructors which will drain resources at fixed rate no matter what project they are on. I think it is a good thing because hopefully you can remove complexity without removing depth.
Varied energy costs can still be tied to different factories.

Wow I didn't even know this was a "thing".
I just can't even imagine PA (being a spiritual successor to TA) not have a streaming economy.
For me it has to be streaming, it is easier to graps and much much deeper than what other RTS offer.
Everyone can and will grasp the basics in minutes because you don't need crappy artificial rules to make if seem like a "deeper system" and not a complete copy of 99% of the other RTS's economy systems, and it will still take you time to master the proper ways to be as efficient as possible and waste as little of the collected ressources as possible.
I think streaming ressources is a winner as far as I am concerned.

As someone working on these games now for 17 years the streaming economy is definitely a barrier for new players. You can choose to believe that, or you can choose not to. Obviously we are still doing it because I think it makes for a better game.

Realistically, they are all economies. You gain economy in other games in units at a certain rate anyway.

Streaming means you get a small amount every single second, and small storage means you must spend-per-second what you earn-per-second, as in you get 17 metal and 35 energy and you build a total of what costs 17 metal and 35 energy. The hard part is making sure to keep track of what you spend, if you spend too much you will start building slower, and if you dont get ready to spend on something new when something old is nearly finished your enemy will have it first.

Fixed means you get a larger amount every 30 seconds or so, and you use it as you have the amount you want available. Same deal, if you dont get as much economy as fast as possible, you wont have enough to keep up with the enemy, and if you try to use more than you have, you will build slower.

Know how I explain it to my friends? I tell them it is like Red Alert 2, where you have a "power bar", except that "power rate" is also used for metal, so you have a "metal rate", and instead of it being a bar, it is a number. Same purpose though, the larger the number is like the larger the bar, and it means the more metal you can spend. You spend metal in this game, just like you spend power in that game. It is mostly true, you just keep spending until your spending bar is your entire "power bar".

Speaking of which, consider making the "rate" a "bar" in this game via options menu or whatever.

@swordy12345: How doesn't the economy tolerate mistakes? ...How are you playing the game? ...Are you playing online? Read my post.

@bobucles: Why are you confusing bugs with the economy system? Bugs are not the economy system - bugs are not game difficulty. And way to not clarify what these bugs are.

@veta: If you are not going to bother to read my post before making points which may or may not have already been tacked, get out. In your case, your very first attributes to the streaming economy fall under being advanced player concepts. And micromanagement my ***; almost every economic decision was important. (Well - except for manual metal maker management and reclaim boost; which are both mechanical tedium.)

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I'm noticing a common thread among these responses - their issues involve handling resources in large numbers. So let's analyse the Total Annihilation lineage of games a bit more to find out what else is distinct about them.

If you notice - every other RTS game implements some form of limits, arbitrary or natural, to stop player exponential growth. Let's analyse a few:

In Starcraft, the limits are a 200 Population cap(where larger units take more space) and finite mineral deposits, and generally few expansion locations.
In Age of Empires, resources are depletable(especially rare earth elements), and there is also a 200 unit cap.
Command & Conquer: Tiberium/ore fields run dry quickly; tiberium/ore replenishing squares trickle lethargically.
Rise of Nations: 200 unit cap(from the top of my head); exponential unit costs for each extra unit fielded.
Dawn of War: Very hard population cap of 20/20 per player(being on the team with fewer players sucks) and small maps.
Warzone 2100: 10 power generators and 5 research facilities max per player(being on the team with fewer players, again, sucks).

So what separates Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander from every other game is they don't employ any checks on player growth like we see in those games; the room for growth is theoretically unlimited - their unit caps are sufficiently large to be unnoticeable and only exist for hardware limitations; but games usually get bogged down before they can even be reached.

And what becomes apparent is veterans of all other real time strategy games never had to learn to deal with unlimitedly scaleable operations. So then, isn't the issue these complainees have not with resources streaming, but with their own inability to cope with the scalability of production? And if so, could it not be remedied by them playing smaller or metal scant maps?

I mean- if we were totally fair in comparing economies, Starcraft should have a 1000+ population cap, infinite mineral deposits and 5-10x the mapsizes and expansion spots. Could you honestly say that managing 5x amount of workers everywhere; 5x the amount of clicking on unit production; stimpacks; siege modes; special abilities and casting units in general, for 5x the army sizes is easier than what you manage in Total Annihilation's streaming economy now?

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Lastly, everyone championing stable construction rates is missing the point. Yes, it lends itself to swifter clarity to the player to then maximise their efficiency, which is itself a noble goal. But actually getting to the point where you need to maximise efficiency requires you to be an imtermeddiate competitive player. It is not something that newbies would quit the game over - which is what everyone would be lead to believe.

All this emphasis is placed on stalling and how stalling is bad. But why is stalling so bad? You really think some economic inefficiency is such a huge barrier to anyone just entering and playing the game?

That is my point.