"The Economy Is Too Hard" <-- Lie

ITT: circlejerk about supcom eco

Calling me a 'hardcore' player is an insult to hardcore players. (I'm the guy who, years after SupCom came out, still prefers to fort up in his base and tech up... even though it doesn't work. I'm reflexively a turtle.)

And I never found it hard.

Hardcore players don't find anything difficult. :lol:

If you compare the streaming games side by side, Supcom had layers of complexity that made it by far the hardest to understand and master. It had the most initial rules, the most nuances/glitches/oddities, the smallest storage, and the most "don't do X's" of any game.

In terms of difficulty:
FA >>> FA(fan patch) >>>>>> TA > ZK


PA will end up somewhere higher or lower than TA, depending on how difficult the "always on" engineers will be to manage.

It took a while to get back to this.

I see.

It doesn't change the fact that bugs are not the game mechanics, and shouldn't be judged as such.

I just realised how damaging this can be to energy dependant extractors.

But it's not like this couldn't've been done away with with a proper implementation of resource priorities and toggles. The very thing being requested in the economy thread. Which you know... if Uber Entertainment cared.

Metal makers only really matter though to consume overflowing energy. And the curcumstance of running a metal maker farm is you're already building a giant power base with which to do whatever you want.

It still doesn't matter if time itself is free or even cheap; the price of time being determined by your opponent's adjusted difficulty/competence. Turn based or not.

Read the last two paragraths of my original post. Stalling in pay-up-front does happen.

Yes I can. What do upgrades and adjency bonuses have to do with streaming resources and the Total Annihilation economy being hard to understand? Surely then, these implementations would equally make pay-up-front hard too?

This says everything about you. If you're not interested in the history of the economy system to understand it, you probably shouldn't be having an opinion on it. Otherwise you would realise Total Annihilation had a vastly different pace to Supreme Commander.

Jon Mavor stated the motivation for copying Total Annihilation is that's what they're a fan of, and nothing else.

Well then you have a screwy definition of what's learning and mastering.

Learning is the player who just enters the game, is briefed about the rules and goals, familiarises themself with the user interface and commands, tries to understand the game's ruleset such as what is the function of a power generator, metal extractor and factory, and the rules of all the units.

When you're looking outside of the game, on the internet for advice on build orders, you're trying to master the game. After all, since when have build orders ever been crucial to playing, or even beating the campaign and skirmishes in any strategy game? Not to mention it takes away the fun of letting players figure the game out for themselves; when a build order tells you to do everything. The economy is the same deal because the game rules can't teach you to be mistake averse -which is what you ask for- and this irrevocably means knowing the correct build orders to go with it, which means you want to master the game. As for saying looking up guides on the internet for build orders is easy - you mean to tell me it isn't equally easy to find guides for tips on the economy?



Once again, all of you explaining the impacts of stalling continue to miss the point; all of you citing build orders, fluctuating income, storage, varied energy to metal costs, energy dependent extractors, bugs continue to miss the point, and that is why is any of this important to newcomers? What does any of this have to do with the lowest level of play?

You all underestimate how much effort if takes to build the necessary large infrastructure to rapidly deplete your energy and thus "insta-stall", which newbies would have to know to do in the first place, assuming everyone starts small. Even when there was a massive energy sucking device or build project you encountered, it wasn't hard to know which thing to turn off because it was almost always the one you just built or started building. Really though, if anyone was determined to never energy stall in their entire life, they could keep building power plants far longer than anyone else would and continue with their game - stall free.

To simply play the game, you don't need to think about reclaiming, metal makers or constantly striking an economic balance. I mean, take a look at this guy revisiting the Total Annihilation campaign. He's barely pushing more than the minimum effort into his game and is wasting resources constantly while on +10 speed, but is still progressing on his own pace.

I must emphasise that stalling can't be frustrating in itself; it can only lead to other frustrating scenarios; controlled by others aspects of the game than just the economy system. As far as barriers go, the poorly structured campaign missions and tutorials of Supreme Commander failing to slowly introduce concepts and the tech tree of the game were probably more damning than anything.

As far as there being a lot more things to manage than other strategy games, this is only a case for Supreme Commander due to virtue of being an overall bigger game. If you took Starcraft, Command & Conquer and Age of Empires, removed their population caps, gave them undepletable and undiminishing resources and similarly large maps, you would get similar big results...and likely more issues. Even just inspecting Total Annihilation, which had a much closer scale to contemporary strategy titles, would make you realise such increase in management is simply not the case.

As far as management and attention goes, I just do not believe Starcraft's economy requires less of either: The act of capping an expansion on the map involves building many components; consisting of a headquarters, refinery and a ton of workers; and waiting for all these components to finish before you can finaly send your workers in. This opposed to just plonking down metal extractors and the appropriate power plants. Knowing how many workers you need for every mineral patch and geyser, counting how many workers you have and will need, and allocating them everywhere involves a lot of number crunching. Mass producing anything requires the player's constant attention, thanks to the pay-up-front system. Any second you wait before clicking "build unit" after enough resources are stockpiled in is stalling, and the resource 'ticks' from workers gathering back and forth are less predictable. Most of these are little decisions which require a lot of attention. Compare this to Total Annihilation: With these two concepts in mind, you can keep the economy stable under almost any condition: If your resource pluses are greater, build more buildpower and factories; if your resource minuses are greater, build more resource structures, or pull back more production. These decisions, each correction is brief and only requires one or few clicks.

And don't tell me permitting the queueing of production before you have the resources will solve anything. Assuming for one moment it's correct people can't find the energy sucking device to shut off - you think tracking down every last production building on repeat queues which magically eats away your stockpiles will be more fun?



So again, here are the updated arguments over stalling detracting newcomers:

"It's frustrating because the economy doesn't tolerate mistakes"
The economy is indifferent to mistakes. Only your opponent doesn't tolerate mistakes...just like they wouldn't tolerate your mistakes in any game. If you want to lax the tolerance for margin of error, pick easier opponents.

"It's frustrating because everything slows down and/or it causes me to lose"
This ties into the above statement. How tolerant the game is to mistakes depends on the opponent.

"It's frustrating because I can't do anything"
You can always pause more resource sucking devices or build projects. Even doing a select+all and stopping for good measure. As far as tracking the worst consumers and maintaining efficiency goes, indicators like in Supreme Economy would greatly benefit everyone. Hell, even priority states would benefit. But this has nothing to do with low level play.

"It's frustrating because there is too much going on"
Play smaller maps, and you will get similar small results. Although, the fact every single-player documented on the internet praising real time strategy enjoys long, drawn out games; and maps like Seven Islands are legendary, shows this to not be such an issue.

The same thing I have been arguing from the beginning of this thread, and has remain unchanged: A streaming economy is not harder on the player. Anyone claiming it is is a no good liar. Any effort to rectify the economy under the motivation of appeasing such claims is responding to false pretenses, and mark my words: the proposed measures from John Comes won't work. It will be realised that only totally drastic measures short of completely removing the economy will be enough to satiate them. And for what? So they can have a quick ego boost before quickly getting bored of the game? And the end result of such rectifications isn't something 'easier', nor 'accessible', nor 'intuitive', nor 'less hardcore' or any other synonym you want to attribute to them... it's something just plain worse. The point is also so long as the industry and misguided gamers continue believing the economy is hardcore, the economy we champion so much and want to see in more games -let alone successors to the very game originating it- will keep getting 'developed' under such false evaluations...that is to say ruined.

And you know what else? As for supposedy being called out, I'm calling out Mavor and anyone on the team who concerns themselves with this matter, who haven't yet clarified their stance or bothered defending it. Just like I already called out Chris Taylor. Both Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander each made over one million sales. Now Square Enix haven't released nor confirmed anything on sales figures for Supreme Commander 2, as far as I can tell - but one million isn't small potatoes for a PC strategy game, especially for one in 1997, and could not possibly have been reached if the games' most fundemental mechanic -its economy system- was earnestly a barrier to players, as it would have to be. Nor could these game have, say, metacritic scores of 86/9.3 and 86/8.1 respectively. Then there's Planetary Annihilation's Kickstarter pitch, which recieved glowing enthusiasm and anticipation all around, and is currently the website's 7th most funded video game. $2.2 million was handed over by 44,000 backers with the full knowledge that Uber Entertainment stated their intent to make, besides a game themed around interplanetary warfare, a successor to Total Annihilation - and would have full reign over every aspect of game design - without anyone so much as raising an eyebrow over the economy system.

The pomposity of anyone who would then suggest on forums the economy is a barrier to newcomers is that I would be had dismissing the one million sales, the professional and user scores, the best game awards, and the money and critical reception to Planetary Annihilation's kickstarter - and asserting a disgruntled customer base over the economy system which has seemingly gone noticed by no one...all because a bunch of forumites cry "the economy is too hard!".

But all this is just me rehashing myself. It's not like most of the responses here can't already be scrutinised by my original post. Everything essential is in it and spelled out in plain english. I made it for you.

daleeburg already did a much poignant job of assessing the conundrum than any frivolous explanation over what degree stalling affects the game. If every one of you simply admitted to growing up mentally incapacitated thanks to a rigorous education system, that would clear up everything. Although, what would be preferable is for all to regain your senses and realise keeping your resource pluses greater than your minuses isn't terribly difficult, and fully apologise to everyone for tieing up fans, developers and the real time strategy genre itself by acting as a hindrance to the development and refinement of the genre, then promise to never propagate such falsehoods again.

And congratulations, you allowed the entire premise of my whole argument to fly over your head. You know how I mentioned from the beginning that even children can figure the economy out, thus implying its base accessibility?

but they still affect game mechanics, and so are still relevant the the problems of the game.

FAF game I played earlier was fresh and fun economically.

We just need a better tool to teach players the better ways of managing their economy, and no systems in the economy that are unnecessary like adjacency bonuses.

Oh jesus christ.

Bugs are only relevant to one game - only relevant to one architecture of code - while mechanics are universal. And bugs only account for buggy games. What's so hard to understand about this?

Do you honestly think a Planetary Annihilation with the same mechanics will also contact the same bugs?

No, If I haven't made it clear, but they are problems to be aware of and to avoid.

But you cannot ignore them like they never existed otherwise we run the risk of doing it again.

Crappy teaching tools along with unaccounted bugs practically ruined supcom for low level players who couldn't account for the lost resources and who didn't know how to properly play the game.

So to make claims that PA will be immune to such things because (We learned from our mistakes) is naive and from a skill point of view elitist.

You're missing the point. For many players, Supcom was their first foray into the streaming economy. It also had a series of bugs that flat out broke certain aspects of the game. The feedback reflected the difficulties of not only the economy, but the broken mechanics underlying the economy as well.

The feedback was not correct, nor was it entirely wrong. It is not the first time player's job to know what is right or wrong with the game. The problem is that the feedback was interpreted under the false pretense that the economy was working properly. It wasn't.

When you see someone complaining about the streaming economy, the first question should be "were you playing Supcom?". If they say "yes", then you get to go "ohhhhhhhh, that'll do it". The streaming economy is much easier to grasp when it isn't completely broken.

I think there's some confusion here. Are we just judging Supreme Commander, or judging the application of mechanics in other games because of Supreme Commander?

If the former, whatever. If the latter, well read everything I've posted again.

So what's the point in rectifying to the economy of your Total Annihilation derived game? Since the bugs were from a different game.

Frankly, to think Uber Entertainment isn't capable of being immune from such things with their engineering experience - or even shouldn't - is to place the barrier of expectation for the evolution of game development far lower than anyone can imagine. That's how low you evaluate the team. Well done you.

Then again - they think there is a problem with the economy system, instead of anything else about the previous game.

Nice, trying to make me feel bad for not having overly high expectations based on an industry that continues to disappoint and fail.

I am truly evil!

If they do good, it'll be great, but I'll shed no tear if they trip where others have before.

See here - the expectation that new itterations of games we play should above all be updates to previous ones, involving technical updates as well as shoring up of weak areas, which further perfect our imperfect hobby is a perfectly reasonable one. Otherwise, we may as well give up on the idea of game development altogether.

I have highlighted the key point I agree on, but what usually doesn't happen.

I really dislike the condescending tone you take in this, but I'll address it anyway.

You're missing a huge point. Supcom had a bigger audience than TA. And a lot of people coming here also came from Supcom. PA certainly is the successor to TA, as the devs have said, but a lot of the popularity is coming from Supcom and Supcom2. Thus, the problems in that game have to be addressed. Pretending that supcom has no influence on this game, especially when mavor and others have come from GPG, is shortsighted. TA isn't the only streaming economy game to exist, and both have to be taken into account.

This is hardly fair, and I'm baffled that you came to this conclusion. Never did I say I wasn't interested in the history of TA, and I certainly am interested. I'm simply ignorant of it. And judging by this thread, I'm guessing I'm not the only one. Which, as I've been trying to say, means that there are probably a lot of people that don't. I'll research the mechanics of TA, and if I find anything relevant I'll come back with it.

You really seem to have the misconception that TA is the only influence on PA. If you were to look at PA's own kickstarter, this is hardly the case.

I guess it really depends on your definition of learning. Most people can't get past bronze league in Starcraft2 without a build order. My definition of mastering revolves around less of understanding how a game works, and more on the application of that understanding. I could tell you all day how awesome the ice fisher strat is for the zerg, but I can't get past silver. Mastering comes from practice, largely, but in order to practice, you have to know what you're practicing.

You could look at it this way: you are told how the pieces in chess move, which is the mechanics of the game. Build orders are nothing more than min/maxing to use the mechanics of a game to your advantage, the complex equivalent of knowing how a chess piece moves. That doesn't make a build order mastery: you have to take that build order and practice it to master it. Of course, the true masters are the ones who define the build orders.

To me, learning is taking the initiative to understand how the mechanics work. Mastery is the understanding and application of those mechanics.

Now, I'm not saying that build orders apply everywhere. I never used a build order in supcom. But it did take time to learn the mechanics, more time than it should have. Which is really all I'm saying, and why I'm glad that PA is making changes: it makes the streaming economy easier to approach.

But this is in fact crucial to newcomers. Take chess. It's especially easy to learn. There are really only 6 unique pieces. A newcomer can easily understand this.

Similarly, it's easy to understand a standard RTS economy with infinite storage. This thingy makes mass. This thingy makes energy. In AoE, you make villagers, throw them at crap, you get crap, you build crap, viola. In starcraft, the only real thing you need to understand is that each mineral field/gas extractor has peak efficiency with three workers. Other than that, the economy is very simple.

A streaming economy adds new variables. The very points that you mention are in fact mechanics to the economy: storage, energy dependent extractors: these are mechanics of the game, that aren't as easy to understand as a standard economy. to save energy, you can shut off an extractor at the cost of energy. In starcraft, all you have to do to make more resources is to make more workers, and occasionally expand. The complexity level is completely different. Supcom only compounded on this with all the weird mechanics, but I'm sure TA had some similarly interesting pieces. Cause and effect: What happens when you shut off a building that takes energy to use? How does that effect strategy? Heck, the fact that you can continue to build if you are in the negative is a huge mechanic, that is directly related to how much storage you have.

The point is, the number of mechanics is different. The reason that streaming is more complex, is from the simple fact that it has more mechanics that drastically alter how the game plays out. Starcraft is a weird example, because the game ends up being more complex due to the intense micro involved, but on a mechanic level, it's rather simple to understand.

That's really all that I'm saying. There are more mechanics in streaming in general. Thus, it's more complex. It might not even be for some people that it takes more effort; it may simply take more time to understand it, time that people aren't willing to devote just to learn a game.

Now I'm starting to regret bringing starcraft into this.

Starcraft is kind of the weird cousin, because it demands a lot of micro from the player. Just as you mention with supcom, a whole lot of this micro could easily be done away with, but people enjoy it, find it as a skill cap or something. Which is great for them. But it skews the mechanics: it's actually rather simple in and of itself. 3 workers to one patch, 45 total per base. worker goes in, stuff comes out. stuff costs stuff. What ends up bogging players down is that timing is everything with the micro.

I will also readily show my contempt of the pay up front system. It's so clunky. It's why I love the streaming economy, because things flow instead of having a break every time you build enough to exhaust your reserves. So don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of the streaming economy. I wish every game used it.

That's a big paintbrush to use and you know it. I can hardly claim to know how everyone thinks, and neither can you: don't call people liars just because you can't accept that other people are different.

Bah. sales figures are hardly indication of how easy or hard the economy is.
If you do want to pull numbers out of a hat, starcraft sold over 10 million. Yes, Blizzard is a big, popular corporation, but then again, AoE III apparently sold 2.2 million. If we go by numbers, then pay up front economy is the more popular choice. As one of my teachers pointed out today...someone she knew said that, because global warming has risen, and pirates of the high seas have decreased, then there are less pirates because of global warming. Neither of which have anything to do with each other.

Correlation does not prove causation

Ad Hominem does your argument no good, it only weakens it to someone who notices. No one here wants pay up front economy. I want it to die in a hole. And PA looks to be doing a great job to make the streaming economy easier for players to understand. Which is a good thing.

Answer me this, if you will: Do you appreciate the changes PA is making to the economy system?

"Not interested" was the wrong term then. You're ignorant to Total Annihilation. Yet, you continue asserting the difficulty of streaming resources.

Look, you miserable fraud, when those with limited experience with certain mechanics - those who can't even prove the stake of their claim with sales - get an equal or greater stake in evaluating those mechanics in the development of all forthcoming games for everyone than those who have played every game, expansion pack, and possibly the more important mods and mutations spinned off from them, to have gained an extensive knowledge of all the nuances, exploits and shortcommings to know with certainty which things work and which don't - you don't get to claim what's fair. Never mind that your argument is wrong already in that a lot of people coming over from Supreme Commander isn't the same as a lot of people having problems with Supreme Commander. But then you argument doesn't even make sense to begin with: "because a lot of people are coming from another game, the team needs to address things which aren't even relevant to their own game." Right...

The only things carried over from Supreme Commander for certain are full scale zoom and the industry experience gained from programming the game. - All the commander upgrades, factory upgrades, extractor upgrades, awkward adjancy bonuses, and other sh!t brought up in this thread, Jon Mavor already put his foot down on them over the course of development.

Take issue with the fact I'm calling all the complainees out as no good liars all you want. But what's apparent is everyone who didn't think the economy was too hard put their money where their mouth was. The rest went on forums.

And you're wrong, sales is everything. Sales is people trusting the product enough to turn over their hard money for it. People don't throw their money away lightly - well...except for losers who gorge on indie artgames and steam discounts, and they don't count. So however easy or hard you want to call the economy - the most important mechanic tying the game together - it certainly wasn't "too hard" as to drive away one million sales, and to drive review scores down. Otherwise Total Annihilation wouldn't be a footnote for anything except for trivia on the history of bad game design, and Planetary Annihilation's kickstarter - upon being heard the game would be derivative to Total Annihilation - would be DEAD. Sh!t like this goes noticed.

A broken economy equals a broken game, and a broken game can't sell. And as for not matching Starcraft and Age of Empires's sales - you think that has nothing to do with the fact those games don't require the latest hardware to run, have effective marketing, draws(historical warfare), production values, brand recognition, Blizzard's early penetration into the dedicated online multiplayer market, and unmatched post-release support? Meanwhile Chris Taylor and co. keep re-inventing universes, which are aesthetically...you know...sh!t. (Further proving the underlying mechanics are solid: the weight of the games' merit depends on them even more.)



When I'm discovering a game for my first time, I won't know, or care what a league is. Keep your league speak out of this. All I will care about is:
Can I kick the ball and aim it towards the opponent's net in football?
Can I accelerate, turn left and right, and complete a lap in motor racing?
Can I pick up the opponent's flag and run back home in capture the flag?
Can I take off and land without crashing in flight simulattion? (Okay - this is an example showcasing why flight simulation is a niche.)
Can I build a base and enough units and sent them against my opponent in real time strategy?

And indeed, all these games can be enjoyed without knowing the first thing about formations, driving lines, the shortest paths on a map, build orders or being stall and overflow averse. In the end, this is all that matters. Do I need to refer you to this playthrough again for further example?



All anyone needs to understand is when your resource plusses are greater, build more production, and when resource minuses are greater, build more resource structures, or pull back more production. That's all there is to cover almost all situations a streaming economy would throw at you.

And none of those other mechanics you picked on are harder to understand:
Limited storage isn't hard to understand: A bar indicates how close to full your bin is. A number on top of that bar shows you the maximum amount you can store. Or I guess the silo mechanic in Command & Conquer games was hard for you.
Energy dependent extractors aren't hard to understand: An extractor which runs at +2 metal, -0.5 energy isn't harder to understand than an extactor which just runs at +2 metal. They're both math.
The implication of shutting off an energy consuming building isn't hard to understand: The difference is the energy consumption rate of that building, and comparing your energy expenses before and after. All math again.
None of these are HARD beyond their ability to change around values. All they can do is REBALANCE the game.

Your comparisons between Starcraft's and Total Annihilation's economies are unfair beacuse you're judging Starcraft's mechanics on their individual components, and Total Annihilation's by their overall stragic implications and interrelations, which will of course be more complex. A fair comparison would be judging both systems under both evaluations(their individual components; and their wider implications).

And for the record, I had no idea when growing up on Starcraft to make three workers per mineral patch. Don't tell me how "simpler" it is.

Like I posted from the beginning: they won't stop the compaints they hope to.

As for what I think of the individual changes, I already posted much about it in the economy thread. So here's the only remarkable ones I haven't already commented on:

Chaining metal to build time makes sense, since time = money.
Disconnecting energy from unit costs is excessive though, when standardised cost ratios would've done the job. It means assisting builders can't be balanced between factories.
Streaming the building of ammo an storing charged shots is novel.
Uniform metal spot yields aren't all that effective at making the game easier, and removes a tool for balancing maps.

All these changes though are miserable for the purpose of making a game accessible, because they only switch around values. These are changes one might make for top level competitive play.

What is reprehensible, ultimately, is the motivation behind the changes; instead of working to refinine the mechanics, we're trying to compromise them because we falsely believe the economy system is "too hard".

You have repeated your points several times now, so are you just arguing for arguments sake now?

Not that many seem to convinced of your opinion.

I would respond intelligently to what you said, but it appears that you have given up on a good conversation by resorting to personal attacks. I'm done. See you in game.

ad hominem

(logical fallacy) A fallacious objection to an argument or factual claim by appealing to a characteristic or belief of the person making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim; an attempt to argue against an opponent's idea by discrediting the opponent himself.

Well my objections contain substance - such as inferring the market conditions that would be required to assert a difficult economy system, what newbies expect from games, and discussing the merit of Starcraft's mechanics being easier. - And I've also provided evidence - such as sales figures, metacritic scores, and then raw footage of what a casual playthrough looks like. This precludes the condition of being ad hominem.

You're the one taking issue with -5% of the content of my posts to conveniently ignore the rest of my pointers. But I assure you, the nature of the subject material demands accusations such as "liar", "fraud", and "no good" be used in literal definition: "liar" because the validity of their claims have been dubious at best - "no good" because they have no intention of making the games in question better for everyone - and "fraud" because of their self-importance. I didn't even intend to hypothetically suggest the world population may be "mentally incapacitated" - you can chalk that up to daleeburg. For you see - the subject is people who post on forums to complain the economy is too hard, despite their history of no evidence and baseless suspicion. By making their complaints the foremost subject - and because their complaints are ultimately about peoples' relation to a video game - which extends to themselves - they make themselves and people the subject of scrutiny. Now if you don't want the complainees to be called liars and no good, you better come back with substantial evidence proving they're a serious market.

Hell, if anything, everyone who DOESN'T take issue with the streaming economy - who are just fans of the games they love - are accused here of being "hardcore" and "circlejerking".

And if I'm repeating my points, it's because people keep either making the same arguments or ignoring that my posts may have already addressed them, or don't grasp the implications of them; which necessitates they get repeated - and I'm trying to move the discussion forward.

I'll skip on past the tone of your comment ayceeem, which literally made me cringe, and turn the topic into a more constructive direction.

Why is it that people believe the game's economy is hard even though it isn't?

How can we help them so they can become good at using the games economy?

What would be the most effective way of doing this in the game? If at all.

And is there a way the forum can properly help people having problems with the game without well....bringing out posts like this from more devoted fans like yourself?

I can see that you really really like these games, but you seem to get rather aggravated when people who may or may not be good at the game using their experience find the economy difficult, and it's sad to see that most of the people on this forum seem to also have a problem with what is a fair question in their eyes when it is easy to you.

So do you feel like we need a section of the forum to devote to...new player questions and the like so when people are having problems or complaints they can post over there where it is expected, and people can try to answer their questions more fairly, leaving the main body of the forum clearer to proper debate between the players who have seen it all and done it all, and don't like to see the same questions every week?

(Another thing I find odd is the amount people complain when someone brings up a previously discussed topic, but then fail to provide a link to the discussion they say to go and use. Its fairly common to happen in forums, yet people always seem to get up in arms about it. Seems strange to me.)

So yeah, lets leave this on a better then sour note this time.

I'm just intrested on uber's interpretation on this round

It sounds like mass(?) Is the only resource this time (well sort of)
Energy on the other hand runs the base and powers the nanoliths when building. (kinda like C&C energy bar)

Sounds alot more simple to me.

As for stalling economy stop spending more than you can afford.

You can't master the game until you learn its basics. Starcraft is a good example of a game with simple rules:

Code:

Build workers
Expand to new bases
Spend all your money

Follow these guidelines, and you won't be led astray. Everything sort of naturally spreads out from there.

Total Annihilation similarly had a very basic guide to using your economy:

Code:

Build extractors
Keep energy slightly in the positive
Spend all your metal
Reclaim everything you find
Build new factories every time your metal gets high

There's a bit more complexity over starcraft, but you'll keep progressing in skill with these rules for a long time. The streaming economy doesn't get much more difficult to manage with scale, further helping as things get intense in the mid-late game.

Now, can anyone give a nice guide to using the Supcom economy? Keep it oriented to SC and FA, because that's when it was at its peak and people made their minds up about the game.