"The Economy Is Too Hard" <-- Lie

Metal(like mass in SupCom) will most likely be the bottleneck resource while energy and buildpower will be the secondary resources. What I mean with bottleneck resource is that the access to metal patches will limit how fast your metal income can grow while there isn't much limiting where you can place more energy generators or how many constructors or factories you can make.

Buildpower is a local resource however as you need constructors or factories at the place you wish to construct units on and if you wanna make more buildpower you have to spend buildpower in order to get more of it.

Managing the energy isn't really comparable to the energy bar in C&C. The energy basically doesn't fluctuate. Every building has a fixed constant drain and you can basically only manage the energy by building more powerplants to increase power or by selling structures to decrease consumption.

Sounds easy enough(or is it?).

I usually have my economy has a slight negative, like between -1 and -10 to ensure that I am able to also quickly drain any reclaimed resources.

FAF says that I waste as little as 6 mass during a game like the AI, so generally that What I have been doing.


But I still feel like we can do more to help new players get into the game rather then giving basic institutions, telling players that they need to build extractors, then power plants in-order to fund a factory doesn't tell anything about how many you should generally aim to use per factory, how many factory's, good unit compositions to start with and buildings they should aim to build to support particular strategy's.

Just stuff to give them a running start into how to actually play the game, rather then a generic control tutorial of how to press buttons A, B and C.

And hell have them actually do it in a tutorial, build a base of 7 factory's, have all factory's building 2 tanks and a AA unit, build an army of 100, move and destroy enemy base.

Just to get them into the macro way of thinking and acting, that took me years to build up to when I was younger, not knowing how many I should build, how massive the game should be played in comparison to other titles.

This.

I don't understand someone that someone would even try to deny that a streaming economy is harder for MOST players. Personal evidence is anecdotal. In a pay-up front system, if you got the ressource and pay, the unit will be build no matter what at the correct speed. In a streaming economy, the system will let you build anything anytime, even when you don't have the money for it, and more importantly: a unit you started building when your economy was ok won't finish in time if you build too many things after that. Engineer can even assist the production! Like many gentlemen said before me, the sheer number of variables determining production is superior to starcraft's and similar games', but I think the one fact that changes everything is the possibility to stall your economy.

Ok so my thoughts on this subject are as follows:

1. 16 year olds mostly do not play RTS. They play MOBAs.

2. Hard core 16 year olds do not play TA. They play Star Craft.

3. We want the regular 16 year olds to give up some of the time they play MOBAs to play PA.

I play with a number of 16 year olds when I play League. They are very friendly, enjoy team work as well as accomplishing goals together. One of them is significantly superior to me in ability to play MOBAs. However, in general these kids get frustrated easily. Things like economy crashes, build orders, etc can be extremely daunting when you add the fact that they have never managed armies or unit diversity before.

The best way to support these kids playing is the following:
A. The AI options needs to be tiered. TA games generally give people the option to customize. These kids do not want to customize. They wouldn't know what to change or how to change it. They want tiers of difficult. One of the biggest problems with MOBAs is the AIs are really bad (for the bads these kids would say). They like to see their rank increasing such as facing higher tiered AIs.
B. The match making system needs to work hard to put them in games with players of their relative skill level. If they get pitted up against higher level players and don't ever feel like their games are closely fought and well won they will get put out quickly.
C. Provide lots of community feedback tools. Uber has talked about a modders store like DOTA. I also think they should look at how Riot has thumbs up on their forums and implements popular ideas as actual game content. This in my opinion is one of Riot's greatest strengths as a software developing company. They don't let the community push them around, but if 10,000 people ask for a $10 skin, it usually gets made.

I do not think these goals are easy but I think Uber has the right talent to accomplish these goals.

With the right tools, its up to the community to grow the community.

great post, deserves its own thread. i would also like to add in summation: approachability should be the highest design priority, the second should be elegance (little complexity for lots of depth) and the third should be fun. Dwarf fortress is what you get if you ignore the first two.

I just hope for competitions sake we can have a non Neutered economy. Starcraft doesnt change the multitude of heavy micro apm sinks for the bad players. In fact, it just adds more. I still cant see whats so hard to understand about Expensive=You need to have the resourses to pay for it.

Why are we trying to cater to the people who cant comprehend basic math? Sure there is a few underlying figures in supcom such as buildtime, but play more than 5 games and you can easily figure out what is the detriment to your economy. Its like people were building monkeylords when they have +15 mass income with no storage in the bank.

Are people too scared to practice? Because from these eco threads you would almost think so... The beauty and depth of many games rely on the challenge of learning the game itself for its intricacies. I for one, hope we dont focus on the League of Rage kids accessabillity. They are a toxic group of yolo freaks.

I would prefer a easy plug and play economy.

I need X metal, so I build stuff that makes X metal.

Easy.

Last I checked, that's what expanding to additional resource points accomplished. Or claiming a wreckage field.

I would like to see storage play a more tactical role when attacking a base, where destroying things like energy storage fields gives you a chance to attack while their energy weapons suffer. (because honestly a good player should keep their mass as low as possible) I would like a game that offers deep strategy for both attack and defense, not simplifies things for players who don't appreciate what gameplay was ruined for their lack of ability. To many admissions for these people will end up in neither side wanting to play. The first because its still to hard, and the second because the depth is gone.

As I said before, at 10 I was not a Hardcore player, and I understood TA's economy perfectly. It does not need a change. If anything, I played TA because the pay upfront in starcraft 1 destroyed the flow of the game for me. Half the fun of TA was getting an economy up to where I could produce whatever I wanted as fast as I could.

'Most of the people on this forum' is very doubtful. But...

Well this depends on what they're after in their game.

If they like playing single-player then no, it isn't hard; because they have control over all the difficulty and map settings, determining the pressures that require them to maintain their economy to begin with.

If they want to beat online players then of course it's 'hard' -- in the same way Starcraft and Age of Empires are 'hard': everyone has to understand all the optimal build orders, timed executions and engine nuances of their respective games in a constant struggle to gain the advantage over the other.

Why they think it's hard is also probably because they think the goal of the game is to never stall. It isn't. There's so much claptrap made over stalling, but it's not even that big of a deal. Even the best players encounter stalling, so abolishing stalling from your play isn't that important. I stated at the beginning why this freaks out people, and it's because the Total Annihilation economy does such a good job of informing players of their inefficiencies that they don't know how to cope with it, even though they play the same way in other strategy games, which have this similar information obscured from the player.

This is where a child has a better time playing Total Annihilation, because they don't understand the implications of stalling, so they don't care.

The ARM campaign did a pretty good job of getting players settled into the game, and even as a baby's first real time strategy game -- not by instructing the player to do "x" and "y" all the way -- but by slowly introducing new units and concepts and presenting scenarioes where the player had to figure them out on their own. What's important about these missions is they felt like you were playing the game -- not listening to some boring tutorial. The shortness of the early missions also lended themselves a semblence of structure, where the player could keep clearing the board and move on to the next stage; which is where Supreme Commander's very long missions with expanding playfields failed and ended up being disorienting.

You're not asking for a tutorial here, but a strategy guide. And you do realise not even Starcraft goes this in-depth in teaching players? Your demands from the economy are unfair. They're not even feasible: strategies which are useful can only come from the playerbase delving into the game, scrutinising it and making the discoveries for themselves, updating and changing them as even more strategies get discovered. This is why Chess remains endearing. Besides, what happened to formulating your own strategies and solutions to problems being fun? That's supposed to be the whole appeal of strategy games.

I cut out all the fat for you, because those aren't prerequisites to playing the game. But here's the accurate guide:

Code:

Build production when resource plusses are greater
Build extractors or powerplants, or pull back production when resource minuses are greater

Utterly irrelevant.

Why should anyone only coming over from one game -- and the game Planetary Annihilation isn't derived from -- be equally qualified in evaluating the development of this game? If they're not going to bother understanding the history and various implementations of the system they complain on forums about, they have an inferior opinion.

Because one million plus sales, two dozen best game awards and glowing reception to Planetary Annihilation "Spiritual successor to Total Annihilation"'s kickstarter pitch is personal evidence. -- Because they all only exist inside my head.

Lol, "We want MOBA players to play this game."

Work on that Defence of the Progenitors custom map, will you, and maybe you'll get your wish, and it overtakes Planetary Annihilation in multiplayer servers. Doubtful though, since DotA already drank that river dry.

Maybe it hasn't occured to you that most people -most humans- simply aren't strategy gamers. And the teens you hang with, from the sound of it, hate real time strategy. Indeed, MOBAs have more in common with MMO treadmills, both wretched abortions of genres whose current 'games' remove all thought, challenge, and thus meaningful payoff, and their only saving grace in the eyes of the slackers is being free-to-pay.

Going after them then is a royal waste of time. And why do we even want to? I thought the success of Planetary Annihilation's kickstarter meant we already secured the market we want, and knew which game we wanted, and thus escaped the bureaucratic pressures of trying to target everyone.

The Total Annihilation economy IS all of these. This is what my objection has been all about. Total Annihilation in fact has fewer moving parts than Starcraft. You're the one who hates the depth arising from little complexity -- while all the championed MOBAs keep adding all these heroes, items and special abilities which don't do anything to change the dynamic of pushing lanes.

In which case, you're STILL better off with a streaming economy. I doubt the input requirments of pay-up-front scale very well.

Yes, and success of Dark Souls and X-COM also means that those games are eeeeeasy.

I apologize in advance for not even bothering to read your topic.
I just agreed immediately, and know exactly what you mean.

I agree, in fact this goes with any genre and any game where the developers constantly use that excuse "it is too hard for the players, they will be confused". It's a very patronizing attitude to have, and I always cringe when I hear it.
It's like, gee thanks devs, you just assume that i'm a blithering idiot without even giving me the benefit of a doubt?

(I'm not talking about PA here, i'm discussing the general praxis of the games industry)

It's like, when we were dumb little kids we managed to play Sim City, Master of Orion, Civilization (which undeniably were MORE complex than their recent "reimaginings").
We managed to play those games as dumb kids!
Yet in the modern times, developers don't even think that adults could comprehend those kind of systems!

As I said, it always always brings a bad taste to my mouth, seeing how developers just assume their playerbase are idiots that wouldn't possibly be able to comprehend even the most basic thing.
It's like games these days are being catered to people that never even went to elementary school.
It's very very sad.

It's also why I adore indie games (PA included).
Indie devs don't have this restriction. They design complex games as needed to fullfill their vision (Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Crawl, Paradox games).
They don't automatically assume that I'm an idiot before I've even started up the game and proved them right.
They simply provide an experience tailored to what was needed to achieve their vision, and they TRUST the players to be intelligent enough to figure it out.

They don't compromise the integrity of their game in their assumption of their own fans being idiots.