The 'new' flow based economy

Lol never knew that

The bucket Analogy got me thinking.

That the standard flow is just that, flow in one pipe, flow out equally divided.
A simple change to help stop stalling, or try to build too much at once.

Instead of flowing equally to all, it would look at you production queue.
Then flow resources draining your resources.
Too each item in turn in your queue while you have you have resources.
But when you bucket is empty. But you still have a income.
Resources flow production in the queue order, until total production equals your total income.
Anything further down in the queue would have to wait until something finished or is cancelled or income increases.

I see this like cascading the flow down the build queue.

There could also be a switch, between tired and standard flow.

Maybe it's something like this or better...

But would that be easier to learn?

I sort of like the idea two posts above, but something would have to be done to allow panic-building (e.g. Base about to be stormed, tell thirty engineers to rush up some turrets - wouldn't work if they had to wait for all the other projects to finish).

Priority? But that would leed to much more micro eventually.

Also possible: emergency limit of resources. The storage aint drain to zero but to an user adjusted limit. If there is an emergency or if you just feel like it you csn sssign engis to that pool.

That becomes a big ol' liability when you want to build one massive project in there somewhere.

Just to illustrate the point, lets say the comet rockets cost roughly 500 tanks.

Also, you don't have enough metal/mass in storage to build that. As such, with your proposed system, your queue will continue to cycle until it reaches the comet rocket. At that point, all your resources are going to be funnelled into it until it's built, and all your factories are going to shut down and wait.

That's hundreds of tanks that aren't going to be built until way later. To build the comet rocket, you're going to sacrifice the ability to maintain your army size.


Now lets say that a comet rocket only costs 5 tanks. It suddenly becomes no big deal because the disruption to your production is so small. However, if comet rockets were that cheap, they'd be used instead of tanks. Size matters.

Now i would really like to know what it is! Come on tell us, what do you have to lose?

(Besides your job, I mean)

if they would discuss every change that they come up with with us before testing it out it would slow the whole development down quite a bit. It's way better if they first discuss and test internally and present us with something that is more than just an idea. If we don't like that idea we still can tear it apart xD

Especially with what happened when Neutrino mentioned the Commander Abilities, so many people immediately jumped off the deep for no real reason. Even after Neutrino tried to reassure them...

Mike

The priority option for queued construction is an excellent idea. Not only could it be used for rapidly constructing base defenses for an immanent attack, but it could also be used to finish up buildings that are very close to finished construction if “the bucket” is empty.
In TA the commander had a constant priority for whatever he was nanolithing which was useful, however it was difficult to haul him from one side of the base to the other to help speed the construction. It would be nice to have this option for multiple construction units. Now most of the construction units would have their own nanolithing speed i.e. land vehicles > Kbots, Adv. Aircraft > Aircraft. Maybe it would be nice to use upgrades to increase nanolithing speed, but if it’s not possible to use a priority system then I would prefer to stick with the original TA way of nanolithing speeds than switching to a research and upgrade system.

Another idea would be to limit the amount of metal/mass available on each planet so that players are encouraged to build storage buildings instead of wasting resources.

I want to explain the idea but I'm not sure I have enough hours in the day to deal with the ensuing giant discussion. Once we've had more time to playtest it and find the holes then we can talk about it more.

The idea actually came from Scathis BTW. It's not a radical change though. Things like prioritization are orthogonal to this.

Now we know where to start the witchhunt if it sucks. ;D

Aww c'mon, you know it's like one of our only sources of entertainment from PA at this point right?

Well, i have to disagree. What did actually happen? neutrino gave some partial information and based of that peoples imagination went wide and some came to wrong (or very wrong) conclusions. What harm did it actually do though. Sure he invested some time clarifying that could probably have also been spent coding, but regarding the actual game sales it will hardly have any discernible influence. People who read this already bought the game, so while some might temporarily get the idea that supporting this game was a bad idea for arbitrary reasons most of us just get entertained. While this argument admittedly also works in the other direction (we already paid why entertain us beyond what was promised), i think spilling a couple beans now and then wouldn't do much harm.

For positive examples of how that can work out see the minecraft or KSP forums. Sure people there sometimes went apeshit, especially concerning update release dates. But the community wouldn't be that big if it wasn't for a steady trickle of information - no matter how mundane -from the developers...

So in short: i'd like more tidbits, but this is the internet so if they don't care to or want to i don't mind, as there is nothing i could do anyway...

just explain it off hand to someone prominent in the community, like mike, and let him deal with the discussion, being outside part of the official team his word isn't as gospel (even if said gospel is subject to change) as yours so you don't get as committed. Other disclaimers can be attached if needs be.

What happened is hat Neutrino considered cutting the abilities due to the knee jerk reactions. Now of it NEEDS to be cut because it's not ready or the balance just doesn't work out sure cut away, but it would be incredibly unfortunate if we lost features to vocal(and potentially incorrect) minorities like that.

Mike

There is also the chance of the opposite. However you are right in that it is a risk, and i wasn't necessarily expecting them to tell you, but i can hope.

My thought of running it through a forum member allows for accurate discussion of topic without necessarily creating any statement for people to obsess about. For example if you or i had made a thread about commander upgrades i somehow feel that there would have also been less kneejerk reactions from those same members that caused the problem.

Sorry, I was more-so responding to guzwaatensen but quoting from my phone is troublesome! xD

Mike

The internet is a horrible place filled with terrible people. No matter what happens, someone will always be mad. It's usually the dumb one. Don't worry about it. And most importantly, don't put any blood in the water. Humans are top level predators, and trolling is a cruel mistress. Feeling bad about something being wrong is automatically a hundred times worse than saying "huh, that blew up".

A near shame, too. There are interesting things that can be done with comms. It's just that putting asymmetry on the most important unit, out of all things, is an extremely risky move. Asymmetry becomes exponentially difficult to handle as the differences become more significant, making it very difficult and time consuming to tweak. But we've had that discussion already.


The economy threads are getting circular and there isn't much else to discuss about them. It would be nice to hear what the devs have considered/rejected and are still arguing over. Don't forget a pretty diagram!