The 'new' flow based economy

Hmmm, I like the sound of the reduced range idea. It's certainly: Interesting, different and not obviously a bad idea at first glance. Could be fun to play with!

So I think energy is a capacity?

Like if you use 10 energy and generate 20, then that's 100% energy.

But if you need 20 energy, but generate 10 then that's 50% energy? things work half as fast, but they still work?

But wait, now I am confused because that sounds like the normal economy for energy.

But I do understand that metal can only be spent as fast as your energy will power the engineers and factory's, so energy is the limiter.

If a factory gets 50% of its energy, it will put out 50% of its metal.
If a factory gets 50% of its metal, it will still drain 100% of its energy.

This is done so you can't get into a feedback loop when you've drained both metal and energy.

Thanks!

Was there ever such a feedback loop? Supcom issues were due to an putting a huge number of unyielding expenses on a prorating economy, along with a several game breaking resource vanishing bugs. Total Annihilation did not have any such issues, and was incredibly resilient against any emergent problems.

Shields and radars and cloaks meant that Supcom had very little economic flex right from the start. An unyielding expense didn't listen to the prorating system, and every device that ignored it was another ticking time bomb on the economy. Shields would reset, radars would flicker, and the Cybran cloak didn't even know what was going on. However, everything still used 100% energy without fail. A +10K energy economy might actually be stuck with -7000 in unyielding upkeep, so killing the extra +3K would cause a fatal economy crash. There was no way to recover or do any production without turning everything off.

For the game breaking bug, just upgrade extractors during a metal shortage. An upgrading extractor could not prorate during a metal shortage, so it became frozen as a metal producing structure with negative production. Upgrading too many extractors and then suffering a slight stall would send resources into a black hole and destroy the economy, and pausing extractors did not work when things got started. The safest solution is to immediately pause upgrading, and finish it with outside workers.

In TotalA, virtually every device that demanded upkeep, produced its own upkeep. Weapons that demanded energy took from storage, making them a low priority system that only uses excess energy. Every constructor could prorate properly, and there were no disappearing resource bugs. In addition, everything with construction power produced a bit of resources. While the metal production was overkill, the energy production made it impossible to permastall.

In fact, the only a TotalA economy could ever stall was by using the Core Contingency targeting computers, and even those prorated properly IIRC.

So I don't see where the feedback loop is coming from. As far as I understand it, there's no such thing. There was just a game with a bunch of bugs in its economy.

I think the feed back loop referenced is when by adding more of something into the economy made it worse.

Like how in certain situations, producing metal just over the power limit would crash the economy, causing the metal makers to stop, energy comes back with the makers off-line, and then the metal makes start again because there is power.

The proposed solution means that with less power, the metal makers would scale down, keeping the flow of resources at a level set by the power rather then an on-off effect.


I think that this is a good idea for minimising what you need to learn to build an economy, and will probably save you a lot of trouble when every scales down in efficiency rather then switching off and on constantly as this would allow such a player to recover somewhat slowly, rather then by having to manually turn things off to free up resources from defences and unit production to fix the problem.

Adding a gradient between the on 100% and off 0% states.

FYI, if you didn't believe the resource vanishing bug for Supcom, it's still there in 3599. That caused more issues for new players than anything else.

In TA it wasn't that big a deal, because everything prorated properly. Supcom is where things got really screwed up.

I am not sure of this bug.

Can you elaborate?

I attached a replay, you should be able to download it.

If not, just do this:
Play Forged Alliance (I did UEF).
Build 2 generators, a point defense, and a land factory. That'll get your mass low.
Build an extractor.
Upgrade it.

Cry.

Isn't that just you running out of mass?

I don't think that is a bug.

Try pausing it. Try reclaiming stuff. Try doing it with 2 or 3 extractors producing on the side. The upgrading mex is working negative, and pausing doesn't do anything. The metal simply vanishes.

I'm not kidding. The metal is simply gone.

Well an upgrading mex is supposed to work negative, because it's not technically on when it is upgrading.

However the pausing not working I feel like I have encountered before, but more like the pause not working rather then it drawing resources when it has been stopped.

Correct, though it's fixed in later unofficial patches (such as FAF). Instead of producing +2 and using -10 for the upgrade (for a net of -8), the +2 disappears, and the extractor uses -10.

If that was the bug, then I feel like it was intended.

Because you can use something when you are upgrading it (Like factory) so the same held true for extractors.

Except the part where you can't pause it to stop losing mass.

True!

And that it lost mass during a stall, making the stall even worse and destroying anyone who was caught unaware. It really explains why the economy was so harsh on new players, who didn't know how to budget and when to upgrade things. Hit the wrong things at the wrong time, and your income crashed into unplayable territory.

We don't have any sort of upgrades in PA, and so far there are not systems that can refuse prorating resources. I wonder how the economy can possibly get screwed up in the way Supcom managed.

It's fixed for a long time in FAF, and also in the steam version.

This is completely different from other games, so don't look for the feedback loop there.

If metal and energy followed each other you'd get into this:
1. Energy is drained, therefore produces less metal.
2. Metal is drained, so reduce the energy used. (<- this is what we're not doing)
3. Now that metal is lower, energy usage is lessened.
4. Go to 1.

So metal follows energy usage, energy does not follow metal. You are still operating the structure, so it still uses as much as it can.

I can understand the part where having too much production is wasteful. By forcing the extra generators either way, it prevents energy stalls when there's a huge surge of metal (like from reclaim). It has been some kind of issue both TA and Supcom, so it's a nice change to have.

But if I had an energy shortage, I can actually increase my production by pausing fabbers to increase the energy % rate? That's the part I don't get. Production can be increased during an energy stall by shutting down less efficient fabbers in favor of more efficient ones. If I mathed correctly(not shown), it gives both higher income and faster production during the stall. I dunno, that sort of feedback just seems strange.

The player's assets are ultimately determined by how much metal they can get, so an unyielding expense like fabbers will inevitably cut into metal. The initial step is shown below:

Code:

Fabber: -5M -20E (when active)
Total Income: +10M +50E 
Mex upkeep: -25E

2 fabbers gives a 77% prorate [ +50E/(-40E-25E) ] Metal income is reduced to +7.7M, and production is reduced to -7.7M. It syncs up.

5 fabbers gives a 40% prorate (+50E/-125E). Metal income is reduced to +4.0M, and production is reduced to -10M. But we don't have that much metal, giving a real production of -4.0M.

The economy loop can also be prevented by prioritizing energy for extractors:
1) Energy goes down, but extractors stay at 100%.
2) Metal piles up in storage as production stalls.
3) Extra energy is built, restoring production.

With this system:

Code:

Fabber: -5M -20E (when active)
Total Income: +10M +50E (-25mex upkeep)
With a prioritized system, the -25 Mex upkeep is shaved off the top, giving:
Adjusted Income: +10M +25E.
2 Fabbers gives a 62.5% prorate (+25E/-40E), producing at -6.25M.
5 Fabbers gives a 25% prorate (+25E/-100E), producing at -6.25M.

If both systems had a 20 second stall before energy was restored:

Code:

First system
20 seconds w/ 2 fabbers: +154M earned, -154M used.
20 seconds w/ 5 fabbers: +80M earned, -200M requested => -80M used.

With priority
20 seconds w/ 2 fabbers: +200M earned, -125M used => +75M stored
20 seconds w/ 5 fabbers: +200M earned, -125M used => +75M stored

Despite a lower initial production, the priority system leaves extra metal in storage. The instant that energy is restored, the extra metal may be used. It could mean an extra peewee, or even an extra generator so the stall doesn't happen again. But it doesn't matter how the player screwed up the economy, because the overall result is the same either way. Both the long term and newbie advantage goes to priority.