Oh hey, are you one of the new idiots? Sorry I didn't notice you around. It almost looks like you're a cockroach between elephants.

His account is nearly 2 years older than your own.

Tue Dec 14, 2010

Sun Dec 28, 2008

So be quiet little roach.
I know this isn't your first account, but previous ones were obviously banned due to fa­ggotry on your part, cyga­nus.

Well put.

FA's economy/upgrade system was the major turn off for players. The scale as far as the size/range of units, and speed of balistics was the major turn on for players. A nice blend of Supcom2's economy (but with storage from supcom1 maybe?) and FA's scale as far as the units go would be a dream matchup for supcom3.

Something like that. I wouldn't even mind FA's flow economy system with all of the exponential increases taken out of it. Using it with SC2-level cost and income would be pretty understandable and easy to manage, even for someone not used to it. No tiered engineers or factories with wildly varying build rates, no piecemeal economy upgrades, no ridiculous variation in build times, etc.

Listing the benefits of each system:

SupCom
-Trickle Economy System
--Allows you to start building before you have all the funds available.
--Creates strategy surrounding power supply for unit functions such as shields, weapons, intel, counter-intel and even mass extraction.
--Power and Mass demands can create frustrating situations when they stallout.

SupCom2
-Buy Ahead System
--Does not allow your buildings and units to stall during construction.
--Fewer power concerns for units.
--No upkeep power drain going to keep unit powers active.
--No cap on the reserve funds or requirements for storage.
--Rather bland economic choices.
--Repairs don't cost anything making keeping your units alive more important.
--Manual clicking for mass conversion is absurd and feels like a big step backward.

SupCom
-Tiered Economy and Technology
--Allows you to construct multiple techs without fear of watering down your units or missing out on opportunity costs.
--Less gotcha situations due to teching because technology is only restricted by tiers and economics.
--Big learning curve to properly understand all the different units and economic growth strategies.

SupCom2
-Simple Economy System and Research Teching.
--New research resource.
--Allows players to upgrade their ecnonomy and weapons in the field.
--Intriguing technology choices arise during a match as you try to save your research points for the most need.
--Easier to learn basic unit familiarity.
--Technology/research upgrades provide another element of units learning curve that can be frustrating to beginners.
--Combat Victories add Technological Advancement resources

I very much feel that both systems have their merits. I personally miss the geothermal plant and nuclear plants that I had in TA. I see that SupComFA had a third tier power plant and an experimental one. I really like the concept of a the Paragon, because it does the converting for you to get the right balance of mass and energy. Anyway, it would be great if highly effective mass conversion required staging into moho-generators. Leaving these out seemed like a mistake from day one as these elements add to the massive factor the game suceeds so well at.

I think the reliability that SupCom2 brings in terms of build time is very nice. Having 100 engineers working on an experimental may feel epic, but it's also annoying. GPG recognizing that is still a big surprise to me. Fan's reaction that it was better the old way is not a surprise to me either. The ability to reduce build time drastically by multiplying the construction resources was rather neat.

I think criticisms of the systems in both games are highly tinted by some of the poor implementation choices that surround them.


For example, the flow economy is very reliable and steady when you aren't dealing with 10, 20, 50x differences in build power or mass/energy output. Because FA had these huge shifts, it made the system very unstable and very prone to bottom-outs. If you put those same cost shifts into a pay-up-front system, it would introduce a different problem: waiting absolutely forever or having to make huge sacrifices (or both) to get your first tech 2, and then tech 3 factory/mex/powergen/etc.

Remove the huge differences in cost, and suddenly going from e.g. 36/40 mass used/income to 48/40 when you start building an experimental a little early isn't that big of a deal. Pause one factory, problem solved.
Meanwhile, in FA, you had utterly ridiculous situations where starting one ACU upgrade could give you a -9,000/s energy deficit at the T2 level, because you upgraded your ACU's buildrate before trying to add a weapon. This is the kind of thing that makes it incredibly confusing and turns new players off.

Mass-engineer-assist is not great no matter how you slice it. The system needed diminishing returns for each additional engineer you stick on a project, to encourage planning and thinking ahead over endless accrual of build power.


Likewise, everyone says the SC2 economy is 'boring'. Part of that is necessary, because making things cost huge amounts hurts a lot worse in pay-up-front, but by and large it's a good thing for balance. It keeps your initial units from being totally obsoleted by some concentrated ultra-unit that packs 100 times the cost and health and firepower into a fraction of the space, and (barring idiotic mass conversion) prevents runaway economy scaling where you can suddenly afford to build units and structures literally faster than any of your enemies can possibly destroy them.

Most other games with similar economic ratios make up for this 'boring' factor by focusing less on unit production and more on actual unit use (special abilities, complementary balancing/mixing, etc). Obviously being a Supreme Commander game, SC2 has to try to do a little of both, so maybe that's where this complaint comes from.

It's sort of funny that people would refer to the economy as boring....it's economy, what's to be fun about it?

When I reffered to the economy from FA being a turn-off, not only was it 'not-fun', but it was almost game-ruining because of a combination of tedium and over-complication. I am not reffering to the drain aspect of the economy, the draining economy works fine, and with proper use of visual/audio clues as part of the interface would be very easy to learn.

In fact it has been modded into SC2 by TheShadowLord in his Scale Mod. If the interface in his mod worked (right now all units list their costs as 0, and the top info bar tells you how much mass/power you have coming in, but not how much you are using), in conjunction with a resource storage system, I could see it being the preferred method for Supcom3.

I have been trying to get back into FA recently but it's hard because although the battles are the most epic epic fun I could have, their is just too much boring/tedious/'hard' (as in OMG don't make a tiny mistake or you will lose even if you use better tactics/strategy)/waste of time stuff to do before you get to those battles.

Look at the battlefield in FA at 4:00 mark. You will probably have had to build 8-10 mass spots, a factory doing nothing but building engies, an engy doing nothing but building power, you will have to upgrade your mexes soon or you will lose. Upgrade your ACU/factory to tier 2 soon or fall behind and lose. Sort of alot of *yawn* in there.

Compare to SC2 at 4:00: you have already built all the power you will need until you get mass convo 3 and a half minutes ago, and can instead focus on getting units/research. You might need one or two more engies to build stuff, but other then that your factories have been building nothing but units. You don't have to worry about tier upgrades to your ACU/factories because your starting unit's are not obsolete (for the most part, obvious exceptions here).

Pretty much the difference being by 4-5 mins in SC2 you can be combat ready with a dozen or two troops that have the potential to last well into the game. In FA, you have so far built your economy (and must continually upgrade it) and a few very small units that will be useless in 5 more minutes.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is: Thanks GPG for eliminating all the stuff that wasn't fun so we could focus on combat. Thanks for making it less confusing (and therefore more fun) by removing tiered unit/factory/resource upgrades. Thanks for making the difference between the smallest unit and the biggest a much lower factor. Now if only the tanks in SC2 could shoot about twice as far and have their shells go 3 times as fast.

I assume most people play games to have fun, not to jump from the chore of the daily lives into the chore of managing your economy. Now don't get me wrong, some economy management is nice and necessary, but the most I and many others are willing to do is build extra Mex/supply building or a gatherer unit. None of that upgrading crap really. Also storage and stuff like that also needlessly complicate stuff.

I agree with the last two posts almost entirely, but I do understand the attraction of some aspects of FA's economy management, like energy maintenance for shields and intel and maybe some kind of mass conversion (but nothing like it exists in either vanilla SC1 or SC2; highly diminishing returns are necessary to balance it)-- as long as managing these things doesn't comprise the bulk of your time spent playing the game at any point.

I guess I'd also like to see power gens just expensive enough that a far more efficient, location-specific hydro/nuclear plant as in FA/TA would be something worth fighting over for some mid- to late-game benefit (e.g. moderate mass conversion, particularly energy-consuming units, etc). FA really botched that though, by making T2 pgens completely supercede hydro plants.

Resource storage in general is not that great. It's fundamentally limiting, so to make execution of a limiting factor fun you have to really lay things out to emphasize the best parts of the limiting system.

Mass storage has never held a lot of appeal for me. For what do we need this? Agency bonuses?

You energy tanks are just there to boost the limit on some quasi global aether. You could run conduits visually and use a radius system to connect your grid, but currently (no pun intended) we don't have that and this would create multiple energy storage pools until you could connect your entire grid. Probably not desirable except for the most Hard Core Sim City esk out there.

The only thing I ever enjoyed about power storage was when I realized that to fire a BLOD or a LRA you needed a higher energy supply. It did not matter how much juice you were producing. You won't ever have enough at any one time to deliver the spike of energy needed to power the weapon. That is pretty cool conceptually. Also, it made dealing with LRA easier. Nuke the fusion plant and the guns stop bothering you.

If using the buy up front system with storage limits it would be a good idea to set the energy cost for units like LRA very high so that a player must buy storage tanks before he can build the unit that will require them. This way his unit will not stall-out the moment he finishes building it.

Speaking of which, it would be nice to visually see energy as a volume in the tank. As the LRA fire the volume in the tanks would drop and then slowly rise. Then the next shot would be fired. A storage tank explosion could be based on % full vs capacity.

Those energy storage tanks should have a portion of your energy in them. Players should be able to steal energy supplies. When one blows up, the energy inside should be removed from the players global pool. Maybe there could be an experimental that would actually transport these things or need to plug them in like batteries or jet fuel. Maybe experimentals have generators. Generally speaking it would be cool to have a visual storage for your fliers if we were to re-implement jet fuel. I miss the repair pads from TA. The UI that was involved always impressed me. It was visually appealing.


In general I think players would like to see Mass Convo automated in SupCom2. Is the click for mass convo a good learning tool? Maybe it is, but players should be able to set it to repeat. Could that stall your economy? Yes it could. If it does, your mass convo will turn off. That's what happened in TA and probably FA. Rarely did mass convo cause considerable problems because mass was and is so much more valuable and energy so much more plentiful.

Another unit which should allow an repeat-click is the Aegis Shield and the Nuke/Anti-Nuke Silos. Also, you should be able to cancel a missile the way you can cancel a unit.

While we are discussing economics, the Research Converter is not being used. Maybe we could convert 3000 energy instead of 300 mass. This should also have a repeat-click option.

Automatic energy demands I wouldn't mind seeing:
-Factories and Construction (nothing new here)
-Unit Powers (nothing new here)
-LRA (to fire)
-Shields (not for regular use, but to restore from zero)
-Repair (no mass required)
-Counter Intel (constant draw or click use)
-Super Weapons (Galactic Teleporter, Noah Cannon, Magnetron, etc)
-Mass Convo (more energy required)
-Flying units (I am not sure how I feel about this.)

I would like to see Hydrocarbon and Experimental Power Plants with detonations upon death.



Can people learn to use the trickle economy? yes they could. Do we want to? Buy up front guarantees you a product in a set amount of time. It also stops players from starting the construction of massive projects without having the resources to finish. Is the trickle economy worth it? How do you setup the bumper lanes?

Do we want adjacency bonuses? Fun idea. I don't think they add that much.

Well, I personally can see an appeal of managing a power grid for defensive (shields) purposes, as well as say for structures you'd think require tons of energy...like artillery (structure that is), experimental structures or something like "mega death lazor in your base". However as long as there's a seperate resource, like say mass and the only thing needed to construct normal units/buildings would be mass (which wouldn't be limited in storage) then I'm all cool with it.

Kind of like Red Alert 2 power management but a bit more in the extreme. To explain to those who haven't played this awesome game; There was 1 resource: ore. With ore you constructed everything, see it as supcom mass.

Then there was a 2ndary feature: power. All buildings and most advanced defences consumed power. However a player would build power generators that say produced +50 power. If you had 2 generators and had buildings that were using 80 power, then all would work fine. However if you built more stuff and exceded the amount of power that you have left(so basically constructing buildings/defences but no extra power plants), you would go into "low power mode", where building buildings and units would take twice as long. The soviets also had this Nuclear reactor that was unlocked mid to late game. It gave tons of power but if it was destroyed it would explode with the force of a nuclear blast.

Now that system I really liked, however it was rather simplistic and I'm sure that supcom could take it much further (without making it so you have to babysit everything though).

Edit /\/\/\ I remember that, and that's pretty much how artillery (and anything else that uses energy) works in FA.

I don't care one way another about storage. I think it would be fine if balanced, but in FA it was waaaaaay too easy to exceed basic storage limits, and the storage units themselves were very poor for their cost.

Adjacency is an awful system though, and they were very smart to get rid of it.

Using adjacency only for dedicated output could be ok. In other words, you slap two +50 powergens next to a -100 shield, and both zero each other out. The shield then does not go down if your other power gens all blow up and your energy economy crashes, but you gain no energy to your main pool from those generators while the shield is active and draining. It'd just be a way to completely dedicate/focus your power generation on tasks that need it, and not something that gives you some kind of efficiency advantage over someone who doesn't want to play sim city with their base.


Re: Flow economy, I really like it, but I don't have any problems with pay-on-production. The only issue with PoP is that you need a good scheduling or priority routine to keep more expensive things producing, otherwise infinite queues will always just pump out little stuff. Otherwise, you can manage it like you would a flow economy, and never have your infinite queues alone quite at 100% utilization of your income. And at that point, is PoP really that much 'easier' to learn?

I can't speak on how well SC2's PoP mode pulled this off, but it seems like some people (formerly vocally in favor of pay-on-production over pay-on-queue) have complained about the way it works.

Adjactency also sounds cool if only applied to power and not too many buildings so it doesn't get too complicated. Say something like "if you place this fragile energy plant next to this factory the factory builds faster, but if the pgen gets destroyed it will severely damage the factory or surrounding shields or anything else". Adjactency bonuses shouldn't be always feasible to use; it's better that the player would make a decision like "It's too dangerous here so I don't want to screw up my factories".

I tried Complete Annihilation over the weekend. They have changed the name of the program to Zero K, but they haven't updated their website. It is a mix of TA, SupComFA and SupCom2. It's available free under the OGL (open gaming license).

It incorporates aspects of SupComFA and TA
-Trickle Economy
-Weapons which require energy
-Commander Upgrade
-Shields
-Multiple Types of AA
-Low End and High End Units
-Experimentals and Super Weapons
-TA: Spiders
-TA: Conditional Defense Bonuses.
-TA: The Goliath: Super Heavy Tank
Note: Sadly it looks like the new-ish TA Zues model which I never played with is in storage for some new burly humanoid robot series.

It incorporates aspects of SupCom2
-Simplified Economy (this takes some explaining and does not match SC2 entirely)
-No Tier System for Factories
-It plays like SupCom2 with all research unlocked

New Aspects
-It is currently incorporating power-grids. Somebody is doing power-grids and has been doing power-grids for a while. There execution is pretty good too. Each generator has a power radius which has to connect to another power radius to share the grid. Large weapons need to connect to the grid to function.
-Old TA Units that are in the game all have completely new models and new textures.
-Goofy graphics. If you don't like SupCom2 graphics. You will not like Zero K. This is just a warning to the FA players who love their dark and murky maps and units. This game is intentionally bright and cartoony like a Pixar movie.
-Mass Conversion is free. Everyone has it. It's done auto-magically. It's called 'Overdriving your Mexes'. There is no pressing buttons or checking on it's state. It just is, and mass is there to use to build your units. Eco bumper lanes? yes please. What's the catch? Your mass has to be on the power-grid. Think adjacency bonus taken to a new level through the grid.


It was a good reminder I want to play more SC2 'all research unlocked' games.
-No worries about acu rushing. Your acu is just as good as his.
-Flexibility in builds. Easily switch from land to air to navy by changing what units you are producing.
-Faster Game play. You could get nuked far sooner, or attacked by experimentals so you will want to play expecting all the toys from the gate restricted only by cost to build and then build time.

Thanks, Bast. I am downloading Zero K now. I look forward in trying it out.

I gave it a shot, but I don't understand the whole Chicken thing?

I downloaded Balanced Annihilation v7.20 and am going to try this one.

This is a neat idea, and is totally doable in FA. It's like adjacency without the pedantic, obsessive-compulsive lining-everything-up-perfectly crap, while still making where you build your powerplants and power-draining structures somewhat meaningful. Adding this to the pool of mod ideas that I'll probably never use.

When you are building Cybran buildings in SC2 there are little lines on the ground that stretch out and glow; I wish those lines stayed there for economy (mexes and power)/production (factory, gantry, missle silos)/buildings with abilities (FLA harden, electroshock, quantum arty, radar overcharge, mass convo, etc) for all races and if you build stuff that had lines that were close enough to connect you would get an adjacency bonus in your factory.

Bases could still be strecthed out, so like someone said it's not FA style where everything has to be touching, but building a proper base to take advantage would be key.

that would be interesting, would require a bit of animation changing though.
Sounds like a good idea to me!

i think the problem of FA is not the way the economy work, but just that something have wrong cost, with a +3 for one mass estraction and +30 for energy(for eacn energy generator) or even 8 estractors at the start; the game would be better...with this you could produce easily everything you need; another problem in Fa, is the fact that there are 3 tech , i strongly think the two tech are enough(like TA),T1, T2 and exp, it is not necessary the tech 3