petition to choose your max out number

[rubikscube]

as the title says, when making a game, you get to choose what's your resource maxout number.

awesome if 1 player you can choose 1,000,000 instead of 600,000
or co op and make it 100,000 to give it to your ally more lol


though i agree you should just get a harder level to play

[deMangler]

as the title says, when making a game, you get to choose what's your resource maxout number.

awesome if 1 player you can choose 1,000,000 instead of 600,000
or co op and make it 100,000 to give it to your ally more lol


though i agree you should just get a harder level to play

I have thought about this, in general I like the idea of choice and configirability.
However, it seems that it would need, like you say, a corresponding change in AI to balance, so the overall effect is to just have more resources, which might change the rythm of the game... (no more energy, so won't effect the units available). Hmmmmm, wonder how that would pan out.

BTW, am I going mad or is this post in the AAR section?

[HellishFiend]

I suppose his after action report is that he wants moar resources.  

[Captain Cake]

I suppose his after action report is that he wants moar resources.  

You sir, made my night.

I have thought about this, in general I like the idea of choice and configirability.
However, it seems that it would need, like you say, a corresponding change in AI to balance, so the overall effect is to just have more resources, which might change the rythm of the game... (no more energy, so won't effect the units available). Hmmmmm, wonder how that would pan out.

You might be able to reward/penalize the player instead of manipulating the AI. You could have the reward/penalty that scales with your choice in how many resources you want to pool. Players would be able to adjust some basic economy settings via a slider to fit their play style.

(**All values are arbitrary, just visualizing an idea**)

For example, a lower resource pool (lets say 300 000) might give your a better benefit out of your reactors and give your a 20% boost in energy generation to offset the lower limit, and possibly a small hit to your income rates as well.

With a higher resources pool (say round 900 000) you would receive a penalty to energy generation, and a small increase in your income rates.

With a scalable system you'd be able to set your cap to whatever you deemed appropriate in your situation/play style. I think some economy mechanic like this would be pretty interesting, and it might not need much balancing from the AI side of things.

Implementation is another thing altogether though, it could be a setting when you're starting up a new game and only have it changeable there. It also might make an interesting economy building, and would allow you to shift your economy to fit your situation.

[x4000]

(This was in the AAR forum, oddly, moving it to the main forum)

If you are really playing constantly, there is no real reason to ever hit even the 600k cap.  And if you want to give resources to your allies, the best way at present is to give them more resource generators of whatever sort -- harvesters, etc.  Trade posts of various sorts have been discussed for a while, and we might implement something like that in the future, but I don't feel like it is overmuch of a priority because you can already trade resource generators quite effectively.

There is literally nothing in this game that requires a large store of resources to buy, since everything is flow-based, so the only reason to accumulate resources is if you are not spending enough.  If you are already at ship cap, then that's the time to be cranking out mercenaries, which will chew through that excess metal/crystal quite quickly.

So why have a cap at all, then?  Simple: to prevent people who are doing too well, steamrolling the AI as they go and not paying any attention to spending their resources, from gathering millions of resources.  When you have millions of resources stored up from a period where you were doing overly well, then if the tide would normally turn it can't -- you're so freaking rich that the AI is completely hamstrung, and the game just gets the more boring for it.  Victory, then, becomes a foregone conclusion past a certain point if you were doing well in the early game.  The current system prevents that sort echo effect, so that your performance NOW and and not historically is more important to how you do in the later parts of the game.

The resource cap was once 300k, but I increased it to 600k because sometimes while people are busy fighting they don't notice that their economy has stopped building anything, and they need to go start spending on something else.  So I increased it in order to make that less of a penalty, so people wouldn't have to micro their economy to that degree.  Generally if you are fighting for so long that your economy hits 600k before you start having to start seriously rebuilding, then this is getting into the area that I am specifically penalizing.  Most likely, you're playing on a difficulty level far below what is appropriate for your skill level, or you're just being a really huge turtle about things.  Either way, this sort of penalty is the only thing that is likely to keep that sort of game from being a complete walk-over, and thus entirely boring after the first 45 minutes or so.  My view is that having victory be a foregone conclusion is pretty lame, when it comes to either side.

[Voodoomancer]

Idea!

Make the resource cap one of the things affected by the handicap?

[x4000]

Idea!

Make the resource cap one of the things affected by the handicap?

That would also work, but there are a lot of players that use the handicaps in ways that are "legitimate" with certain otherwise-impossible scenarios (diff 10, etc).  I am not confident of what that would do to those scenarios.  Anyone who uses handicaps in that way have some thoughts?

[Fleet]

Perhaps some way in-game to store extra resources. An unlock able building that cost some K, some energy upkeep, or other maintenance requirements. When you build this, it will store an extra x metal and crystal when you hit the natural cap.

Of course, there should be some reasons *not* to get this..
-Large K requirement
-High upkeep energy/metal/crystal
-Inc AI progress if killed
-AI Wave modifier (The idea being the enemy is making resource stashes, which should make them feel unfomfortable, and strategy wise make for realistic targets)
-Low resource holding capacity

[x4000]

What game problem does that actually solve, though, other than the meta-requirement of players wanting more resource stores... just to have them, apparently?  Assuming you are constantly fighting and facing a normal difficulty for your skill, you won't have a bunch of leftover res.... and, I'm just going to be restating my arguments above.  The cap was put in to prevent specific game-breaking behaviors, so the only reason I can think of to add in resource stores would be to re-allow those game-breaking behaviors, albeit at some penalty.

[Buttons840]

I like the game how it is, but while were throwing around ideas.

What if the AI waves become exponentially stronger as you stored excessive resources?

2,000,000 of each resource?  That's fine, but you'll be facing 5x stronger waves.

Again, just an idea.  Time is probably better spent improving other aspects of the game.

[x4000]

That is an interesting idea, and quite clever actually.  The main drawback I would see is that players could then run into situations where they accidentally over-store resources and then get killed.  And since there is no easy way to stop resource income from coming (why would you?), they'd then be forced into finding quick ways to spend all that income, which seems like it adds more micromanagement.  But, it is a cool idea in general.

[Epsilon Plus]

Total Annihilation (which had a fairly similar resource model) had a similar resource system. In TA, though, you built energy/metal storage because:

1. At the maximum starting resources, you only had 10k of each
2. Units frequently needed Energy (which was a resource like Metal and not a pool like it is in A.I. War) to fire lasers; running out of Energy frequently meant your defensive turrets were dead in the water
3. Good TA strategy frequently involves mass-assisting factories/plants to pump units out as quickly as possible, which is going to require a large resource pool

Most of these aren't factors in A.I. War, although I've always wanted to see a large missile-launching defense that required stockpiled missiles beforehand that the player would have to build, kind of like how the Hive Golem stockpiles Wasps; A.I. "leakage" or small attacks wouldn't require you to trigger the missiles, but they could be useful in the event of a large CPA (especially if you suspect the enemy's going to hit you from 15 jumps away and you don't have a store of telestations/teleraiders). Probably slightly overpowered, though.

[x4000]

I never played TA, but I played a lot of SupCom, which was its spiritual successor.  In general I really liked the resource model there, and AI War is fairly similar to it for a reason, but as you say the specific mechanics are different enough in AI War that the stockpiling, etc, doesn't have the same meaning.  It would be interesting to see more stuff like the Hive Golem in the future, though, I agree -- and I expect we will, either through future DLC or through future expansions, etc.

[TheSilverHammer]

Why not simply scale up your storage per system you acquire?  maybe 25k per planet?  Or allow you to build 1 storage bin per planet or something like that?  I do not know what the exact numbers should be, however the more territory you control the more resources you can store.

I can see a reason to hold a lot in reserves.  If you have a lot of factories you can easily burn through 600k of metal if you lose your fleet or a good part of it.   I know if I ever get into a slug fest I will tap out on metal really fast.  It is annoying to be at my cap and to be wasting all those resources I could be using for other things if I were not ALSO at unit caps.

The big difference between TA and this game is that in TA you essentially had unlimited units.   Yes, there was a global cap, but you could set that to a very high number.  The limit in TA was almost always your income because your unit cap didn't prevent you from building more units or structures.

In AI War, it is easy to reach your unit caps so you easily run into a situation to wasting resources.

Another idea I just though of is that factories can keep running forever.  New units are just put in cold storage.  You can activate them when your unit cap allows.  However the factory can keep burning your resources and manufacturing things for future use.  I do not think this would affect game balance too much since your main fleet is still limited, although reinforcements would be available quite quickly.

[x4000]

Why not simply scale up your storage per system you acquire?  maybe 25k per planet?  Or allow you to build 1 storage bin per planet or something like that?  I do not know what the exact numbers should be, however the more territory you control the more resources you can store.

That basically falls under the design flaw of "if you're already doing well, let's help you win even more," which is what I'm trying to avoid. 

I can see a reason to hold a lot in reserves.  If you have a lot of factories you can easily burn through 600k of metal if you lose your fleet or a good part of it.   I know if I ever get into a slug fest I will tap out on metal really fast.  It is annoying to be at my cap and to be wasting all those resources I could be using for other things if I were not ALSO at unit caps.

AI War is a game about throughput, rather than material storage.  If you're already at unit cap, why are you hitting so many resources?  What are you doing?  Assuming that you scouted in advanced, and continually, presumably you always have several targets in mind -- go attack one, and that will solve your excess resource problem very quickly.

The big difference between TA and this game is that in TA you essentially had unlimited units.   Yes, there was a global cap, but you could set that to a very high number.  The limit in TA was almost always your income because your unit cap didn't prevent you from building more units or structures.

In AI War, it is easy to reach your unit caps so you easily run into a situation to wasting resources.

If you're hitting your unit caps that easily, you're either undervaluing knowledge (and thus not having enough possible ships to build, which makes it harder to routinely hit unit caps), playing on too low a difficulty (and not losing many units, so thus hitting caps easily), or playing a very conservative game in general (constant withdrawals to repair units, etc).  If you play conservatively, then mercenary space docks are the outlet for getting more stuff with that excess cash. Otherwise, this really should not be a general problem, except fairly early in the game when the caps are lower in general.

Another idea I just though of is that factories can keep running forever.  New units are just put in cold storage.  You can activate them when your unit cap allows.  However the factory can keep burning your resources and manufacturing things for future use.  I do not think this would affect game balance too much since your main fleet is still limited, although reinforcements would be available quite quickly.

All of this is trying to solve a problem that I am intentionally not trying to solve.  Aka, if you have too many ships and too many resources, the LAST thing I want to do is give you more ships, or resources, or whatever.  That just makes the game a runaway, a downhill slide to your inevitable victory.  Yes, the game is punishing you for turtling, in essence.  Mercenary space docks are the one way around that, albeit at a really poor cost-to-benefit ratio, but still better than just throwing it away.  But that's about as big a concession as the game is likely to see toward that direction.

To put it another way, there's no point in Chess where you just hang around on your back rows, amassing queens and pawns until you so outnumber your opponent that you just crush them.  I really, really hate that about normal RTSes (most of all because I tend to play that way myself because it usually works so well).  AI War is designed in every way to try and crush that sort of behavior, and provide a more rewarding, more strategic, play environment because of it.  There is only one reason there is any storage at all, really: to account for accidental under-spending during periods where you do briefly hit your cap on units if you were intentionally building to cap before a large battle.

It would now be easy to argue about how easy it is or is not to hit caps.  Please don't.  The fact remains, whether you hit your cap or not, when you are at all near it you should be doing something with all those ships.