OK so basically I'd like to have a general discussion about how metal extractors are being implemented. Currently they are going with the metal deposits (points) system, what do people think about my concept & its viability for being implemented by the devs or in a mod? I'll just get into it now, i think that having an efficiency radius makes more sense than metal deposits from an immersion perspective, it feels more realistic, not that it is. It provides interesting & varied tactical & logistic elements to the game. it also prevents players from just building walled gardens with these things. So how do i think this should work. each metal extractor would have a radius that it draws metal from, lacing extractors with over lapping radii will reduce their efficiency (less metal since they are now both drawing on the same supply. size of these radii will have to depend on tier & balancing. possibly variable radii but that may add too much complexity, so set seems preferable. Secondary to having to account for over lap certain terrain types should provide more or less metal. % of radius on terrain type will confer metal amount generated, with terrain having specific metal volumes. This will create an incentive to fight for control of land that may otherwise be tactically irrelevant, but has now become strategically important due to its economic implications. It shouldn't crate a barrier to new players due to complexity due to it not being complex to understand, especially if the UI for it is fairly obvious (could be potentially more clear to newbies than metal on the ground) ie. have the radius show up in a colour range varying from green(good) to red(bad) with portions of it shaded depending on terrain types it is currently overlapping. It would also contribute an easy to learn, hard to master aspect of the game due to the strategic decisions involved. so i think that's about it... discuss! (edit): I missed the part where the devs said that they are using metal points so i made some changes to the opening. (edit2) Also probably wont be implemented so do you think it provides enough of a change to make a mod? could it work? or would it be too unbalanced?
Re: metal extractors, metal deposits or efficiency radius I feel like you don't know how mass deposits will work in this game...
Re: metal extractors, metal deposits or efficiency radius if there is any info on this from the Devs that you could point me to that would be great so far i haven't seen or heard any mention of how they plan on implementing the metal resource. i assume the plan is very much like they have done it in TA, Sup Com, FA & Sup Com 2.
Re: metal extractors, metal deposits or efficiency radius Based on one of the Questions during the May 3rd LiveStream(near the end of the Q&A) that Metal will be focused on set points much like it was for Supreme Commander. I assume this was chosen due to the user-friendly-ness inherent in that system. Mike
Re: metal extractors, metal deposits or efficiency radius Thanks some how i missed that, ;p well what do people think of this concept anyway? do you think it has any merit, maybe worth a mod or something? as far as usser-friendly-ness, I've had to teach a fair few people that the metal extractor goes on the metal deposit on the terrain, in both TA & sup com. As dumb as that sounds it's not as visually obvious as it seems, some don't even realise that the metal deposits are metal just some random ground.
Peeps need to play the tutorial. *Goes and plays the FA tutorial for the first time ever* *shudders* Nevermind... Oooogg that was painful. Tell you what: that kind of tutorial just won't cut it for PA. There'll be some changes made to that formula, mark my words.
hahaha, and i think it got worse with the Sup Com 2 tutorial... i still have nightmares :cry: the best tutorials I've played just give you hints & tips during your first play. Maybe if they do something like: "hey see that guy there, that's your commander he's awesome & builds stuff, see this flashing thing that this speech bubble is pointing at that's a power generator put it anywhere, see the metal extractor place it on this (points you to a metal deposit). pretty much have it help you build the basics of your first base, get you to do a small raid on the enemy & then leave you the hell alone. you learn the basics & now your just continuing on with your first game.
It was the constant faux military chatter that hurt me... that silly little screen fizzing in and out... for NO reason (other than every one is tied to an individual soundbyte) ... And the condescension... Oh science the condescension. I'm not 5 years old damnit!
i have to agree & it didnt help that the voice acting for if was terrible. Personally no speech, just text bubbles & visualisations would do it for me. Quick succinct ones. Anyway this is somewhat off topic. Any thoughts on the extractor radius?
Spring had a similar system in the early days. It still has, it's up to the map maker. It was fun at the beginning but it become quickly tedious. It's not that fun to try to place your metal maker to achieve maximum efficiency. Now, most of the maps are released with simple metal spot.
Yea. SimCity did something like that with the watertable and Oil deposits and such. It was cool to see the overlays, but placement of the actual buildings was fiddly and took a long time since, naturally, I'll hover around trying to find THE most efficient place to plop it. If you've got "spots" of Metal, like in Total Annihilation you're told the "best" place for your extractors. no fuss, no muss. Metal abundance overlays would be an OCD persons worst nightmare. --- Those are my thoughts.
hmm yeah thinking about it more, it's probably more time consuming & convoluted & pretty much does what the metal deposits do anyway so probably not worth the effort.
To expand on what torrasque said. Spring has this feature, it is not a good thing to have in this type of game. Maps in Spring have a metalmap layer which is a greyscale image with each pixel worth an amount of metal up to a configurable maximun. Metal extractors have an extraction radius (also configurable) and the sum of the pixels within the radius is the income of the mex. Pixels can only be extracted from by one mex at a time. The interface works fairly well, there is a metal map overlap which appears when placing extractors and can also be toggled with a key. Here is an example of a 'splotchy' metal map: http://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/7205 This feature allowed great flexibility in map design. Full metal maps can have gradients. A large extractor radius on a full metal map creates an area control type mechanic. But the feature is mostly unused. Most maps use small spots of white which can be encompassed by a single extractor to create discrete metal maps. Like so: http://zero-k.info/Maps/Detail/7224 Spring has had 1000s of maps made for it and almost all of them use a 'Core Prime' style full metal map or discrete metal map. The maps with unusual metalmaps are old and nobody plays them. The playerbase voted with their feet and the map makers either agreed or followed. Many games only support discrete metal maps such as S44 and Evolution RTS. Zero-K only supports discrete metal maps and full metal maps. This experimental feature has been tested in Spring for several years. The result is that it is a bad idea for this type of game.
In my opinion that is one of the things that StarCraft 2 does really well, with the whole bot training program Also, on topic, that is a really interesting post GoogleFrog, and as far as I see it, efficiency radii would just be a bothering without too much added, based on the arguments that torrasque made. I do however not have any personal experience with efficiency radii, maybe it could be interesting as a mod, if done right. But in the base game? No, I don't think that it is a good idea
this was informative, thank you. i remembered metalmaps on spring long ago but had not played for years. MEX points are the way to go.
If they implement this system I could not play this game. It's OCD nightmare. I also believe it adds too much micro having to try and place as many MEXs in as small an area as possible. It also adds complexity that is unnecessary in my opinion.
Sounds like a cool idea, what about having unit wreaks add new, but temporary metal deposits into the ground when units die? Turing war-zones into temporary gold mines for metal extractors, but a mine that would dry up quickly. Could add some fluidity to the wreaks system by having extractors pick them up if they are inside of their radius
I actually entertained posting about this a while back (I had a similar idea, and by similar, I mean the exact same), and decided otherwise because the idea had inherent flaws. It'd turn out very similar to the Adjacency Bonus mass storages conferred in FA. Instead of expanding, you could consolidate your resources with similar turn-out and no risk at all. Arguably, if you made the efficiency decrease high enough, it would be less efficient to consolidate, and nobody would do it. But then that ruins the point of large-area mass deposits, in that it's pointless to build more than a few mass extractors on it. Even then, consolidation by unit spam goes strongly against PA's mantra of reducing pointless micro, especially that of economy babysitting. My conclusion from this was that for all the hassle required to implement large-area mass sites, it would be much more effective to just cluster multiple mass points and/or increasing the mass/second output of certain points, like in TA.
I have come to the same conclusion, i had envisaged something a little different from the spring system, unfortunately i think it would have a lot of the same problems & would be far better served with some concentrations of a number of metal deposits in close vicinity to each other as well as the random spaced out deposits, to crate some areas of high economic value in the game, hopefully this will be possible in the planet maker if not a mod shouldn't be too hard.
