Economy local to planets?

I have not been able to wade through the many pages of discussion here so far, so forgive me if this has already been asked, but will mass and energy collected on one planet be usable by the player in constucting stuff on a different planet? It would not seem to make much sense that the mass and energy on a distant planet could be used to immediately fund building on a totally different planet. Will each planet have its own unique mass and energy income and storage, or will the same mass and energy income and storage be shared amongst all planets you might be operating on?

I don't think this has been discussed much. I think many people assume completely global resources because local ones would be hard to manage. But it is an interesting idea so I would like to know if it is a possible feature.

I'd like local to planets. It would mean incentive to actually make an investment in planets, instead of KEVing them, and dropping down an engineer to claim the metal.

It would have the effect of providing an advantage to the defender, since the person landing on a planet could not rely on their super duper economy on a distant planet to build up their base on the world they are assaulting. It would thus necessitate that any sort of successful assault would require more than just landing a commander, but perhaps transporting an army onto the planet too in order to get a proper foothold.

I'd definitely like to try it if possible but it sounds like a lot of management which would need a complex UI. As in you would have to balance the economies on all planets and then constantly send the resulting units across space to where they are needed.

I hadn't thought about that.

I think it should be local but you can transfer them. ( in different ways )

Keep in mind that unlike most game developers we tend to build things using iteration and testing. So in most cases design consists of thoughts about which things to try more than anything.

In other words we are going to try and bunch of stuff and see what we end up liking. The default is just one global economy but we may end up somewhere else after experimentation.

If gas giants make it in, global economy is really the only option. All of that energy and nothing to build with it? No mass points, so you'd have to build a city of floating metal makers? Doesn't really make sense. Maybe have it be an option to toggle off if you want to mess with non-standard games, but I think global economy is the best way to go for the base game.

I don't know if anyone here has played star ruler, but planets there each had a local economy, and you built structures that allowed the import and export of resources. I don't know if having to manage an interplanetary economy like that is within the scope of this game, but being able to destroy resource beaming stations, starports, etc to cut off supply lines to a planet could make for an interesting mechanic.

I could see working global economy very easily if a ferry point way system was used for "cargo Haulers" of some kind.

The only instant problem I see is I have an instant distaste for units that don't:
A-Have guns
B-Build things with guns

It would be possible to introduce some kind of ressource-transportation buildings.
It would i.e. transfer some amount of metal/energy per second to any other planet that has such a building. If you want to transfer more resources you need to make more such buildings. Would be interesting, since this way you could actually attack the enemies resource-transportation system and therefore stop him from building stuff on some planet.

I think that any import/export system should be sending/grabbing resources straight from a global resource pool rather than having planets sending resources to each other. The problem I'm seeing with a multi-planet economy is you don't want to layer too much more complexity on a flow economy, it's already a tough learning curve for new players.

As mentioned earlier, a global economy is a must largely due to design goals for "farm" type planets, i.e. Gas giants/metal planets. The resource transportation issue is the real focal point here as it can be viewed pretty much two different ways: Distracting to the fighting, or strategically important to how the fight pans out across multiple worlds.

Personally, i am a fan of a 'streaming' style global economy that streams progressively slower the further away from a distribution node. Outside of time it takes to set up, management of the node would be about as intensive as making sure it hasn't been attacked / destroyed. Placement becomes crucial, especially if remote "emitter" type stations can be set up, potentially in hostile worlds.

The reasoning i think this is crucial is pretty straight forward in a meta sense. It would be nearly impossible to beachhead a planet that is fully owned by another player if you had to do so while fully setting up resource and production facilities sufficient to fight off the defenders currently on planet. If its a case of "this is player-x's last planet and you have a super economy therefor your economic might is going to crush the planet qq+ and it isn't fair type argument," just dust the planet with a big rock and serenade yourself in sweet qq.

This is honestly my biggest concern with any of this. Adding complexity to the flow economy can be deadly.

I agree. This would add complexity and micromanagement to a game which will most likely already require substantial multitasking. I think shooting for awesome would allow the question of how resources find their way between planets to be completely ignored.

If you are shooting for awesomeness, want to use this idea, and don't want to complicate things too much, why don't simply put a building that transfers resources to another planet by a giant laser?

It would be cool to see and not THAT complicated.

I was going to try structures that share X amount per second of each resources. So similar to your idea here.

I'm more and more convinced though that just combining them is the way to go. Frankly it's pretty easy to try this both ways though.

As said in the kickstarter video, we aren't going for realism, we're going for awesome. The issue of a global vs local economy is one where realism would scream for local economies, but gameplay would argue for keeping it simply with a single, global, rate based economy. Thus the question is, would making economies local any more fun? Adding layers of complexity such as resource beaming structures probably wouldn't add significantly to the fun factor. As has been pointed out by others (and which I had already considered), making economies local would mean that gas giants that are huge energy farms or metal or lava worlds which are mass farms would lose a lot of their importance.

Just to satisfy folks such as myself, perhaps you should add some sort of hand waving fluff explanation in the manual or backstory saying that all economy and construction units can teleport raw mass and energy directly across vast distances to each other, thus negating the need for power lines and physically moving mass.

In my mind, I imagine the resource management to happen largely autonomously. Distance penalties is the only real simple way (I can come up with) to add a strategic level onto this without making the resource management overly complex.

I disagree with adding in rare resources. Rare resources are only useful when you want super units, i.e. I-WIN buttons. Rare resources give an edge over massive unit costs in that it enables someone to build a powerful unit type earlier then otherwise plausible given some extreme unit cost + long build time.

However, if the UI took into account distance penalties when planning invasions, this would make it very simplistic for planning attacks accordingly. Players could easily deside if they want to go right for the neighbor, or jump to a near by planet to build up a resource chain. This could be as simple as a tool tip pop up when you mouse over planets. In this regard, if you really want to jump way the hell away from where you are, but you have some unrealistic resource generation, you could eat the distance penalty and get set up on some distant planet. This obviously could add some pretty significant dynamics to strategies involving how players planet hop around.