I think it might be a good idea to add part of a 'negative' eco bar. That way a player will be able to see if and how badly he is into a negative economy. Some examples how an eco bar could look:
everything is fine, no buildings are queued, beginning of the game
player builds his first barracks, the necessary resources are highlighted in yellow, still room to queue new buildings/units
player is about to use up all his starting resources and go into a slight negative economy but his income offsets the minus, player should stop building new units/buildings at this point
player is about to stall his eco, acustical warning, player should cancel or pause something draining this resource (see post #4 for more info)
player is stalling badly, auto-pause 'factories'
__________________________
To make it even more fool-proof the placeholders of queued buildings could show different colors:
player has enough resources to finish all bulidings
player has barely enough resources to finish the last building (his income is enough to offset the minus)
player has not enough resources to finish the last building, he needs to pause the red building or acquire more resources (reclaiming, build another quarry/mine)
With this you could even make long queues transparent for new players. If you want the system to be perfect you could even 'predict' income from already queued resource buildings and take them into consideration. It would basically be impossible to stall your eco unless your opponent destroys a bunch of your resource buildings.|||Glad you're working on this, Jessop! We certainly do need an easy way for noobs to understand the eco. I think that such an addition would be helpful.
Here are some concerns that I have, though. There is a certain guessing game for beginners on how quickly to expand the economy without stalling it. When I see the bar go from green to yellow I could be run negative in 30 seconds, or it could take 5 minutes. The different colored status bar doesn't communicate that very important information on what sort of time frame I have. I'm less concerned with the level of my resources and more concerned with the rate of decrease versus the time it will take to get new economic buildings online.
Perhaps when resource use is on a negative trend a timer could display the time left until resource depletion at current usage rate. That way, a player could compare the build time on new economy buildings with new units.|||Great suggestion, would be great to have something like this. Well, we already do with the pure numbers but such a visualisation is quicker to display changes. An autopause on the stalled economy values makes perfect sense.
@Epiphenomenon: I dont think that taking buildtimes of economy into account is necessary. People will learn the game as they did with TA, supcom, FA and supcom2.
Maybe as an option but a display including time frames to the next predicted economy change could maybe be too much info for a starter.
Srogg|||Epiphenomenon|||Also: Add a somewhat in-depth tutorial on how this form of economy works. I say this because Supreme Commander did not have a very good tutorial on this particular aspect of the game. In other words: players were kinda' given a crash course in Rate Based Economy when they first played the game, and I'm sure some people got easilly frustrated.
Just my two cents. :)|||Col. Jessep|||I think the Colonel is on the right track. With this kind of fairly simple feedback a drain economy doesn't need to be complicated. My feeling is that adjacency in SupCom1 made the drain eco unnecessarily difficult. For me the drain eco in TA never stalled as bad as SupCom1's and in TA I even had to manually "upgrade" my mexes.
In this suggested new system an infinite cue has to be treated as a ongoing loop were the units in the loop determines the drain. Perhaps by a cost average of the units in the loop? Or can it be calculated exactly?
There have been other suggestions in the past on how to make a drain eco simpler with priorities and cut-offs. That can be part of the information that can be switched on or off depending on how skilled the player is(feels).
Drain is possible!
/Kantorai|||You should write up a short email and send it to CT. It might convince him; I've had good success with my emails.|||This is a good idea and thread.|||Epiphenomenon|||When you get it, please post a copy of the reply Col. Jessep. Full copy not just a summery
|||I don't understand what was so hard with the old way: You're making this much, and spending this much. If you're spending more than you're making, that's bad. Are people really too stupid to understand that without pictures?|||AngryZealot|||seiya|||A drain eco and a good ui to support it, very well done Col. Jessep, like the concept art, am all for it.|||AngryZealot|||The whole OP/******* signed|||RastiMinato|||One small change to the OP, it would make it impossible for players to unintentionally stall their economy.
There may be a time when I want to go the the bathroom, and I que up a bunch of medevil nukes (chicken cannons?) and stall my economy. But I meant to do it.|||Grim Tuesday|||While this idea is nice it probably won't solve the problem. It only targets the self-induced stall and how to avoid it. I doesn't really help to get out when you are already stalling and you will stall, your opponent will see to it. The problem is the lack of control when it comes to economy.
What we need is the "strategic zoom" of economy. We don't only have to have the flow/drain, we also have to control the flow. And we have to be able to limit the flow, locally (this base will not spend more than X energe/mana/whatever). We have to "zoom out" and get a real overview of the economy. The existing box (SC1) where you could see the resource income/spending for every unit is more or less pointless, because you cannot see the whole picture. When you zoom out, these info boxes became unreadable. We have to select a group of units and not only see the combat values, we also need the *accumulated* economy values (income/spendig), so that when you select a base you see whether it is self-sustaining or not. Or better a colored (grid) overlay, where you can see the where your income is generated and where it is spend. And there are probably a thousand more ideas.|||X-Cubed|||Quote:|||Good thinking!
Drain eco is more fun but harder to understand, this is perfect help!
|||X-Cubed
No comments:
Post a Comment