I think he wants to build up several things at once, and let the money flow handle the rest


speaking of which I really want to quoue up ships on an "as available" basis, not on the "you have it or not, gimme now" thats currently set up.

The system wouldnt work for Sins because people will most likely stall their production with either too long build queues or with too many things being built. It will make the game too hard.

If people can´t prioritize its their problem then, right?

I have played rounds in TA where i was completly broke for minutes and nothing got done.
I got pounded for it and learned ^^
Is it really that much to ask from players to plan ahead and not build everything they can and hope noone will do something against until its all finished in 2+ hours?

Has anyone considered how annoying it would be to find your capital-ship-in-construction stuck at ~90% slowly working it's way up with the message, "insufficient resources" flashing on your screen?

I find this suprising coming from you. Its not a matter of being able to. Its a matter of whether its fun enough for a player to actually have the willpower to.
Balancing resource production rate with income rate is not worth microing. Microing ships and watching the combat is fun and its worth microing.



Except this is not true. Income rate is dynamic. It will go up and down. You will never achieve a perfect balance especially with THREE resources. You will always see one resource drained more then others leading to stalls. What happens if you have pirates raids on an artic planet? Your crystal income goes down. Suddenly your overloading on credits but your ships grind to halt because your now stalling on crystals. And its not only ships ,Its logistic buildings, defenses ..upgrading population. Everything grinds to a halt. Now you have to search through your 10-15 or so planets looking up every sub menu to see if theres anything to cancel. Hmm a half-done log upgrade here , or should I cancel the queued up pop upgrade there , or maybe the guass cannon on the other side of the galaxy? Can you really put up with that?



The problem with this , is that now the game is all about being able to manage your buying. To be good at the game, one must now be able to over the course of a 3 hour game with a dynamic income rate, balance his build power accordingly. The player with greater knowledge of crystal , metal and credit drain for each item and able to remember what is been built across his empire becomes the better player. This is the sort of stuff that makes new players leave games because they are put off by the difficulty of economic management.

Actually im making valid points based on my expierences of this game and many other games which uses the other system. Sins just wouldnt work with the suggested system and theres nothing wrong with the current system.



Replace pirates with opponent...



The game will hinge more on your ability to manage yourself out of stalls and keeping yourself stall free. Thats the problem.

Good points on both sides. I have thought about this myself and decided that the current system is probably the better way to go. That said, I find it incredibly annoying having to wait on credits/resources to queue something up. I often find myself sitting there, cursor hovering over the button, waiting for the resources to hit the magic number so that I can queue it up.

Perhaps the solution could be to have some sort of Shift click (i think that is already in use but another key combination could be found) where it tells the game to queue up the unit when the resources become available. This would stay mostly true to the current system while giving the rest of us a way out of our predicament.

If you think its just as tedius albiet a different form of tedium then fine. But the biggest difference between current and suggested is that you cant stall and I think stalling in Sins is just too chaotic for such a game design.

I support the current , and this is me who has played many RTS games in the past that actually used the suggested system. I just take into account how it fits in Sins and it just doesnt seem to fit for me.

I proposed planetary managers that would basically do the same for planetary structures/developments. There was no dev answer but Ron definitely nailed it with "it's too late". So I'm guessing this will be the same.

Otherwise I definitely agree that paying in advance is not realistic but it makes things much easier for the developers. And if you don't have an economy model with interests built in it doesn't affect the gameplay - except the micromanagement level.

These are interesting ideas, but it is too late to try out such radical changes to the economic system. Beta 4 will mark Sins as being feature complete, and it's only a week or so away. There's really very little time left to get stuff done.

Psy, I don't know how you play, but if you can really afford to pay in advance to churn out dozens of ships, you need to work on spending more!

The main thing that would make it work better is the 'fragmenting' of buying. For example, if 2 players have nerely identical starts, but one is slightly further away, so that adds 30 seconds onto the time it takes to get 3000 enough for big ship, then that extra time to actually build it might screw the player who started further away, or whatever.

Whereas, if they could use progressive building (the name for the HW/TA/supcom build style), they would both start building at the same time, and the gap would only be 30 seconds, compared to 30 seconds + build time.

Anyway, probably not something to change at this point. Maybe experiment, and think about for SINS2