Rise of Nations.

That goes a while back so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but I thought there was a cap on how many farms you could have in a city.

In Rise of Nations you definitely had to gain the map to keep harvesting optimally. There were natural resources that you had to get inside your borders.

Age of Empires III has an infinite resource model. You can build lots of farms/plantations inside your little town and harvest indefinitely. You'll have to pay through the nose for wood though, but there is no pressing need for controlling the map.

Sins has as much an infinite resource model as RoN has, you need to gain a big enough portion of the map to build enough refineries and trade stations to keep the goods flowing once the asteroids run dry.

Yeah, you guys are still thinking of resources in a different manner. The mines don't run dry, but you still can't efficiently build more of them. Farms in AOE would work, but workers contribute to your unit cap, you're balancing production against max army size. There is no limitation on resource production in TA outside of the object cap.

hm, another thing could be to have a real maintenance cost. enough to make a player refrain from taking a world he doesn't really need, but not too high, so as to be prohibitive. that way, expansion isnt always the best option in a given situation, at least not until your economy is more developped.

two problems with this: one is that unlike in tbs, the ressource "credits" which would be the form of the maintenance, is also used for production in sins. sure, you can do some shuffling and stuff, but it just doesnt affect your production capabilites as directly and immediately as it would in sins.

two: it would slow down expansion slowing down the game as such. I for one wouldnt mind that much, but a lot of people probably would.

otherwise I stick to my "I want to have some sort of intermediary alternative to forced geographical expansion". again, the latter is the better option overall, but it shouldn't be the only one and atm it pretty much is except for the early game possibly.

Which is a bigger limitation on resource production than a pure unit cap, because every single building in Supreme Commander counts towards the object cap It has been ages upon ages since I touched TA, but unless it was different there, then same story.

While yes, in SupCom every object, not just military, counts towards the object cap but don't think for a single second that this is somehow limiting with respect to how much you can increase your economy. For instance, you can start a sandbox game and do nothing but spam economy and military units. While you will quickly reach the unit cap this is mostly because of military units, not eco units. You could literally spam NOTHING BUT eco units for a whole hour and you still would not be capped. Of course doing this for just 15 minutes would give an insane economy. Doing it for an hour and still able to increase it further is... well beyond insane. And this is without someone attacking you. In a real game you of course can't put all your attention into economy.

The limiting factors in a traditional RTS are generally:

1. There is simply no option to "fabricate" resources. The only method of income is by taking points on the map. DoW is a good example. Sins is another.
2. In a harvesting type of game like Star Trek Armada or Homeworld 2, moons or asteroids only have a limited number of "latch" points. Assigning more harvesters past a certain point does not increase your income rate.
3. Many games have a very low cap on the number of economy units you are able to build. Dow, for example, only allows for 6 power generators; Rise of Nations only 5 farms per city.
4. The overall unit cap is so low that your percentage of economy units can really only get so high before it starts to effect your ability to field a reasonably sized army.

SupCom is designed is such a way that economy is something that you should be increasing from the very second the game starts to the very moment you have your opponent nailed. If you don't, then you are ignoring a very imporant part of your war machine and you give yourself a weakness you opponent can exploit.

I thought I would give you some real in game images as an example. Here is a game where all I did was build up economy. No enemies involved.

Here is the start of the game. Top bar has resources. You start with +1 mass income per tick.



I took another shot at about the 10 minute mark. Notice the huge increase in mass income. Now at +81 per tick. Of course, this will be exponential .



Now at 21 minutes. +263 income.


Now at 36 minutes. +1721 income.


Now at 46 minutes. +2676 income.


And I could of kept going but this was about the point where the number of economy units actually started to make a "bit" of a difference in the size of my military. At the end I had 241 units out of a max of 500. This is not even 1/2. So I can still have the majority of my unit dedicated to fighting. And with this kind of economy, you can literally replace all 259 of those military units in like 2 minutes . Insane wave after wave of units.

Also note that as you get such a large economy, you can actually start pumping the REALLY expensive units. You will notice in last 2 pics a few large artillery emplacements. This is basically a game ender kind of unit and is INSANELY expensive to build. I had to funnel all my economy into building these and I only had 3 completed by the time I ended the game. I had 2 more in progress though and they were both at about 50 or 60% .

Now of course in a normal game you would never have a chance to build such an insane economy. But I just wanted to illustrate my point about what I really mean by "infinite". While it isn't literally infinite you would never reach this kind of cap in a regular, or even irregular, game.

And take note that I was actually spending every last penny of that income. It is one thing to be able to have that kind of an income. Quite another to have the infrastructure to spend it all.

You realize that this is pretty much the same as starting a Sins game with no enemies, colonizing a few nearby planets, upgrading them fully with logistics, and then filling all those slots with trade stations and refineries. And the bonus there is that logistics slots don't share anything with tactical, or your fleet. Completely independent, unlike Supreme Commander where everything is in one pool. Sure with 500 objects there's usually plenty of room, but what if you played with 250? That's much more limiting. And Sins will also be able to increase the logistics limits with mods.

Now, I know, you can try to argue that in Supreme Commander you need less 'physical' space to create the 'infinite' economy, but that only goes so far. In an actual game, you still need territory to expand the economy, taking into consideration all your military and defensive buildings to protect that territory. Same in Sins, except in Sins the territory is additional planets instead of additional land.

The basic concept and system is much the same, but as the scopes of the games are different, so is the implementation.

I hope the devs can decipher all these different threads stating either imbalance or not... I'd love to see this game compete in the RTS world.. truthfully I'd love to contribute more to the success of it, but i'm far too biased and moved onto other betas for the moment. I've played my share of SOASE and love how it's coming along- eager to see what changes are made in Beta 4.

To all of those people out there that don't like to proofread their messages and ask themselves, "Am I contributing to the well-being of the game or trying to destroy it?"

Please don't overload the devs and make them pull a Sony Online Entertainment.. or an EA for that matter.

not if you're building a zillion MAVORS

Well, that is what I have been trying to tell you. It is NOT the same. Not in any way shape or form. You even said it yourself... the difference is scope. One is basically infinite and the other is not. This makes for very very DIFFERENT game play, not the same as you seem to allude to.

And 250 units is NOT limiting. Not in the slightest. This is again because of how SupCom implements scope and epic scale in a different way. 250 tech level 4 units equals to the same cost as thousands of tech level 1 units. There is no option in Sins to spend all your economy on just 3 units and have the time required to build those three take 40 minutes. It is just different. No other way you can explain it.

And you don't need to increase the unit cap with mods. 500 is the default but increasing it to 1000 is built right in. I don't think anyone has even created a mod to increase the size beyond this number since it is so crazy large to begin with, although it is possible.

All this all equates to a VERY different and untraditional implementation of the RTS genre and makes for a very different way to play the game.

And perhaps I should of zoomed out to show how little land I actually owned in that mock game. I only expanded outwardly at the start since geographic control is important then. However, in the end I only needed to control just the immediate area around my starting point, something like 2% of the map. I would hardly call that as having to take land. COMPLETELY different than in Sins where you HAVE to take and hold planets. Try building your economy when you only own 1 or 2 planets.

Not to sound overly harsh Annatar, but nearly everything is your last post is factually inaccurate. Personally preference is one thing. I know there are many people that dislike the way SupCom plays. I share many if not most of those sentiments. But one thing that I think is indisputable is that it is different; VERY different.

So now this brings us full circle. This whole conversation started because of how Sins suffers from slippery slope. Some of the untraditional things that SupCom has done help to solve this problem. An infinite economy means you can still have enough resources to field a comparable army to fend off your opponent even after you have lost your first battle. This means your opponent does not have to simply win the initial battle. He can not get complacent. He has to win the second, third, forth, fifth, and so on. And if his attacks become careless, all he will be doing is smashing his units into your defenses pretty much giving you a whole bunch of wreckage which can be extracted. This would in effect nullify any advantage that the attacker had from winning that first battle.

Now I am not saying that Sins implement the same thing. SupCom's implementation does have a number of issues. I don't want to focus on those. Rather I think we should focus on how slippery slope has been attacked elsewhere and discuss how we could attack it in Sins.

hehe. Ya. The Mavor is the big boy. I could of funneled a lot of that income towards fatboys or a bunch of T3 units but Mavors I think illustrated the point I was trying to make fairly well.

But you misunderstood what I said. Both use a pretty similar system where you don't need to build workers to gather resources for you. In Supreme Commander, you build mass fabricators and power plants for your resources. In Sins, you build trade centers and refineries. In both games, the ability to expand this economy is very high (a fully upgraded Terran planet with Logistics can fit 8 refineries, for instance), but not limitless.

The difference in scope is not about the economy of the game, but the game itself. Supreme Commander has one map, and you expand on the land belonging to that map. Sins has a galaxy, and you expand not on land, but on planets. Each planet's grav well becomes a map of its own, independent of any other planet. That's the difference in scope.



Everything in my post is factually accurate. You do need land in Supreme Commander to expand, how much land is irrelevant to the point being made. For example, you claim to have controlled 2% of the map with that massive economy. But that's a function of the size of the map, not the economy. What if, in Sins, you had a galaxy map of 200 planets, and you controlled 10? 2% also, and you can create a hell of a good economy in Sins with 10 planets filled to the brink with trade posts and refineries. Or what if the map in Supreme Commander was 10 times smaller? Suddenly, you have to control 20%.

All of your arguments focus on direct numbers that cannot directly translate from one game to the other in the way you translate them.



But nobody has really made a good case for what slippery slope exists in Sins. In any other RTS, once your base starts getting steamrolled, if you can't beat it you're defeated. Same in Sins, if you're unable to defeat the attacking force, they just keep destroying your planets and you're defeated. Except, in Sins, it's actually *more* possible to survive, because it takes more time to travel between planets and bomb them than it takes to destroy one building on a base and move on to the next. And that gives you more time to make a last stand with ships/defenses, unlike any other RTS where the attacker usually focuses on all your unit producing facilities first, leaving you completely shut down.

You can say losing a capital is too harsh because it leaves the opponent with a higher level capital, even if you build a fresh one. Okay, that's true, but only in Flagship mode where the level difference is immediately noticeable. What about standard mode where everyone has to spend the resources to build a level 1 ship? All is fair there, no? And if Flagship mode creates such a huge difference in military strength once one player loses theirs, how is that really different from an Assassination mode in, say, Supreme Commander? There, the opponent can just suicide an entire force on your commander, and you lose instantly. In Sins, they can destroy your flagship, but you still get a chance to rebound.

So, again, what slippery slope is there that's bad enough to warrant gameplay re-designs?

Someone has already tested 10K units... and was working on 50K, IIRC.

Figured I'd note this mistake in my post before someone else does. Was early morning and my brain was half functioning Yeah 10 is 5% of 200, but the point I was conveying stands that it's still a function of the size of the map.

Have you played supcom? It really sounds like you haven't from your comparisons. A fully upgraded terran planet probably isn't even comparable to a tech 3 mass extractor. Even with a hundred planets you're not going to approach the economy variance that exists in supcom. Just upgrading the mass extractors to tech 3 is more of a resource gain over the baseline than you can achieve with trade ports in sins. The ability to spam a massive economy, and in a very small area(you can create a shielded power base that will fund dozens of factories producing T3 units in less area than the factories will take) doesn't translate to a galactic scope very well, but the economy far outstrips the one in sins. It's designed to build to a ridiculous level, sins is designed to make ships important by making replacement cost you.

I've played Supreme Commander. And you're right, it's designed to build with a different scale than Sins, where in a short period of time you can pump out a lot of units. Sins can support a lot of units as well, but it's designed to take longer to make each of them more important.

That, however, doesn't change the fact that the basic system is the same. The only difference is magnitude. For example, if you increase the rate of credit/crystal/metal gain by 10 times and increase the amount of credits/crystal/metals delivered by your cargo ships and refineries, wouldn't it be true that it would also make it possible to have a ridiculously strong economy in a smaller physical space? That wouldn't change the basic system Sins uses, only the rates at which resources accumulate. Converesely, if the income rates in Supreme Commander were decreased by 10 times, wouldn't it also be true that the same number of resource buildings would end up delivering a much slower/smaller economy? Also, the system does not change, only the magnitude.

And different magnitudes do not change the fact that the basic principle is the same.

The economy is Sins is not very high in comparison. You can go from +1 income rate to +2500 in SupCom. There is NO such scaling in any other game that even comes close, Sins included. Play the absolutely largest map in Sins that you can find and compare your income from the first minute of the game to the last. Even go ahead and own every single planet, max all of them out and put only economy modules in every single logistics slot. Yes your income will be much higher at the end than the start of the game but not nearly, not by the longest of shots, as when comparing the beginning and end of SupCom. And even this comparison is skewed since you are comparing owning the entire map in Sins, with only a small portion of it in SupCom. It SupCom, owning the map is not necessary in order to get a booming economy.



True, this is a difference between the games. There are many differences between the games, including scope.



You are right that your starting area takes up the same physical size regardless of the overall map's size. So if the map size decreases the percentage of the map that your starting area takes up increases.

It is also true that you do need at some land to build things.

However, all these points are independent of the size of your economy. The size of your economy is not a function of the map's size. I could have gotten the exact same economy on a map of any size.

How much land is completely relevant to the point I am trying to make. It is a relatively simple one:

You don't need to control a lot of land to achieve a booming economy.



Yes, but you still have the same economy. Just because the map size changes, my maximum economy potential doesn't. In Sins, this relation is directly proportional. This is a factual difference between the two games. A difference which allows SupCom to effectively combat slippery slope.

For your argument to hold, a Sins game where you only owned 2 planets would have to have the same economy potential as if you owned 200.



I believe they can. Once we have enough of the facts and understand the mechanics of both games well enough, it is within out best interest to learn from the successes and failures of games that have come before Sins.



The OP seems to disagree with you and so it seems a number of others who have posted here, myself included. And I find it somewhat odd that I can publish hard numbers and facts and have you respond with "All of your arguments focus on direct numbers that cannot directly translate from one game to the other in the way you translate them" and then in the very same post in the never next sentence you state that no one has been able to make a good case. What more evidence would you like? I have attempted to bring forth simple facts, hard numbers and straight forward arguments. I don't see how else we can discuss the topic rationally. Where is the evidence that these numbers don't translate well? Where is the evidence that slippery slope doesn't exist? I have not seen a good argument against the evidence provided since no contrary evidence has been provided.



Yes, in an RTS that has a base, once a player is able to destroy your base, you will likely lose the game. I agree with the statement but I don't see it supports your argument. I actually see it supporting mine .



This is not the same as when someone's base is being destroyed in your previous sentence. Why? Simply because many battles would have been fought before the attacking force got into your base. Each or any of those battles could of been pivotal in the attacker reaching your base successfully, or you thwarting him. It gives the defender many chances to turn the tide. In Sins, the first battle is very deciding which is the basic definition of slippery slope.



Once that initial battle is lost whats to stop the victor from bypassing your outer defenses and hitting your factories? They can take out any hyper inhibitors with few losses and move on there merry way.



Are you comparing assassination mode in SupCom and Sins? If so, then yes they are similar in the sense that once you kill the main unit (ie: flagship in Sins and Commander in SupCom) you win the game. Or are you comparing assassination mode in SupCom with non assassination but flagship mode in Sins? If its the latter, then they are different in that the game does not end right away in Sins, it keeps on going until the victor takes all the planets, which takes a fairly long time with little chance of the loser to make a come back. The very essence of slippery slope.

A more accurate comparison would of been between Sins' flagship no assassination mode and SupCom's supremacy mode. Here the game keeps on going in both cases but in the SupCom case the loser has a fighting chance since, as your units get higher in tech, your Commander is no longer top dog.

I am not sure what you were trying to get at here. It actually was sounding like you were supporting my point of view. I am glad you brought it up .



I knew it... I just knew it. Just because I started making analogies to another game's designs, someone somewhere would think that I meant that we should re-design Sins' gameplay to match .

A gameplay re-design would be warranted for Sins 2. I never mentioned or even wanted to implicate that Sins 1 should be re-designed. It has a lot of merit. I feel confident in saying that slippery slope won't be addressed before the game launches. There are likely too many other items to work on. However, I also believe it is in the developer's best interest to understand that there is definitely a potential slippery slope problem as part of Sins' 1 gameplay design. The developers can keep in mind that some non earth shattering tweaks could be warranted over the game's life cycle (for instance, giving planet developments a buff). The large analogy I have made with SupCom is only done to illustrate what slippery slope is and what SupCom has done to confront the issue so we can learn from it. I in no way want all these concepts implemented here. There are many aspects of SupCom's game play that I don't like .

That is very cool. I did notice the thread of multianna with screens of huge fleets. It is a testament to the quality of the code. Ironclad has done a great job. I would love to see this kind of mod become standard.

You lose one of your outer planets, along with the bulk of your fleet while trying to defend it. Your shipyards are 3-4 jumps away from that planet, deep in the remainder of your territory. You have plenty of time to rebuild a fleet to attempt to halt the enemy advance before your shipyards are in danger.

Not so in any other game, assuming the enemy has enough units left to press the advantage.



There's quite a good chance for the 'loser' to come back, depending on the situation and how/when/where the flagship was lost. I've done it, I've seen others do it.



I haven't played SupCom multiplayer, so really am not familiar with the details of Supremacy mode.

But hey, regardless of the mode, your commander blows up in the middle of your base, there goes most/all of your base. Flagship blows up anywhere, well, all you lose is the flagship.



Typically, in a debate, the simplest and most effective way to counter any examples is by using the same basis as the other person is using, only turning it around to work against him Hence why my comparisons went with Supreme Commander also.

Only in small maps too. I've come back from catastrophic blunders on mediums, it's not impossible to come back, just impossible to come back with six functional planets and one layer of defense.

Sorry Annatar, it is simply completely different. I have been trying really hard, but I just don't see how what you are saying is related to the topic at hand.

It isn't only that SupCom is built on a different scale; it also built with a different resource model. That difference is that you can fabricate resource infinitely, independent of how much of the map you control. Whether you play on the smallest or larges map, you can still get the crazy +2500 resources I gave screens of. This makes the games very different, not similar.

It is also one of the methods that SupCom combats slippery slope, which is the only reason I brought up the analogy in the in first place

We shall see. Lets bring this topic up again a few months after release and see how more of the competitive games will be played



No one said it never happened. You just don't want the "streamroll" effect to happen too early in the game.



?? Are you supporting my point of view again?



Yes, but it would be wise to have in depth knowledge of subject matter at hand to make your counter arguments make a lot of sense.

Basically, Tholan, here's what I don't understand about the supposed slippery slope in Sins.

Let's use your example:



So basically, your opponent wins the engagement, and we make the assumption that he has enough forces left to press the attack. Agreed?

Translating it to any other RTS, your opponent defeats your main 'army' outside of your base and has enough units left to press the attack.

Any other RTS: He then proceeds to either bypass your defenses if possible, and attack your production buildings first, and then mop up what's left.

Sins: He then proceeds to either bypass your defenses if possible (phase inhibitor with defenses clustered around it make taking out the defenses more or a less a requirement, unless he's willing to suffer heavy losses trying to just knock out the ihhibitor) and then attacks your shipyards, and then mops up what's left.

In just about any other RTS, the time elapsed between breaching the forward defenses and your defeat is usually pretty short, depending on how large your base is, but you must admit usually if enough enemy units get into your base you really can't do anything to stop them.

In Sins, the time elapsed between the breach of the forward planet and your defeat is a lot longer, due to a) necessity to destroy the planet's infrastructure to deny you building rights once he leaves, longer travel times - have to go through the entire planet's gravity well, plus jump aligning, plus phase space time, rinse/repeat per planet, and to a lesser degree c) your empire in Sins is generally more spread out than your base is in any other RTS. Granted, in most RTS games you can have mini bases set up in various parts of the map for quick access to an area, or whatnot, so c) isn't a very strong point.

Just the time difference alone gives you more time to either fortify your next best defensible position and rebuild your fleet, which typically isn't possible in other RTS games.

So, considering that, what I'm seeing is that Sins is quite a bit more lenient to the 'losing' player than just about any other RTS I can think of.

----



The opposite. Losing your most precious unit (regardless of game mode) in SupCom can easily result in a simultaneous destruction of your base. Losing your flagship in Sins means you just lose your flagship, and nothing else is directly affected by it.



Everyone is able to twist words to make them sound how they want them to sound. My knowledge of Supreme Commander mechanics is quite enough to put up a good debate Even if I don't know the specifics of one of the game modes.



Much like you can fabricate resources infinitely in Sins, even if you only control one planet. It may be slower, but it's no less infinite. Again, different magnitudes/rates of increase do not change the basic principle that your resources continuously increase and never run out. I know the point you're trying to make that in SupCom, you can have a more sprawling economy in a smaller area of physical space than in Sins. But that's just the physical way of differing magnitude of the economy, it doesn't modify its basis.