Idea: Gradually paying for stuff

Well, ships are built so fast that the money would be gone in just seconds..so, I'm not really sure of the point.

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 main thing is that pay as you go allows you to set up your entire bloody army from the start and get it as you can afford it without having to go back and click the stuff in every few minutes.

Unfortunately, it does have drawbacks, managing resources is simple when you're using it as soon as you click the stuff in, it's a little harder when you're getting it as it builds. It's not as visually apparent how broke you are when you're finished buying things. Unlike a standard rts, where this is a requirement quite frankly, sins is fairly slow paced and your fleet might take 20 minutes to gather the resources for and only five minutes to build out of your starting shipyards. I don't know which system I'd prefer actually, it's definitely more hands off that way, but the game isn't really conducive to continuous building of ship after ship throughout the game. You build a fleet in a few minutes time and you're done for a while till you need another fleet, occasionally sending out reinforcements to replace casualties.

I would like to be able to queue up past my fleet limit and monetary restrictions though.

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.

your talking about something like HW had right?

that was an AWSOME idea that HW had, I think it would work very well in this game.

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?

It wont work actually since hw and sins is different. Ill refer to hw2 (which the system worked also) , since I cant remember hw.

In homeworld 2 you had one resource - credits
In homeworld 2 ,you have to balance what you build with what your income.
Its pretty easy since you just have a mothership , carrier and shipyard that builds stuff so its easy just to manage your build queues with your income so you dont stall.

In Sins you have three resources that come in at different rates.
In Sins each planet is a build entity meaning alot of stuff that can build stuff. It will be very hard for players to manage.

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 it way more annoying to wait till i have 3000 credits so i can finally begin construction.

As for P5yy: how many shipyards or planets where you have actually constructing in a game? i never had more than 4 small shipyards and one large at a single time, with maybe two planets needing development at the spot.
So that is at max lets say 10 things that are under construction at the same time.

How hard is it to manage 10 production places when you can also micromanage a fleet with 50+ ships and dozends of planets?
Sorry but i find you argument very moot.

If i queue multiple structures, only one gets built at a time so only one drains, also only one ship is in construction in a yard at one time.
You should only seariously run out of money when you really overbuy yourself (like research+ multiple planets developing + multiple planets structure building + multiple ships in construction.)

In the current situation if you want to build something like this you can start a few of these things and then have to watch you money closely so you can start your next project immediatly when you have the bucks.
That way you are possibly neglecting your fleet and expansion.
If you could just give the order and then let things develop themselves you have actually more time to manage your fleets and the interesting stuff instead of watching imaginary money accounts rising.

It would also make the game more intuitive i think and allow for better long term planning of fleet and social development as you can split your income on both instead of choosing one side and neglecting the other.

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.

p5yy seriously man, your really just pulling up some nice smoke from out o' your ass

something so dramatic would rarely occur.

not really... yes thats part of it, but its not an allconsuming task

there really isnt any serious microing in the economy, and even still getting this quoue thing up will only relieve the need to switch back and forth back and forth.

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.

again, unless you are making dramatic errors its very rare followed by cursory adjustments.

same thing with the current game, except its just WAY more tedius.

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.

Maybe use that button to allow "negatives"... which simply repesents being qued up past your resources (and as you get the resources needed for a given project, the project gets started...)

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.

the stalling still occurs, the difference is whether or not the player is an active participant in the process.

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.

P5yy if you´d run out of one res but don´t want to stall, you can simply buy that one on the black market if you need the construction done now, its really just like the current system, only that later on it needs less waiting on the player side.
Instead of waiting he just has to look for shortages and then corrects them.

If you see a shortage in crystals for example that would also give you incentive to retake that omnious ice planet, indirectly giving you directions where to you should expand the empire so that everything goes smoothly.

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.

If I built five shipyards on a medium single star map I'd build entire fleets in a few minutes time, what the hell would I need to pay while building for? With the construction speeds compared to the income, there's really no need for it. It's simplistic to manage your resources when you don't have to add them up yourself, so why bother for a few seconds free time that you didn't spend clicking them in?

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!

I'm with P5yy here. An income/expenditure flow system works great in Total Annilation and SupCom, but in those games there is only one scarce resource, mass/metal. (There is a second resource, energy, but in most games it plays a much smaller role outside of the first 5 minutes of a game.)

Trying to track income/expenditure for 3 scarce resources as in Sins is a recipe for trouble. There is also the issue of depletion in Sins. Even if you do nothing, and your opponent does nothing, as asteroids become depleted your income will drop, and perfectly functioning economy could collapse without any user action. You could easily say that failing to compensate for depletion is a mistake on the player's part, but it's just an example of something that TA/SupCom doesn't burden the player with.

To put it another way, the added workload on the player for a flow-based economy is acceptable if the rest of the economy is very simple, so the player can focus on managing the flow. This is true for Homeworld (2), Total Annihilation, and SupCom. It is not the case for Sins.

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

Sins' is not really structured with an "infinite build model" in mind, although I wish it was.

You can't set your factory to continuously churn out units, for example. This kind of game allows you churn out A LOT of cheap units very quickly, particularly when you are also churning an endless stream of engineers to help assist the factory. Obviously having to specify the exact cost of all your units up front does not fit this "infinite" kind of building.

But should you have to have the resources up front in order to build something? I say no. I think it would much simpler from an empire management perspective. How often have you spent time with the research window open waiting for the last 5 seconds to go by so you can purchase that next tech? I would rather have the freedom to specify research right away so I can go concentrate on something else.

Therax had mentioned that a Sins economy would collapse once asteroids were depleted. I quote:

"Even if you do nothing, and your opponent does nothing, as asteroids become depleted your income will drop, and perfectly functioning economy could collapse without any user action."

This I believe is completely false. This reasoning would apply to SupCom because factories can be set to build infinitely (there are other factors too like a resource storage cap, which Sins does not have). This infinite build model requires a non changing economy to avoid collapse and thus expendable resources wouldn't work. However, the OP was not requesting that things could be built infinitely, but rather that you could start building something before you had all the resources to pay for it.