View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0001861 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Game Mechanics | Dec 6, 2010 12:38 pm | Jan 3, 2011 11:45 am | |
| Reporter | Suzera | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Summary | 0001861: Powerplants always on as a safety vs economy decision | ||||
| Description | Right now you just build as many spare power plants as you care to and leave only as many as you need on. You can pause, turn on, and unpause any time one happens to get destroyed, or you overbuild or you're reaching your power cap from reclaiming. This is boring, simple, tedious and unchallenging. If powerplants were always on, and thus ALWAYS draining resources no matter what, they then become a long term, continually redecided safety vs economic efficiency decision, through the entire game. With how the player's planet layouts change during the game, this could be an evolving decision process base on how the player's borders look at any given time, favoring safety some times and economy others. Or even just WHERE they are built would become of more importance. With how fast and cheap powerplants are right now though, you could just chain build backups as needed, and thus undercut the decision, so they need to take longer to build if this gets in. Much longer for mk 3s. They would also need to do their continual drain on resources as soon as they are placed so people can't hold almost-built powerplants ready to finish as backups either, or else that too would shortcut the decision and just cause extra decisionless micromanagement. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Well, in the past powerplanets WERE always on. And they took longer to build, actually. I thought right along the lines of what you are saying. I can't remember if this was pre-1.0, or post-1.0. There were some complaints at the time, and I wound up changing it away from that for reasons that are not fully coming back to me at the moment. I'm tentatively in favor of your suggestion, but I'd rather have thoughts from others. There's a good chance that this would be a highly-reviled change on the surface of it, just because people don't like "options being taken away." But, even if that's the case, thinking of something else that gives the same sort of net effect to what you're suggesting would be interesting, I think. One way or another, I agree that the dynamic you're discussing -- the longer-term risk vs reward of building a power plant safety net -- would be a good thing. |
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Technically, this would add options that aren't there right now. Right now there's only the option of "am I lazy or not", which isn't strategically deep. I'M even playing it lazy by not building enough spare powerplants on each planet to power my entire fleet, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't if it became more necessary (and I already build several spare mk3 power gens for every planet I own on the HW to leave off for emergencies in cutlass games). This would also suit your statements I think, since you have said it "shouldn't be an issue to keep them all on". You like the safety and turtling, I tend to favor the economic edge that mindless micromanagement gives right now. This change would actually make it a conscious decision with every new planet, with every new power plant built, with every new technology upgrade, with every ARS taken, to keep that economic edge or keep your power turtling at ever increasing surpluses instead of a busywork process. If this is implemented, you HAVE to cut out the two loopholes mentioned though, or else nothing is really different besides the question becoming even more "am I playing lazy or not?" Edit: thought you were Keith. Pronouns he->you. |
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The main thing that makes me iffy on this is that it basically replaces the "pause" button with the "scrap" button (which is not so easily used by the bottom-of-the-screen-menu). Of course, it removes most of the "safety net" feel since you may not have the time/engineers or resources to build the necessary replacements, whereas unpausing costs nothing. |
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Yes, sacrificing your safety is easy, but you ALREADY paid the price by having it drain until you scrapped. If your fleet blows up entirely, and you scrap powerplants, you have to repay for them again so scrapping and rebuild powerplants should be costly enough to not be worth it (mostly in the mk 3s). If you are playing economically, your price is paid if you fail. If you never fail, you're still walking that razor's edge, just waiting for something to slip onto an underdefended planet and plunge you into a blackout, turning off all your turrets before the enemy wave of bombers slams through your territory, or forces you to turn off your attack fleet to leave them helpless to slaughter in a last ditch effort to keep your defenses marginally up. Or maybe not entirely helpless, but at least underpowered. 125k possible power loss can be quite a large number of ships. The build time on mk 3s should be long enough that a wave of 200AIP bombers should have a least enough time to blow up a couple planets probably, even with 20 mk 1 engineers helping. Something might need to be done to make it harder to keep all your good power plants behind a hard chokepoint though, or else it turns into just getting a hard choke point and placing all your power behind that, except for with counterposts, backdoor hacker or warp jumper. |
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I would actually prefer the power plants had same kind of automation as manufactories, only the ones that are needed are on, and the ones that are not, are automatically turned off. I mean, they're practically the same thing. They consume resources to produce another resource. If manufactories are allowed to prevent consuming resources when not needed, then why aren't power plants too? Though I'm generally too lazy to switch off power plants to save resources, so a change like this wouldn't really affect my games much. Still, producing backup facilities shouldn't be penalized by forcing to use them constantly, so I'm against this. Remember, Manufactories don't have this penalty, and you can build as many of them as you want for future needs. |
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Manufactuaries aren't used to keep your force fields and turrets online. They also don't determine how many ships you can build, or how fast you can build them. Powerplants do. |
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This sounds enormously fiddly, and as Keith says essentially trades pausing for scrapping, and 3 second "oops I didn't notice the energy counter" brownouts for 5 minute "oops, I'm losing the game because I didn't notice the energy counter, time to reload" brownouts. I can appreciate the intent to make reactor building a more strategically meaningful decision, but the energy quantities in this game fluctuate so wildly, and often so inexplicably, that punishing the player (by turning off their static defenses) for failing to notice one of those fluctuations seems problematic to me. I'm trying to imagine how much excess energy you'd have to have to be safe from that kind of thing in practice, and at least in my experience I think it'd be at least 300k. I suppose if you wanted to buff the output of the higher mark econ stations I'd be ok with that, but ultimately I'm not sure I see the point. Is anyone really going to take the "low enegy" path here, considering the risks? At a minimum a drastically more "vocal" feedback system would be needed on energy. One should be able to set up "alerts" in the CTRL menu to let you know when you're at various levels of energy excess, so you can start building if need be. |
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@suzera: Yeah, different resources do different things. Isn't that the purpose? I don't see how that makes the comparison any less valid. The core function of power plants and manufactories is the same. Resource for a resource. What is done with the resource is a different topic entirely. |
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Oh, THAT's right: players were having to scrap, instead of pause. Now I remember. Whenever someone's fleet died, they'd then have to scap a ton of powerplants just so they could rebuild... then rebuild the power planets. Some sort of risk vs reward safety net could be intersting, and strikes me as intriguing, but this isn't the way to go about it, thinking about it more. |
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There's only one route to power, and that is power plants. The main resource gatherer for crystal/metal are harvesters, not manufacturies. You never turn metal or crystal harvesters off to save power, do you? |
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@suzera: Maybe I'm missing the point here, but I don't see how making power economy more complicated makes the game any more fun. I would rather focus on making the war itself more interesting than constantly fiddling with power plants to keep the power economy ideal. And actually, command stations produce power too, so power plants aren't the only 'way to power'. Sure, it's not enough to keep things running, but then again so aren't manufactories alone enough to produce ships either. All of these units are part of the resource circle, and should, IMO, all have identical functionality. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 6, 2010 12:38 pm | Suzera | New Issue | |
| Dec 6, 2010 12:39 pm | Suzera | Description Updated | |
| Dec 6, 2010 12:41 pm | Suzera | Description Updated | |
| Dec 6, 2010 12:41 pm | Suzera | Description Updated | |
| Dec 6, 2010 12:45 pm | Suzera | Description Updated | |
| Dec 6, 2010 12:45 pm | Suzera | Description Updated | |
| Dec 6, 2010 12:50 pm | Suzera | Severity | minor => feature |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0005375 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:20 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => feedback |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:31 pm | Suzera | Note Added: 0005377 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:31 pm | Suzera | Status | feedback => assigned |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:32 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005377 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:32 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005377 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:33 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005377 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:34 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005377 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:35 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005377 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:35 pm | keith.lamothe | Note Added: 0005378 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:38 pm | Suzera | Note Added: 0005379 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:39 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005379 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:39 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005379 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:41 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005379 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:41 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005379 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:42 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005379 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:44 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005379 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:46 pm | HitmanN | Note Added: 0005381 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:47 pm | Suzera | Note Added: 0005382 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:52 pm | Vinraith | Note Added: 0005384 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:54 pm | Vinraith | Note Edited: 0005384 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:55 pm | HitmanN | Note Added: 0005386 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 1:56 pm | HitmanN | Note Edited: 0005386 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 2:03 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0005389 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 2:03 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | assigned => resolved |
| Dec 6, 2010 2:03 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
| Dec 6, 2010 4:30 pm | Suzera | Note Added: 0005427 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 4:30 pm | Suzera | Note Edited: 0005427 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 5:07 pm | HitmanN | Note Added: 0005438 | |
| Jan 3, 2011 11:45 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | resolved => closed |
