Resource Denial: PS1 vs PS2

[Smokingrabbit]

I fully agree.
I also see potential in this system to cause empire hop'n.
As I see it any system that has players paying for deployment from a cash stockpile is going to at least be confusing.
You did a great job ilistrating the major flaws, thanks for brining more attention to this.

[qbert2]

I'm going to grasp onto the idea of resources are problematic to transport (ignoring the lore of having soldiers spawning wherever they want) I'll keep the idea of the fixed percentage dividend that is the current design.

I'll add in the idea that you have your current personal supply that you have immediate access to. This is what depletes when you pull something that requires resources. This source is not too large, in that it's possible for it to be depleted.

I'll add in resource acquisition terminals. Here you gain access to your larger pool of resources to fill up your current immediate pool. The resources from the acquisition terminal fills up over time.

Now, you can adjust the impact of resource denial in at least two ways. One, the closer you are to the front, i.e., the further you are from your empires' claimed areas, the slower the acquisition terminal fills at your current location. Two, it allows for a capture point or some other game mechanic to disable the acquisition terminals.

This will impact the pulling of items that cost resources at the front and force people to relocate to gather more of their resources.

The largest problem with this idea is the fact that, afaik, the current design allows you to spawn anywhere without penalty. So it wouldn't take much time to spawn somewhere else and fill up your personal pool and then spawn back to the front.

You could mitigate this in two possible ways. One, make your personal pool smaller, or two, remove the personal pool altogether and only have a pool of resources that's currently available to you at that location.


Edit: just wanted to point out that this isn't offering very much in the way of new ideas. I was just summing up and grouping together some of the ideas I liked that were previously posted.

[PsychoXR-20]

Just spit-balling a few idea's here, StealSky's idea made me think of a few similar methods.

I scanned over the second page so hopefully these weren't mentioned.

We've seen in the E3 videos, that each territory has an influence, this influence could determine how the resources are gathered.

1: Your Empire must have a certain influence over a territory to gain its resources. If the enemy come behind you and takes a territory, not only would that territory stop producing resources for your Empire, but so could potentially all adjacent territories. This makes losing even a single territory behind the front lines impactfull, as losing one territory could cut off your supply of several other territories.

2: Each territory has a resource value; use the influence of the controlling empire for that territory to determine the final amount of resources it generates. So if the TR take a piece of NC territory behind front lines, the NC outright lose the resources for that territory, but also take a hit on all nearby territory. Those surrounding territories may only be producing 70%, 60% etc. amount of resources as normal.

[Malorn]

Not responding to anyone in particular, but when writing my OP I originally had 3 I's, one of which I removed for emphasis on the other two, but I do think it's worth mentioning

Intuitive - whatever system exists for resource denial it needs to be intuitive for someone to understand why they don't have resources, what caused them to not have those resources, and how they can get them back.

PS1 had this being fairly straightforward. The continental map had icons for each facility showing the resources provided at that facility. The lattice clearly showed links, and links that were severed were yellow/gray. Solid empire-color links were good. By looking for the resource provider and the lattice links you could fairly easily determine where and why you did or did not have access to a resource. From there it's simple to see what had to be done. Was a generator down? Was a hack on? Those were really the only options that would cause you to lose access to resource.

Point being it was easy to sort out what to do and how to impact the resource system.

Complexity doesn't strictly mean that things become less intuitive, but the more complex it is it certainly becomes harder to simplify it down to a few core easy-to-understand concepts. The underlying code and methods can be quite complex so long as it's represented in an easy to understand manner. We don't have to know what sort of diminishing returns something might have, only that the simple concept might be that things further away are less impactful. That's a simple idea, though the implementation of that idea may be quite complex.

Simple ideas and simple concepts are key. Some simple concepts that I've seen in this thread that I like.

* Resources owned by players are tied to the territories which produced them
* Closer territories provide more resources
* Losing a territory means you lose the resources it was holding

I don't think all of these need to be incorporated but I hope it gives an example of how something that might be fairly complex can be boiled down to a few simple statements that are easy to understand that might be concisely represented on a map.

[super pretendo]

I think diminishing returns is really hamfisted as well. In fact, I think the opposite would be an even better idea; having many producers of the same resource type increases their efficiency, a way of abstracting economies of scale.

Why, do you ask? Because that actually makes empires more heavily committed to certain types of strategies. An empire could try to pursue heavy tank production, and other empires would have to scramble to deny them their final production node. Or, the other empire lets them have their nodes, but the savvy players see it as an opportunity to pursue a strategy that counters tanks; the tank-heavy empire then wouldn't be able to switch to a more suitable strategy instantly and would have to deal with their previous strategy being outplayed.

Do you all see the grand-strategic depth this would add?

Now, contrast this with diminishing returns; DR would make it so every empire has homogeneous resource ratios, making it so it's rare that empires would have considerably different balances of specific resources to make them have different gameplay experiences based on their strategic choices.

[super pretendo]

bump, I hope the devs consider this thread, especially since malorn articulated the ideas very well.

[Kalbuth]

Originally Posted by Malorn

If resources were global then resource denial would be impossible. By having them continental-based it means you can impact the local battle by acquiring or denying resources. I don't think it was intended for continental domination. In a way it actually works against it because the more back line resource objectives you have the more you have to defend, and it gives an underdog with few territories to more attack options and a way to hurt the juggernaut empire that's dominating much of the continent.

Well, in theory the underdog at this point is not supposed to be able to hurt the juggernaut for long, because he will be lacking tanks, aircraft and such due to lack of resources.
This resource system will create a king of resource barrier under which you're going to be unable to respond with force, and your only answer will be footzerging essentially. Once your opponent has forced you into this situation, he has basically won, until the 3rd faction balances things out.
If one of the 3 empires manage to force both other empires into "footzergers", it's only a matter of time before he's going to dominate the cont.
Q : if this happens, how do you get out of it?
Answer 1 : the other 2 empires are going to the other 2 conts, and their soldiers are going to farm resources there, enabling them to come back to their foothold and get out in force
Answer 2 : After X minutes of an empire gaining dommination, resources from the other 2 conts begin to transfer to troops in the losing empires footholds. It's essentially the same as #1, just faster and without the need for players to go to other cont, and lowering their income on other cont, impacting fights there.

All this blabble not answering the questions at hand : how to make the resource management impact immediatly and significatively?

I think a resource cap rather low is the answer. When you have enough resources, your resource bucket is filling fast enough for you not to feel this cap.
Once your empire lacks resources, and because you couldn't cash in from previous period of full resources, your bucket is going to empty fast and fill slowly.

[Dagron]

Originally Posted by Malorn

In order to keep a losing empire competitive, resources need to be more valuable when they are close to the fighting. That way all the resources behind the lines aren't as big of a factor and its more about what's going on now.

If the resources behind the lines were less of a factor, wouldn't that also discourage people from doing backdoor jobs even more?

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Dagron

If the resources behind the lines were less of a factor, wouldn't that also discourage people from doing backdoor jobs even more?

Depends on how much less of a factor it was and how the rest of the system works. As of now there isn't really any encouragement for behind the lines jobs so I don't see how it would discourage it. Any sort of system that encourages back door action would first need a reasonable objective back there to take.

As long as the influence system makes it unreasonable to take rear territories in that really only leaves resource-related objectives, like something that might disable the flow of resources from one territory to another.

[Dagron]

Originally Posted by Malorn

As of now there isn't really any encouragement for behind the lines jobs so I don't see how it would discourage it.

I see.

Originally Posted by Malorn

Any sort of system that encourages back door action would first need a reasonable objective back there to take.

As long as the influence system makes it unreasonable to take rear territories in that really only leaves resource-related objectives, like something that might disable the flow of resources from one territory to another.

I know, but i really liked the idea of sneaky teams taking facilities deep inside enemy territory...
I suppose just having them make sabotage runs or other similar missions would also be cool though.

I guess i'm diverting the topic though, so i'll be quiet now.

[ArcIyte]

In Company of Heroes resources dot the entire map, much like in PS2.

However, not all resource nodes are equal. CoH uses Manpower, Ammunition and Fuel as resource. There are 3 grades of resource node: High, medium and low. A High fuel node is essentialy 3 low fuel nodes, so it is very valuable and you don't want your enemy to have it. Much of a CoH match is centered around fighting for a High Fuel point or a High Ammunition point.

The node values can always be changed or moved to fine tune the map balance, and I think it would solve the issue of a large empire not caring about losing resources, while still rewarding them for taking lots of map control.

[noxious]

So here is the system I have come up with after thinking about it some more.

First, there are two types of territories. There are facility territories (the major bases), that generate no resources but provide bonuses, and which are the only location (outside of your warpgate) where you can spawn vehicles. All other territories are resource generating territories. These territories provide no bonuses and they can't spawn vehicles, but they generate the personal resources that you need to spawn vehicles, buy certain equipment, etc.

To gain the benefits of a facility bonus or to obtain resources generated by a territory, you must be in a hex that is adjacent to a functioning friendly territory. You gain the benefits from the adjacent hex and all friendly hexes that are connected to that hex (obviously including the hex you're in, if it is friendly).

All facility and resource generating territories can be disabled rather than captured via sabotage. Doing this not only stops that territory from providing benefits or generating resources, it also severs the link between contiguous hexes; this makes it possible to cut off an enemy territory by capturing or disabling all of the enemy hexes that surround it.

There is one glaring problem with this system as it has been described thus far; resource generation is a public good. Individual players have no incentive to assault resource generating territories because a player will obtain the same amount of resources even if all they do is attack/defend facilities. To rectify this, resource territories should have terminals from which a player can obtain a modest but immediate injection of resources (with a cooldown of N minutes so you the player can't reach the resource cap by visiting a single resource territory).

A successful attack/defense of a resource territory should provide an even greater immediate injection of resources. Finally, players operating behind enemy lines should be able to steal resources (since they won't be adjacent to friendly territory, they won't have any natural resource generation) from enemy resource territories. These last two abilities will be an important balancing aspect when an empire has lost a lot of territory; even though such an empire will have little or no natural resource generation, the enemy will have a lot of territory to be captured or stolen from, allowing for a quick injection of resources to get back into the fight.

The final piece of this puzzle is the individual player's resource cap. A cap that would allow the purchase of 3 to 5 of the most expensive vehicle would seem appropriate, but this is the kind of thing that would require a lot of testing. The cap should be set such that a defending group can hold out for 10-15 minutes after being cut off from the rest of their territory (long enough for a counter attack to regain the connection) while still being low enough that resource/facility benefit starvation is a viable strategy.


The system described above would be relatively easy to understand, emphasize the importance of every hex, allow for more varied empire-wide strategies, and provide a viable avenue for an underdog with little or no territory to get back into the fight.

[Pillar of Armor]

I'm a big fan of adding a resource "truck driver" or some version of the ANT.

[noxious]

Originally Posted by Pillar of Armor

I'm a big fan of adding a resource "truck driver" or some version of the ANT.

I am personally, but I get the feeling that SOE are very interested in eliminating 'boring' roles from the game, so we're extremely unlikely to see one.

[Toppopia]

Maybe the closest thing we might get, is convoy missions, where a convoy of sunderers drive from resource sights, to the foothold and it shows up as a mission for enemy factions to attack, and as defend missions for friendlies, the attackers get bonus xp/resources for every truck they destroy, while defenders get bonus xp/resources for each truck that survives. This could allow resources having to be transported to the foothold to actually be distributed to your empire instead of magically acquiring resources.