Resource issue (gain per continent) is huge. People don't leave Esamir if they can get lots of nifty Auraxis there every 5 mins... Incentive for NC is to stay on a blue Esamir and keep it blue. :/
We were wondering how you would create a resource system that tries to balance per continent so you can deny enemies the gain of tanks, while the fighting is supposed to take place on multiple continents. Well basically, you can balance it per continent, but you can't do that globally if it's done per continent...
Good thing we arrived at that conclusion when the resource system was first announced to be per continent and there'd be no intercontinental gameplay for a while. :P
Anyway. What we've seen is that empires that are locked in sanc and camped there have a lot of trouble getting out while understaffed. They have to make really concerted efforts to pull anything off.
I would say at the very least Auraxium earn rate must be on a global level, in fact it might be the case for all resources: if your empire does well globally, it'll do well everywhere. This will reduce the incentive to linger on a continent after it's been captured. Warpgates should provide a flat rate global resource gain at the very least.
Raising unit costs universally would punish the lowest gain empire most. It is possible to look into unit cost penalties for winning. Call it an overstretching effect. This would offset the resource gain from the amount of territories owned a little.
Not sure if any of you ever played Europa Universalis (1 to 3), but that's a nation builder game (covers 1399-1821). You could be any nation, but there if a nation grew larger, it was slowed down by having to "core" the area before revolution risk would die down and tax income etc would go up or even new stuff could be build there.
In PS2, we could have something similar with regards to resource gain: you could make it so that conquering territory would immediately revoke the resource gain from another empire, however, there'd be some time until the amount of resources produced by this facility goes up again. This way, the resource gain of the conquering (especially steamrolling) empire is slowed down significantly.
You could still have a "plunder/conquer" bonus, where you get an instant, one time resource bonus for capturing an area, but it would take some time for the territory to become a structural resource benefit. This plunder bonus could also be greater if the territory has been under enemy influence for a long period of time. However, it should be a fixed total that's distributed over the amount of players present, possibly with a maximum bonus per player. This would make it very lucrative to conquer territory for small teams or underpopped empires, less so for overpopped, large groups.
Since players only have limited personal stock, any surplus gain could go to an empire pool, from which more resources are distributed per tick, by spreading it over the players till the pool is empty again.
In the end, you'll still earn more while winning, but it would significantly lower the average resource gain from the areas in the center of the map, which change hands most often. It would stimulate invasions more than it would stimulate reconquering frequently conquered territory. As such, it would give different strategical meaning to different parts of the map as well and would make "cored" territory more important to defend and hold on to.
Just some initial thoughts on this, concept needs further refining.
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2012-10-08, 06:13 AM
Linear Mode
