Resource Denial: PS1 vs PS2

[Figment]

So overstretching effect of resources? What if resource distribution (vertical) per amount of terrain held (horizontal) was parabolic?

Let's take resources distributed of your empire around a third of the terrain you are at standard, or a 100% resource gain. Now, if you capture more, this amount increases up to a certain point. Let's say if you hold 55% of the continent, you're at your max gain and get around 125%. After that, it slowly drops back to 80% gain ("logistical overextension effect"). If you have less than a third up to 0%, gain drops to around 60%. This way there's still an advantage in gaining territory, but the attrition gap might just become a bit smaller and easier to overcome.

And again, what's the global effect of holding terrain? Is it averaged over all territories? Sorted continent by continent? Modifiers?

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by Figment

So overstretching effect of resources? What if resource distribution (vertical) per amount of terrain held (horizontal) was parabolic?

Let's take resources distributed of your empire around a third of the terrain you are at standard, or a 100% resource gain. Now, if you capture more, this amount increases up to a certain point. Let's say if you hold 55% of the continent, you're at your max gain and get around 125%. After that, it slowly drops back to 80% gain ("logistical overextension effect"). If you have less than a third up to 0%, gain drops to around 60%. This way there's still an advantage in gaining territory, but the attrition gap might just become a bit smaller and easier to overcome.

And again, what's the global effect of holding terrain? Is it averaged over all territories? Sorted continent by continent? Modifiers?

Well as it stands in their current build, resource gain only applies to the continent you are currently on. So if you have 90% territory on one continent, you are gaining a lot more resources than if you have 0% on another.

But most of the resource distribution occurs based on gameplay, so the more you kill enemies or heal allies or do other valuable things for your empire, the more resources you gain. From some of what Higby has said, it sounds like you still gain some small amount of resources through fighting even if your empire holds no territory or resources on a continent.

So the way I understand it, an empire with no MBT making resource could still pull tanks no matter what, but they may be so costly that you had really better make sure to try and keep it alive, because you won't have enough resources to pull another one for quite a while. You'll be fighting the war on a budget until you gain some resource territories.

It sounds to me like resources will act as sort of a convenience motivator, sort of like a lot of the cash shop items do in other areas. As long as they balance it right, players with no resource territories can still get by, but players with a ton of resource territories will be able to spam shit a little bit more carelessly, while still not overpoweringly.

Let's not forget that there is a certain amount of appeal in taking territory just to take it, or to hold on to territory just because you like to feel like you are dominating and like to see the map in your factions color. It doesn't take a lot to help motivate and balance the territory captures and defenses in the right direction, when the gamers mindset is already pretty close to where it needs to be on it's own.

There could be some inherent flaws that need to be sorted out with the resource system in beta, but I think they will be much more subtle nuances. As long as players are willing to push into a continent where they don't yet hold any territory, I think that most of the battle lines will work themselves out quite nicely and dynamically with only very minor intervention by the game mechanics to push things along in the right direction.

But why would I push into Esamir where we hold no territory and I have to work for 20 minutes to pull a Scythe, when I can fight on Amerish where I can spam grenades all day due to our 70% territory control? I think it will actually be a good thing if empires can get pushed off of a continent and may be disinclined to come back right away, but there has to be a valuable reason to come back there eventually, beyond just pride and wanting to control as much territory as possible on the world map.

[Kalbuth]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

It sounds to me like resources will act as sort of a convenience motivator, sort of like a lot of the cash shop items do in other areas. As long as they balance it right, players with no resource territories can still get by, but players with a ton of resource territories will be able to spam shit a little bit more carelessly, while still not overpoweringly.

Yes, it looks like a simple attempt at reflecting on players their empire having little territory. It has no "tactical" value, targetting specific hex for resource starving isn't going to impact enough to be worthwhile to do, from this description.

[wOOtbEEr]

I worry about auraxium since it can be spent like station cash for weapons. Say your empire controls a whole Cont. Thats nine or so bases pumping out money on a cont with no fight. Very tempting for people to just go sit a character there and go play something else.

w00tb33r

[MrBloodworth]

This is a trend with the this design, and i noticed it early on as well.

Plantside focus on the group, Planetside 2 focuses on the individual, so much so that failure has been taken out almost completely.

You can't have a good war game with out failure.

[Kalbuth]

Originally Posted by wOOtbEEr

I worry about auraxium since it can be spent like station cash for weapons. Say your empire controls a whole Cont. Thats nine or so bases pumping out money on a cont with no fight. Very tempting for people to just go sit a character there and go play something else.

w00tb33r

One of the reasons there should be a cap on personnal resources

[Malorn]

On the subject of abuse cases. We definitely don't want bots sitting around farming resources or people not logging off when they leave to harvest more resources. There's many ways to control abusing resource farming unrelated to the system itself.

The simplest method is ensuring that some minimal score generation per unit time exists in order to receive resource dividends and scaling to population.


1) Fighting is linked to resources. We already know that fighting (more specifically score-generating activities) generate resources. There may be other factors in this, but it would be possible to prohibit all resource gathering without some minimal score generation. So standing around doing nothing would net zero resources.

2) Scaling on relative and absolute population. The dividends themselves could be proportional to your relative population on the continent. So if your empire has some massive population advantage on the continent (because the other two empires left it due to foothold camping or whatever), then your dividends could be reduced. The dividends themselves might literally be divided by the number of people on the continent, so a high population could mean fewer resources per-person.

3) Low resource caps. If you can't hold a lot of resources then the benefit of AFK farming it is reduced. The problem here is Auraxium, which is used to buy side-grades and may not have a limit like the other resources.

4) Slow resource generation over time while offline. This approach removes the motivation to farm resources to begin with if you will get them while you are logged off anyway. Combined with a low resource cap it could remove the motivation entirely. Logged off for a few hours and come back with a full resource pool. Then there's no need to stay logged in, create a bot, etc just to farm resources. Some auraxium generation might also factor in here to discourage trying to afk-farm it in game.

You put all those things together and you can make it difficult enough and not worthwhile enough to bother, but still work just fine for people actually playing the game and not trying to cheese the system.

[TheBladeRoden]

I kinda pulled this out of my ass, but here it goes. What if passive resource accumulation was based on how closely the resource node is connected to your current hex, instead of the warpgate?

In this image, each connected hex away you are from a resource node, the lower your income from that node gets. It doesn't necessarily have to be a 50% loss each hex, just for illustration purposes.

If you were sitting on the yellow node, you'd be only 3 spaces away from the blue node. But as the enemy eats away at your back line, the connection gets strung out more to 4 spaces, and then 6; harming your blue income, and harming the yellow income for those on the other side of NC's advance.

And if the enemy completely cuts you off, then you got a Stalingrad situation going.

[Dagron]

At first glance it seems interesting, i wonder what the more strategy savvy people think of it.