Maintenance cost for buildings amd/or vehicles.

There's plenty of games when the res produced is far more than the res needed for each faction. This suggestion will probably not solve the problem, but at least reduce it, as of now both teams can build too many vehicles even if one team has more res points than the other.

Basically, whenever a building is placed, 1% of the total cost will be subtracted from the total res income every second. So if a vf costs $400, for every VF placed and FULLY CONSTRUCTED on the map, 4 res per second will be going to maintain the structure.

If however no res point or no res income is available, the maintenance cost turns off until the total res income per second is greater than the total res consumption per second.

In addition, the maintenance cost will not work if there's less than 100 res available (the price for one refinery).

This suggestion will never actually subtract the amount of res that a team has directly, it will only decrease the total income per second to a minimum of 0 res (which shouldn't happen if you have that many buildings placed on the map).

PROS:

-This would make commanders be more careful on where and how they place buildings.
-Would reduce the strain on the servers and fps of players by having less buildings be in front of their eyes at any given second.
-Creates new strategy options: - recycle old starting base in order to have higher income and risk the enemy sneaking through? or have less resource income per second but maintain the structural advantage?



CONS:

-Would make commander's life harder by having to choose what to reinforce and what not to.
-Another concept to be learned by players.

ALTERNATIVE:

Another suggestion which can work with and without this one implemented is if you have a vehicle maintenance cost as well.

Jeeps would be exempt from it, but all other vehicles should also receive a maintenance "tax" of 0.1% per second.

If you build a very strong heavy tank full of composite armor and powerful weapons, your wages would take a toll every second, and once your wages run out, the total resource of the team will take a hit of 0.01% of the total price of the vehicle. So if you built an expensive heavy (1400 res), you'd get as much as 1.4 res subtracted from your wages, and subsequently from your team's total resource count per second.

THE RES WILL ONLY BE SPENT BY THE DRIVER AND ONLY WHEN THE DRIVER IS LOCATED INSIDE THE VEHICLE. IF YOU ARE KILLED WHEN YOU COME OUT OF THE DRIVER'S SEAT, YOU WILL NOT PAY VEHICLE "TAX".

PROS:
-The stronger you are, the more you pay. Will encourage players to achieve their goals faster knowing that every second they waste is a drain of resources.
-Will make players unlikely to buy a vehicle without necessity and be more cautious about resource spending.

CONS:
-More shit to learn for empires players
-Puts stress on player, requires the player to leave the vehicle in order to avoid "taxation" on repair pads etc.

EDIT: Just thought of a new PRO for the building "tax". This would make the ref nodes a lot more valuable, a great strategy would be sending a scout to sabotage the ref points and thus make the enemy team unable to get resources until the refs are built/repaired or unnecessary buildings are recycled to account for the lost res income

 

I like it how a player's wages are subject to tax, rofl

Also, not a good solution to the problem for the following reasons:
* Players are punishing their team for building tanks (and/or buildings). Your concept works splendidly in pure RTS games, as you have only yourself to bankrupt. In an RTS/FPS, you have your entire team to bankrupt. Players should not be afraid of getting a tank if the res flow allows it.

*There are other ways of preventing a winning team to crush the losing team as soon as they get the upper hand in res flow, such as reduced income from each additionnal ref you get and carcasses being able to be recycled (with the enemy team getting more res out of a carcass than your own does).

This has been suggested before and has been discussed in length; in the end, it just seemed like too big of a tax on your team's resources so you can have fun in a tank.

 

Go play more scrims, every res counts there!

 

Hmm, I see the problem with vehicle taxation.

However I still like building taxation system.

 

Whilst I know I'm picking on specifics, Player multiplier for refinery income, as well as 1% being a huge amount per building, would make this impossible.

 

Fair point, it shouldn't be 1% of total cost, it should be a percentage of total cost of the building times a constant times the res multiplier which will be based on number of players.

 

I've been trying to work out a system where the more refineries you have, the lower amount of resources you get from each additional refinery, but I'm just trying to work out how you'd handle refineries that are worth different amounts to other refineries.

 

Glad I am.

And yeah, I think that's a better solution than maintainence, although the building type was interesting.

Edit: Trickster, you could taper it off first, then add the multiplier. So if the ref is 2x but a normal ref would reduce to 0.75, you reduce to 0.75 then +1. This makes sure that higher res nodes are always worth that little extra, and it's the bonus for the winning team to have those refs.

The alternative is to apply tapering by a default level, so for a x2 you'd just do 0.75x2 = 1.5. Still same as normal ref tapering, just makes that ref a higher profile target as per normal.

 

It also needs to be order-independent to avoid anomalies and teams attempting to maximize their income by focusing on specific refineries.

Regarding the original suggestion... I don't think it's a coincidence that tax systems inevitably become too inadequate or too intricate or both. Though, that's probably less important than the fact that people simply don't like being taxed. :p

 

BJ is raising a good point, but it's a solution to a problem with the res rates that didn't used to exist, or at least, not to the extreme that it does now. IMO, it's better to just fix the problem instead of creating a feature to combat it.

 

But the "new feature" helps loosing teams more then fixing original problem would.

 

The res rate for the losing team is usually too abysmal for it to work.

 

While it is true that the loosing teams res rate is low, this works to there benefit due to them also having less tanks and less buildings to "pay for". So it won't effect them at all really. While the team who has a huge res flow will also likely have huge map control thus LOTS of buildings and tanks thus it will effect them tons more. Helping to whittle away there power to control the map. Take out 2 res nodes and it WILL hurt them substantially. as they are not keeping pace with res out flow.

 

n_i : amount of refs with multiplier i

resourcerate=(n_1+2*n_2+3*n_3)*0,95^(n_1+n_2+n_3)
Works up to 20 refineries.

take 2:
resourcerate=(if(lg(n_1+n_2+n_3+1))=0 then 0 else (n_1+2*n_2+3*n_3)/lg(n_1+n_2+n_3+1))
Works on any amount of refineries. Additional adjustable by changing basis (radix in english?) of logarithm.

 

aww shit its math class time in here... im getting the fuck outa here.

 

You think this is math? Calculate stuff with all forms of complex numbers, multiple exponents and logarithms. Maybe you then get an impression of maths. If not do all this in Hexadecimal.

 

Get the total res income per tick, divide it by 100, subtract it from one, then use the resulting number as an income multiplier.

So say you're getting 10 res per tick, 10/100 = 0.1; 1-0.1 = 0.9; 10 res per tick x 0.9 = 9 res per tick actual.

20 res per tick: 20/100 = 0.2; 1-0.2 = 0.8; 20 res per tick x 0.8 = 16 res per tick actual

30 res per tick: 30/100 = 0.3; 1-0.3 = 0.7; 30 res per tick x 0.7 = 21 res per tick actual

40 = 24 actual, 50 = 25 actual. After that it starts getting smaller, but 25 res per tick seems enough I think. If you want it to max out later you just have to change either the divisor or subtract it from a different number. Or you could simply multiply the output by a constant scalar.

That seems a pretty good system all in all. Especially as it doesn't matter about build order, or where the money comes from, it's just a hard income scale system so that more income sources = less returns.

 

hex ohh no. /me giggles

 

I like hex. I never found bases particuarly difficult, although anything algebraic sort of leaked out of my head almost as soon as I left secondary school, I couldn't even do rearranging equations for AS chemistry.

 

So it's easy for you to exponentiate hex numbers?
say AB53^F * LOG_DE(5439 AF4D)

edit: chris your system does not work on maps where a team has more then 100 res per tick.