Re-implement Research cost, as res/s

In order to implement an idea like that we would need to define what happens if the team goes below 0 res during research. How do you feel it should behave in that case?

 

Why would this be a good thing?

I can only see this slowing down research acquisition and adding a real decision between expansion or researching.
Serious meaningful choices are a good thing.

My thoughts on the disadvantages?

- This will not be good for low population games, as the resource rate is very low. And making technologies cost res/sec will reduce that teams capability to progress early in the game.

- This will slow games down and draw them out for longer. It already takes half an hour to run out heavies if you stop for meds on the way... Games can take long enough as it is.

- Reduced ability to make a comeback as a losing team will not be able to produce vehicles or research at the same rate as the winning team. This means that early game is even more important than it is at the moment.

- The game will now be even more dependent on your commander. The early game will be so crucial that making a mistake (like losing an unbuilt building due to a gren snipe) may well lead to a lost game. Simply because you wouldn't have the resources to keep up with your opponent in research

I have only ever played Empires with 0 research cost, but I'm willing to try it and see.
However... Convince me that this would be a good thing!

 

I'm going to say something crazy at this point, which is it's not hard to win without tanks. Tanks aren't used to counter bases and break though stuff to help end games, they are to counter other tanks. Just think how often you came close to nearly losing or winning in the early game when all you had was a vf and some apcs with no good armor, as did the other team. I make this point because heavies aren't really what is closing out games, if anything I would hazard a guess that it's simply their high cost which can actually bankrupt a team that causes someone to lose eventually. So I'm going to say that arguments about delaying heavies will delay an end to the game are false, and a poor reason against something.

Preventing comebacks has more merit, but it's also something I still say is either off or just wrong. Why should a team that's been losing the whole game suddenly make a comeback at heavies? If anything that's just showing faction imbalance. I can understand if it was to get a couple of beefy tanks to kill the comm or something, but it's usually a slow map takeover instead.

I would hazard a guess that no one actually dislikes long games, they just dislike the stale end game and just want the map to be over, or a bad round to end because the winning team just can't close it out. There's nothing wrong with 1 hour games, I feel like that's where empires should be shooting for anyway. It's just we get heavies at the 30 minute mark so by everyone's standard we are in the end game for more then half the game.

The point I'm making is I honestly didn't mind any costs, but personally I felt I liked just having costs to chassis because it gave a team options if they were too poor to get to the next level, which helped extend the mid and early game(my favorite parts at least). So for me I do like research costs but paying in bits or lump sum makes no difference to me.

 

@Lazybum


I agree that tanks are most often used to counter other tanks (this is an entirely separate issue). However when it comes to destroying bases? And getting rid of turrets? Vehicles excel in ways that infantry just can't...

And I have a certain situation in mind that I feel will be made worse by research cost...

*The below scenario is highly dependent on actual costs, so it's all hypothetical at the moment.*

It is early on in the game, and the initial refinery rush is over. Your team ended up with less refineries due to being beaten in infantry combat. Your team struggle to fight against the enemy team with infantry alone (amazing veteran players, better coordination etc...). The only hope now is decent tank play to regain the ground (too far to walk, can't beat them on foot etc...).

Without research cost. All resources gained will go towards vehicles and buildings. If you have a radar... You can keep up with the enemy research. So only your vehicle production is affected, not the quality of your vehicles.

With research cost. You now need to spend resources on research too. So if you choose to build vehicles to regain the ground, you fall behind on research and have low quality tanks. If you research, you don't regain ground as quick, and so can't build as many vehicles. Your opponent who has more resources also has this issue but they have the infantry advantage, and more resources to spend.

So as the team who is behind... If they don't regain ground soon, then they will fall behind so far as the cumulative bonuses for more refineries stack up (more money = more research + more tanks)... So surely the game is already decided, why bother continuing?
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I know that this is a very specific scenario, but it happens so often in games, as one team usually ends up at an initial disadvantage...

EDIT: upon further thinking... This situation is highly dependent on the ratio of vehicle cost to research cost. If research cost is relatively small compared to cost per vehicle, then this situation wouldn't be as bad. However then research cost wouldn't be as noticeable or impacting as much on gameplay.

I'm still undecided which is better.

 

I gave the tanks thing a mention because it's entirely related to what you were asking. After all the only purpose of research is better tanks. Sure nukes wipe out turret farms and dual he can get the job done too, but it really isn't like a few grens can't get the job in a similar amount of time. An engineer with a box of ammo can clear bases faster then a tank. Tanks aren't needed to win, and aren't as needed for a comeback if teams are of nearly equal skill.

You have forgotten entirely about wages, but that's ok because I know mr x would also say they shouldn't exist, so lets continue without them. If a team is winning that much in the beginning from things like way better teamplay or simple skill stack, I don't know why you would think tanks make the difference here. Generally people good on the ground tend to be good in tanks, so it's not like the playing field has been leveled just because you can both keep up with research. As someone who has played countless losing games I know better tanks don't win, the most I can do is mitigate things with better building placement, slightly better or faster research, or play some distractions so my team can not die for a bit longer. If my team ever does turn it around and start winning, 99% of the time it's just because a vet decided to unstack it a bit and help us out or the other team just stopped caring and started to try to nine mine something.

So I pose this question to you, should we be delaying inevitable defeat in the hopes someone fixes the team stack or do we let the game end early so we have a better balanced game next round? Game play changes such as this should be viewed more of would it make balanced games more interesting and fun, and this probably would. That said I'm more for just chassis cost, but I'll take anything over this heavies for most of the game thing we currently have.

 

@Lazybum

I am unsure as to whether research cost will prolong or shorten a game. That depends entirely on the map, team skill, and available resources. But it will slow research progress for sure.

I do agree that games should not be prolonged unnecessarily when a clear winner is determined. However games also shouldn't be too short and have one team give up, this could happen if a winner emerges too quickly.

As for fun... Many of my best memories and stories from playing empires occur when a team comes back from defeat.

As a separate point:
I also think that research cost affects the amount of vehicles one team has.
Fewer resources -> less tanks -> tanks are rarer and more valuable .

But with more valuable tanks... This would mean that they shouldn't be wasted. This may have a bad effect on new players. As vets will want experienced tank drivers to drive their rare tanks, rather than inexperienced tank drivers.

This will lead to more instances of "omg we lost because noobs wasting tanks". And if there are fewer available resources(spending res on research...), then it will be harder for new players to experiment and learn and may actually cause more tanks to get "stolen" as people explore the game.

I feel that this effect is lessened with more available resources and more common tanks.

 

Come backs are easier with less resources in the game, it help prevents the winning team building a huge amount of redundancy in their bases, having turrets everywhere, and have everyone in tanks which have take a beating better then infantry, are faster then infantry, and can have an easier time killing infantry. This is what my experiences in older versions were like(like 2.0 to 2.12 I think I played), everything was way more expensive and res rates were lower along with research costs and no wages, it was an incredibly poor game compared to what we have now. Those times it was way easier to get things done with the cheapest resource a losing team has, infantry, and that's excluding those weird things like 9 mining buildings to blow them up.

I'll be blunt on that last point you're making, common tanks don't help new players. Yes they can mess with different loadouts and what not, but there's a price to pay for it, they don't care about losing it because there's no "value" to the tank. With so much resources in the game people undervalue their tank, and don't take good care of it. Even vets who should know better don't try very hard to keep a tank alive because of how easy it is to get a new one. When a tank costs more, when it's a more significant part of the game, people will value it more and try to die less. Note, regardless of anything newer players will still lose tanks just as fast as they can make it, but I don't think having worse games to help new players not hurt the rest of the team is worth that trade off. That needs to be fixed with a better vf menu and tutorials.

That sounds kinda crazy, but to me that's where the commander is suppose to come in, and lock the vf. The game isn't denied to them either, that's the point of wages and a major reason I like them, it really helps give everyone a tank or at least a jeep to get around.

 

This answer is going to be shorter than it should be, but what if we also restricted the maximum amount of refineries the team can place (with a researchable limit increase) to prevent the situation where losing the incredibly forward barracks costs you half your income and sets you back a ton?

 

Ok. You've convinced me that it's not a conceptually bad thing. I'd like to try it.

As a final note. Some maps have very little resource income at a low player count. Canyon with 1 per ref with 5 players on your team. With 4-5 res/sec, it will be difficult to do much if you're researching for 1-2 res/sec. Wages and vehicle recycling might offset this slightly. I feel it would take a lot of tweaking in practice to get these costs right across all maps.

Since this is a "re-implement" thread... why was research cost removed in the first place?

 

To help the losing team not lose as horribly.

 

honestly @VulcanStorm, most of your cons sound like pros to me :D

 

I don't quite get what you mean here. Refs have diminishing returns already.

Vulcan, one idea to help low pop vs high pop is have research use the same player multiplier that refs use, so for example he cannon starts at 100 and just multiplies from there, with 48+ being 500 res to research, assuming the default 12 player threshold. Also here's what trickster had to say about research costs from this vintage pug thread.

 

What I mean is, if you can only benefit from holding a portion of the map's refineries, there's less pressure on you to take at least half the map because your income will be just as good as the other team's if you can only have, say, two refineries at that point in time. Even with diminishing returns, which I honeslty am not sure if they work, controlling six refineries gives you more income than the other team's two.

 

That's the point of res a second, you don't have to save at all. It's basically a drain on your income, not your pool of res. This reminds me though, I have a feeling this isn't going to be obvious to both the commanders and players, so I expect lots of "wheres the res?" questions.

 

why? if both income and research expense is in res/second it should be quite clear. instead of only having +res the field next to resources it would also show -res.
fe. you gain 10 from refinaries and spend 12 on research it will just say 2000 (-2) in the top bar. thats pretty much like every game which uses such system does it.

i dont think it makes much sense to include big one time costs such as tanks and buildings and calculate resflow from that (like a projected income per minute or whatever).

also i dont see how the decision between progressing in research versus amassing tanks midgame is bad? ofc there needs to be some sort of balance of interests (and like thexa already said a pause button), but lets be honest, resource flow needs tweaking anyway ...

 

I mean it's more people learning that research takes away. If you come into empires now and saw it constantly decreasing by 2 or simply going up by 1 even if you have the whole map you'd think there was a bug or something.

Honestly I'm making more of a point that I'm going to be yelled at by everyone for not continuing research all the time because it's no longer free, but 90% of the player base who doesn't command won't know that and will keep forgetting. Because it's a small drain they are more likely not to notice that it's costing me something too. I get yelled at enough by people who think I can cater to their every whim.