A Different Direction Resources Could Take

So lets see, the way it is now everyone has a resource cap for Infantry, Vehicle and Aircraft of 750. And if you fight in a territory with a certain resource, you gain resources for experience gaining activities. In addition, you also get passive resources for owning the most territory. SOE is trying to reduce the amount of tanks in the game by increasing the cost of the vehicles, and to an extent it is working. But its also creating a lot of frustration for players and still contains quite a few problems. I'll just list a few here.

1. People who play tanks/planes only can't play the game they want to play it. If they pull their first tank and game crashes or die due to just sheer bad luck, they're on a resource cooldown. This makes sense, but it is frustrating.
2. The system heavily favors the faction with more population and more territory, which emphasizes pop imbalances. With a resource cost hike, people might stop going to continents where they're underpopped because they can't possibly fight off the tank zerg coming their way. They just don't have the resources for it.
3. If you have a base with 100 people in it on your side, all maxed out on resources, there's a resource potential of 75,000 tank resources. At 400 resource per tank, that's a potential of an empire rolling 187 MBTs. And then if you die (more than likely you make the resource back in your lifetime), you pull a plane. That is a LOT of tanks for enemies to deal with, and there's no real gauge to how much more armor you have to put up with. All of a sudden, taking out a tank isn't really having a huge impact on the battle.

I could go on and on, but these are the three things I'm going to focus on trying to change and fix with this update, as well as add a little bit of immersion and meta-game (did I hit all the forum keywords there? Immersion? Meta-game? Shoot, I forgot MLGproYOLOswag...).
The main changes:

• Changed to "Fuel-Based" and tied to main facilities.
• Resources can be filled manually (very quickly) or stolen from the enemy.
• Territory control no longer generates resources.
• Personal pools of resources are removed, and instead now belong to the empire.
• Harassers and Sunderers now have a new "Resource Transportation" role.
• Amp Station Benefit changed from "Turret Heat Reduction" to "Acquisition Timer Activation"

First off, we're doing away with individual resource pools. They're now going to be empire-based.

Taking territory will no longer generate resources for a base. This shouldn't change the current game, because how often do you find yourself even saying "man, I'd really love that extra 3 resources every 5 minutes for my tank pool..." This has no place in the new system, anyway. It also favors the faction with more territory (and probably more population) pretty heavily.

Amp Stations will be getting the benefit of activating/deactivating the Acquisition Timer benefit. You don't own an Amp Station? Standard timer. You do own one? Your timer depends on certs spent as it does now.

Each Main Facility will have a capacity of 30,000 resources maximum, and recharges resources at a very slow rate, like maybe 500 resources per minute.

Re-fuelling a base:

You can fill a base manually by taking a Harasser or Sunderer with a "Resource Transportation" utility, and filling it at the warpgate at specific Aerospace or Mechanized resource silo's, then driving it to the appropriate resource silo in the Main Facility and pressing X to re-fuel. This is an experience-gaining activity and should be enough that entices people to want to drive a Resource Transport, but not so much that EVERYONE drives one.

I think Harassers having a capacity of 8,000 resource and Sunderers having a capacity of 15,000 resource sounds fair. This is enough to let you pull a BUTTLOAD of air and tanks, but not enough to fill a base in one run.

How to steal resources from an enemy:
Simply take your harasser/Sundy to an enemy base's silo, and press X to steal resources. Fills your Harasser up with their nanites waiting to be driven to one of your bases. You'll get a small chunk of experience for the resources you steal, as well as experience for dumping it in your base.

How Sattelite/Small bases will work:

For satellite bases and small facilities, it would be VERY annoying to have to top each one of them off (and in most cases impossible if under siege). So instead of their own resource silo, they will drain resources from the closest connected ALLIED Main Facility. If the closest Main Facility is out of resources, they cannot pull vehicles. It does not switch to the closest base with resource.

On Continents where you own no facilities:

You get standard infinite resources from the warpgate. The attackers need some sort of incentive to open a new continent, and since you have no bases you need resources from somewhere. This reverts once a Main Facility is captured.

The main changes I think people would notice are:

1. A new way to play the game, and resources that actually start to matter. Perhaps I'm being too strict with a 30,000 max capacity, but that still is about 90 tanks for an empire. A small meta-game comes into play as people start trying to steal resources from eachother to hinder the enemy and aid their allies.
2. If you want to play a tank, and your empire has the resources, YOU GET TO PULL A TANK. But if you've used up all your resources at your base, or the enemy stole them, someone needs to go on resource duty to keep the fight going.
3. As you progress further and further from your own warpgate, it becomes increasingly difficult to drive resources from your gate to the front. You'll either need to steal them from a closer enemy base, or commit to the long drive where you can be intercepted.
4. The over-popped empire who are controlling most of the continent become a less dominating force in the tank versus tank battle, because they're no longer over-saturated with resources. They'll still have a HUGE advantage on numbers and territories, but the power gap won't be as large.

Its not perfect, but I think its at least an interesting idea. I'd like to hear what you all think, where would you improve it and how you think it'd pan out.

Shameless bump.

Very interesting idea, it would defenetly need some work still though. Sounds a bit like the PS1 NTU system, but i defenetly support this one.

Kind of what I was going for. NTU in PS1 at the very start did drain with vehicle pulling (changed to not drain), but were changed to infantry spawns/base repair. It would liven up the game a lot in my opinion and give people who are sick of combat meaningful and VERY important things to do.

With this, you can steal resources, intercept resource transports and blah blah blah. Actual kind of tactics and stuff, instead of the hex "tactics". Yes, I'm biased. Lattice ftw.

I particularly enjoyed the idea that the further away you are, the more you need to work on your logistics and resource connections, otherwise you run out of fire power. This would work very nicely, as there would have to be an organised force to warpgate a faction, instead of just repulling every vehicle / max / mines etc at every next base you capture.

Empire wide resources won't work because it will either be drained by the zerg, with no thought of the consequences, or never run low, undermining its existence. Although, the overall idea can work if bases served more functions beyond being a spawn point.

Think like Amp Stations powering domes, Tech plants facilitating construction projects, Shield generator facilitates, Artillery bases, Teleport hubs, cross-continent links... even overhauling class utilities so they play off of new systems.

Thats the idea, though. I'm thinking of ways to make bases more important. At the moment, the only really important base in the game is a tech plant, because without that you don't get magriders. With the new system, you're bases would be a resource dump that needs to be filled to fuel the front-line, but also defended from would-be resource thieves.

As for the zerg draining all the resources and dying off, let me ask you a question. Would you rather see a zerg starve on resources and die because they refused to keep themselves alive and fuelled up, or see 485 magriders spamming a small outpost spawn room because they're over-saturated on resources? Not saying the latter wouldn't happen on the new system, but you could be like "oh well screw you, I'm going to go take your resources from behind your back and lay mines at your silo!"

Exactly this, the zerg draining all the resources and running out is the entire point of this suggestion. I stops the tank zerg. Isn't that what everyone wants?

So what happens to Infantry resources under your plan? Infinite C4, nades, and maxes for all?

I didn't tackle that in my post, because I had no idea what to do. I was thinking we could leave them as per-player consumables, and you earn the resources by simply fighting. A change like this didn't make sense for infantry consumables because they're not purchased at bases.

i hereby support this fully. it takes most of the major game hurting things into consideration and proposes a way to fix them. Snap to it SOE or at least explain why not.

Ideas like this sound fun until you spend 5 minutes bringing resources to a forward tower to spawn yourself a MBT and some other ****** uses them all to spawn one first.

But you get all the experience for doing it. Could be a new dedicated support role. Or maybe you get a tanks worth of resources set aside just for you for 2 minutes.

It's a different generation, people don't do things just because it needs to be done anymore.

It actually could with more advanced resource management like a tiered system.

A tiered ranking system that ranks players for the effectiveness of resources that are used and their experience with that resource.

If the resources of a certain type start to get low, the system starts denying access to lower tier players. Basically cutting the dead weight or weakest links until it either runs out, the economy stabilizes, or they rebound.

So a riff on NTUs? I'm game, especially considering the lattice system breaks down horribly without the NTU system. Just a note however, these resources shouldn't be vechical only; air and infantry as well.

It sounds way more fun than the current system, which really isn't saying a whole lot, I know, but still. It'd be awesome to see some Sunderer convoys truckin' resources around the place, rolling with some Harassers for protection.

As is, you see something, you kill it just 'cuz. Just a big ol' deathmatch. It'd would be pretty awesome to see something more along the lines of "OH MAN, that sunnava***** sunderer's stealin' mah resources! Let's get 'em!" *imagine a southern accent for flavor*.

And I like the idea of different bases providing abilities. Good stuff, Ras.

I would. Did it in PS1 when bases needed ANTing, and I'd do it in PS2 because without me the front wouldn't survive.

I wasn't sure about infantry resources, I thought maybe since those are actually bought on a screen in the menu and not a terminal, it'd be simpler to just have that be for the players to manage themselves. Perhaps for MAXes, we can drop the cost of them back to 100 and shove 'em back in with Mechanized Resources. This idea was intended for air, however.

Gotta say, I see what you're saying but I'm not a fan of the idea of a tiered system. Because BR1 player NoobyMcScrubbins who is brand new to the game might want to pull a tank, and he might have the most honest intentions of not wasting his empire's resources. But somehow he can't because nobody filled the base and he's a low priority player? Doesn't seem right to new players, and might create a very unfriendly atmosphere towards new players.

Said new player could be directed to deliver a truckload of nanitey goodness instead, both gaining him xp and more knowledge of the game.

Either way, fantastic idea, NTUs need to be brought back, this game easily supports more playstyles than just run-and-gun, we just need the tools to do so.

I disagree with the loss of personal resource, but I do agree with facility/base resources to allow vehicle spawning. Something that automatically fills from neighboring large facilities and your Warpgate at set intervals and amounts. The facility/base reserves are reduced whenever anyone spawns a vehicles/uses Infantry resources. When depleted those resources cannot be used at that base/facility until more are delivered manually or automatically. Facilities could also have a limited "reach" for automatically resupplying bases. That would add the requirement to manage personal resources and ensure facilities/bases have enough to spawn the desired vehicles. Very interesting ideas here.