Overview:
The reason we don't like AOW2 is because everyone spams shit, right? You might not be aware of it, but one of the main reasons everyone spams shit is money. Players simply get too much money.

What:

When a player just spams shit, he does these things too:

1. Exposes himself to the enemy - if he spams long enough, the enemies will be able to determine his position by hearing same sounds coming from the same positions which will make them think someone is spamming, and someone really is. With this, he's exposing any one of his allies to the danger too.
   
2. Not being able to check the terrain every few moments - if he keeps shooting in one direction, when he's spamming, he will keep shooting in that direction which means he won't turn much - perfect opportunity for a chainsaw guy or a ssg guy.

With this, the spammer is putting his life (and his team mates' lives) to a huge risk. But the spammer will not care, because he will be able to afford 5 more commandos after he respawns, so no loss for him.

Now, if he didn't get so much money during his life, he would have spent all his money this way, and then he would not be able to buy a spammy or OP class again, which will make him learn that he needs to live longer. And once he's done thinking about the ways he will live longer and the consequences of his spam, he won't be so spammy again. And once everyone learns, people will start thinking of effective ways to get rid of their enemies and will probably start teamworking, but this prophecy is too big and I am not sure that there will be teamwork, but it will definitely make players use their brains, even if it's just a little. Better than nothing.

Where are the money trees:

Now that we know that one of our main enemies are money fortresses, let's see what gives us money:

• Kills
• Building destruction
• $300 every 5 minutes by default
• Harvesting
• Credit flow
• Mini refinery - increasing the credit flow
• Crates
• Repairing MCT's - increasing the credit flow

If we take out all the things that need you to work hard on, as well as rare credit givers, (or both) we get this:

• Harvesting
• Credit flow
• Mini refinery - increasing the credit flow (once people get enough money - which is a short period - they will build one and spam it with mines or whatever they can afford, and in most cases it stays there for quite some time)

So, this is what's wrong with. Discuss.

This might be seen as a "clipping" problem. Currently, anyone can afford anything just 10 or 15 (arbitrary numbers for the sake of argument) minutes into the game. Instead, only the winning team should have enough money to buy anything (but still go broke if they spam) at about 5 minutes (more arbitrariness) before the end of the game. That way money is still important to gameplay, but it is always scarce enough that you need to pay attention to it.

Is that a good target?

Of course, there's still the issue that having credits leads to winning, which in turn leads to even more credits, but that is inherent in the whole concept of money.

EDIT: Thread title is like, super long.

You lost me right here.

I came back on AOW after 2 years of absence. I wasn't satisfied with at the moment, and thought a lot of things could be improved, but didn't believe they would.
I can't tell how much I was surprised when I came back a month ago to see that the game has been handled so well by the omega team.
For me the game is just fine now as it is. Of course it could still be improved, but not really on the topic of money...

To have money you have to refine ... and when no one do, and your refinery has been broken, you don't have any, which makes sense.

And remember that nothing to spam = nothing to kill. I haven't seen spam like there was before ...

I don't want to hurt your feelings but I think that this topic is a waste of time.
The game could still be improved on other matters, yet.

U hurtd my feelingz.

Qent: They won't be able to afford 3 commandos in the start, so they can't spam right from the start. They'll either have to save up on money and buy weaker classes and THEN start doing it, but it won't last long if they're not going to watch out for their lives as much as they do it now. From time to time they'll buy a class as soon as they can afford it if the credits system change is done properly.

I think that one of the easier methods of doing this are editing the game to support a credflow of 3: making 3 the default aow_credflow value "3". With that, there's two building config options we can choose with that in mind:

a) Refinery gives 1 cred/sec, RC gives 1 cred/sec, always have at least 1 cred/sec. I like this one, because losing the refinery's ability to harvest is bad enough without cutting your credits by 2/3.

b) Refinery gives 2 cred/sec, RC does not affect credits, but still removed advanced classes and makes the team unable to research which is still crippling in early game.

Miniref might give one or two extra per second, idk, either way it's still far far better than what we have now.


Reducing enhanced harvesting gains can be lowered to 200 as a start and see how the players feel.

Might not be a very bright idea, but how about have Refinery give 1 cred/s and RC give 1 cred/s and when they're both dead players still get 1 cred/s?

As for enhanced harvester gains, I'd say $125 or $150 max, but you're right, we'd need to slowly reduce it and watch the reactions, although I expect them to rage once things get harder to earn, because they got used to their rich and spammy gameplay.

This.

Alrighty then, so Option A it is. Dusk has put in a cvar to allow us to change the amount of money gained from harvesting. With this, we can tinker with harvesting economy during games with rcon behind the scenes and see how the playerbase reacts before setting anything in stone.

Alright, hum. Looks like we're taking on another big one here.

First off, when one team is clearly pinning another team (like cutting off their tiberiums), the pinned team won't have much money at all. It's happened way too many times for me to realize that. When things get bad enough you're lucky if you can afford a $200 double shotgun... while the pinning team has probably $2K per member at that point.

While planning R2, we had this idea: classes themselves wouldn't cost anything, add-ons only. While that might sound too extreme for AOW (free commandos, anybody?), this does give me the idea, maybe make the more basic classes like rifleman, machinegunner and super shotgunner cost less. For the winning team $200 isn't much, for the losing team it's overwhelming. If we do cut back the credit flow, cutting down the costs of basic/defense classes would become vital - spammy classes can keep their price.

One note about plasma cannon - if we make $1500 mean as much as it did back in the day, this thing needs to become worthy of such a big price again. Meaning buff it, maybe back to the old plasma cannon which OKHO'd anything it hit. On the other hand, if the winning team can make $1500 easily, the losing team won't have a chance unless a defense class can counter it. We'll have to keep this in mind. Suicide bomber and time cop would need a cost cut as well.

That's my thoughts for now.

EDIT:

I haven't put it in yet, but I plan to. Remind me if I don't.

By the way

Remove every other method besides this. EXP is enough reward for kills, repairing, etc imo. Money for kills/everything else just makes the strong stronger and the weak weaker anyway.

I believe that it should be:
Harvesting
Credit Flow
Mini Ref
Repairing (50xp isn't enough to compensate the time spent firing at the a texture.)

Oh you.
So, are we going to actually do something about this? I think we should at first lower the money given by harvesting (and to remove that annoying feature that gives you money as well when your team gets money, so you get $250 + $250 = $500 ). After we see how things turn out then we should consider lowering (mini ref) cred flow until we get what we want.

I still am yet to make harvesting cvars.. I'll get that done.