Castles & Economy

[CompanionOfMacedon]

The Castles in FTC serve as the economic power for your fish tank fighters, without them your fish would starve and the fighting fish tank warriors would slowly but surely diminish. I feel that either the castle or units in the game should change, stats wise. A game with more than 4-5 castles can easily become a grinding match between to opponents. You can quickly make large amounts of units and it becomes out of hands, you start running out of space. I propose that the castles fish food that it dishes out per turn be reduced to 3. Another way of evening this is just to inflate the cost of the fish tank warriors so that you can't pump out massive amounts of units. To anyone that reads my idea, thank you for reading and please comment to further improvement my idea. Again Thank you.

[Joker007cronic]

There's a lot of fun to be had in massive battles, where the units are all crunched together and the battle can go either way. (The real issue here is chokepoints, and the lack of any unit beyond the seahorse to be able to get onto weeds with still enough movement to attack afterwords.)

I think, for now, the resources that castles provide are alright. You may be right when new units, tiles, and other things are added later, however.

[quill18]

I agree that, especially on large maps with lots of castles, the game becomes too "spammy" and turns can be tedious with 10+ fish to move.

I still think that starting with ~5 fish is right, so lowering castle income might be best (or increasing cost and starting funds).

Another idea is to put a "supply cap" on your army, where there's a limit to the number of units you can have (like, say, 10 -- or maybe 5 + 2 per castle owned -- or maybe it's 5 + 2 for every "supply depot" you build?). For this to work, we'd need to introduce much more expensive late game units:

Goldfish cost 6 Bettas cost 10 Oscars cost 25 etc...

So later in the game as your cheap units get killed you start to replace them with expensive ones and you start to get a real progression.

[quill18]

To continue, we can again look at the starcraft model, where you need to balance:

• Economy
• Units
• Supply Cap
• Tech

You can't spend money on all things at once (well, you can, but then you are half-assing everything). We need to require meaningful choices to be made.

The "Tech" could be that the late game, powerful units need to be "unlocked". I.E. You need to spend 20 fish food to unlock the option to build Squids. Now you have a meaningful choice: Is unlocking a "spellcaster" unit worth "sacrificing" 2 bettas?

The "Supply" is related. I'm currently at my supply cap. I can either spend money to increase my supply cap and just swarm with low-tech units, or I can make do with fewer units but instead unlock more powerful ones.

The fact that the "right" answer should vary according to the map will be a very good thing.

[CompanionOfMacedon]

I am glad that the economic part of the game has been thoroughly examined and I am sure after Ludum Dare it will see massive amounts of updates. I completely agree with your starcraft-based model, all strategy games employ these same and similar methods that create the games many guys like myself enjoy (also as a side note I suck at first person shooter games :D ). Thank you Joker and Quill for reading my thoughts and commenting, special thank you to Quill; It is awesome to get my thoughts noticed by the creator of FTC and awesome youtube commentator :D (Did I over do the flattering?) Lolz.

[Demonac]

I think the next round of balance will definitely result in increasing costs of most or all units and some major economic changes.

On thing I'd suggest is that we increase the base food you get (for your first castle, if you want to think that way), along with increasing the unit costs such that overall, you have fewer units, but also each expansion will be a smaller percentage of your income, so that being ahead one expansion will be a slightly smaller advantage than it is now.