Alternate ways of attaining minerals

[RODTHEGOD]

I've been thinking recently about various macro ideas based around the economy. We all know the basic way of gethering minerals, well I was thinking what if starcraft 2 introduced a veriety of "basic" ways to gather minerals? as apposed to the macro mechanics where they are more efficient means of gathering minerals, players would choose how they gathered minerals. I have a few idea's here that I'd like to suggest...

Gathering minerals from a node with a harvester: the traditional method to gather minerals.

Salvaging buildings: a way for the terrans to get their money back from buildings that are no longer necissary. One way to possibly add to this is maybe to include neutral salvagable buildings across the map. In a terran on terran match it would create competition over getting these salvagable buildings. hell you could even destroy them; which is likely what would occur in a match between a terran and a zerg/protoss but if these same neutral buildings could be used in ways more akin to the protoss or zerg playstyles then there might be an interesting new mechanic for starcraft.

Money from kills: I suggested something with this idea behind it, essentially a zerg player could get a small amount of money from kills(whether its friendly or an enemy). Along the same lines I suggested a way that the zerg would sort of "farm" their units by making it so that killing their own units would give you more money then how much the unit cost. this I think would create a very neat zergy mentality and would have both benafits and disadvantes to using it (you get more money but you loose units)

Money from deaths: Along the same lines as above, another idea for the zerg, essentially giving the zerg the idea of I need to attack to get more money. so it might create more continual waves from a zerg player and makes them more difficult to kill as time wears on as they get more money (I guess in this mechanic the zerg player would only get a percentage of money from the death of a unit)

Power Plant: basically a building you build that gives you money over time until its destroyed. I think its an interesting idea, however it would be difficult to balance as the more you build the more money you get. However I think with a little creativity it could be implemented. Like if something like this was given to the terrans, one of these would be like a pylon providing minerals to the buildings nearby. Instead of having a total amount of minerals that you decide what to do with over your entire base; each building would sort of have their own stock of minerals that could only be used at this 1 building and it would be up to these powerplants to keep that stock as full as possible.

ofcoarse there could always be sort of combinations of these ideas as well like these idea's for the most part don't involve bringing the resources back somewhere which is what the traditional method is like. For the "minerals from kills" idea perhaps each zerg unit can carry a certian amount of minerals and after they make kills they pick up the minerals and its up to you to bring those minerals back to base so that they can be used.

well those are just some idea's on different ways minerals could be attained rather then the traditional method.

[Xyvik]

I've always been a fan of the bounty system, personally. Killing enemy units means you get money, which focuses the attention on combat. However, combat is generally where you're supposed to be losing money, ala Logistics, which is more important than combat for a real war.

Not entirely certain if any of this would work in SC2...but they might be better alternatives than what we've got now.

[n00bonicPlague]

The problem with money from salvage, kills, and deaths is that even at maximum refund you are just getting resources that you already have. If you get back more than you made the unit for, then...that's......just.........stupid. The powerplant idea has some potential, but it doesn't make sense to have minerals coming from nowhere.

[Amph]

the powerplant one, seems too similar to the oil derrick, from c&c red aler 2...

[The_Blade]

Actually noobonic, there is a way...

According to our friend Einstein, energy can be converted to matter and backwards. (E=mc2)

Though we would need a colossal amount of energy and a powerful particle accelerator.

[n00bonicPlague]

You would spend more energy trying to smash energy together than the energy you already have.

[ArcherofAiur]

This is good design space to explore. Two suggestions


1) Tie "Advanced Mining" to gas. Make the player choose when to spend money on more minerals and when to spend money on higher tech. (Bonus: casual gamers can just pump gas into tech and play with the cool high gas units.)

2) Make the mining actions a targeting decision. The player should have to choose from multiple mining locations with advantages/disadvantages for each one.

[The_Blade]

This is good design space to explore. Two suggestions


1) Tie "Advanced Mining" to gas. Make the player choose when to spend money on more minerals and when to spend money on higher tech. (Bonus: casual gamers can just pump gas into tech and play with the cool high gas units.)

2) Make the mining actions a targeting decision. The player should have to choose from multiple mining locations with advantages/disadvantages for each one.

Already in ;D

number 1 didn't worked out (remember gas buy?)
number 2 are yellow mins

[n00bonicPlague]

I think the gas thing could've worked had they gone with the idea I had suggested over an over again.

I actually thought it would've been cool to spend gas to mine more minerals as well.

[ArcherofAiur]

Already in ;D

number 1 didn't worked out (remember gas buy?)
number 2 are yellow mins

I was saying Gas->Minerals. The old gas mechanics was Min->Gas. The problems with the old mechanic was that casual players wouldnt have gas and those are the same players who enjoy playing with high gas units.


Yellow minerals would work if it involved a targeting action to harvest. For instance if the player had to use a macro mechanic to harvest them and there was decisions the player had to make about which minerals to harvest.