Macro Idea: improving upgrades and research

[Josue]

Sounds interesting, but a bit too complicated...
wasn't the motto "Easy to learn and hard to master" ?
I guess just make it cost 3 resources: the normal amount of minerals it would cost, the normal amount of gas it would cost and a significant quantity of the new resource that those buildings produce therefore you must also take care of that energy resource.

[Triceron]

This essentially paces the game and lowers the need so save min/gas for teching. I think it's a good idea, but a game changing one at that.

1. Everyone has bigger armies. Your min/gas only needs to be used to make these buildings, anything else can be directed and focused on units. With tech being dependant on this resource, all min/gas can be saved for unitss/buildings. That means you will always make units, less saving for tech.

2. No tech rushing. This paces gameplay because you can't technically rush to certain units/abilities because you must wait for that building to generate enough resource to allow you to. Everyone would be paced by tech, so we wouldn't have some of the more risky T3 rushes. If this resource is upgrade-tech only, it still affects many T3 units that may depend on researchable abilities (psi storm, lurker range, etc)

3. Fully teched, useless resource. Once you've fully teched, what is the use of that fourth resource?

[n00bonicPlague]

That's a point, why not give us a few maps with all-mineral or all-gas expansions?

The first Blizzard-made maps were like this. The average starting location had 1 regular gas geyser and about 9 regular mineral fields. There were some expansions that followed this suit, but then there were others that had some variation. Some expansions had slightly fewer minerals than normal (1 geyser and about 6 fields). Other expansions had nothing but minerals (usually about 12 fields). Others had nothing but gas (1 or even 2 geysers). And finally, there were some expansions that followed one of those examples but had the fields and geysers separated significantly further apart than normal.

This variation was eventually done away with for the sake of balanced map gameplay. A great example of a map with such variation is the classic, Blizzard-made, 256x256, 8-player map Killing Fields:
http://classic.battle.net/images/bat...c/lp/8/lkf.jpg
http://classic.battle.net/images/bat...c/lp/8/bkf.jpg

[newcomplex]

I was poking fun at C&C4 but on the subject why would all planets (maps) have little crystal chunks neatly arranged in rows with two geysers on the sides?



And yes stuff falling from the sky is awesome!

You might as well implement creeps then :/

[ArcherofAiur]

You might as well implement creeps then :/

?


I perfer creep tumors.

[Norfindel]

The first Blizzard-made maps were like this. The average starting location had 1 regular gas geyser and about 9 regular mineral fields. There were some expansions that followed this suit, but then there were others that had some variation. Some expansions had slightly fewer minerals than normal (1 geyser and about 6 fields). Other expansions had nothing but minerals (usually about 12 fields). Others had nothing but gas (1 or even 2 geysers). And finally, there were some expansions that followed one of those examples but had the fields and geysers separated significantly further apart than normal.

This variation was eventually done away with for the sake of balanced map gameplay. A great example of a map with such variation is the classic, Blizzard-made, 256x256, 8-player map Killing Fields:
http://classic.battle.net/images/bat...c/lp/8/lkf.jpg
http://classic.battle.net/images/bat...c/lp/8/bkf.jpg

Well, they could make it balanced by being symmetrical. For example: you could have one starting location and two possible naturals: one mineral-only and one gas-only, or one with a lot of minerals and another one with few minerals and a lot of gas.

I think that there should be different geysers with different worker capacities, to allow for better variation in vespene per expansion (not just one geyser or two). The bigger geyser could require an upgrade to allow more workers, or not. It could be an "unupgraded capacity/upgraded capacity" setting in the map editor.