mineral farming

Exactly!

No, seriously... or just ask blizzard to make a patch or something to increase the mineral max on every map. Or something like that.

 

it might work if there was a limit on the number of farms you could make, but i'm still skeptical.

 

yes a limit on farms a small amount of minerals only and having them lategame.
i like to play team games with four a side but if you protect your allies you end up with not enough resourse's becouse eight players chew it up too quickly.

if you'r using extra minerals as an alternative to this so they don't turtle its going to make them turtle more than a small amount of farms becouse instead they'll just build around a sh*tload of minerals with no need to expand

i suck at making maps and i'm not going to download a patch. i hate patches *grumble grumble*

 

maybe they should make a limit of 2 farms or something per player 2 make it fair???

 

no that just turns a stupid idea into a stupid idea that can't ruin the game as much. if it's only 2 buildings which could not add enough to truly help, why not just have no mineral farms.

 

yeah and then people could find a way to exploit the two mineral farm thing and then create dozens and dozens of them and start spewing in resources how about just leave the resources like they are because like someone said earlier they are already giving us gold resources that i would think give you more resources.

 

there are multiple types of collection systems in different RTS games. Some have strategic points that give you resources, some have resource collection through resources on the map. Both require that you expand outwards to gain more resources. This is a key part of the game and is the part that creates the conflict of the different players fighting with each other. So, adding something to water this down would be a big mistake. Same with adding more minerals to each field.

 

The map running out of resources?

I'd solve that problem by making minerals act like vespene: giving a large amount for a given quantity, then depleting afterwards...giving the player only trace amounts, but something you can still lean on if you're absolutely desperate.

I kind of apply something like this in some of the maps I make: I make heavy patches of 12 of or so clusters, but maybe 7 of them have low resource amounts, maybe 250-750. For the first half of the game, you have something comfortable to work with, but later on, your income drops sharply, and by then you should really be considering expansion. On other maps, you might not notice the fact that you're on the edge of being broke if you only look that the number of clusters, but having more than half of your income drop out, almost at once, in theory, at least, is a bit more noticeable.

Of course, in theory, decent players on a decent map should be able to finish just about every game without depleting the map, so who knows if that actually helps? *shrug* It makes the clusters look prettier, at least.

 

Well, for me massive attacks dont win games, but small precisely placed powerful units or powerful unit combinations, so generally I dont require more than 1 expansion, but I like to secure reasources nodes early in the game incase initial attacks fail. I also have had to rely on turtling (I hate to admit it) and I have gotten to a point where I simply run out of resources from constantly laying siege on enemy bases.

I would hate to add any automatic reasource generating building as I am afraid of late-game unbalance but I do like Ne's idea. The way I have it pictured is making the minerals not decrease in size but become greyer and greyer until they become "depleted" like the geysers. Then workers could still gather but very small amounts. Nice suggesiton Ne.

 

unless there are two evenly matched players who just can't get an advantage because they are both so good at countering each other's moves... either way I think running out of resources on a map is fine. Makes it interesting.

 

yeah its all cool except for the fact that youre going to be stuck there for a while, untill something happens. The idea Neon brought up of making the resources act like the vespian gyser was actually pretty good, cause c'mon really who likes to sit there with no resources to use, itll turn into a dull boring match unless both players turteled and accumulated tons of resources and then start attacking eachother at the end game point. i really wouldnt like to see that but threr are aalot of peopel who do that, it becomes a boring game, well atleast for me.

 

10-Neon, the mineral setup for your maps that you mentioned sound so damn interesting.  I hope they set up some of the official SC2 maps that way, would make some awsome games.  If there were more maps like that, we would've had more people who learned to play properly.

Although running out of resources has never bothered me, I like 10-Neon's proposal of depleted mineral patches.  But in that case, they would need to make two distinct type of mineral patches.  Ones that deplete and ones that disappear.  They would still need patches that disappear for maps that have mineral patch blockades.

 

howabout they all disapear but they leave little blue specks on the ground that you can mine for minimal resourse?
i like that idea quite alot actually.

 

yeah say like the first patch of blue minerals you start out with could deplete, while all the others run out so your only left with your original patch of blue minerals i think that would sound fair, so i would think it would encourage you to finish the game faster or you would have to mine like 3 resources instead of the possible 8.

 

I really like the little blue specks idea. Especially if you could walk over them. Or hover. Or w/e it is your freak race does xD. Anyways, I really like the idea, and I bet it would be implemented if it wasn't already for the brown minerals.

 

eh, i like the idea of the brown minerals that blizzard came up with. Lets say you and your enemy are running out of minerals so you go for the expansions with the brown minerals. This will add a great deal of strategy and whatnot. With the idea of the minerals being depleted and you get less of them, the battles would be much smaller during the end of the game.

 

their much smaller anyway when you can't train much troops

 

Make the minerals slowly regrow their amount (after all crystals do grow ) 1 every 2 seconds sounds fair..
same with geyser. Srry forgot persons name who suggested this..
You could also have a system where if you harvest a patch it doesnt regrow for a minute or something...

 

Eh with the vespene geyser depleted, you can still be able to get 2 vespene units anyways so prolly any vespene amount that is replenished at a small rate would be futile.

 

I didn't mention this in my first post, but regrowth, as you mentioned, could also be used to lengthen the useful lifespan of minerals.

Minerals would have a set mineable amount (let's call it the cache) that is like normal minerals. A cluster with 1500 cache would be the same as a 1500 mineral cluster in StarCraft, except on top of that, the cluster would also have a regrowth amount: its cache would slowly increase over time. As you are mining a cluster, this would be totally unnoticeable. With a slow enough growth rate, you'd see maybe 400 extra minerals per cluster in 5 minutes. But with patches of minerals away from heavily mined bases that don't get touched for the first 20 minutes of the game, assuming each cluster started with 1500, these patches would have over twice the available resources, ready to feed hungry armies.

I don't personally like the idea of doubling resources, so maybe each cluster can be assigned a cache limit, where the regrowth stops when the limit is reached. This would mean that the regrowth effect would only be helpful for filling "depleted" minerals in mined-out patches, and re-filling abandoned patches for later re-use. It might also work to keep players from expanding to certain patches of minerals until they have filled to a usable amount (say, they start at 100 cache, with a limit of 1500.)

I still think basic gas-like depletion would be more appropriate for StarCraft II. The regrowth thing is a bit too complex for the desired effect over the average timescale of a StarCraft match: you just wouldn't notice it in shorter(most) games. It would really be better suited for longer games: I personally came up with the idea while brainstorming potential resource problems in long-term MMORTS games, where the depletion of resources vs expansion problem would be a lot nastier.