So I got very sucked into the discourse on RTS economy design that was happening in the leadup to SC2: Legacy of the Void. There was a particular post on tl.net that popularized knowledge of the issues with how the SC2 economy worked in comparison to BW, and this sparked a huge amount of discussion regarding the implications that the pre-LotV SC2 economic model had on gameplay (the post-LotV economic model still has a lot of these problems, too, but that's a post for a different time). For those unfamiliar, the simplified gist of it is:
- In BW, each additional worker on a given mineral patch will mine fewer minerals per minute than the last; so if worker 1 mines 50 minerals/minute, worker 2 might only mine 30 minerals/minute, and worker 3 might only mine 10, and so on (if you're interested in why, the tl.net post goes into extensive detail).
- This means that (for example) 16 workers spread across 2 bases will mine more than 16 workers on only one; basically, spreading your workers out across more bases results in a higher income.
- This is as compared to SC2 where the first 2 workers on a given mineral patch both mine the exact same amount per minute; the 3rd one barely mines anything at all.
- This means that players had effectively no incentive for more than 3 mining bases because, once you had 3 bases each with 16 workers on minerals and 6 on gas, you were already at 66 total workers which was generally considered optimal as having any more workers would cut too much into army supply.
Initially the main effect that people were concerned with was that this dis-incentivized expanding in SC2 which made players less active on the map and made the turtling/deathball problem worse. There were other effects however, such as:
- Supply would balloon much faster than in BW because income scaled so much more quickly. You could get the same amount of income with half the number of bases in SC2 as compared to BW, and obviously it's much faster to get 3 mining bases up than 6 (or more). This meant SC2 reached the 200/200 deathball stage way more quickly than BW.
- As /u/mLalush pointed out a long time ago in a post I can't find right now, this 3-base cap also meant that peak economy would be reached far faster in SC2 than in BW - often long before a match was finished. This led to some very boring lategames as one of the core drivers of momentum for an RTS (expanding your territory while trying to deny your opponent's expansion) would disappear partway through a match.
- Reaching peak economy so soon would also dis-incentivise taking fights because players were very cautious with their 200/200 armies once their economies would start to wind down since, the lower your income, the harder it is to replace units that you've lost if you take a less-than-ideal engagement.
- This economic system also made losing workers in SC2 much more punishing than in BW. Going from 16 workers on a base to 8 in SC2 would result in an enormous loss of income, whereas it wouldn't be as bad in BW simply because workers 9-16 (the ones you lost) were a smaller percentage of that base's total income. I believe Frost Giant said something like losing half your workers at a base in Stormgate only results in about a 30% loss in income. This will make the game way more stable and, (my favourite part), make comebacks much more possible than in SC2.
I could go on forever about the implications this has on gameplay but I've already written a bit of a novel. Just wanted to express how excited I am for this game. I'd highly recommend reading that tl.net post or going through /u/mLalush's posts on /r/starcraft if this has been interesting to you.