As me and my coop-players always find ourselves exchanging our gathered ressources for tactical reasons, it would be helpful to implement an optional team-ressource-pool for each ressource type. E.g. the team agrees to share industry and science, they vote ingame and then may add their gathered ressources automatically to the team-pool. Until someone declines.

I think it might be easier to just have the choice between individual ressources or shared at the start of a multiplayer game, depending on the group (i.e a group of friends should be able to work with a shared pool just fine).

@Nirual I like your idea. But it might be difficult to share all ressources from the beginning as offensive Players might overuse the Food-pool for example - or one leves more often than the others. In this case it would be useful to select the ressource types to be shared, before starting a game.

Perhaps. Food is probably the biggest risk in that sense.

I think it's surprising that the developers implemented a very individualistic multiplayer design. If players don't pool their resources and researches, then they lose. The only exception to that is probably "Too Easy", where players could probably survive without ever sharing. Perhaps they found in playtests that more players went for this route than the pooled resources route. I'd like to know how they came to that conclusion though.

Hi,



Indeed, in a previous dev version, resources were shared and it was... chaotic

EndlessRunner wrote:
If players don't pool their resources and researches, then they lose.

Players need to deliberately exchange resources; we think it's interesting for a coop game

But we could improve tools to make communications and exchanges easier.

The way me and my friends play, we pick 1 person to be the leader at the start of the game. Everyone else gives that person all the industry and science, but not food. Honestly though, while it would be nice to have an option which did this automatically (maybe set up a 'per door resource transfer'?) it's not exactly a huge problem to do it manually. In fact, I'd say a more useful feature would just be to see other player's resource amounts.

Well something that would go a long way would be just having a total resource indicator. We don't mind sharing among our friends but it is really annoying having to constantly tally our resources to see if we have enough for certain needs when it would be very simple to see the amount of resources everyone has in the UI, or if there was just a single line with the total team's resources so it did the math and we could quickly decide to proceed to open a few doors to establish our needs.



Now, the group I play all uses teamspeak and even with constant voice communication half of what we have to talk about for hours on end is something like "Does anyone have 16 industry?" "I have 4" "I have 11" "I don't have any" etc, on and on forever. With a simple addition to the top left UI this wasteful amount of conversation would never have to take place repeatedly, monotonously.



It's really annoying after hours of play and seemingly could be addressed with a slight amount of team resource information on the UI .



Food for thought..

I've been playing multiplayer quite a bit since I got DotE during the Steam sale, and I've run into the same problem. The current resource sharing system leads to players comparing resource totals after every room, which bogs down the game greatly.



A "total resource indicator" would help alleviate the problem, but I'm not sure if it's the best solution. The way resources work right now encourages players to constantly give all their Science and Industry to one player (probably the most experienced), and let that player handle all construction and research. This makes the game go faster and smoother, but it also deprives the other players of a major part of the game. Of course, you don't HAVE to play this way, but the game mechanics encourage you to do so. If you don't make one player the "construction master", the game starts to drag as you shuffle resources every turn to whoever needs them, which gets very tedious very quickly.



If instead, the developers removed resource sharing (while tweaking income and costs to maintain game balance), each player would have to contribute to construction and research. The mechanics would stop encouraging "Give Bob all your resources so he can manage all construction", and start encouraging players to coordinate what and where they want to build. Maybe one player has a support hero and focuses on economic and healing modules, while another concentrates on strong defenses in a single room...



I would love it if "no resource sharing allowed, everyone gets slightly more income to compensate" was at least an option when starting a game.