Yep.
In addition to the normal gold we know and love.
Except worth more.
Maybe control chip expensive.

Gold generators, anyone? It's a decent fix, and with some Lua you could make control-point like functionality.

Already exists in MP3's pack. Really slow rate of generation, and you might as well just give yourself unlimited funds because you're not working for it then. Kills and objective completion for gold is the best way methinks.

Duh's idea implies that you fight over gold-generating points, it's not cheating. Think DoW. Man, that would be awesome if we could also build fortifications on the Gold Generators...

Never played it. HW2 had a mod that allowed you to board and capture megaliths for RU generation. It was cool.

OH! That would be very cool for 2+ player maps.

I definitely agree with you on this, Warman. If you look most other games involving resources, they are acquired either automatically or inherently through your actions. It definitely derails the gameplay when you have to set aside three to five minutes just to get enough resources to bring in maybe two more drops worth of equipped soldiers.

Now I know "it's the theme of Cortex Command", spage-aged gold rush and all that. But for myself and friends, the only time we really care to think about digging is when it's done to infiltrate a bunker. Otherwise, since we don't care to sit there for 5 minutes listening to the dull, droning sound of diggers, we usually just use gold-generators.

However, when building our bunker, we put our generators at an intermediate point between our brain and our bunker entrance. This way if one player mounts a successful attack on the other's bunker, they are rewarded with the potential to cripple their enemy's economic abilities. This then forces the crippled player to devise immediate plans to retaliate, whether to cripple their opponent's economy as well, or to outright kill them. When both players have lost their generators and have to dig for gold, then gold-digging becomes an interesting aspect.

But it has to be built-up to. It's better to be digging for gold for 5 minutes at the end of a game, than it is at the start.
Ultimately, it's better not to have to dig for it at all.

EDIT: That Cash-for-Kills brain is awesome. I think this may have just replaced the use of gold-generators for me.

If I'm reading all this right it appears the only real complaint is that the Digging AI doesn't work so well. All the other issues (mostly just tedium) doesn't matter if the AI actually worked.

And a digging fix is in the pipeline... So nothing to worry about?

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Something like that. A general AI boost would be cool, so that you could actually leave the AI with orders and expect them to mostly carry them out.

The best way if you utterly ignore canon, maybe?

The official game has to make sense, that's sort of the entire point of there being one.

As such, while you might be able to write off a gold benefit at the end of a round (capturing the enemy's stockpile), objective completion makes no sense.

Go look at military pay scales; while there's hazard bonuses, it's not like there's a system in place to "Kill 50 hajjis, get five thousand dollars"

Automatic digging DEVICES would make more sense to me than having clones do it with inefficient devices. A drill of sorts, or something else entirely. This also runs into problems with CC having extremely limited natural wealth, with the limited size of environments.

I don't ever dig for gold, it just melts the terrain for how far you have to dig to get to all the small pockets.
I'd actually dig more if it went faster and maps had more terrain under all the action, where more gold could be placed.

What which would be SIMILAR, but not exactly the same would be bounty hunter and retrive the object missions. And it could make sense by tradestar having bounties on objects and people.

I see where you're coming from Grif, and not to say that I think you're wrong, but I do disagree. The official game would make sense still in the sense that the story inherently is not about digging for gold (its just the easy way to get funds) - it's about territorial expansion and the overall gain of wealth and resources by the powers that be, assuming I understand the intro video correctly.

That said, who's to say the powers that be don't provide incentive wealth to the soldiers of the front line? Frankly, there are plenty of other games out there that do it with much more shallow overall goals in mind (kill the terrorists/CTs, slay hordes of enemies and loot their corpses for gold pieces, etc.).

I just don't see why there is a necessity of digging gold when you really CAN'T make a story line around it. There are only so many campaign missions the campaign designer/mapper can expect the players to do where the story is "Land on the planet, collect 5000 gold, call in reinforcements, kill the enemy brain, evacuate the planet. YOU WIN."

To digress, and stop my ranting, it just makes sense in my opinion that there be more than one way to accrue wealth, simply because it expands the ways the game can be played and makes an already somewhat non-linear game less linear, which is it's best feature.

And on a side note, one place I do agree with you on is the automatic digging devices versus clones and manual labor. However, I would prefer to see good AI using something like unarmed civilian miners to take care of all the resource acquisition underground with diggers. For example, you would hire a dropship w/ a miner, miner jumps out that is of an allied faction with your team, but the miner doesn't fight for you, just starts digging down for the nearest gold pocket. If he's killed, buy another one. Repeat.

I think that would add a lot of needed flare in the background of the game, and would give the player's something that they would have to actively defend and watch over, other than their brain bunker.

Homeworld: Complex - it's still going and it still ♥♥♥♥ rocks.

I was really happy when the gold digging AI was better - it did actually dig gold properly a couple of builds ago but I don't know if they were forced to change it to accommodate other features - I'm sure it will be back in though. I'd like to see slightly rarer things such as diamonds or an objective based resource plan but overall digging for gold is still fun!

I'm pretty sure it's been mentioned time and time again that the current build of Cortex Command does not contain much of anything resembling what the final mode gameplay will be like. I don't see how we could possibly judge the gold-acquiring mechanic as it is now without having a full sense of the rest of the game's mechanisms.

Also, people's expression of being "tired" of mining for gold is clearly a subjective expression born from having nothing to do with the game right now except ♥♥♥♥ around in skirmish.