@Allstarz: Here's a quick overview of the Ore Node system from GameReplays.com's 7 Important Things About The Red Alert 3 Trailer article:
Quote
7. Regulated economy
What this means for gameplay
Everything. In fact it's so important, rumor has it that God postponed the apocalypse once he saw this trailer and realized that RA3's chances of being a terrible game went from possible to virtually zero.
Basically, it appears as if there are no ore fields in RA3. Instead they have been replaced with some sort of ore storage facility that only one harvester can collect from at a time. Compare this with C&C 3 where you can have several harvesters on a field at once, and you can see how this will impact gameplay.
Now it seems that the income rate is limited to how many of these ore facilities you happen to control. It prevents you from making a half dozen harvesters and inflating your economy to some absurd income rate that lets you produce Patton's entire third army every minute. If you want a stronger economy, you will probably have to expand in order to get it. So the number of ore facilities there are on the map will determine what your income rate per minute will be.
What's more is since only one harvester can collect from them at a time (it seems, based on the design of the structure), then it will last a certain amount of time before it's depleted (if it's depleted at all). This means that rather than a field of tiberium or ore being "locusted" in the space of 2 minutes, completely ruining its importance as a strategic point of harassment before the game even fully gets under way, ore facilities can be tuned to last much longer. Let's say one facility gives up ore at a rate of $1,000/minute. If there is $10,000 in it, it will last 10 minutes. That's a much larger window of opportunity to harass your opponent's economy.
Most importantly, this allows EA to have control over the production pacing of the game. If they don't want players making 50 tanks every minute, they can just set the output of the ore facility to some specific value that can avoid massive armies and chaotic battles. Instead, they can easily decide what a comfortable average army size is, and stick with it. This could mean more micro, more tactical depth, and more intense combat.
@Topic: This looks
very powerful. I get the feeling it'll be the Empire's Kirov - big, expensive, tough, and hard to get it where you need to go, but utterly devastating if it does arrive. Also, there's no mention of it being amphibious, so that's likely to be a big limiting factor on its power in this heavily navalised game.