What I did here was to create some graphs which show the resource income for each game mode per time.
To explain a little bit about where the data comes from:
What the graphs show is the average fuel, manpower and CP income after a match ended in a specific game mode, binned in 3 minute windows. The statistic was derived from all automatch game that I found since the start of 2017. For a total of about 280k, 356k, 202k and 340k games for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4, respectively.
Let's start with command points:
As we can see it seems like CPs increase more quickly the less players are involved. The difference between 1v1 and 4v4 is about 3 minutes. Now, some notes on this:
- The CPs should be capped at 32 so I would have expected that within 60 minutes each player would have reached that point. Now, seems like that that is not happening in 3v3 and 4v4 (at least on average). I looked into this a bit more, and found that occasionally the cpearn value is actually higher than the theoretical maximum 32. So, occasionally there seem to be a few hiccups either in the client or on the server side. That said, this happens rarely and probably hasn't much influence here.
What I guess is that in the higher gamemodes occasionally poor players that are near AFK and thus do not accumulate a lot of CPs are carried by stronger players (or you have one of those on either side). So, since the maximum is capped at 32 it means that the average is lower in this cases.
This does not happen as often in the smaller gamemodes because if e.g. in 1v1 a player is AFK, the game will surely end before reaching 60 minutes! - Furthermore, the average of CPs for 4v4 is 0 even after 9 minutes (likewise the average for all other gamemodes is unexpectedly low. That surely can't be correct, right? Well, I guess the "problem" here is that games that end before 9 minutes probably do so because one or more players are basically AFK. So the values at very early times are not expected to be very representative for how many CPs the average player will have by - say - 9 minutes.
Next comes fuel:
What we can see here is that in 3v3 and 4v4 the fuel income indeed is higher than for 1v1 and 2v2. This is expected to the typically slightly higher number of resource points on larger maps and the prevalence of caches in these game modes.
That said, the difference between 1v1 and 4v4 is smaller than I expected (around 200 fuel after 60 minutes). Also, it is noteworthy that before about 14 minutes the fuel incomes is slightly lower in the larger game modes.
This is partially probably due to the longer distances that need to be covered, but surely also subject to the "players are AFK effect" described in the CP discussion. That said, I expect the effect here to be smaller. The reason is that an AFK player does not only earn no CP but he also keeps the opposing players from earning many CPs. In terms of fuel, however, the AFK player might not actually cap for his team but he makes it easier for the other team to cap points.
And for the later stages of the game it shouldn't make a difference because all point will be captured, if not by the team with the near AFK player then by the other team.
Finally manpower (which is basically is the inverse measure of how many units the players have on the field):
Here, the higher the gamemode, the less manpower was earned. This would mean that on average there are higher casualties the smaller the gamemode. No idea what I expected here... This might have to do with players tending to have more units idling around, camping or simply not being very aggressive (see the points above on players being carried); that said, a player that is so AFK that he even fails to build units would push the curve up, so...
Edit:
Ok, after the discussions below, I added a criterion that only games are included in which all players are at least level 10. This restricted the number of games considerably (about a tenth is left). This did help a little bit, but the CP curves for the late games in 4v4 still looked a bit wonky. Then I realized that there are not that many games that last 60 minutes, so it's probably simply not worthwhile looking at the end there (I just happen to like asymptotical behavior as sanity check. Sigh...).
This is how many games there are left for each 3 minute bin:
CPs:
The rest also contain X per minute plot.
Fuel:
Munitions:
Manpower: