1 or 3... 2 sucks... ya I know not really helping... Kill off 2 and do a post with a poll between 1 or 3. This might solve the problem.

OK, maybe I should have expanded a little...

How does the game know what I want?

Just as an example, I may want to train pikemen in town A and soldiers with swords in town B. I have based my decision on the speed at which I can get the required resources to each town. I have barracks in each town but I don't actually have the resources yet, so I cannot train the people right now.

Town C produces swords and will start moving them to town A as well as town B, based on the fact that there are barracks there, even though I only want them in town B. I know I can set a 'priority' for swords for town B and once I start building the soldiers, town B should receive more swords automatically. But as option 3 is described at the moment, some swords will always end up in town A.

Ya I really kinda want control over what goes where. Tiefling makes a good point... I love 1 but I can see why people hate it and with 1 the game might not sell as well...

Ah...

Now I remember what this reminds me of...

In the old Impressions Games city building games (Pharaoh, Zeus, etc.) each warehouse had a setting per resource which was 'store this resource', 'don't store this resource' or 'move resource out of the warehouse'. The latter could be used when you no longer had any need for a resource in this location or just needed to make room for something else. A cart pusher would then move the resource out of the warehouse to other warehouses that still accepted the resource.

This concept works quite well.

If I remember correctly in these games it had the flaw though that a game always tried to move resources to the closest warehouse first, then realised that it didn't accept the resource (or was full) and moved on to the next and the next and so on... in the end taking a lot longer to get to its destination than had it gone there directly.

What will happen to caravans that are sent to city when production is turned off in that city? Will the continue to it or change their destination?

Will it be possible to specifically sent ressources to a city that doesn't need them yet ? Will there be a way to send manually ressources in warehouse to another one?

I sent this to other peoples:

I might want to suggest another twist to it, which will make the game more interesting (maybe more depth). I took the basic idea from Europa Universalis III, a game I love a lot. In that game, you can decide to influence the government and the civilisation's ideologies over many topics with a slider menue. That slider can only be influenced from time to time, trough random events or with a preset chrono. You get to choose between Plutocracy vs Aristocracy, Mercantilism Vs Free Trade, Centralisation Vs Decentralisation, Land Amry Vs Navy, etc... All slider changes affects only numbers slightly, but on the long, the effects are really present.

In the "Merchant" idea, you have your economy reacts to the new set of circumstances you put it trough. If you build a smith, Iron Ore will start being sent there. You effectively have a "reactive" economy based on supply and demand, and you don't control it all.

However, some people might want to see supplies sent to a town in anticipation of what is going to be built there soon. Or maybe they want to increase the priority of Town A over Town B regarding to how many Iron Bars are needed or the location of swords. Such actions would require governement interventionism in the economy. But such interventionism is inneficient, and the merchants won't get the best deals available as they would have if they had followed the organic economical development. The consequence would be a decrease in the number of supplie units that will be shuffled around in your empire. Nothing major, just.. let's say... 1% decrease? That will be reduced to 0% in 50 turns?

But for every direct interventionism of the state in the economy, you will get another decrease. Always a small thing, but eventually, players who over-manage everything will have a crippled economy, as their merchants will wonder what's the point of doing business.

This is a system that allows flexibility to micro-manage some elements, but discourage it, as you will weaken the more you do it. There would be an effective downside to overruling the economic system.

Camp#1 "Sophisticaticated" gets my vote...i like to have full control.

However,some sort of help in all that micro-management would be welcome.

So A.I sending you suggestions (Town A will run out of iron for swords soon,closest mine is B and there is planty on iron in Town C) and warnings (there is great amount of iron in TownA,but that town does not produce anything that need iron) may be better then letting him handle everything.

Climber's making some excellent points on the risk of overmanagement of the resource streams.  He basically owes the company I work for a day of my pay, since I thought about this problem instead of what I should have been working on...Climber, I think they'll take a check.

One of the things that is central to the argument is whether or not we want to have the caravans as a physical entity on the game board.  The benefit from a strategy sense is that now I have something to attack to hurt my opponent's economy, but having all those individual caravans is causing a lot of micromanagement.  So maybe a suggestion might be to back off from having caravans as physical entities.  How about this:

You upgrade a natural ore resource to a mine.  At that time, you draw a line between it and 1 city; that ore now goes to that city at a certain rate (say 10 ore/turn).  Working with Kael's excellent suggestion of developed resource growth, after a set number of turns (which we adjust in balance play), the mine grows to a level two, and a second line can be drawn from the resource, either to another town (which now gets 10 ore/turn) or to the same town (which now gets 20 ore/turn).  You keep growing the resource to a set maximum.  At a strategy map level, I can change where those lines are drawn and change where the resource goes to.  As an example, maybe the mine has had time to grow to it's most productive level (50 ore/turn, for the sake of argument).  I've got 10 ore/turn going to a nearby town, 20 ore/turn going to a town a little farther away, and 20 ore/turn going to a frontline city that's in desparate need of new troops and resources.  I can click the old line connecting the 10 ore/turn route, and add it to my frontline city, making it 30 ore/turn.

Maybe you have a "distance tax" built in (also adjusted during balancing) so that you can't have a well defended, 50 ore/turn mine sending that all to a frontline city a continent away.  Maybe up to 3 squares away is 100%, 4-6 squares is 75%, and so on down to 10% for more than 20 squares away, thus making it so that the front line city only gets 5 ore/turn actually supplied to it.

As an opponent, I can't attack the caravan route, so there's no need to code that so opponents can see your trade network.  But they can attack the mine, and drop it's level (over the course of maybe multiple turns, like pillaging towns in Civ IV) or eventually destroy it.  Roads could affect the percentage loss of ore for remote resources (in the example above, having a road from the mine to the frontline city 23 squares away now makes it so that the town gets 12 ore/turn instead of 5).

Cities producing refined resources become "resources" of their own.  Say that close town has a smithy that's making swords.  I can chose to send 50 ore (eventually) to that town, where the town then makes 10 swords/turn.  I can then click the town, select the resource from a dropdown menu of all things produced in that town, and then click a recieving town (I'm assuming towns are the only thing that can recieve resources, but I haven't really thought deeply about that.  Is there other map resource that would even need to be a recipient of goods?)  Maybe processed goods (like the swords) have a higher survival rate for overland travel, and a town 21 squares away might receive 50% of the swords created, instead of the 5% of ore.  This makes my economic strategy choices of producing goods in my interior cities, and moving them to the frontlines vs. shipping the ore (with the loss that it would incur) directly to a frontline city.  There should be a penalty for the goods too, so the choice is strategic, but since this idea currently uses rates (ores/turn, swords/turn, etc), you can't really impose a time delay, it would have to be a rate reduction.  I haven't got a really good idea about that yet, but maybe someone else does.

What does this buy you?  No protection of caravans, just protection of your resource nodes and cities, so strategically easier for attack and defense.  Managing my trade network becomes an overlay to the world map, where I can see the lines from raw resources to towns.  Maybe you make the lines thicker if they're carrying more resources, or put a little number in a circle at the center of the line to indicate the resource flow after losses are subtracted for range (I'd prefer that, so I can see "at a glance" what my penalties are, and adjust my resource flow for maximum efficiency).  You can resketch your resource flow on this level in response to changing war conditions, and this is the level at which you can manage the whole of your economy, since you can see raw resources, improved resources, and where they all go, all at one level.  I think (but I'm by no means sure) that this eliminates a lot of micromanagement, since you would set up a resource flow to where you want things to go, but you don't have to check every city every turn to see what it's doing, you just have to periodically make sure that the finished goods you want are showing up where you want them.  You might color code the lines to make this "economic strategic" level of the map (which I envision as an overlay over the world map that can be turned on and off) easier to read.  A red line might mean basic resource, a red line might mean military resource, green lines food resources, etc.

So, there's that idea.  I'd appreciate comments and suggestions.  Oh, and Climber, you can send that check to...

Winni

I like the sound of #3.  I think it'll still be important, though, to have a decent management interface where we can get an overview of where our goods are flowing and get immediate feedback on the consequences of our decisions about building new manufacturing facilities and enabling/disabling existing ones.  Going into separate city windows to manage settings that have this sort of empire-wide impact is too clunky.

CAUTION ! POZOR ACHTUNG ! WNIMANJE !  UWAGA !

It shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that 'camp 1 (sophisticated)' is the most popular here. Who typically hangs around a forum of a game that's not yet released ?

Hardcore gamers.

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That said, I would only like camp3 or camp1 myself. Hopefully camp1 doesn't force me to micromanage. I would really like to have an expanded version of camp3. It was a bit too simplistic in some regards. "Build more barracks -> more resources transported here" is only good as long as everything works as usual. If resources start to dry up for whatever reason, I may want to reconsider my priorities and redirect them to a city that _REALLY_ needs them, not to my biggest training center. Camp3 with some ability to influence demand manually would be pretty ok for me. I don't want to have to raze 3 blacksmiths or barracks to change resource distribution !

Camp 1 is not bad either. I tolerate too much micromanagement better than too low customizability. And what draws me towards it isn't that I would be able to train units with max items etc, but rather tailor them to my needs. Intercepting enemy shipments and salvaging weapons is a quite unexplored area in turn-based games. I want to launch an attack on enemy armory and arm my bloodthirsty hordes. I want to capture enemy weapons, I want to destroy my sophisticated siege machines rather than let them fall into enemy hands. I want equipment to be actual equipment, not a +damage bonus on my unit. Like Alexander, I may want to equip my existing experienced troops with lighter armour for extra mobility. It's not micromanagement that I want, it's flexibility and semi-realistic representation of guerilla warfare, capturing enemy armory etc.

I like this a lot.

Sammual

So.. no bears?

Anyway, I'd say that while I like the idea of Camp #1, it feels.. convoluted, somehow. It needs to be simplified, or have some really, really good UI work done on it. Governors are never good. Governors are always useless. Why? Because they don't do what is optimal. Because they don't know what you want. At the same time, not having Governors turned on could turn it all into a tiresome microfest. I like microing. I really do. But in all the microing, I tend to boggle myself down in work and then suddently realize that this isn't funny anymore. Galactic Civilizations 2, while a great game, tended to have this effect on me. At the same time, Fall from Heaven 2/Civilization 4 doesn't, and they are comparatively simple to the gameplay of, say, Galactic Civilizations 2 (and most likely, without a doubt, the future E:WoM).

I'm not sure I understand Camp #3 entirely, but I feel that it's a somewhat reasonable compromise.

It is very hard to give an adamant answer without seeing it in action. Which is, of course, completely out of the question. By the time you get that far in development, I take it it is pretty tough to completely redesign the system like that.