I've double posted.  The forum does not show my first attempt to post after I post.

And to make it easier, maybe Stardock could implement a feature where you can specify, "I want X number of Y troops to be built and sent to this spot in the shortest time possible," a small screen could pop up with a list of a few of the quickest options including whether they already have production queued and an option to override/add to it. Because, while I also consider this a plus, I do sympathize with Ellestar about having to go and manually try both options to see which is faster.

I don't understand your last sentence, but I'm 95% sure that I agree with you A small boost in efficiency would be fine, but it'd be better to boost overall production and quality of produced goods.

Yeah I think the once every few turns part there is key. If caravans are shipped from every source of resources to every destination every day, caravans will cover everything... 

Voted! Nice survey, Denryu!

Yeah, you get rid of per-city storage and revert to the, "I have an iron mine a million miles away so all my cities can use all my iron anywhere, any time" syndrome. And even worse, the "I just captured an iron mine, and now my city a million miles away can start producing iron armor!" syndrome. And even worse, the "I have an iron mine on an island in the ocean on the other side of my enemy, now all my cities can make iron goods!" syndrome. You could avoid the last by requiring roads to connect goods (like Civ IV), but there's no good reasons why Caravans shouldn't be able to travel without roads at need.

And yes, you would reduce the number of screens (although city-oriented resource information could be combined with other information); but you wouldn't ever (or shouldn't ever) need to go through looking at city-specific info for more than a few cities a turn even if you have 30. And a good, contextual interface with clever organization and sorting that displays the most important or desired resource management information could probably do away with having to look at city-centric screens even that often. Especially if you add in a nice trade-route map overlay interface (a picture's worth a thousand words). Again, you're too focused on the notion that the only possible way of displaying this information is via innumerable monstrous spreadsheets, and that's just wrong.

And you are hardly managing resources at the same level of strategy you would be if you forego universal storage. With universal storage all you care about is having the resource, the building to use the resource, and where to use it. But the decision of where to use the resources is trivialized by the fact that you can use any amount of it anywhere. With distribution, you have to plan ahead. If someone sneaks an army up to a poorly defended border city of yours, with universal storage you can whip up an army on the spot in the few turns' warning that you have. With distribution, unless you had the foresight to maintain a reserve of resources just in case, your opponent will be able to take advantage of your unpreparedness. Also, with a distribution model, location becomes more important (of both resource sources and cities). Having your iron mine on one side of a large nation and your main production hub on the other would be a poor decision; there is incentive to take risks, and even to control and fortify resources even if they're close to danger if it means being able to supply another section of your empire with quick access to it. The list goes on and on - there are so many things that are lost in a universal storage economy.

Well, that's one of my desires, yes, but only indirectly. It's true that effective convoy raiding could help reduce the Stack of Doom problem, but more importantly it just adds another layer of strategy. There are many things that contribute to Stacks of Doom being so effective - scouting is a big one for sure (and another thing I'd like to see improved, via magic, units, espionage, or any combination thereof), unit caps, and even typical TBS economies (they tend to encourage mass producing your most powerful unit and nothing else). There are others as well, but there are several threads on threads on these forums listing them all and discussing possible solutions.

And regarding raiding not being economical - well, that's something that could be made economical. Generally the only way to raid in TBS games is to pillage a town - but doing that requires having a large enough force to take the town, which defeats the purpose of calling it a raid... Caravans would provide much more vulnerable targets to raid, and thus could help make it more economical. 

But, like I just mentioned, it's possible that with a minor amount of work, the presence of something like caravans could go quite along ways towards making raiding efficient. But, it seems like on the issue of raiding in general, with or without caravans, we are in agreement.

The micro (which I still think could be made minimal) is not the inherent advantage that comes with a good distribution economy. The advantage is manifested through the innumerable choices and options it opens up - offensively, defensively, and organizationally (by which I mean the layout of your kingdom and non-military areas, including economy, diplomacy, etc). I have outlined (several times) the strategy that would come with a distribution economy, so I'm not going to go through it again.

Being offered a job (which you didn't take) doesn't imply expertise in the field; more often than not the expertise comes later. So you're a professional programmer with a little knowledge about AI and as unfamiliar with UI design as I am. To me that doesn't sound like enough to go on to accurately judge the feasibility or effort required to design a good game UI. 

No, I hate micro. I stopped playing Civ IV because of workers. I will, however, accept a little bit of extra micromanagement here and there if it means it gives me many more interesting things to play with in exchange. And, with one warehouse you definitely still need to prioritize. Prioritization is not an artifact of distribution, but of limited, quantified resources. Priority only matters if you don't have enough (even with caravans, if you have enough then caravans will automatically deploy everywhere, negating the need for prioritization...).So even with global storage, if you have enough Bears to train 2 Bear Cavalry per turn and you want to train them in 3 cities, you have to choose which is going to wait. Or if you have enough bears to train 10 Bear Cavalry and you have 2 cities set to build 5 per turn when suddenly an enemy shows up near a third, when you order that third city to build 10 Bear Cavalry you are going to have to somehow indicate that you want the third city to have priority over the first two.

I actually have to confess that I've never played MOO II, though everyone tells me I should go find it. That isn't exactly convoy raiding, though it does fall under economic disruption. How did food transfer work? Also, have blockades universally reduce production is an inelegant solution. In a distribution economy, blockading a city would affect production only if supplies run out, but until then the city can go on normally. If a city has 50 tons of iron laying around there is no reason why sword production should be slowed until it runs out. But once it runs out of iron, production shouldn't just slow, it should come to a halt. Ships could occasionally run blockades, but resources hardly ever get through a siege.

Camp #1, Camp #3 (and therefore a full-fledge caravan system) would not be worth implementing if the only thing they accomplished was putting caravan raiding into the game. Don't pigeon-hole the economy into so specific an area, though - the economy affects everything in the entire game; it affects most things directly and the rest indirectly, and so whatever economy is implemented will have far-reaching consequences. It just so happens to be my opinion that the consequences of a Camp #1/#3-like system would be amazing and wonderful, with the small trade-off of a little extra micro. Any system that uses global storage is just the same old all over again, and in my opinion a tremendous lost opportunity for Stardock and strategy gamers.

I think Psychoak's idea of improved efficiency only being a bonus of the early upgrades, or maybe every other upgrade or something. Upgrades don't need to be uniform and can impart special bonuses at different levels, as well. Anyways, the numbers themselves aren't really worth debating as that's not something we can intelligently discuss without having much more information than we do.

I don't like this. I'm much more in favor of positive reinforcement rather than penalties. The more factories you have of one type should make it cheaper to build more of that kind of factory, and leave the costs of others unchanged. There have also been several discussions about having synergies between buildings to make specialization more efficient (and yet still encourage not spamming the same building over and over). I can't find a link to any of them now...

The gist of the idea, though, is that as you specialize you increase efficiency/quality/etc. This way, a diverse city isn't penalized but a specialized city is rewarded. The difference isn't huge, and it's mostly psychological but I think it's an important distinction.

Yeah, that is one of the tricker aspects of it. It's the reason why I've flirted a little bit with ways of simplifying the MR side of things without breaking the system. One way is to make it that blacksmiths only produce when there is demand or if you tell them to (either as a one-off order or a continuing order).

Also, any time you think of something like, "Damn, that means I'll have to go city-by-city to adjust X" it means there should be some way to do so on a single screen. We should never have to go through each or even many of our cities to make some small adjustment. Having to do so is an indication of poor UI.

I think maybe the best way of handling the MR problem is to implement production chains. Something like giving cities standing orders like, "Produce spears and swords, but stop once X and Y respectively have been stockpiled." This wouldn't totally get rid of waste (and thus there'd still probably be the occasional person who'd feel compelled to delve into micro hell for the sake of optimization), but it'd limit it. Maybe someone more creative can come up with a better method of implementing efficient Production Chains which could dictate production and use of MR.

I love Option 3 the best by FAR.  Still, it needs to have the ability to 'turn off' buildings in cities that you no longer want to have caravans shipping resources to.  I would prefer the choice to make buildings 'dormant' than to being forced to destroy/deconstruct the building to regain a % of resources and to free up space (of course, that should still be a choice)....just in case you suddenly need that city to produce that type of resource again.

TOO many games use a dumbed down 'GLOBAL STORAGE' and 'INSTANT TELEPORTATION DISTRIBUTION' of resources.....please don't do that to this game.  Let the AI use caravans to move ALL resources on the map to the locations the resources are required.  I am particularly enjoying the thought of Caravan raiding to mess with opponents production.

Hmmm, maybe troops can be assigned to travel WITH/WITHIN caravans to guard them from light/fast enemy raiders instead of just independently patrolling the roads?

As far as researched tech upgrading units/buildings already deployed, here is an idea.  Once you research a new tech level, any units/buildings that are built from that time onwards get the benefit of the tech.  HOWEVER, units/buildings that were already deployed have an 'upgrade timer' that starts to run.  So, after 4 turns (as an example), those units/buildings that were already deployed will also gain the tech upgrade....think of it as the new equipment/resupply taking a bit of time to filter down to the troops and facilities.

*It might be an interesting touch to make troops that move around (or buildings that produce stuff) each turn take longer for the new tech upgrades to reach them.  For example, a troop that remains stationary will be upgraded in 4 turns.  However a troop that moves/fights each turn will take 8 turns to be upgraded.

Finally, I hope there is a limit on cities in this game.  I hate games that become a race to see who can build the most cities to support their economy/military....sort of like a settler rush!  Maybe available citie zones on maps should be predetermined during the maps creation.  Or maybe available city zones can be determined by the distance from other cities (just make it a very long distance).  Or maybe city zones availability can be determined by proximity to water and ariable lands.  Or maybe you guys have already figured out something completely amazing!

To sum up, I REALLY like Option 3.  Option 1 is okay, but is so complex I think it will fall apart AND turn off a lot of potential gamers.  Option 2 is too simple.  Option 4 is the worst case scenario.

You could still raid caravans if we had the concept of spreading an army out over an area.  This would, perhaps, expose said army to destruction in detail, but would allow it to plunder villages, raid caravans, tramp on the flowerbeds, etc.  Ancient armies' foraging parties fought all the time.  Heck, Gettysburg started where it did due to a Confederate foraging party looking for shoes.

Whichever option gets adopted, I really don't want automatic, instantaneous empire-wide distribution of resources.  Resources from far away should take time to get utilized, even if I get a steady flow once the "pipeline" is primed.  Roads needn't be a hard requirement: ships can transport very well, and rivers can be great resource transportation systems.  Keep in mind in the ancient world roads were rare and expensive propositions for most empires: Rome was somewhat of an anomaly, though I recall various Chinese dynasties had a good road infrastructure as well, at least in parts of their various empires.

Navigable rivers beat roads anyday: cheaper, faster, and you could carry more for less cost in people and draft animals.

It might be safe to say the 'Chinese' (depending on what you mean by that) 'invented' most any major pre-industrial tech innovation you can think of, although they sometimes abandoned something for internal/cultural reasons.

Bureaucracy and crossbows come to mind in the former category, and a sort of brass/bronze predecessor to Gutenberg's movable type is in the latter group. (Movable type is just not quite the same thing for a pictographic writing system as it is for a phonetic one.) As far as roads, I'm pretty sure that they had the first 'national standards' that tried to ensure all wagon axles were about the same width so that the ruts in wagon roads would fit almost all wagons.

It's problems like random road widths that helped make rivers and coastlines the interstates/railroads of the pre-industrial world.

I used shudder quotes and a "might." It was just a casual example, and maybe some passive-aggresive hangover from old dispersion-vs-parallel invention arguments. Inca string-coding sold me on the parallel side.

Back on topic, I want to see some economic modeling as rich as some of the ideas we've seen floating around here, but the more I read this and similar arguments, the smaller I want the actual 'tech' (Craft) tree in Elemental to be. I might feel differently if we were going to have a generational approach to the calendar, but I still doubt that the devs are interested in anything like that. If game time flows in anything like the super-fuzzy way it does in GC2, I think Elemental would have a better 'feel' if any changes to something like a road system came via enchantments and not someone getting better at knowing what material to put in which layer for a serious pre-industrial road bed.

Of the options presented, number 3 stands out.  The idea of micromanaging the flow of resources is distasteful to me.  Number 2 would result in extremely limited build options so 3 functioning as a simplified 1 feels most appealing.

What I want:

* The idea of being able to customize troops sounds fantastic!  I am imagining this as when I'm setting up a unit for production I can select the level of training, a mobility option (none/bear/horse/etc) where some of those options may give bonuses to troop strength ect.  Weapon slot, multiple armor slots (helm/shield/body/legs/feet) with each of those.  I just am hoping that like MoM troops become more powerful with field experience.

* Resource management, like I mentioned before, micromanagement doesn't appeal to me, I don't want to direct what goes where and how, although I would like the versitility of not being limited to what the city can produce for developing my customized troops.

* I imagine that basic level resources could be exempt from micromanagement by following a model of sphere of influence.  A mine has a set level of production, lets say 5 for the moment (which could be increased through onsite improvements). If a city were within a turn's travel of a mine it could have access to the full resources of the mine, whereas a city 2 turns away could only use half of the mine's production a city say 5 turns away could only use 1/5th of the mine's production.  By introducing roads and improved transit, a city could better tap the resources of a mine.  However also taken into consideration would be the maximum production of the mine so if you had 5 cities relying on a mine, each requiring 1 unit of iron, if you were building a smithy in a sixth city that would draw on the mine, you would get a warning that your request would overburden the mine, if you still chose to build a smithy, the production capabilities of all of the cities would be reduced to accomodate the needs of that additional smithy.  Additional micromanagement could be achieved by shutting down production or reducing production on a per city basis, which would allow resources to be diverted to other cities in need.

With all that said, the game as described would be awsome in any of the proposed formats.  I'm really looking forward to the beta!

That Doesn't even matter if it's with roads or without, empire-wide distribution is very silly and way oversimplified.

Good point.  Roads of different techs would be nice.

Ok I think I can agree on camp 3... my god this is one epic dev post.