A few questions I would like to pose on resources....
Should an iron mine ever play out? The mine startw with a set amount of iron and can eventually be depleted. Maybe a minor spell could reveal the total amount available. I personally like the idea, but it isn't anything I would get to worked up about either way.
Should resources come in different qualities? Not just the total amount of resource that is there, but the amount of resource it can produce at a base level. Some mines might produce 5/turn with no upgrades to the mine, others might be able to do 10 or 15. Again, I like the idea of some diversity between same type resource nodes, but not something I would really freak about either way.
Should there be mixed resources? To mine Adamantium you would have to have the relevant research done, but might it be possible for your iron mine to also produce a small amount of adamantium per turn? or even crystals? Just throwing ideas out there.
Any rare/unique resources like meteorite shards for making a one-of a kind sword? Should that type of thing jsut show up randomly at your regular mine, should they be found lying around on the ground, or should they be a random event? Or combinations of all these or other ideas?
Sorry, I was bored. Gonna go check survey monkey to see if more people have taken the survey.
Mixed resources, no.
Meteor shard bit, all of the above. Material for a badass unique stuff for your channeler/hero sounds excellent for a random event or preplaced goody on the map.
I am in argeement with these items.
Sammual
I am in agreement. Mines shouldn't play out and there should be no mixed resources aside for possible random events ("Your miners have found a ruby the size of a bear's head in the iron mine, what do you want to do, kind and great god-sovereign Awesomemurder?"). It just adds a level of unpredictability that I have no wish for, as the balancing of caravans could easily lead the best plans of mice and men astray. An ongoing tactic may depend on me getting exactly 20 iron with the next caravan.
Not 19, and certainly not 15 iron and 5 mithril. If the caravan is raided, that's taking one for the team. If it arbitrarily isn't carrying what I'd expect it to be carrying, that's being screwed over by the system.
I'm sorry but I honestly don't see where mines not being depleted affects versatility. Yeah, they will allow you to build anything type of unit you want by an unlimited time. Which I suppose that would be more versatil than stone and sticks troops because of lack of resources. But units are not alone in the game. Maybe for when the mines are depleted, you are already doing Populus like magics and breaking havoc in the world anyways. Or you reach a quest victory. Etc. If my channeler can run out of essence and not being able to cast some spells anymore (I'm speculating here right now), why not mines? (or farms) If player cannot adapt to a situation or being able to prevent it even when he has the ability to do so, it's not the game's fault. That obviously supposes that the game offers you alternatives to military.
The onyl two real problems (players not liking it appart) that I can see are:
Besides if they blitzed all over to grab resources, aren't those resources going to be poorly defended of necessity?
Limited resources in a game like Age of Empires means turtling more often than not results in an unwinnable, unlosable stalemate. In a TBS game with multiple victory conditions it means that those conditions that don't rely as heavily on limited resources are inherently better for longer games. With finite resources, a very evenly matched game is bound to degenerate into crap, unless you stop requiring those resources, which seems unlikely. Limited resources makes 'quick' strategies advantageous, because there is little risk of running out of resources while it's being implemented.
"Maybe" is the operative word. When resources run out will happen at totally different stages of the game every time. Sometimes it the game might be won well before it becomes an issue. Sometimes resources might run out long before anything is remotely close to being resolved. Like I said before, maybe in the essence thread, hard-capped limits on any sort of resource only ever work within some intended framework. In the case of limited resources, there is some assumption about how long a game should take and at what rate resources will be used. If those assumptions turn out to be wrong in a given game, it doesn't work. When an entire map runs out of resources and no one is in a position to win, the game is broken. That just isn't fun.
And the argument, "if essence is going to be finite, why not mines or farms?" is horrible. For one, everyone who wants essence to be limited to some predetermined number wants it to be so to differentiate essence from everything else, to make it that much more precious. And using that argument on me is even worse considering I want there to be ways to get more essence. I don't want the game to ever reach the point where my channeler becomes unable to cast spells or do anything useful (like you, this is just speculation, we don't really know how essence will affect channelers).
I think limited resources really would force people to play a certain way, unless they want to risk spending hours playing a game just to discover that it will never be resolved - or at best that it'll just become a long, drawn out battle of attrition.
Thank you for the explanations. Altough I still find interesting (less now than before) the idea of limited resources, I get a better idea of why those limited resources could be very bad for the game.
I agree, and want to emphasize the "could" in "could be very bad." In the Utopia of All-Pleasing Software, I'd like to see resource models have a bit more 'realism' on the finite-renewable axis. But I try to never forget that the Greek behind the English word utopia translates as basically "no place."
I like “some” of your mines to play out, with the conditions1. Gamer has no idea when a mine plays out.2. New mines will be discovered automatically over the whole period of game3. Not all mines will play out. Some are huge mine you’re not ever going to deplete. The trick is in the "balance". I want gamer change their resource infrastructure from time to time, maybe 2 to 5 times max. for a 300 turn game, due to mine depletion or discovery.
I think a mine playing out should maybe be an uncommon random event. (If you get this event a mine/other resource is randomly chosen for depletion. I agree all mines should not play out.
Also, regarding my first post, I wasn't really advocating most of those things - I was just throwing ideas out to see where you might run with them. I veel pretty ambivalent on most of them, but like some of what has been posted afterwards.
I do like the idea of new resources popping up, due to weathering thru the course of the game. On further thought I am NOT a fan of the idea of mines with mixed ores. I think it would be cool when the map is generated to place resources that are immediately visible and others with a "turn countdown" attribute that would determine when it becomes visible. I like the idea that maybe someone who has an apparently bad starting position could actually be in a resource cornucopia that will gradually reveal during the course of the game. Maybe some "earth magic" could expose some of those early...
I think I would script the game to evaluate if mines should be depleted vs. when new mines should be granted. If a mine is super worked (like is fueling a massive war engine off a single iron mine) it may be more likely to deplete than one in the middle of no where that has only been tapped for the last part of the game.
I'd also have it so the event creates a cool-down period "we think we're nearing the end of this vein. We should start looking for another source of <insert resource here>" (then 50% mine efficiency, then 5-10 turns later it will start runnig at 25% efficiency. another 10-20 turns it would stop producing at all)
More conext sensitivity is a swell idea in general, even if the depleting mines question is moot so far as the devs are concerned. For example, I'd really love to see at least Mega Events, if not events in general, have some map-dependent variables that could make them unfold very differently depending on the player's map setting choices, how far along on that map the game is, etc.
that brings up the notion that mines are also usually in the same area. I mean, areas that have a lot of gold.... will have a lot of gold. However, other places of the world might not. So I'd think that one option for world genaration (something the devs might consider anyway) is to keep resource deposits clustered. So like "diamonds" would only appear in 2 places of the world, but there would be a cluster of mines at that location.
In terms of mega events, I imagine that if "an ancient meteor crashed here before the cataclysm, and traces of 'space titanium' has been found in the area" would open several 'space titanium' mines. (it would be best if said deposits would "randomly" appear on a national boarder between 2 or more factions to create tensions when an event or new technology allowed them to be discovered by a player)
{+1 to the 1st person able to catch from where space titanium refrerences)
Mechagodzilla 1?
Edit:
Wow, I want to be able to build one like that in the game. It would be a Golem, so no whinners about Steam Punk.
Edit 2:
Not sure about quoting code so... @Landisaurus: I like that cooldown idea. Very very nice.
Quoting Denryu, reply 18Not to be nit-picky, but I said pretty much exactly that in my previous post And I also brought up some potential concerns with a system like that. If you can see all resources on the map from the start, then there would probably be an early rush to control the most high-end resources. That's one thing I like about Civ IV - you have no idea where those resources will be found, so you can't go establish a power base there in advance. It's also more realistic - why would people fight over an adamantium mine before they have any clue of its worth? Or over bears before anyone thought of riding them?
That's true but what I'm saying is at least have a variety of base metals. I dont want to play a game with a linear evolution of metals ie. iron>bronze>steel> and whatever comes after lol
Or maybe at the begining of the game you can only learn how to mine one metal until you research a new tech that allows you to get another then you would only use the metal most accesible to your civ (or native to your region).
I agree with you. For one thing, linearity in anything in strategy games provides for less strategy than parallel options. Providing options at the start of the game regarding certain resources like metals will go a long ways towards making the game play out differently each time, and makes you really play to your location. One of the things I love about 4X games the first few times I play them is how to best utilize the area around me; but after a fairly small number of games it just becomes wrote. I want Elemental to keep me thinking about these things for as long as possible, and to make each game play as differently as possible.
Well put lol
Limited resources can be cool, but it should be an option.
I like the fact that resources can disappear in other games (civ for example) and/or be literally used up in a linear fashion (spaceward Ho!).
to be blunt, i really don't like resource depletion mechanics. The following reasons;
1.) Bad timing (you tend to run of a key resource at the most inopportune of times, especially if you only have access to one node of that type).
2.) The level of importance (if a particular resource is needed to do, literally, ANYTHING then you're SOL if it just plain runs out. Take lumber for instance, you'll need it for constructing buildings, make weapons, maybe as an ingredient for an advanced resource or to make furniture).
3.) Loss of value to towns (If a specialist town, like a mining town, runs out of iron than it becomes worthless and than you need to either completely moddify it to suit some other purpose or leave it be and rot).
4.) Practiculality (Maybe in games like starcraft does resource depletion make sense, mostly as an encouragement to expand your base).
I wouldn't mind if a resource is depleted eventually, but, personally, i don't want an iron mine to runout within ten turns of gaining access to it. This actually happened to me a few times in Civ 3.
Now having different quality levels of resource nodes is a good idea. This would add variety and increase the importance of certain locales. If you have access to three poor quality iron mines then they would equal one of my rich quality iron mine
Exactly finite resources if done properly only changes the strategic level of the game. I've never even heard of a TBS game where two players were evenly matched with troops, terrain, resources, etc., etc., and then both players ran out of resources evenly matched causing a stalemate.
Ideally the game should have the option for both finite resources and infinite resources. If given only one choice then infinite resources would probably serve best.
That's probably because they're all RTS games.
It happens all the time. You get two asshats that are too closely matched, and they wipe each other out in the middle of the map, rarely getting forces into the enemy stronghold. As the game progresses, they both end up with substantial tiered defenses capable of wiping out anything but large scale attacks with minimal support.
Then, the mines run out. A full scale assault every five minutes suddenly becomes a full scale assault every half an hour. The game is still playing out the same way, just slower.
And then it becomes impossible to field a full scale assault at all, and even if you throw everything you have at the other player it'll just be mowed down by his defenses (and vice versa). Then the game stops, when no one can do anything but press end turn or twiddle their thumbs.
Also, a perfect match isn't required. There's almost always an advantage to the defender, which means that even if one player is doing a little better than the other it can still easily get to the point where even the better player is out of options.
They almost always, invariably, ended up fighting eachother. Tying up eachother's defenses, wasting resources. Then, in the middle of one of their big fights, I swoop in with my Dais of Destruction, destroy half their armies each, and then proceed to whipe them out one by one.
Yeah, I know it doesn't really have anything to do with the thread. I just wanted to mention how much I love that scenario. Suprise buttsecks.
@luckmann: with you, there is no surprise.
I find that in a game like this, having a resource to be finite, or appear to be finite (such as having mana nodes drain to a slow crawl) would encourage conflict and resolution. At the same time, if there are many resources (like this game) there is no way to really limit resources without messing up the flow a bit.
What if we don't always want to be encouraged to be in conflict and for a quick resolution? Finite resources is like turn limits, and I hate turn limits.
I wasn't really supporting resource limit or turn limit. But that is what it does. I don't really like it that much either, but I understand its need. Personally I think the best way is where a resource drops down to a low income rate when it is "spent" such as in much of the Command and Conquer series, the resources slowly come back. Or in Dawn of War, you can sometimes exhaust req sources which drops production down.
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