We got the possible Elemental way where warehouses will store resources like wheat and iron. Don't know how they intend to do with mana though. (I don't know of any games which handles resources this way)
Then there is the Age of Wonders way which is how the popular RTS games like StarCraft, WarCraft and Dawn of War do it. You get the resources but they are not stored anywhere.
At first I wanted maximum control'n'stuff like "everything's a resource" and warehouses for storing stuff. But now I got second thoughts since I've been thinking about it....
Will a "real" resource system with warehouses and stuff make the game more fun?
What are the up and downsides with the two systems?
From my experience, the AoW way is better since it allows for comebacks and building far away from home. Like if I have some flyers in the northwest that are striking at some undefended backwater cities while at the same time an enemy is launching a fullscale invasion of my homearea and captures/destroys my cities then in AoW I would be able to build up the cities I conquered but in the possible Elemental system my resources would be in some stupid warehouses in my cities which I wouldn't be able to effectively use/save/get rid of.
And even if I'm not invaded, I can just build less in my homearea and get new armies up at the newly conquered place.
Another serious thing with the warehouses is that they SLOW DOWN the game since I wouldn't be able to build troops like in the AoW system....
Realism be damned. Gameplay is the thing for me.
What are your thoughts on the subject?
It all boils down to: How central to the game is the economy? If it is a secondary or tertiary thing, then no resource storage is fine and you can abstract things like crazy.
If it is a major part of the game, then abstraction comes out a huge gameplay price, and I feel you need resource storage and things need to be a little more tangible.
I'm a big fan of it being a major part of the game, but i also realize there can only be so many major parts or they ALL beome trivialized. I would love to be able to have a Bene Gesserit style breeding program that I can trade my desendants for other players to get the genetic stock I want. And I wnat to be able to breed in certain characteristics and breed out others. Of course the magic system by definition has to be a major piece. And I would prefer large meaningful battles where both strategy and tactics are meaningful rather than just getting your army on the samesquare as the other army and watch the RNG work it's magic. And I also realize if you have all of that to the depth I would like it you are likely going to have a big unweildy and unfun game experience. It's kind of like my art teacher used to say, good art is as much about knowing what to leave out as knowing what to include.
I have already posted ad nauseum about what I would like to see in the economy/resource model, so I won't waste anyone's time by repeating myself.
IMO, there are only three other aspects of the game that I think should be even remotely as central to the game as economy: magic, diplomacy, and combat. One of my biggest reasons for this is that having an economy that takes into account location, distances, etc is about the only way to make location actually matter!
In 4X games, location tends not to really matter all that much. Defensibility is somewhat important in games like Civ IV but ultimately it's very minor (you can cross any terrain, and you can quite easily bypass cities that would be too much of a challenge to take). Likewise with resources - all you need to do is make sure you don't lose key resources, but that's the extent of that. With finite resources and localized storage, location all of a sudden because an actual factor - especially if combined with methods of making actual choke points and making borders meaningful. (Multi-tile cities helps with the former, and making 'heart-ripping' only one of many viable strategies helps with the latter). It means that you'll probably want to have your cities that are nearby industrial resources to be major industrial centers, to make most efficient use of them. Then you'll have to ship off most of their production to cities geared towards training troops & whatever else might use those products. It forces specialization, it forces location to actually make a difference. Is it worth holding onto that isolated mithril deposit? In a global, infinite resource system - probably! In a finite, localized resource system? Maybe not. Shipping the mithril to a more central part of your empire might be very risky, but it might be prohibitively expensive to set up the full production line and training facilities to make use of it in such an isolated location...
There are very few aspects of 4X games that have such wide-ranging effects on so many different parts of the game as the economy does. It provides one of the basic backbones to what you can and cannot do. A more complex economy lets you do more, and what to actually do becomes much more of a strategic choice. It affects diplomacy, it affects combat, it affects everything! In fact, I'd even venture to say that in a non-fantasy strategy game it is probably the fundamental core of the game. In Elemental, where magic is to be a major aspect, I'd probably put economy and the magic system on ~equal terms.
Civ IV has an incredibly simple economy system, and as a result many aspects of the game are likewise extremely simple. Training and maintaining an army depends only on the opportunity cost of the training time and the upkeep cost of the units. Maintaining control of strategic resources depends only on not losing all the cities around it so that the resource remains inside your cultural boarders - no matter that perhaps its on a small island next to one city in which you've stationed a giant army, and no matter that your enemies have completely sealed it off. There are tons of strategic limitations in Civ IV that are due to its dumbed down economy, and nearly all (if not all) of them would be removed very naturally and intuitively if you add in local resource storage.
Basically, implementing a dumbed-down economy will directly limit the strategic scope of the game and go a long ways towards destroying immersion.
I do think it's possible to have your cake and eat it too in terms of the economy.
For example:
I don't think you have to have a resource inventory in order for distances to matter. The way we are looking at having distances matter in economic terms is through the caravan system.
The caravan delivers goods from another city. The distance of that city will obviously matter because the caravan has to obviously travel there. These caravans are automatic, require no micro management at all. The further awaya city is from the source of a resource, the longer it will ultimately take for that caravan to get there.
But at the same time, we can also have a city instantly gain the benefits of being in a civilization that has such a resource.
Let's use metal as an example.
Initially, every city will produce 1 metal per turn once metal working is researched.
For every metal mine in the the civilization, an additional metal unit is produced each turn.
If there is a road that connects that city to a metal mine, then another resource is produced each turn.
All of that is instant.
However, a caravan that brings N metal with it (say N starting at 5 and increasing based on the player's research) would come from each mining town to each city that is building something that makes use of metal automatically. The distance would matter here.
None of this requires the player to have warehouses and what not.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean. If each city automatically produces metal, then what are the caravans doing? Do they bring extra metal if you place a big enough order? What happens if you cancel the order while the caravan is in transit? Do those resources disappear? Go back? Continue to their destination? If there is no such thing as local storage then the only option is for those resources to disappear.
Additionally, if each city can produce X metal per turn, what happens if I don't use it? It vanishes? It was never made in the first place? That would result in quite the min/maxing problem. It'd encourage you to make the most efficient use of your resources/turn at each city. What if I'm building/training things that take a long time? By the time the next item in the queue comes up, I should've stockpiled quite a bit of resources while they weren't being used; but without resource storage - no. I'd have to wait even longer for the next item because I wouldn't have any surplus - there would in fact be no such thing as surplus! The most efficient building/training strategy therefore becomes to build/train things that go quickly and use most of your /turn resources. Doing anything different, which might be strategically more important, would result in huge waste.
This basically comes back to what I said before: I don't think finite resources can work without local storage. You could in theory use global storage and still have finite resources, but at the cost of location having any importance at all (and at the cost of immersion).
What you suggested, though, seems like a great addendum to a local storage resource system. I really like the idea that as long as your city has access to the resource somewhere, each city (maybe only each city with the appropriate infrastructure, or only if connected by road?) would produce some small amount of that resource automatically. This could simply represent some small amount of autonomous trade between your cities that occurs without your explicit oversight.
This would allow you to build/train things in small quantities in places far from a resource source without having to mess around with sending caravans across huge distances. But it'd still prevent you from undertaking massive projects without using caravans and making sure all the resources are going where they're needed. The result would be a system with local resource storage, but one in which you don't really have to manage resource storage/transport except for relatively large-scale projects.
Also consider this: the ability to ship more resources than you immediately need to a city, and for them to be stored there, can greatly reduce tedious micromanagement. If I'm trying to build up a new city, and have to worry about resources every step of the way, then building that city will come down to min/maxing. On the other hand, if I can ship a boatload of resources to that city, I can build things the way and order I want them built. I won't have to worry about resources there for quite some time. Sure, there might be an opportunity cost in having resources tied up in storage when I maybe could've used them elsewhere - and I suppose min/maxers could min/max caravan shipments instead of their build queue, but in that case you are merely changing where people are min/maxing, not whether or not there is min/maxing to be done.
But with localized storage in place, you could even minimize that min/maxing! If you have a long production/training queue in place, the system could automatically send out caravans to arrive when they are going to be needed; if something changes (resources arrive from some other place/means, the queue changes, whatever), then those resources just go into storage. If a nearby city then puts out an 'order' for that resource, a caravan could bring it from there, rather than directly from the source much farther away!
You don't place an order.
It's for extra metal.
It's all automated.
And they go to the towns delivering "Stuff" no matter what.
What I think many others believe, and I myself am firmly in this camp, is that we don't want to be monkeying around with storage amounts.
If it takes 10 turns to build a knight it should take 10 turns on average. I don't want to have to figure on whether I have storage of metal or what have you.
Early on we had a lengthy discussion on how the economic system might work (this was months ago) and it became pretty clear that most people preferred a simplified system.
Originally, we considered a system where players mined the ore which in return was turned into equipment which in turn was shipped to wherever it needed to go and only when it arrived would it end up on the soldier.
It's a lot more realistic but it's not fun for most people. It's not fun for me anyway.
I didn't like Colonization for instance. I don't want our system to be like that.
At the same time, I am strongly in favor of a system that rewards the player who controls actual physical resources in the world and that those resources are very finite.
I am a little confused now. So we have caravans, no warehouses, and a global access to a mine (example)? So training of one knight takes 10 turns, yes?
How does it change when I have additional barracks?Is the blacksmith somehow needed in this chain?If yes, then is one enough for whole empire?The distance doesn't count, yeah?It doesn't matter how many super-rare-and-powerful-resource mines I have - it's needed to have only one to crank out super units (tons of them)?
Ah that's a pity for me I liked the way the Colonization system made you build home-grown units and husband them carefully rather than spam them like a demented C&C player. In your system, can production be completely cut off e.g in a siege or does the town always recieve one metal per day? (sorry if this has been answered I'm fairly new here!)
Well, I've been trying to not jump the shark because nothing is finalized, but these announcements on the simplification of the economy system are really disappointing. I just hope that this doesn't get hardcoded so at least through modding we can have the complex economy initially envisioned for this game.
Preventing caravans from arriving in a city would significantly slow down production from my understanding of how this works.
I've really got to see more of what they have in mind but I am kind of in the same camp. One of the coolest things about the game is that it was going to be really an accomplishment to field a well equipped army using even just iron weapons and such. And depending on what actually ends up in place that could still happen and equipping an army will be a non trivial event.
I really liked how EVE's economy worked. You needed to mine raw materials, then have that refined, then have the knowledge of how to make something from one or more of the refined materials and then you made stuff and either created new ships or equipped your ships with the stuff you made. It's an online space MMORPG, that although I am not currently playing it I recommend anyone at least playing the two week trial.
For osme reason this 1B build is extremely unstable and I am getting CTD after maybe 30 turns, so I have not really had a chance to see the economic features that were in the build. (I have had good stability on Beta 1 and 1a though).
I'm not that worried about how the economy works out. Someday I would love to find a game with huge amounts of micro and even getting that first iron sword made requires some logistics and is a "big deal". It doesn't sound like Elemental is going to be the game for that, but there is so much more that is looking fantastic that I'm not too let down.
I just hope the game doesn;t get too consolized, which based on Frogboy's post that is not going to happen.
I like that. I don't mind having storage as emergency or reserve (but that wouldn't be needed if towns produce a minimal amount of the resource). I just don't want a game of warehouse management. I do want a game however where resources aren't universal or ubiquitous.
Yay, thank you. I also hope that you won't ditch the caravns or trade routes. They clearly still need work (posted a bug report about them today) but I like the concept. So I'm more curious about discussing exactly how the caravans will play a central part of the economy.
That wasn't the same thread I was reading. Option 1 was far ahead until option 3, and that took over (with option 1 as second choice). The really simplified system wasn't very popular.
Yeah, that is a good thing. Two iron mines should be better then one iron mine, especially if you have a lot of iron consuming cities. The really important things are that attacking caravans should matter, and having extra mining capacity should matter. I don't think warehouses are needed to achieve those two goals either. You could give the town access to all the excess iron production it's connected to as long as caravans are getting through, and cut that off if a caravan gets attacked until another one gets through. That's a pretty simple mechanic, but it makes caravans meaningful and doesn't use warehouses.
By placing an order, I meant queuing up a sufficient # of troops/buildings of sufficient cost. Not explicitly placing an order for a resource.
And.. So caravans will be hopping around cities delivering resources based on build/training queues, right? It won't be random... (like it is now with gold and food, for example). But again, what happens if I change a queue, or cancel it? The resources in transit vanish in a puff of smoke, unless the next item in the queue will also use it? Resulting in lost resources, because they could've been sent somewhere else?
Well I don't want to be monkeying around with storage amounts for excessive periods of time, either - but as I said before I think this is automateable to the extent where we won't have to monkey around (maybe not even at all) except on the occasional turn when your strategy calls for doing something the automation can't deal with.
It taking 10 turns to build a knight on average... So basically, we're going to see resources being shipped all around our nations via caravans, and training times will never be predictable? And if I queue up a bunch of knights in one city and want them to take priority over everything else, I'm SoL? And I'll still see the resources that could be going to building my knights faster being shipped off to other miscellaneous places? Sometimes my knights will take 7 turns, sometimes they'll take 13 turns and I'll have no control over that?
That sounds dismal. In fact, that sounds significantly worse than Civ IV's take on economy. It is more complex without providing any of the actual bonuses of finite resources.
... I was a very active participant of that thread and that is not at all the case. It looked to me like #3 (local storage + automation) was the most popular choice. At the very least options 3 and 1 were tied, but I'm pretty sure #3 took the lead.
I love Colonization
Well that's good, but I'm afraid that you're going to end up making the economy too complicated and too simple all at once.
Too simple because skipping out on resource storage is a lost opportunity when it comes to emphasizing the importance of location, relative distances, specialization, military strategy and even trading.
Too complicated because having finite resources, but no storage (not even global storage, let alone local storage!) completely defeats the purpose of having finite resources to begin with. It is nonsensical and unintuitive... Why should my smithies shut down just because I'm not training troops at the moment? Why should me lumbermills stop producing lumber just because I'm not building anything that requires wood? It makes sense for time-dependent things like labor not to carry over between turns, but wood? Iron? Wheat? You make/gather them, and they're there until you use them or they spoil... If you remove storage completely, then there is nothing you can't do with a Civ IV approach (with some tweaks here and there so it's not completely binary) that you can do with a castrated finite resource economy.
What I'm saying is this: if you're going to dumb down the economy, then don't leave vestiges of complexity there for the sake of it when they aren't going to actually do anything that requires that extra complexity. I'd obviously rather you don't dumb it down in the first place, but if you must, at least do it right
The answer here is to do exactly as MoM did. Excess production = Gold. It makes sense as well, as it is simply the wealth of your nation as a whole. The stuff doesn't disappear it makes your nation wealthy.
I must admit... having read and participated in that same economy thread I really don't see how one can say that the simplified economic model won out. Option 3 looked to be by far the most popular.
And I've got to agree with most of the other posters here that not having some system of resource storage kind of defeats the purpose of having finite resources to begin with. That being said, I am a huge fan of finite resources... just also a huge fan of being able to store them (the two should go hand in hand).
The reason I'm not a fan of that approach is that it turns gold into a jack-of-all trades resource. If you're rich, who needs resources! I'm assuming, of course, that you can reverse that conversion (ie, that you can turn gold into resources, perhaps for a less favorable rate than the reverse). This basically trivializes resources entirely (especially if resources/turn is done on a per city basis, which which case you'd be turning per city resources into universal gold). If you can't turn gold back into resources, well then that doesn't even remotely solve the problem.
So basically, turning excess resources/turn into gold either largely defeats the purpose of having a system like this in the first place, or doesn't actually solve the problem...
Why not just have a Warehouse or a Silo building that can store a limited amount of each resource? If it takes 10 turns to make one knight, would it take 100 turns to make 10 knights? What if I had enough Iron to make 10 Iron Plate Mail suits all at once? If that's true then it should only take 10 turns to train the 10 knights, not 100 turns.
I'm not saying go crazy with the storage. In Medieval time periods (fantasy or otherwise) they really didn't stockpile things like we do today anyway. (except for food)
Just a "small" building to make it seem logical when you start cranking out whole divisions of troops at one time. If you can't store 50 swords somewhere then you can't make squads at once in a logical manner.
I like your idea, I am guessing why they don't go this route for gameplay reasons is, most people would not make the knights (and start paying their upkeep) they would just keep lots of raw materials on hand and then crank out their legions on an as needed basis. I do like the idea of a strategic reserve of resources, but am willing to take a wait and see attitude.
I can also remember that in the economy-discussion thread the more sophisticated concepts were prefered by the majority of the users.
Anyway, i´m eager to see where this is going, but right now i´m a little disappointed that "ressource inventory" will get nixed. For the exact reasons pigeonpigeon already has stated.
I was one of those who voted for #1 but that was partly because it was the hardcore way which is the "cool" thing around here. I fell for the grouppressure a bit....another part of it was that the more hardcore the system, the less consolised. (I realise now that I was wrong.)
Pigeon: I guess your opinion means that you don't play much games with global resource storage then..?
Global resourcestorage is a tried and tested way. The popular RTS games use it as do Age of Wonders and Master of Magic (beat THAT!)
This is just a "memory enhancer" for anyone that cares about the survey (NON-SCIENTIFIC!) That I took back during the resource discussion days. Emphasis by bolded.
I think I would be pretty happy with the currently solution Frogboy is proposing. It strikes a pretty good balance. I think it would be nice if there is a way to stockpile resources in certain cities as well, but I can definitely live without it. Given the space limitations on how many buildings we can build I don't think a Warehouse/Silo would be built very often at all. There will probably be much more important buildings.
As a compromise I think an option to have cities set to always want certain resources from caravans might work. That way caravans wouldn't wait until I was trying to build something to start delivering it, and my major cities could always expect to have a decent flow to tap into as needed, instead of having to wait to prime the pump.
What this doesn't handle very well is stockpiling of any resources that absolutely require the resource to be produced. If a mithril mine is absolutely required for mithril weapons (and it probably should be) then I want some way to guard against instantly losing my mithril if the mine is taken. I guess I would have a little bit out there in caravans still. That might be adequate.
Another question (which we may need to discuss here actually) is if we will have separate buildings for blacksmiths or enchanters or whatever to make special equipment or if that will just be done in the barracks or not need any special buildings at all.
Global resourcestorage is a tried and tested way. The popular RTS games use it as do Age of Wondersand Master of Magic (beat THAT!)
I play many of them, because that's all there is. The only exception that I've ever found is colonization (without leaving the genre completely, anyway).
But in AoW, there aren't any resources besides gold and mana, and those two things are much more reasonable as global resources: mana because its magic and therefore special, and not really physical; and gold because you can pay someone with an IOU or whatever and then get the gold to them. But you can't equip a knight with a promise of armor. I've never played MoM (shock!) so I can't comment on that. But I suspect it also didn't have a large array of resources.
A much better example is the omnipresent Civ IV, whose economy has always, as I've said before, been one of its weakest points for me. I enjoy Civ IV, it's a good and fun game and you are right that global resources is tried and tested (I even mentioned this myself). But that's all we've ever gotten within this genre since its very inception... Colonization is the only exception I'm aware of, and its implementation of it is not particularly spectacular. The only reason I really enjoy colonization at all is because of its resource system, otherwise it would be pretty boring.
So yeah if Stardock decides to go with global resource storage, so be it. I'm sure I'll still enjoy the game, but I'll be even more aware of how the game was so closed to being so much better
I've said a lot in this thread, but ultimately I have two points:
Please don't remove local resource storage!
and
If you must remove local resource storage ( ) then at least don't pretend to maintain some vestige of its advantages by retaining aspects of a local resource storage economy that are completely superfluous sans the actual local storage. Complexity for the sake of complexity (or appearance) is not the kind of complexity I like in my games. I want it to actually mean something.
MoM had a large number of resources but rather than being global they generally gave tile bonuses to different stats for city development (Gold&Silver deposits gave + Gold to city production, etc)
I have to agree. One of the pillars, and often a make or break, for a 4X game is its economic system. If you dumb it down too much you make it superfluous... if you make it too complex (or have an inadequate UI to handle its level of complexity) then you make it frustrating. The key to making a successful local inventory system work isn't to try and have your cake and eat it too (which will simply irritate a lot of players who had supported what, is in my opinion, a fairly workable system), but to make a transparent and easy to manage UI so that a player can get immersed in the economic system if he wants to, but doesn't necessarily have to micromanage it if he is less interested in economics. I think one of the few good things about MoO3 was the way they handled the economy. You could micromanage if you wanted to tweak the system just the way you want, or you could ignore it after setting a few broad guidelines and still be ok with the result.
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