How Resources should be done...

[Switch]

I do like this idea, it would add some more realism and strategy, as well as flexibility, to the resources. Does it really make sense that one source of rubber or aluminum could supply an entire continent, or even more?

But about the resource upkeep idea, I can't say I'm a huge fan of that, as it adds unnecessary compications, many of which could be unexpected and fun-ruining...You have you huge-friggin' army on the enemy's doorstep, and that turn it happens the RNG gods dislike you...oops, there goes your only oil supply. Now that I've just declared war, I have a pile of scrap two tiles away from their nearest city waiting to be pumelled. Unless, of course, they eliminated the random disappearance of resources, but then that might reduce the strategic balance...

[MattPilot]

oops, there goes your only oil supply. Now that I've just declared war, I have a pile of scrap two tiles away from their nearest city waiting to be pumelled. Unless, of course, they eliminated the random disappearance of resources, but then that might reduce the strategic balance...

i've thought about that. And i agree, the resource upkeep isn't that a good of idea. Unless it is done in a way where units requiring upkeep are not useless. Like vehicles moving only 1/2 distance.

But i guess it would be best if resource upkeep were kept out.


ANyhow.. how does one go about to get the devs to read and comment on this?

[Wai_Wai]

Your ideas are great.
This rationalizes why I need to occupy more strategetic resources of the same kind.
It's crazy/unreasonable once I can access to just one source of oil, i can supply to the whole empire.

To sum up yours and add mine, the new concept of strategic resources(SR):
Depletion Issue
- Depletion is something which is within our expectation, and controllable. We know when we will use up all our valuable resources. So we can develop a sense of thrift.
- so depletion should not be guided by merely random. It should be highly predictable and controllable.

Max Supply Amount
- Every SR pile has a total amount of supply
- When it drops to zero, the SR pile will disappear.
- Another SR pile will reappear in somewhere else.

Max Supply per turn(spt)
- there's a spt base value (Man! We need time to extract, say, oil)
- so even you have tons of oils, you cannot produce tons of units (which needs oil for production) all of a sudden.
- the supply value can be raised by various means (eg building terrain improvement, tech advances)

City Screen
In the city screen, it will display your total amount of a parituclar SR, and its spt.

Resource Manager
- Your resoucre mangager will help you to do reports and present nice tables about your state of SR - when will it be depleted based on your current usage, and so on.
- What you need to do is to make strategic decisions. No complicated calculations or micromanagement.


Storage Place
- Storage facilities are city improvements.
Function:
People who suffer much from the limit of spt may consider extract and stock SR, so they can use some more SR over spt when needed in war-time.
Also you may trade the extra stock to your opponent for money :-)

- they needs considerable maintenance, and have storage limits
- when you decide to utilize your stock, you cannot use ALL your stock at once (ie in 1 turn) because we need time to transport and process the resource, though we can use some more [ie by raising max spt (eg +10 spt)]
[Note: it's to do with game balances]
Eg:
You have 25 spt from the oil pile.
You start to pile-up some oil for storage (eg 200 units)
Later you decide to use the stock. The max. process rate is 20spt.
That's mean we can use 45 spt (25spt from mines; 20spt from storage)

- some wonders may be created to help with the above (eg unlimited storage amount :P)


Trade
- It makes the trade of reosurces more sacrificial
- Not only you gives benefits to your opponents, but also you will lose your valuable amount of SR
- In Civ3, a really costless SR deal can be made when you trade, say iron, to a far-away country where you will not attack the country in the near future. Only a few gold pays!
- The trading unit is no longer in terms of pile (rather unlreaistic, right?), but the supply amount. It can be traded in lump-sum (if stock is available) or per turn.

[Addled Platypus]

so would we nee to build "special storage facilities"
to keep these resources for trade/ latter use?

I wolud like the option of opt in/out approach

[MattPilot]

initially, i was against storage, but i do like the way Wai_Wai puts it. LIke only having a max 20 output from storage.

Storage could be based on building a Warehouse (like the granary). Although it should not store more than a SMALL amount (and never be unlimited). All it should do is, for example, give you a boost for say 10-20 turns during war time. Ex... You have 200 stored, and by switching to "MOBILIZATION" you get a 20 boost per turn for 10 turns.

[Trifna]

Limiting the storage is artificial. The reality is that no one starts storing everything because it can be rentabilized by USING it. Should it be by trading it... or incorporating it in the economy (cheap fuel for citizens, lots of rubber/metal consumer products...).

[Unspeakable Horror]

I like Wai_Wai unified model

[waab]

I like it, but I do tend to dislike the hunt for resources all over the planet...

[wrylachlan]

What's the point?

And I don't mean that to be sarcastic - I'm asking what you think this system achieves, because I think there are much simpler ways of doing this.

Another way of looking at it is - what gameplay decisions does it create?

The current strategic resource system already creates the land grab decision. Do I attack you for oil? It also creates the diplomatic decision - Should I cozy up to this nation so I can trade for some oil? This is the stated purpose of "Strategic" resources. They give specific parts of your nation greater "strategic" value than others (to make war more interesting), and create an incentive for trade and diplomatic relations. Modelling resources is NOT the goal.

What decisions does this new sytem create that weren't there before?

Use now vs. stockpile for later? - What effect does this have? It makes you decide between building a lot of units and having a standing army vs. a small standing army and ramping up quickly for war... But wouldn't you achieve the exact same end by just increasing the upkeep on units?

A more nuanced decision about trading some of a resource...? Well you can already do that. If you have 3 iron, you can trade 2 of them. The problem is that this isn't really a decision, because there's no upside to owning multiple resources. That would easily be fixed by a percentage gold discount on units that use the resource. So you have 1 resource, now you can build tanks. 2 resources, you can build tanks at 95% cost. 3 = 92% cost. 4 = 90%, etc.

Another way to think of this is, "How do I expect the player to act different with this system in place? What would he build differently? Where would he move units differently? How would this effect the timing?" and then ask yourself - "Is there a simpler way to effect this change in behavior?"

And note nuance is not necessarily strategy. In chess a knight either moves 2,1 or it doesn't move at all. No nuance necessary. What do you achieve by being able to trade .23463 of a resource versus trading in whole resource blocks?

[Adagio]

It just makes it more interesting
It's defently more interesting than the discount on units idea

With the old method when trading a resource you can't set any limits to the other nation. If you sell oil to the enemy for 20 turns the other nation can build as many tanks as his cities makes possible during those 20 turns. With the new method it would be possible to limit this so the enemy only will be able to build a max of 2 tanks simulatiously (sp?) while you'll be able to build 2 tanks less (at any time) than you would if you didn't sell it

[Sandman]

Is it really necessary to have resource quantities measured to the nearest ten, hundred or thousand? Instead of extracting 50 oil a turn, and trading 20, why not earn 5 per turn and trade 2?

I'd like a system whereby each resource has an availability rating for each civ, rather than a discrete amount. The availability rating would be absent, scarce, adequate, plentiful or abundant. Finding resources or (in some cases) raising your tech level would boost the rating for each resource. Researching, say, stirrups, would guarantee an adequate level of horses, whatever your resource situation. Researching advanced chemistry would guarantee a scarce level of oil, as long as you had an adequate supply of coal.

[Fosse]

How would having "adequate," "scarce," or "abundant" levels affect play and trade?

There have been proposals with numbers that contain a direct translation of amount to use (10 units of oil is enough to power two battleships, with two left over to trade, for example). How would you suggest something like that be provided?

I also like the idea of certain techs influencing the amount at your disposal, but this could easily be applied to many of the discrete number (horse tile provides three, high chance of vanishing, when you discover stirrup it provices 10 with a minimal chance of vanishing).

[Xorbon]

I like this idea.

I posted a very similar idea to this in another thread quite a while ago. I think unit upkeep would be a good part of the system. It would be similar to how gold upkeep is done now. However, instead of disbanding a unit once a resource is cut-off, the unit would suffer some sort of penalty. The penalty could vary from unit to unit, or even better, from resource to resource. So, for instance, lack of iron could cause an attack penalty while lack of oil could cause a movement penalty.

[Sandman]

Originally posted by Fosse
How would having "adequate," "scarce," or "abundant" levels affect play and trade?

There have been proposals with numbers that contain a direct translation of amount to use (10 units of oil is enough to power two battleships, with two left over to trade, for example). How would you suggest something like that be provided?

I also like the idea of certain techs influencing the amount at your disposal, but this could easily be applied to many of the discrete number (horse tile provides three, high chance of vanishing, when you discover stirrup it provices 10 with a minimal chance of vanishing).

A civ with a scarce level of oil would have trouble building and operating units that required it, a civ with an adequate supply wouldn't. A scarce civ's tanks would only be able to move 2 squares a turn, an adequate civ would move at 3 squares. Plentiful or abundant civs would have some bonuses to construction, but not such a huge bonus as to make trade pointless, and they wouldn't have a movement bonus.

Why ten units to move two battleships? How does the game benefit from giving each unit a distinct resource usage? You'll need a calculator just to work out moves; "Let's see, two tanks at 3 oil units is 6, plus one mech inf at 2 units make 8, plus 3 cruisers at 4 units makes 20. Oh wait, I only have 19 units available..."

If you go for discrete resource values, just keep it at one resource per unit, without any exceptions.

[Fosse]

Originally posted by Sandman


A civ with a scarce level of oil would have trouble building and operating units that required it, a civ with an adequate supply wouldn't. A scarce civ's tanks would only be able to move 2 squares a turn, an adequate civ would move at 3 squares. Plentiful or abundant civs would have some bonuses to construction, but not such a huge bonus as to make trade pointless, and they wouldn't have a movement bonus.

But where is it determined if a resource is plentiful or rare? If it's number in your land, or number being traded for, then how do you prevent the Civ 3 goofiness in which a single bit of iron can supply the world's largest nation for thousands of years, but doesn't provide the excess to trade a bit to the one city nation next door? Unless you put in discete numbers someplace you're going to have some level of funkiness. Are you asking for a system in which the numbers are below the hood?

Why ten units to move two battleships? How does the game benefit from giving each unit a distinct resource usage?

First, I'm just making up numbers to serve as examples. But what I mean is basically the same as other people have said: some units would require a resource upkeep, like how settlers used to need food. Each tank, then, might need one oil unit in order to keep moving that turn (it doesn't "use up" the oil to move in the same way that a unit in Civ 3 didn't "use up" shields for support, they just took them out of the build queue).[/quote]

You'll need a calculator just to work out moves; "Let's see, two tanks at 3 oil units is 6, plus one mech inf at 2 units make 8, plus 3 cruisers at 4 units makes 20. Oh wait, I only have 19 units available..."

No no... yuck. That'd be awful. You would just need so many units of oil to "support" particular units. If you require 20, but you have only 18, then one of your units gets stuck for the turn (I don't know which one, the one deepest in enemy territory, the one farthest from the front lines, whatever). This is less horrible than units simply disbanding like in the past! OR, using discrete numbers, "unsupplied" units could suffer the same kind of "Rare Resource" penalties you outlined earlier. What I'm really getting at is that I don't understand how you imagine the vague amount of a resource should be determiend.

So you wouldn't have a pool of oil that you burn when you move units. This has been explained much better in the past (probably above, even), and I'm two minutes from leaving work.

If you go for discrete resource values, just keep it at one resource per unit, without any exceptions.

There have been lots of complaints about it costing the same to support a warrior as a nuclear missle. It does make sense to have different units cost different amounts to keep up, but this is tangential to the discussion here.

I think almost everyone wants a system that isn't binary supply/not supply like Civ 3 though.

I'm going home.