Civ Design - Resources

[Decimatus]

Hey guys, its been awhile.

I wanted to talk with fellow civ fanatics and see what you think about various systems in place in the Civilization games and how they might be improved upon.

The topic on my mind right now is resources.

I feel the core Civilization series has been lacking regarding resource systems, though it has slowly but surely made improvements in this area. Games like Call to Power made resources far more important and interesting, even though the execution was quite abstract. Of course, later Civilizations were working towards more robust resource systems that powerful units and buildings required, but missed out on meaningful motivations and systems for trade and resource acquisition-through-conquest.

To me, the resource system should fulfill 2 main functions. It should simulate the importance and scope of resources in history, and it should motivate players to seek out, trade, refine, and fight over those resources as part of that historical simulation.

To complete the historical simulation, the following must be accomplished:

First, you want to give empires a reason to want not just resources, but lots of resources. Resources need to be quantified, not just one and done(I'm looking at you Civ 5 luxuries). Units need their metals, factories need their energy, your ever growing population demands ever more shinies, etc. The more resources, the more of everything, assuming you have the capacity to handle them.

Second, if empires need lots of resources, then they are going to need a way to trade for what they need, and trade away their excess for profit. A robust trade system can be a way not just to transfer resources from one empire to the next, but as a resource sink that turns resources into essentially consumer products which generates currency for the empire. Are you turning your Iron into tanks, or into profits?

Third, empires need to want resources enough to go to war over, whether to acquire more, or simply to keep the trade routes open.

Finally, with motivation goals in mind, resource gathering, refinement, and empire use can be considered, which is really the meat of the topic. How do you feel resources should be handled in a Civ game?

[Decimatus]

Of course, another goal to keep in mind when designing anything, is managing complexity. And that is part of the simulation aspect of the game. How complex can you make the resource and trading system before you make the player's brain explode? Obviously this is largely why Civ resource systems have been so basic, though I think we can come up with something that is significantly more robust while still keeping the game playable.

2 Key improvements I would make to the base resource system in order to make it more meaningful:

1. Split resources into 2 categories. Minerals, and Organics. Minerals are underground which could be represented by a sub-map that you can toggle on and off, or simply using icons on the main map if you can do away with the need for icons for the organics. Organics occur on the map itself, though if done right they can just be represented graphically and through production windows instead of through a proliferation of icons.

2. Organic resources are reproduce-able. You know like the Agricultural Revolution that spawned Civilization ~8 thousand years ago... You find wheat, then guess what, you can grow wheat on all your farms. Or maybe your people want rice, so you farm mostly rice and farm the small amount of wheat that they want for variety to make them happy. The same would go for all organic resources, cows, chickens, vegetables, luxuries such as Coffee, Cocoa, etc, etc.

This would actually let you move organic resources largely off the map(icon-wise), since you discover something and then you get to decide how you want to exploit it on an empire-wide scale without the need for icons cluttering up the map. You would simply know that that vast field of golden brown is wheat, and you would have a simple window to show you how much you are making compared to how much your people need/want. They need more? Plop another wheat farm down, or change a farm from something else to wheat.



Additionally, resources would play a bigger part in production. Instead of 200 hammers going into the pyramids, how about 2000/whatever units of stone that you have to quarry in addition to the hammers? Stone being found practically everywhere, this could be a project that consumes your entire civilization as you mine the countryside, use other population and trade routes to move stone to the construction site, have other cities send food to the work city, etc.

Wood and stone would act as basic construction resources for much of the game, while many of your other minerals and metals would be used alongside them depending on the function.

[Aeson]

It's an interesting topic. "1 and done ... you get the effect" can be fun because it's streamlined and out of the way. The focus moves to other systems (which hopefully provide the fun).

A more in-depth resource system (or economic system as a whole) could be a great addition to the series though.

We have been talking about an open source game project in the other OT, maybe you'd be interested in it?

http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/206223-FrankenCiv-a-hypothetical

[Decimatus]

It's an interesting topic. "1 and done ... you get the effect" can be fun because it's streamlined and out of the way. The focus moves to other systems (which hopefully provide the fun).

A more in-depth resource system (or economic system as a whole) could be a great addition to the series though.

Simplifying one system is definitely one way to shift focus elsewhere. However, personally, I think resources has been downplayed too much in previous games compared to their importance through history.

That and resources and how they tie in with the territory gives you all kinds of interesting game play as you trade and fight for those resources.

Is it more fun to fight for a city housing a giant oil field, or a city that just has the same mines and farms as every other city in that civ?

One of my favorite aspects of Call to Power's resource/trade system is that you would see a city surrounded by 3-4 of a single resource with tons of trade lines going in and out of it and you would immediately see the importance of that city and it becomes an objective to be captured or defended.

In a similar way, Call to Power's tile/improvement system made it quite apparent where the giant production cities were(the mountain ranges), and how important they were to any civilization's (war)economy.

We have been talking about an open source game project in the other OT, maybe you'd be interested in it?

http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/2...a-hypothetical

I would be interested in discussing high-level civ design topics, though I don't think I would be much help with the actual construction of your game. Got one of my own to work on afterall.

I think you guys could use a little more organization of your objectives and discussion topics. You should create a sub-forum for your frankenciv game design so we can talk about more general topics without stuff getting lost in the middle of that giant thread.

[N35t0r]

Differentiating industrial output from mineral production in the late game would definitely be an interesting move.

[Decimatus]

Differentiating industrial output from mineral production in the late game would definitely be an interesting move.

For sure! That can get real complex real quick though.

Actually I already plan on having factory and industrial park tile improvements that would replace the mine spam you see in most civ games. I want mines and quarries to be constructed specifically to get the resources found in the ground and not as some catch-all production system.

I also want power plants to be represented on the map. Both to serve as military targets, and also because some of them can be quite big.

Being able to quantify and trade industrially produced goods is something I do want to try to work out to see if it is practical. It could range from the super simple with basic categories like Consumer Goods, Industrial Goods, and Military Goods, to something more complex involving maybe a dozen or more different industrial goods.

[Aeson]

I would be interested in discussing high-level civ design topics, though I don't think I would be much help with the actual construction of your game. Got one of my own to work on afterall.

I think you guys could use a little more organization of your objectives and discussion topics. You should create a sub-forum for your frankenciv game design so we can talk about more general topics without stuff getting lost in the middle of that giant thread.

Yah, that's just the initial idea/planning thread. I'll have more time to set things up in a month or two. A dedicated forum, git server, and whatever else we need.

I'd be interested in hearing more about your own project. Is it a 4X game with a resource system along the lines of what you're talking about here?

[Decimatus]

Yah, that's just the initial idea/planning thread. I'll have more time to set things up in a month or two. A dedicated forum, git server, and whatever else we need.

I'd be interested in hearing more about your own project. Is it a 4X game with a resource system along the lines of what you're talking about here?

Yeah, basically my own version of Civilization. Re-envisioning most of the core systems, though generally it is still the same game.

For resources I am still ironing out the core ideas behind the system; what they will be used for, how you can trade them, etc, so that I can implement them into my map generation. I could implement it into the generation right now but I want to be sure I have cut the number of resources down to the amount appropriate for the systems, the map, player interaction, etc. So yeah any feedback and ideas could help me guide the system to it's final state. Of course, as with all systems, it will likely get iterated on a dozen times as new systems come online and interact with it.

Right now I am continually iterating on the map generator. The basic generator is in place with world wrap, coasts, a dozen or so tile types, biome generation, etc. So working on the idea behind the resource system and will implement rivers as soon as the spline tool is up and running.

[Decimatus]

So as I have been thinking about and researching various resource/building/improvement implementations, I am not sure I want resources represented on the main over-map as they have been in past Civ games.

One reason is that I want to bring back the concept of Hamlet/Village/Town, as well as increase the importance of tiles for industrial and scientific use. And obviously there are the agricultural tiles which will handle the Organic resources. This could be hard to do with the way resource extraction has been handled in the past.

If the smallest map size was Huge, then I might not have to worry about the map clutter, but there are technical limitations to consider.

So I am thinking about a way to represent the minerals on a sub-map, and having 2 options for extraction.

The first option would be that the minerals are extracted without disturbing most of the overland. A few mine shafts or oil wells don't take up much space and can exist along side a farm or a logging camp. This would provide a steady stream of resources each turn and be overall cheaper to maintain. This option won't necessarily require input from the player to happen, though I am thinking about a requirement to assign population to work the mine(automatic assignment as default). The fact that there is a mine/resource on the tile could be represented by an unobtrusive icon as well as being represented on the mineral map.

The second option would be open pit mining which would take up the entire tile. This would provide a great quantity of resources in a short amount of time, and would cost quite a bit more money to maintain as well as reverting the tile back to normal for use afterwards. This would also run the deposit out of material sooner than otherwise.

[Aeson]

The idea for different types of extraction is cool. Wouldn't open pit mining damage the other outputs of the tile even after it stops being used (at least for a very long time) though?

[Decimatus]

Yeah, if you open pit mine an area you would have to reclaim the tile somehow. Actually, my home town used to be a big series of open pit mines and chat hills, but when I went back ten years later they had pushed all the chat hills into the pit mines and everything was green and flat. Was almost weird.

The way my map currently generates is that each tile has a precipitation rating(Arid, Wet, etc), and the latitude band(Tropical, Temperate, etc), and together they determine the vegetation. So after open pit mining you could spend a few turns to clear the tile, and if the rain and temperature is right, then it could be farm-able again. It may either need lots of resources or a certain tech to allow for reclamation, but the mines will probably take awhile to run dry anyway. I don't really want to deal with soil fertility on a per-tile level, so that will generally be simulated through tech advancement.