DESIGN: Economy/resource system thoughts

[Solver]

Please post your thoughts on possible changes to the resource and economy system of CtP here. This is supposed to be a wishlist/discussion thread for our ideas. I'll start with a bit of thoughts on Civ3-style resources.

About the strategical resource system. Civ 3 had this idea implemented, but I think that there are ways how it could be improved upon. Suppose you have found a source of Iron and connected it to your cities. In Civ 3 this means, you have Iron. I think that it could mean, for instance, that you have 10 units of Iron. This could be enhanced. If you build a standard mine, say, you get 12 units of Iron from that source – and the standard Mine production increase for the tile. Or, you can build an Iron Mine there, and get 15 units of Iron, but no production increase. This will add the necessity of deciding between higher production and higher amounts of strategic resources.

With that Iron now, you can’t just go ahead and build Pikemen. To build a Pikeman, you need no less than 20 units of Iron, overall – whereas for 15 units, you can build Swordsmen. This will require you to connect more than one source of something.

Also, even the late game units should require resources. For instance, require 100 iron for a Battleship, in addition to whatever Oil or other costs it has. Through the ages, though, there should be upgrades to those terrain improvements like Iron Mines, that increase the output of a strategic resource.

Trading of these resources would happen similar to Civ 3, except that you select how many units exactly are you trading away. So, you can give away 1 unit of Iron, or 30 units of Iron. Of course, the AI would have to be adapted to understand such proposals.

A more radical idea would be to require support costs for units in strategic resources. For instance, have each Pikemen unit require 0.5 Iron to support. All your existing resources go to support first, and building next. So, with 30 Iron units income, and 20 Pikemen, you are spending 10 Iron for support, and have 20 remaining – you can build more Pikemen. But with 21 Pikemen out there, you only have 19.5 iron units remaining, and can build no more Pikemen till you get more Iron or disband existing ones. Currently, though, I’m not exactly sure that I would like this idea. Maybe yes, maybe not.

Luxury resources were another good Civ 3 concept, increasing the happiness in your empire. This, I think, could be implemented in a way more similar to Civ 3, where there are, for instance, 8 different luxury resources, and each one increases happiness in every city of the host empire by 1, for a maximum of +8. Extra sources of each luxury resource can be traded away.

Proceeding with the “special resources” can be risky, IMO. Those could include things like bonus HP for units, extra production or whatever, if you control the resources, but I think it can, in some cases, be unbalancing.

Another idea for economy would be to allow for more detailed control of numbers. For instance, why not allow the PW allocation to be changed by 2 or even 1 percent, instead of by 10 percent?

[Locutus]

Re: Economy/resource system thoughts

This is long term thinking (it impacts many areas of the game and will require major changes to a lot of the code), but I do agree that improvements in this area are definitely in order. I also agree the Civ3 system is a good starting point, though there is indeed a lot of room for improvement.

Originally posted by Solver
About the strategical resource system. Civ 3 had this idea implemented, but I think that there are ways how it could be improved upon. Suppose you have found a source of Iron and connected it to your cities. In Civ 3 this means, you have Iron. I think that it could mean, for instance, that you have 10 units of Iron. This could be enhanced. If you build a standard mine, say, you get 12 units of Iron from that source – and the standard Mine production increase for the tile. Or, you can build an Iron Mine there, and get 15 units of Iron, but no production increase. This will add the necessity of deciding between higher production and higher amounts of strategic resources.

That doesn't work: you can get production from all over the map, while Iron (presumably) is rare. So that's a non-decision: everyone would always build an Iron Mine everywhere to maximize the output of the rare resource. That isn't a choice, that's a chore.

With that Iron now, you can’t just go ahead and build Pikemen. To build a Pikeman, you need no less than 20 units of Iron, overall – whereas for 15 units, you can build Swordsmen. This will require you to connect more than one source of something.

Also, even the late game units should require resources. For instance, require 100 iron for a Battleship, in addition to whatever Oil or other costs it has. Through the ages, though, there should be upgrades to those terrain improvements like Iron Mines, that increase the output of a strategic resource.

I agree with this. Rather that just having Iron, you should indeed have a certain amount of it (and possibly different sources might produce different amounts of mines, but that might complicate things too much). Or rather, your Iron source(s) should have a certain output (so 20 means 20 per turn, as Solver already implied). But not just that: at least for some resources, there should be a maximum amount you can gather, it should have a certain stock. For example, an Iron resource might contains 4000 units of Iron. If you harvest 20 units per turn, the stock would decrease to 0 in 200 turns, after which it's depleted and simply disappears. That is much better than Civ3's random depletion of resources. New technologies however could not only be used to increase the output of a resource, but also it's total amount (i.e. you'd become more effective at extracting the resource, loosing less to waste and stuff).

You might or might not want to introduce Iron Mines (or similar) to the game which would increase this output of a resource (not sure about that), but if you do and a player decides to use them, this would of course also increase the rate of depletion of the resource. That creates a strategic choice: more Iron now and nothing later, or a little Iron now and a little Iron later.

Instead or on top of that, I would certainly want to introduce something similar to rush-buying: a way to forcefully increase this output of the resource (temporarily) when you urgently need more of it, but at the cost of having an exponentional effect on the depletion rate. So through such a mechanism, you could for example (temporarily) extract 40 units of Iron per turn instead of the usual 20, but this would also deplete the stock of Iron resource at a rate of 80 units per turn. This way you would be able to choose between getting more Iron over a longer period of time, or getting less quicker.

This does create a risk of unbalanced gameplay though: someone who happens to have a major Iron supply could quickly pump out a huge army of Iron-clad units and overwhelm and try to destroy his Iron-less enemies with it before the stock depletes. There should be some checks in place to prevent this (a time limit for how long you can rush, a happiness penalty for rushing that increases with time, and of course a major increase in the rate of depletion, maybe also time-dependent?).

For some resources (e.g. for food or animal resources), the stock may increase again if you leave it alone for a while, or at least cut back on production. For others, such as metal and minerals, the resource won't grow back, but new source may from time to time be discovered (as in Civ3).

A more radical idea would be to require support costs for units in strategic resources. For instance, have each Pikemen unit require 0.5 Iron to support. All your existing resources go to support first, and building next. So, with 30 Iron units income, and 20 Pikemen, you are spending 10 Iron for support, and have 20 remaining – you can build more Pikemen. But with 21 Pikemen out there, you only have 19.5 iron units remaining, and can build no more Pikemen till you get more Iron or disband existing ones. Currently, though, I’m not exactly sure that I would like this idea. Maybe yes, maybe not.

Basically I think I like this idea, but there's a huge risk that things become way to complicated. We want to avoid that. IIRC it was MoO3 that was critized for playing like a spreadsheet rather than a game. We want to avoid that here. But if it can be implemented properly, I'd like to see it.

Luxury resources were another good Civ 3 concept, increasing the happiness in your empire. This, I think, could be implemented in a way more similar to Civ 3, where there are, for instance, 8 different luxury resources, and each one increases happiness in every city of the host empire by 1, for a maximum of +8. Extra sources of each luxury resource can be traded away.

It's silly a single resource could make an entire civ happy. For all resources, I'd like to see that every city has it's own resource box that requires a certain amount of resources to be dedicated to it. Being connected to a road network alone shouldn't automatically fill the box.

My idea: if you produce 20 units of Ivory in your empire, you could create +20 happiness with it, but at a rate of +1 happiness per pop. So if the Ivory is harvested by a city of size 10, that would increase the happiness of the entire city with +2, without affecting any other cities in the game. However, you could also decide to set up 2 trade routes with two size 5 cities and export 5 units to each (keeping 10 units for the original city). This way all three cities would see an increase in happiness of +1. The same should go for production resources as well: if you produce 20 Iron, you can use it to build lots of Iron units/buildings in the city where the Iron is made, or you could export some/all of it to other cities and use it to produce Iron stuff there as well.

Note that I would use trade routes here rather than a road network, in more or less the same form in which they already exist in CtP2 now, with routes that can be set up and pirated and everything. Of course, you would now also have to specify how much you want to trade, and the AI would need a thorough overhaul to deal with the changes. Also, it would be nice to have some control over the trade routes themselves, or at least to make them more intelligent and avoid enemy territory and other dangerous areas (e.g. water, if you have a weak navy). Perhaps at the cost of effeciency (if you take a detour to get a safer route, a certain amount of the units traded is lost to corruption?)

One downside of Civ3's system is that it's incredibly powerful: if you happen to be stuck on a continent without Oil and you're at war with someone from a different continent in the Modern Age, you're pretty much doomed. Unless you can find an ally willing to spare you some Oil, your Industrial Age armies and cities are sitting ducks for your Modern Age opponents, even if you're 200 years ahead in scientific research. I'd like to tone this down a little, as it can kill a game really quickly. Even if you have 0 Oil resources, you should IMHO still be able to build units that ordinairily require Oil, only they should be a lot more expensive in terms of regular shields (and maybe have slightly inferior stats or something). Also, it would probably be a good idea to ensure there are basically enough resources on the map for everyone (I've played Civ3 games where there were like 2 Coal sources on the entire map -- that's just not enough when you're with 8 civs).

All in all, my proposals would make trade *far* more important and most cities would probably end up with several trade routes (in rare cases perhaps even dozens). This is a good thing as trade was of HUGE importance in real history and is IMO being seriously underestimated in all existing Civ games.

Proceeding with the “special resources” can be risky, IMO. Those could include things like bonus HP for units, extra production or whatever, if you control the resources, but I think it can, in some cases, be unbalancing.

Not just unbalancing, it makes things just too complex.

Another idea for economy would be to allow for more detailed control of numbers. For instance, why not allow the PW allocation to be changed by 2 or even 1 percent, instead of by 10 percent?

Because (too much of) that would turn it into a spreadsheet game.

[The Big Mc]

i don't like strategic recourses as if we did not have oil the latest navel battle ships would be made using steam power or something else just because we can't get oil does not mean the player should be penalised

[MrBaggins]

Strategic resources favor the human, and will do until the AI is capable of defending a particular map point. Unbalancing as of now.

[george03]

I think the strategic resources are definetly needed, because that's the way it works in real life. Also I think that the idea to have stocks of resources and units/buildings requring certain amounts of certain resources to be built/supported is great one! However I think that the ratio of resource in stock to how much say a pikeman would cost should be bigger than 4000 to 20, as if say a pikeman (which in real life would of course represent somewhere around 100 real pikemen) costs 20, then an aircraft carrier would cost certainly not less than 10,000! So, if stocks should be implemented, they will need to store larger aounts of resource.

Tile improvements, like mines, should increase both the rate at which resource is gathered and the total amount of it in stock.

I also think that there are some cases where resources as such should not exist, For example forest. To me, it does not make any sence to have a little hardwood resource on the forest tile. Obviously hardwood is a resource which is needed to produce certain things (some buildings, trading vagons, etc), but a plyer should not grather this resource by connecting to the actual resource icon via the road. Rather he should simply build the road on that tie to gather the resource. What I'm basically saying is that there are times when the tile itself is a resource. This way if a forest tile has 10,000 units of timber, when the player uses it all up, the forest tile will be terraformed into grassland.

Now, I want to say a bit about tiles. I think there should be a clear distinction between tiles and what gorws on it. So, styrictly speaking forest should not be considered a tile, becuase it can grow on plains, grasslands, tundras, mountains. It is there of different qualities and qantities hough. So this way while grassland forest tile can have 10,000 units of timber, mountain forest tile can have only 2,000 units of timber. This way things like forest & jungle should be reagrded as sort of natural tile improvement that can produce certain amounts of resource (timber in this case).

I also like the idea of resources dissapearing after thye are used up.

Another thing that I want to say a few words about is the distinction between the natural resources or raw materials and manufactured goods, that can be in turn the resources to produce buoldings, units, etc. So, I think there should be several levels of resources, if I can say that. This way from things like iron and alluminium with the advent of metallurgy a player should be able to build a factory dedicated to producing various secondatry goods that arise from alluminum and iron and other raw materials. For example cans, or various tools, or whatever. Obviously not to complicate things too much there should be only one secondary resource that arises from this metallurgy factory - call it metallurgy resource for example. A factory will require 20 units of alluminum and iron (and other resources of course (that depends on the factory)) per turn, and output say 40 units of the secondary (metallurgy) resource which we need 30 units of to produce 1 tank.

Although the above factory/sec. resource system sounds complicated, - it's not. Because there will be only 10 or 15 at most different factories (resource) groups or I should say industries, much like the way the economy works in real lfe. One city has good textile industry, while the other has good chemical industry. The outputs of these inductries can be traded (they are sec. resources after all, but obviusly cost more than raw matetrials) and above all else they are strategic - they are needed for many many things!

One last thing about transportation. I think there should be a penalty system for transportaion of resources over long distances. A good way to implement it would be by time. Say a factory produces 50 units of textile good every 2 turns, and it takes 3 turns to get to the destination. This way the FIRST time it will take 5 turns for textile good to reach its destination from the moment of production, but then it will be every 2 turns, unless you change the destination again. Speaking of which, there should be some easy way to set precisely where, how much, and how often of each resource is going. That can be done in the trade manager, similar to caravns but a bit more complex. This WILL BE needed becuase of the FINITE and IMPORTANT nature of the resources in this new game.So,, you would not want a computer automatically destributing your 50 units of textile good, which you worked a lot to produce.

Hope the above suggestions will be useful.

[MrBaggins]

There is a significant danger that strategic resources implemented at a low level turn the game into a spreadsheet exercise.

N.B. Civ isn't about reality. Its about a partial simulation of reality. Its largely abstracted.

[Solver]

Yeah, which is why we shouldn't go too heay on all those stocks of resources. Having 30 different resources with varying stocks and gather rates will make it a spreadsheet. So, we want to build a bit on Civ 3 system, but not going into too much complexity.

[MrBaggins]

I'd like to see trade working perfectly before we consider special resources.

[Solver]

Well, go ahead and write your ideas about perfect trade .

[The Big Mc]

goods only appearing after the said advance is found

[MrBaggins]

Well, first the big idea.

International trade is greatly strengthened in potency. It value is increased. Perhaps (or even probably) the income produced goes towards science (as a proportion as per regular income,) rather than just being gold.

Also, international trade routes shouldn't automatically be created. There should be consideration of trustworthiness. A sneak attacking, warmonger, should get less chance of getting a trade route than a peaceful partner.

Thus wars have a real downside, since they would break potentially valuable trade possibility.

Also, if we get everything working well, I think we should consider reintroducing the trade monopoly system, to a lesser extent.

[Solver]

Yeah, the value increase even should be enough, coupled with the idea of possible loss of trade if you're a warmonger. Yet another reason to play it peacefully .

[MrBaggins]

I think that the science bonus might be necessary to make this be "enough". I don't think, at first sight, that just increased gold is enough benefit. Give the AI beaucoup gold, and its pretty insignificant. Give them extra science? Thats meaningful.

Plus, the human doesn't get a carte blanche advantage for being human, since it takes two to trade, and they have to agree. He can't be a complete bastard AND gain the benefits of trade as well.

[Maquiladora]

Increased gold definately isnt enough benefit, its a problem with the gameplay as a whole, theres too much gold available already so theres no point wasting production on caravans when youre already raking it in.

Id like to see a commerce bonus, perhaps commerce from the good being traded, multiplied by the distance travelled, including the other ideas of trust, maybe even rarety of commodity etc you lot have mentioned.

[Solver]

As Mr Baggins says, if the gold value from trade is increased, and it goes to science, then it's a good balance. Mainly because science isn't as easily available as Gold is.