DESIGN: Economy/resource system thoughts

[The Big Mc]

the over advantage would be if you secure a intonation trade agreement with a country for uranium the city on the other end of that international trade rout would be able to make the super battle cruiser too

it would also make trade a potent weapon eg to part b you sign a peace treaty with party c or we cut your supply of supper cruisers

[Locutus]

There are basically two subjects discussed in this thread: the (present) trade system and the introduction of a special resource system (a la Civ3).

As for the current trade system, I agree that gold should be replaced by commerce -- I've argued for this several times in the past. I hadn't considered MrBaggins' suggestion to use gold for national routes and commerce for international ones, but that sounds like an excellent idea to me

As for rebalancing gold, it's obvious that that is required for the original game, pretty much all the mods already recognized and do this as well (IIRC the MedMod even had gold-based support costs for units). But that's a topic for a different thread...

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

I disagree -- it was completely flawed and counter-intuitive in CtP1. I mean, you gather a lot of the same trade good in a single location, the price RISES? Anyone with basic enocomic instincts will realize that the price should plummet to rock-bottom. Monopoly only works if you're the *sole* supplier of a certain good (in CtP1 only the amount of a good you had mattered, not how many competitors there were), and you can only make money by actually selling it. So to make monopoly work in CtP, you'd have to find *all* goods of a certain type on the map and get them to a *single* city, and then export those goods from that city to other cities again. I don't see that as a workable model for CtP2. CtP2's system is a bit bland and doesn't add much excitement to the game, but at least it makes sense...

As for the resource system:

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

It will require massive changes to many parts of the game, including the AI. I'm sure that if we commit to it we can get it working. But it goes without saying that this is long-term thinking, as I announced in my first post.

Originally posted by The Big Mc
goods only appearing after the said advance is found

I agree, we should implement this as well. Basically this could be done independently from the rest of the resource system. Though I fear a quick-fix isn't possible because you'll have to change the AI to cope with this change.

Originally posted by george03
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.

The numbers I (and probably Solver too) provided were mere examples. Working out the exact number can be done at a much later stage, and will probably require a large amount of playtesting to balance properly. Obviously an aircraft carrier would require more iron than a swordsman. But of course, much also depends on how technology upgrades work: if they can increase the output/stock of a factor 100 by the time Aircraft Carriers become available, the numbers aren't really that far off...

To me, it does not make any sence to have a little hardwood resource on the forest tile.

Hardwood as a trade good/resource represents wood of the highest quality. Of course, you'll find plenty of wood in any forest, but hardwood can only be found in certain places and is as such a trade good/resource. I think your suggestion of treating all forest as a source of a seperate wood resource would be too complex. You would then have to break up the entire existing resource structure and do something similar for clay, stone, tin, lead, cereals, meat, milk, etc, etc. This is of course how the real world works, but as MrBaggins says, Civ is merely an abstract simulation of the real world. The closer you want to simulate the real world, the more your game will become a spreadsheet game.

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.

I really fancy your Colonization-like suggestions on introducting manufactured goods, that was in fact for me the biggest appear of Colonization and I've always hoped it would be incorperated in some future version of Civ as well. However, I fear it would be to complex to add to CtP2, or any other Civ-game for that matter. Probably the reason why it worked so well in Colonization was because it was really the cornerstone of that game. Colonization lacked (or at least had very simplified versions of) many of the other subsystems of Civ, such as diplomacy, science or governments.

CtP2 OTOH does and should have these systems, so special resources will never be more than just one of the systems -- it will never be the cornerstone of the game. Because it will be hard enough to prevent the stock/output system I proposed from becoming too spreadsheet-like, I don't think adding manufactured goods would be a good idea. The resources in CtP2 will unfortunately simply have to represent both the raw materials and the manufactured goods that are produce from them.

[BTW, george03, since you didn't reference Colonization in your post, I assume you never played it; you should give it a try some day, it's resource system works pretty much as you what you proposed. Then you can join the rest of us in hoping Firaxis will ever make a sequel ]

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.

From a realism point of view this works well, I'm not sure if it would work out gameplay-wise though. If it works, I'd favour adding it, but that would probably just have to be playtested.

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.

I think that goes without saying. Deciding what goes where will be a key concern in controlling your empire's economy, if this system is implemented.

Originally posted by E
I like the resource consumption system. But to prevent the spreadsheet disease perhaps strategic resources should be introduced through techs at various ages. About 1 or 2 per age (moddable of course)
example: ancient is horse and Iron
middle ages wood (for larger ships, i like the forest idea)
industrial coal
modern oil and uranium

of course we can work on this, but introducing a few at a time will allow the player to adjust to the resource and get a feel how to manage it instead of throwing a lot on them at once. As they adjust to it, it wont be a spreadsheet and besides people have been able to cope with RTS games.

I agree, organizing resources by age is a great idea Two per age sounds like a perfect number to me. And resources could over time also go 'obsolete', which simply means there are no longer any units/buildings/etc that require it. That way, it would never be necessary to deal with a handful (2-6) of resources at the same time. Civ3 has 8 resources and though there are many things to be said against that game, it certainly doesn't play like a spreadsheet.

Luxuries could work as Locutus said I think with a consumption based on population points. But I think it should be a one max, market saturation thing.

Market saturation -- good idea

OVERALL, these features should not be the cornerstone of the game but an additional feature. Or an economic victory route.

Exactly. Personally I'd like to make trade a very important part of the game, at least important enough to make a peaceful playing style a viable option for achieving victory (as CtP2 stands now, even the peaceful victory options require a good deal of combat to be achieved, or otherwise an extremely boring style of play). But it shouldn't become impossible to win the game just because you don't happen to have access to one or two resources.

Originally posted by Straybow
The way to add a strategic element is to have prospecting as a PW. New resources only appear if you prospect for them (subject to whatever selection process is used to distribute the resources on the map).

I like this idea

What causes this mystery waste; are they in such a hurry half the ore falls off the carts?

It's mostly a gameplay suggestion, not necessarily one based in history. But it has a basis in history as well. For one thing, you don't use iron or any other raw resource in it's pure form: as george03 already mentioned, most resources have to be processed and turned into manufactured goods (e.g. in case of iron: tools, weapons, armor, pipes, chains, anchors, machine parts, etc). In this manufactoring process loads of things can go wrong, especially if if you're under pressure. These errors in manufacturing will turn perfectly good raw iron into useless waste. (I'm guessing the same principle of mistakes wasting resources applies to the mining process itself as well, but I admit I don't know much about that).

"Depletion" is entirely dependent on tech.

Well, that makes sense. At least for metal resources we could certainly easily simulate that (once animals or plants have been wiped out, no amount of technological research could bring those back to life, so it doesn't make sense for all resources).

Trade routes, plus separate trade routes for each type of special resource or even for each special resource individually?

Well, that's not too different from how it currently works. You already have to set up a trade route for every individual good you own. In the new system, you'll just have to manage the amounts you want to send as well. The trade routes for strategic goods would work exactly the same as those for luxury and regular goods, except that they have a rather drastic side-effect on the economy.

The way I picture it, the trade manager would show you a list of all goods available for trading (seperated into three sections: regular, luxury and strategic). When you select a good, it would display a list of all possible destinations, how much of the good they require and how much profit you would get from the route (it should be possible to sort and filter this list -- much like the player lists in Championship Manager) and once you've selected a destination it should give you the option to select an amount to send (where the ideal amount is already selected by default).

Purely looking at the trade portion of the game, the main changes compared to the current system would be in the UI (the Trade Manager would pretty much have to be rewritten) and in the fact that a single good could in the new system be traded with multiple cities instead of just one.

Special resources should represent unusual marketable quantities, like the massive oil fields of Texas, Persian Gulf, etc.

That's exactly how I see them

Therefore, if you don't have a resource, you can still do anything you want, you'll just miss out on some extra bonus on the price and/or performance of your units/buildings. Missing out on a certain resource would put you at a disadvantage, but not loose you the game.

[Ekmek]

Locotus,

I like your system. THere some other things I'd wish for but if you get your stuff in there I'd have a happy game,

Would this stuff lead to an economic victory?

[Solver]

I can say, great work Locutus on the system. I will add some thoughts later, but, by and large, I agree on it. And, just to confirm, yes, the numbers are provided were all random, just to illustrate my idea.

[Straybow]

Trading comments (mostly)

Originally posted 03-11
The way to add a strategic element is to have prospecting as a PW. New resources only appear if you prospect for them (subject to whatever selection process is used to distribute the resources on the map).

Of course, some at random could appear without prospecting—deposits exposed by erosion and so rich that anybody in the exploring party with knowledge of the craft could recognize it. Like building a fortress, Prospecting PW should be applicable outside your territory but limited to tiles under exploring units.

Originally posted 03-11
What causes this mystery waste; are they in such a hurry half the ore falls off the carts?

Originally posted by Locutus
It's mostly a gameplay suggestion, not necessarily one based in history. …In this manufactoring process loads of things can go wrong, especially if if you're under pressure. These errors in manufacturing will turn perfectly good raw iron into useless waste.

The rush-buy cost already accounts for the increasing marginal cost of labor, etc. Most resources can't truly be wasted. Iron is simply melted and reworked if the rushed product is inferior. If waste occurs in the mining process, again mine tailings are re-mined as soon as incremental tech makes extraction of feasible. If the high quality ore is wasted then the existing tech makes re-mining feasible, which amounts to increased marginal cost of extraction.

With oil you can have fires and spills, but accidents of that sort only account for a tiny percentage of the raw material. As soon as extraction or transportation starts "using up" more via waste, somebody's gonna clamp down on QC.

With mast timber it is easy to use it up faster than it is naturally replaced, since it takes 100-200 years to grow a tree big enough. In that case you need a growth rate for the resource. Exceeding that growth rate wasn't easy with bronze or iron tools. Medieval steel was required for that, and it still took several centuries in Britain. I don't know that France ever used up her mast timber.

Well, that ["depletion" being entirely dependent on tech] makes sense. At least for metal resources we could certainly easily simulate that (once animals or plants have been wiped out, no amount of technological research could bring those back to life, so it doesn't make sense for all resources).

Unless the species still exists elsewhere in the world, like the Spanish re-introducing horses to N. America, where indigenous horses had been hunted to extinction a few thousand years earlier.

Originally posted 03-11
Trade routes, plus separate trade routes for each type of special resource or even for each special resource individually?

Well, that's not too different from how it currently works. You already have to set up a trade route for every individual good you own. …The way I picture it, the trade manager would show you a list of all goods available for trading (seperated into three sections: regular, luxury and strategic). When you select a good, it would display a list of all possible destinations, how much of the good they require and how much profit you would get from the route …and once you've selected a destination it should give you the option to select an amount to send (where the ideal amount is already selected by default).

Still waaaay too much micromanagement. At least with existing resource you only worry about one route per source. With Civ2 you can only have 3 trade routes per city, and beyond that you don't get additional continuing income (approximately 3N complexity, where N is number of cities in the civ). Your proposal approaches N² complexity, each city trading it's special resource (or resources) with many friendly cities and foreign cities.

Originally posted 03-11
Special resources should represent unusual marketable quantities, like the massive oil fields of Texas, Persian Gulf, etc.

That's exactly how I see them

Therefore, if you don't have a resource, you can still do anything you want, you'll just miss out on some extra bonus on the price and/or performance of your units/buildings. Missing out on a certain resource would put you at a disadvantage, but not loose you the game.

So why add the µmgmt in at all? The city with the resource gets the advantage, and one destination city gets the advantage if you set up a trade route. You get some money (or commerce), and you choose whether you want lots of money trading it to another empire and giving them the bonus, or the double advantage of trading it internally but less money.

If you have happiness resources the Civ3 system works best. I don't want to have to set up multiple trade routes just to stabilize my larger cities. CtP1&2 and Civ3 have eliminated commerce trade for other models. I'm not much of a fan of either model, but at least they have the advantage of simplicity going for them. Don't sacrifice that as well!

[Ekmek]

I think some micromanagement should be there for who wants to dive into the economic route. Again if its not a cornerstone some just playing as conqueror could do without trade, money will be hurting, but the option will still be there.

The way I'd like, and I think Locutus was saying this too, is that there should varying options of victories and paths/priorities. If you want to push the economic trade empire game the tools should be there to dive into it. Some players might get into cutting deals, embargoes, free trade, making monopolies, watching the cash roll in while watching or funding the conqueror players on the sidelines. I think it would be fun.

This means some sort of economics minister that'll act like a governor might have to be made too. So the people shooting to be militaristic, cultural, religious, etc civs can focus on micromanaging other things.

Just a comment on micromanaging (and this may open another thread) is that I think the type of government you have should determine how much you can/have to micromanage. I.E. a despot has to micromanage everything. In a Democracy a lot is "locked" in governor mode. I have other thoughts on this but I'm getting off topic.

[The Big Mc]

but that would mean a democracy would be a disadvantage if you have a crap governor

[Ekmek]

I'm opening a government thread...

[MrBaggins]

The game has enough micromanagement as it is. The advances in interface that CtP2 made that obvious.

I like the idea of introducing strategic resources, but only if the AI isn't crippled by them (and it definitely can be, as witnessed in Civ3.)

The trick is making them non-essential. A small bonus to an aspect of a pair of cities. Production, Happiness, a bonus to units built, or whatever. The key is to not make any bonus so large that the difference is overwhelming for a civ with and a civ without. It should be a marginal difference. However, those that like to min-max their games, will want them, and there will surely be situations that every civ player will find them advantageous.

There should still be a real choice between the "benefit" and the income gained from regular trading, especially international. National trading, indeed, should be marginalized (except for perhaps food caravans?)

Trading, in general should be increased significantly in importance. After all, its one of the cornerstones of civilization, and right now in CtP2, its merely a sidenote.

[Ekmek]

I have weak programming skills (crappy turbo pascal) but I was wondering if we could implement the Resource system by copying the code of production/pw but have a new graphic and name for it, iron for example. Basically if we copy the code that runs PW and make it for each resource but only assign that resource's "PW" to the certain good.

Basically it would be like hills 1 food 1 PW but with the resource it would read it at 1 food, 1 PW, 1 Iron.

we'd probably have to give every terrain file the line for each resource, but assign it as 0. And only give a value to the resource. You'd also have to add those lines to units and improvements as well in the text docs. (did I say this clearly?)

I think that maybe the easiest way to implement it. The hard part is still the AI unless we assign another value point to goods like "importance" and establish it as a goal for the AI to go after tiles with certain levels of importance (of course it maybe hard to implement this with discovering resources)

Again, I have crappy at best programming skills but this could be a way to implement resources.

[Martin Gühmann]

Well for strategic resources, a benefit could be if you have it you can research a tech one or two techs earlier, or if you have oil your tanks have an additional move point, but you shouldn't need oil to build tanks.

-Martin

[Ekmek]

Originally posted by Martin Gühmann
Well for strategic resources, a benefit could be if you have it you can research a tech one or two techs earlier, or if you have oil your tanks have an additional move point, but you shouldn't need oil to build tanks.

-Martin

Martin, yeah I like that idea too. Its kind of like my "wonder goods" idea. Certain resources on a map give certain bonuses, like fruit/citrus can give ships healing at sea or iron gives HP bonus to ancient units etc. THese bonuses can be based on consumption too. Like coal or oil, makes your laborers more productive (power plants) but it requires 1 unit per laborer per turn to get that extra PW or something like that. Same for a luxury to add happiness, or something for science, etc...


But I'd like a deeper economic model to allow players to explore a different path besides stretch out, build an army, conquer everything. I think the game has potential, for those that like games that take weeks, to be builders or traders and not just conquerors.

[Admiral PJ]

My Suggestions:
Having varying quantities of resources used to supply units would be great, with more for battleships as opposed to a small frigate. It would balance the game more than without resources, as a large superpower with numerous enemies and therefore massive fleets and armies would be spending vast amounts of its resources just on support, therefore the smaller civ's would have a better chance as they only need a small amount of resources to supply their ships, and probably only need to defend a few cities. (which ought to have a good oil rig to more than sustain that nation) Otherwise the superpower could build unchecked, battleship after battleship. If the small civs join up and share resources and take over some of the superpowers Resource supplypoints, then the superpower will begin its quick fall.

It would be nice to have a similar system for power generation.. coal or oil, gas ,uranium resources are needed to generate electricity or other forms of power , and without enough electricity random powercuts could occur among your cities, shutting down the city like a Civil Disorder event. This would give renewable resources an added bonus. This happened in real life in the UK(and probably the rest of world) in the 70's in the Yom Kippur war i believe, when oil imports were low and expensive from the mid east.. leading to the setting up of oil fields in the north sea. I don't think climate change is an important enough reason for renewable fuel sources on its own.
Oil and coal could also be needed for industry, or motor transport. Sea transport is heavily reliant on resources too.

I don't see why such systems would need a great deal of micromanagement, or spreadsheet play, just have a value shown on the civ stats page that shows how much oil you have saved up (in reserves) or how much you need to have your civ working properly( how much your in deficit ).
Some things might make this system difficult to play, such as having to set a trade route for every movement of resources. You could have resources spread over the civ universally, without trade movement simulation, but use the trade system with other civs . Maybe when you build a unit , the amount of resources should reflect how long it will take them to come from the mine and corruption from pirates and corrupt officials, though doing this for support costs would be slow and annoying for the player.

[Admiral PJ]

I agree with the previous persons post.. about trade being another way to win , or play the game. I think by this we should include economics.. ways of making money or wealth , and how many mines and resources are collected. Perhaps there could be a Trade Win ending, where your trade routes and deals were so powerful, you practically controlled the rest of the world. This sort of win can be interesting, as you have to use clever methods to prevent the enemies getting a superior trade network, by creating diplomatic hostility between nations so they won't trade, ideally creating wars where no trade is done between the warring sides.
I suppose piracy should count as trade.. it would greatly improve the system, with privateer ships or smugglers raiding a trade route and taking a percentage of the resources as bounty, helping destabilise the enemies trade networks. I don't think piracy should work well in a Democracy though.. the home nations navies would try to stop their pirates under a free senatorial system.

[Admiral PJ]

As Mr Baggins points out.. Strategic Resources a la civ3 can be too powerful. I'd suggest to minimise their power, by giving each of your cities standard resources, maybe the bigger the city the more standard or base resources they get. So city London would be a metropolis, and get 3 iron, 3 wood, 3 oil, 3 uranium etc. You can find extra resources somewhere on the map, which you gain by having a city near to them.. or making a colony, and linking with roads/airports etc, but you'd have to have a mine built on the resource to collect it , or well/rig call it a Collection Point (something civ3 was lacking). Collection points could be quite strong, so you'd have to destroy them before cutting off that resource supply(though cutting off its roads would be easier). Even cutting off the CP's roads completely could still allow a little of the resource collected.

The main reason for every city having a minium resource collection each city would be to stop you losing completely a certain resource. If a small civ loses all of say iron, then it is doomed and if all your AI opponents have no resoures then its no challenge. I think this could be realistic.. as even a poor landscape has some resources and materials that can be salvaged, and theres always a bit of recycling where resources can be found from old machinery and in old waste deposits - trade and mining/exploration never stop completely.

Just make it so gaining mines is worthwhile, and you can't get away with just owning 2 cities for all your resource needs.