A new resource system

EDIT: There is now a summation of the conversation for you new readers, so you don't have to go through all posts in order to get some idea of this. It is located here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=84914&perpage=20&pagenumber=3
Somewhere in the end of the page...

I have suggested this before, here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=74574

The idea is simple: why not make resources handled in quantities rather than units? I dislike the idea that if I don't have oil as a resource I am severely handycapped, as I can't build ANY oil-based units. If I trade oil from the AI, I must pay ridiculous sums and then I can build as many oil-based units as I want. Often have I thought that if I only could buy SOME oil, not all.

This has a potential of being a real spoiler, should it become too complex. Therefore I would suggest keeping it simple. All I am suggesting is that there is more oil-patches scattered around, but they vary in size. If an oil-patch is of a size 50, you could build 50 oil-based units (Or perhaps some units would take 2 oils instead of one?). It could be depleted as before, but then it would disappear completely - no need for gradual emptying as it would become too complex. You could sell, say, 30 of your 120 oil units and keep the 90 for yourself - or you could sell it all if you liked.

This would greatly add to the enjoyment of the game. The missing oil is no catastrophy anymore, as you can relatively easily buy 10 to 30 oil units and make yourself a sufficient tank-army to perhaps invade some more oil-patches.

I would suggest that the amount of oil dictates the maximum number of oil-based units you can have. With 30 oil you can have 30 units. Should five of them be destroyed, you could build five more to replace the destroyed ones. This would keep the system simple and, IMHO, as easy to grasp as the present one - with more realism, of course.

This would also improve trading, as you would want to buy oil even if you already had some and also to invade more oil even though you are filled with it - to trade. Now by owning ten oils is relatively a small benefit when compared to the contrast between zero and one oil!

There have been suggestions that some resources should be used up in making an unit and other should be used to maintain them. For example, a swordman would use up one of your irons and that iron would be lost, but a tank only needs oil to maintain it (to allow it to move) and the oil would return to your reserves when the tank is destroyed. While this would indeed be more realistic, I find it too complex and unnecessary. I think all resources should just dictate the maximum number of possible units. If you want realism, you could of course think that the dead swordsman does not need its sword, so it can be taken back to be used by another unit

One concern that rightly arose from this is what should happen when you have the maximum number of units and your oil-patch is depleted/captured? I think that the solution is simple. The excess units should NOT be disbanded, nor should the movement of such units be restricted (say, you could move only 40 of your 50 tanks in one turn), but I would link this to the overall economy - as the units are even now through maintain-expenses. Having an appropriate number of units would cost you only its normal maintain. Having more than the limit would stress your economy (this could represent smuggling and such - a nation is never completely deprived of something it dearly wants). Lets have an example:
I have 100 oil and 100 tanks. I pay 100gpt for maintain (minus the possible free maintain). Let's say that an oil patch of 40 would be depleted. Thus I would have 60 legal units and 40 excess units. This means that 167% of my units are excess units. Now there are many ways to make the calculations, this is just an example. Let's say that all the excess units 101%-120% (unit numbers 61-72) would cost 2 to maintain instead of one. 121-140 (73-84): 3, 141-160 (85-96): 4, 161-180 (97-100): 5 and so on. This would result in an overall maintain cost of:
60 + 24 + 36 + 48 + 20 = 188gpt. (+88 compared to original)
This would not collapse the economy straight away, but would severely slow you down. Now you could choose to keep those units and either buy more oil or retake the oil-patch, or simply to disband those units that you want.

This would allow for rich nations to decide to have excess units compared to their resources. And even poor nations could hang on for a while with excess units if need be. The penalty could IMO be a bit greater still - the step could be 10% instead of 20%.

All in all, I think this would be simple and interesting. It would allow more strategy concerning the resources and would prevent the game from coming to a dead end due to a missing oil-resource. I would not implement any storages for oil or some such without a careful consideration, as I would not want to build those storages all around and worry about them. Some refineries or other would perhaps be fine, if they would, say, allow you to in effect have 150 oil units while having in reality only 100. Anyway, what do you guys think of this?

I agree, some amounts for resources, rather than all-or-nothing, would be nice. Its very important, however, that it not needlessly complicate the game. Here's my own idea (I'll let other people judge whether its more or less complicated than Shyrramar's):

Instead of giving you limitless access, each strategic resource tile creates one "unit" of that resource every certain number of turns, for example, an iron deposit creates one iron ore icon every five turns, or each oil field creates one barrel of oil icon every other turn, etc. Then, your trade advisor screen keeps track of how many of each resource you've accumulated. Each time you start building a unit or improvement that requires that resource, your stockpile is depleted by 1. Personally, I wouldn't add the complication of resources for maintanence of units, although this could be added just by having certain units or improvments require a resource each turn they exist rather than just the turn you start building them. (In that case, you'd probably have to crank things up so that an oil field produced more than one oil barrel per turn).

When trading with other civs, you could either trade lump sum amounts from your stockpile, or you could make a resource-per-turn arrangement, if you had enough sources of the resource to spare.

Basically, each strategic resource would be similar to the gold in your treasury: you'd have a per-turn income (from tiles you controlled and from trade agreements), an amount stockpiled (that you could use when building things or trading lump sumps), and expenses (from per-turn trade agreements). It'd be pretty easy to show this graphically on the trade advisor screen, with a row of icons for each resource type and your surplus/deficit each turn shown just like the surplus/deficit food on the city screen.

It sounds good, judgement . I would be careful with the stockpiles, though. It could lead into "resource-warehouses" and all sorts of other improvements that in my opinion are tiresome.

If you implement the resource-upkeep model, what do you suggest should happen when you lose your resources, if the link to economy does not satisfy you? I think that this is the most crucial part of this: it should be easy to handle that situation and it should not result in too radical consequences.

i'd suggest that either of these systmes gets used for the luxuries too.

i hate the way luxuries are now. how can the same sorce of spices or dyes satisfy both a small one city nation with no leftovers(to trade) and a huge empire (that includes that same city).

something like each lux provides some number of points (for lack of a better term) that you can assign (or have the computer assign for you evenly) across your empire.

or at the very least, something like each resourse can only affect 10 cities, and after that size, you need to get another one (by trade or otherwise)

I actually suggested this in the abovementioned thread, but for some reason people didn't like it - perhaps they thought it would make it unnecessarily complex. I think it is a fine idea. You could make a certain number of happy faces with each luxury (could also vary depending on the source), just like you said. It would not be complex IMO. The computer could do it for those that don't like to micromanage, otherwise you could choose the cities affected by the luxuries. Even if there were more luxuries than cities, you could never make more than one happy with one luxury (if you don't have a marketplace). This could actually bring more strategy to luxuries too, as with marketplace you could choose to make one city VERY happy, but leave others less affected.

Eeeeer...Am I the only one who needs military alliances that doesn't include YOUR country?
For example, you could ask the aztecs to fight the french and don't get involve against the french, except that you'll really have to pay a lot to the aztecs...
This is the British/French/Spanish/Arabs strategy of all 19th and 20th century...

Originally posted by Shyrramar
It sounds good, judgement . I would be careful with the stockpiles, though. It could lead into "resource-warehouses" and all sorts of other improvements that in my opinion are tiresome.

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Yeah, I'd keep the stockpiles abstract, just like the treasury. There wouldn't be any improvements involved, just icons on your trade advisor screen.

If you implement the resource-upkeep model, what do you suggest should happen when you lose your resources, if the link to economy does not satisfy you? I think that this is the most crucial part of this: it should be easy to handle that situation and it should not result in too radical consequences.

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Well, like I said, I'd prefer not to have resource-upkeep, since it would complicate things uneccessarily IMHO. However, if it was used, nothing immediate would happen when you lost a supply of a resource, since you'd presumably still have some stockpiled. An advisor could warn you that "Our reserves of oil are getting low" and you'd of course try to secure another source before your stockpile ran out. The only radical consequences would be once your stockpile ran out, and those consequences wouldn't be any worse than what happens if you let your treasury get to zero.

I do like your idea of essentially being able to substitute extra gold for the resource, but on the other hand, sometimes a fun strategy is to try to deprive your rivals of resources they need, and that strategy wouldn't be as fun if all that happened to them was that they lost a little extra gold. And if the entire rest of the world is unwilling or unable to sell you oil and you've used up all you have, you ought to be in some serious trouble. To mitigate this, resources like oil would be more common, so that most civs, even small ones, were likely to have a least one or two sources, letting them field at least some of the resource-requiring units. After all, in the real world, few nations can't get access to any of a resource they need, its more a question of having access to enough.

Oil and coal are really the only resources that is more applicable for "upkeep" than for creation of a unit or improvement (although one could make a case for saltpeter). Like you said, it would be needlessly complicated to have those get used for upkeep but others get used for creation only, and my preferred solution would be to have all resources for creation only. One could imagine that part of the process of building a tank unit involves setting aside enough oil to fuel the tanks. Civ 2 had certain units that required food as well as gold for upkeep, and as I recall, they got rid of that for Civ 3 to streamline the game. That makes me doubt they'd be willing to add in something like units requiring both gold and oil for upkeep, but you never know.

I like the idea of Shyrramar much. It is easy to understand and logical in itself. This system can be used for luxuries and pop as well.

I agree with judgement. Here's my tangent:
An RTS-style resource system would work great IMO. Every resource deposit has a very large amount of the resource (but could vary, say 500-2000), and produces one every few turns by default.
Tile improvements, however, would improve resource output as well as F/S/C output. For example, an oil field would contain 2000 oil and would begin producing 1 oil every 2 turns as soon as a road was built to it. (which would remain abstract, showing up only in the trade screen, or possibly military screen) When a mine is built on the oil tile, oil production increases to 1 per turn. Some resources would have a specific improvement for them, in this case an oil refinery, or maybe a pipeline. When one of these is built on the tile, production increases to 3 per turn.
When one of the following happens, oil production is halted, but all harvested oil remains in your "treasury":
1. a hostile unit is on the oil tile
2. improvements are pillaged
3. connection to the tile is lost
4. the tile "converts" to enemy territory

Units would use up a certain number of resources when created, and not return them to the stockpile when destroyed. Also, only oil and coal would be required for maintenance, maybe one every 3 or 5 turns, depending on the unit. This would represent the increased value of fossil fuels, while not complicating the system much. If you ended up with more units than you resource supply could handle, Shyrramar's cost formula would come into effect.

This system would provide a new levelv of realism, without over-complicating the game or using entirely concepts new to players.

originally posted by judgement
I do like your idea of essentially being able to substitute extra gold for the resource, but on the other hand, sometimes a fun strategy is to try to deprive your rivals of resources they need, and that strategy wouldn't be as fun if all that happened to them was that they lost a little extra gold. And if the entire rest of the world is unwilling or unable to sell you oil and you've used up all you have, you ought to be in some serious trouble. To mitigate this, resources like oil would be more common, so that most civs, even small ones, were likely to have a least one or two sources, letting them field at least some of the resource-requiring units. After all, in the real world, few nations can't get access to any of a resource they need, its more a question of having access to enough.

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I think that your strategic aspect is interesting, but I still believe that my cost-system would work fine as well. Losing one oil-field isn't really that bad for a wealthy nation, but losing almost all would plunge the civ into chaos. Think about the costs if you had 100 tanks and your oil would fall down into 10 units. Depending on the exact system, you could well be paying more than 10gpt for the last excess units! This would force the civ to disband its units or turn its whole economy to war only - which should (if the AI is formulated properly) cause it to quickly seek end to its disastrous war.

On the other hand some stockpiling could be fine - I just still don't fully like the idea of resource-harvesting. Perhaps the cost should simulate the usage of harvested stockpiles? Somehow I think it would become tedious to watch your resource-stockpiles - we must keep in mind that there are a lot of those resources! In all cases I think that you simply cannot make a system that allows you to trade 100 oil from other civs, construct 100 tanks and then lose all your oil without any consequences. This could be solved by introducing maintain-costs, but as you said, this is to be avoided.

My system is simple, but still more realistic than the current system (what wouldn't be?). I leave it to others to decide if it is too simple. I do agree, that resource-harvesting is more realistic and not too complicated either, but I still maintain that it would become boring. I'd like the resources to be something in the background, something you needn't worry about if you had enough of it, and not too disastrous if you had little of it, but totally devastating if you had none - and this situation should be based on your folly not on some bad luck, which happens all too often. The maximum unit number would be real easy to grasp. You simply could have a certain number of oil-based units and that's that.

Originally posted by WWWeasel
When a mine is built on the oil tile, oil production increases to 1 per turn. Some resources would have a specific improvement for them, in this case an oil refinery, or maybe a pipeline. When one of these is built on the tile, production increases to 3 per turn.

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I would personally avoid this. I think that no mine or anything should affect the amount of oil pumped. It would of course be more realistic, but imagine the tediousness of mining all your resources (and you would also want to irrigate those tiles). Even if this should be accepted, I am certainly against any specific improvements. You could perhaps have some tech that would add 50% to your resources as a side-effect (as replaceable parts increase your worker strength - there are no "super-workers" or Civ2-styled engineers), but please no improvements. The workers are a weak link of the game already. I dread the idea of putting my workers to build an oil-pipeline, then stables to horses and so on. One could argue, that only the oil-pipelines are needed, but I think that they are too much already: the road-network can represent this IMO.

Units would use up a certain number of resources when created, and not return them to the stockpile when destroyed. Also, only oil and coal would be required for maintenance, maybe one every 3 or 5 turns, depending on the unit. This would represent the increased value of fossil fuels, while not complicating the system much. If you ended up with more units than you resource supply could handle, Shyrramar's cost formula would come into effect.

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This too is a fine idea in theory, but I wouldn't recommend it into the game. No one could easily calculate the amount of oil needed. Say, you get 5 oil per turn. You want to build an army of 100 tanks. If you build 3 tanks per turn (on average, as your cities finish them in different times, a fact that adds another variable into the equation, but it need not be addressed here), can you create your army and maintain it assuming you have nothing in your stockpiles? Of course you can by all means build 3 tanks per turn in the beginning, but when you have 50 tanks, they would require 10 oils for upkeep already! You would be stuck when you reached 15 tanks. Then should we think that you would get, say, 50 oils per turn. This would make a ridiculous relation between the amount of units you can build per turn compared to your upkeep. If one tank took one oil per 5 turns, you could maintain 250 tanks - of which you could atleast in the beginning build 50 per turn. No Civ could build 50 tanks a turn, so the actual amount of oil harvested would be irrelevant.

One could of course argue, that the upkeep should be less (one in ten turns) and build cost higher - but that would make it even more difficult to ordinary non-mathematicians to calculate the unit-cap (Although mathematicians rarely can calculate. It is said: "there are three kinds of mathematicians; those who can and those who can't count" ). And add your trading to this equation and you are in trouble. The situation would soon be very much like with corruption now: no mere mortal can calculate your intended citys will-be corruption and rarely can one even guess it. If you have something like 80% corruption in a city producing 13 shields, how much would your courthouse affect?

Anyway, my point is simply this: it should be either possible to easily calculate the needed resources (and by easy I mean like city growth and the food consumed) or it should not be necessary. My system represents the former - the exact calculations are irrelevant if the player understands that "this is how many units I can have, anything extra costs some" and that having 150% of allowed units would be very costy, 200% would be pure horror.

Thanks for the great comments and ideas, by the way. I think this is important enough to be fully pondered from all possible aspects.

Originally posted by Shyrramar
I think that your strategic aspect is interesting, but I still believe that my cost-system would work fine as well. Losing one oil-field isn't really that bad for a wealthy nation, but losing almost all would plunge the civ into chaos. Think about the costs if you had 100 tanks and your oil would fall down into 10 units. Depending on the exact system, you could well be paying more than 10gpt for the last excess units! This would force the civ to disband its units or turn its whole economy to war only - which should (if the AI is formulated properly) cause it to quickly seek end to its disastrous war.

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Yes, I see how making the costs extreme enough could have a big effect on a civ without resource access. However, I'll give an example from a recent game of mine for why I'm still not convinced. I was Persia, with a good sized empire on one continent, but way behind in techs. The Indians were dominating the other continent and were leading the game. In exchange for sparing another, weaker civ from the wrath of my Immortals, I was able to acquire Gunpowder, and as soon as Saltpeter showed up on the map, I noticed that India's only source was on a small island where the had just recently built a small city, which didn't yet have a harbor. I sailed a caravel over near their big continental cities, and sure enough, they were defended by pikemen and war elephants only. I knew India had researched Gunpowder along time ago cause they had frigates sailing around. I thought to myself, "Self, now is the time to invade India, before the discover Nationalism or connect their saltpeter-island city with a harbor." But first, before I did so, I quickly conquered a Russian city that was near Russia's second source of saltpeter, to make sure that Russia wouldn't be able to sell any to India.

Now, neither of our proposed resource systems would have changed the course of my war, since the AI wasn't smart enough to rush a harbor in its saltpeter-island-city. But if the AI was smarter, or India had been a human opponent in multiplayer, the result would have been very different. With the current rules, on the very turn India got their harbor, they could have started building Musketmen in every city on their continent, as well as immediately upgraded all their Pikemen, making my invasion with Immortals much more difficult (I probably wouldn't have won). Even if I conquered their island city right away, 1 turn after they built the harbor, it would have been too late, production of Musketmen would already have started and the upgrading would already have happened. This I think, is one of out complaints about the current system: that one little source of saltpeter, for as little as a single turn, could let India upgrade and begin building as many units as the want, no matter how big their empire.

With your suggestion, as I understand it (please correct me if I misunderstand) as soon as India built their harbor, they could upgrade or start building a only certain number of Musketmen, dictated by the size of the saltpeter resource. Let's just say, for this example, that saltpeter is an "upkeep" resource, like oil (which could be sensible, since you'd need to periodically resupply for Musketmen with new ammunition). And lets say that their saltpeter resource is big enough to let them maintain 20 Musketman units without paying extra gold (this was a relatively small map, I don't remember exactly the size). My invasion plans are hurt, because I know the Indians can now field 20 Musketmen against me, although its not as bad as the current rules, under which they'd have Musketmen everywhere. Now, one thing I like about your suggestion is that I can simply conquer India's island city, deprive them of their saltpeter, and watch them start paying huge amounts of gold to maintain their 20 Musketmen. But India was the dominant power, with vastly more gold than me and way ahead in tech, too. If I was at war with them, its likely they could have afforded pretty huge amounts to keep those 20 Musketmen long going long enough for me to give up and agree to peace, or for them to discover Nationalism and start making Riflemen (of course, if Riflemen also required saltpeter, that'd be another whole story, but for now assume the current rule). Simply having access to 1 source of saltpeter for as little as 1 turn would give the Indians a huge boost defensively, and probably doom my invasion, even though it might also be very hard on their economy.

With my suggestion (stockpiling, but no upkeep), once the Indians connected their saltpeter, they'd only be able to build Musketmen slowly, at whatever pace the resource tile produced resource "units", maybe one per turn, or one every other turn, or whatever. If I acted fast enough to conquer that island city before too many turns had gone by, I could be confident that the Indians hadn't had time to mine very much saltpeter yet, and that my Immortals would only be faced by a few Musketmen when they landed on India's continent.

Thinking about this example, its not obvious to me which suggestion is better. Of course, Civ 4 could certainly combine them, having both stockpiling and resource-upkeep (or, they might ignore both ideas and leave things the way they are now ). But it sure is fun to think about, and try to understand the advantages and disadvantages of various ideas. If only Firaxis would pay us for it .

On the other hand some stockpiling could be fine - I just still don't fully like the idea of resource-harvesting. Perhaps the cost should simulate the usage of harvested stockpiles? Somehow I think it would become tedious to watch your resource-stockpiles - we must keep in mind that there are a lot of those resources!

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Maybe, its true there are many different resources, but its wouldn't really be anymore tedious than keeping an eye on your treasury. If you have iron left in the stockpile, you can build swordsmen, if you run out, you can't, simple enough.

In all cases I think that you simply cannot make a system that allows you to trade 100 oil from other civs, construct 100 tanks and then lose all your oil without any consequences. This could be solved by introducing maintain-costs, but as you said, this is to be avoided.

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I admit its flawed, but its still better than the current system, where you can trade for 1 oil resource from another civ, build as many tanks as you want, then lose the oil access and not have any consequences. My suggestion would limit the number of tanks you could build to a finite number, without changing the rest of the game much at all.

My system is simple, but still more realistic than the current system (what wouldn't be?). I leave it to others to decide if it is too simple. I do agree, that resource-harvesting is more realistic and not too complicated either, but I still maintain that it would become boring. I'd like the resources to be something in the background, something you needn't worry about if you had enough of it, and not too disastrous if you had little of it, but totally devastating if you had none - and this situation should be based on your folly not on some bad luck, which happens all too often. The maximum unit number would be real easy to grasp. You simply could have a certain number of oil-based units and that's that.

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I think we agree that both systems are simple and an improvement on the current system, but maybe what we're deciding here is that a combination of the two ideas would be worse than either idea alone. As long as you didn't have to worry about upkeep, my idea would also keep you from worrying too much about resources: having some in your stockpile lets you build new units, but if you run out, you don't have to worry about the units you already built.

Basically, with your upkeep-but-no-stockpile idea, you only have to pay attention to how many of each resource you have access to, there's no stockpile amount to worry about, while with my stockpile-but-no-upkeep idea, the number in your stockpile is the only thing you really pay attention to, and access is only important for growing your stockpile. Its only if you had both stockpile-and-upkeep that you have to perform difficult calculations to determine how many units to build.

Thanks for the great comments and ideas, by the way. I think this is important enough to be fully pondered from all possible aspects.

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Hey, this is more fun than working...

In the midst of typing that last long post, I thought of a twist on the resource-upkeep idea that would make it more acceptable to me.

As Shyrramar suggests it, each resource tile gives you a finite number of units you can build/maintain, and then if you exceed that number (because you lost access to some of your resources) your maintanance costs can skyrocket.

What if, instead, there was some cost associated with retrieving a resource. Each tile would let you maintain as many units as you wanted, but the more you maintained, the more expensive it would be. Say, for example, the first 20 tanks supported by each tile are free, the next twenty cost an extra gold to pump the extra oil, the next 20 an extra 2 gold, etc.

Then, if you had access to 5 oil resources, you could support 100 tanks without any extra cost. Just like in Shyrramar's original suggestion, if you then lost access to some of your oil, your costs would go up. If you went down to access to 4 tiles, you'd pay 20 extra gold per turn for accelerated pumping of oil from those 4 oil fields, and if you lost all but 1 oil tile, you could still keep all 100 tanks, but the cost of pumping that much oil each turn from one small field would be really huge. The difference from Shyrramar's suggestion, though, is that if you lost all oil tiles, you would be in serious trouble - unable to support you tanks.

I guess the reason I'm not convinced on the original idea is that my brain keeps asking "If you don't have any oil, how does paying a lot of gold per turn magically make oil to fuel your tanks? That oil has to come from somewhere!" Nevertheless, I am senstive to the concern that losing access to a resource should not be catastrophic. With a simplistic "each oil tile supports 20 tanks" approach, if you drop from 5 tiles to 4, you lose 20 tanks, and if you drop from 5 to 1, you lose 80, and that's no fun. Shyrramar's "substitute-extra-gold idea" lets you keep all 100 tanks, just at increased cost, when you go from 5 tiles to 4 or even to 1, and I like that, but I also like the ability to deprive a rival of all oil so I don't have to worry about them fielding tanks against me. With what I'm suggesting here, losing some of your oil would be just like in Shyrramar's suggestion, but losing all of it would indeed be catastrophic. As long as there was enough oil on the map that depriving someone of every source of oil was pretty difficult to do, it shouldn't be too big a problem.

Originally posted by WWWeasel

Tile improvements, however, would improve resource output as well as F/S/C output. For example, an oil field would contain 2000 oil and would begin producing 1 oil every 2 turns as soon as a road was built to it. (which would remain abstract, showing up only in the trade screen, or possibly military screen) When a mine is built on the oil tile, oil production increases to 1 per turn. Some resources would have a specific improvement for them, in this case an oil refinery, or maybe a pipeline. When one of these is built on the tile, production increases to 3 per turn.
When one of the following happens, oil production is halted, but all harvested oil remains in your "treasury":
1. a hostile unit is on the oil tile
2. improvements are pillaged
3. connection to the tile is lost
4. the tile "converts" to enemy territory

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I like this idea, although its true that specific tile improvements for specific resources might overly complicate things. What might be cool, though, is if you clicked "Build Mine" on a tile with oil, the graphic was different, looking like an oil rig instead of a tunnel entrance. In any case, I do like the idea that building a mine on a resource would increase the speed at which it was produced and filled up your stockpile.

Alternatively, if there were no stockpile but resources still produced only a finite amount (Shyrramar's orginal idea), then building a mine on an oil field could increase the number of units you could support from that tile, or, increase the number you could support without paying extra to extract it faster (see my previous post).

It's always seemed strange to me that to get extra production out of normal hills, you build a mine, but to get oil out of the ground, you just build a road there.

Great comments, Judgement! Let's see if I can contribute some thoughts...

About the example. I agree, that your system would work better in that situation, though I think that both of use are trying to prevent that sort of situation entirely. Am I correct? A great nation such as India there should NOT be dependent of only one saltpeter (that's what I hate about the current system: no matter how good you are doing, chances are that your game will be ruined by the Missing Resource Demon). The points (to which I agree) you made about depriving your enemy of a resource should follow from your active campaign. With this I mean that you should EARN it by conquering your foe's oilfields (for example). With this it should indeed follow that the nation in question would be in deep doodoo...

...but still not without any resources. They can trade it, of course, but apart from that, they can still acquire SOME oil. You expressed your doubts about this, but I think it is realistic: there are always black market smugglers available. Heck, Iraq could sell oil for banned goods even though UN had imposed sanctions on it and the most powerful nation on Earth was keenly supervising it! I think that it is impossible for any nation to be left completely without resources, if it had money. But it is expensive, of course.

Thinking about this example, its not obvious to me which suggestion is better. Of course, Civ 4 could certainly combine them, having both stockpiling and resource-upkeep (or, they might ignore both ideas and leave things the way they are now ). But it sure is fun to think about, and try to understand the advantages and disadvantages of various ideas. If only Firaxis would pay us for it .

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I think that in the light of this example, your suggestion gets the longer straw. This is an isolated (and should not happen in future) case, so I am with you in this overall puzzlement. But that's just the fun of it. If it had one obvious solution, you could just state it and pack your bags and go home, but this way I will probably have something to do for the next couple of days . If only indeed

Maybe, its true there are many different resources, but its wouldn't really be anymore tedious than keeping an eye on your treasury. If you have iron left in the stockpile, you can build swordsmen, if you run out, you can't, simple enough.

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Treasury is one thing, resources are a dozen. But I agree that neither of these suggestions are too tedious.

I think we agree that both systems are simple and an improvement on the current system, but maybe what we're deciding here is that a combination of the two ideas would be worse than either idea alone. As long as you didn't have to worry about upkeep, my idea would also keep you from worrying too much about resources: having some in your stockpile lets you build new units, but if you run out, you don't have to worry about the units you already built.

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I'm with you. There is one thing that I don't understand, though. There are (as far as I can see) two options: either implement maintaining or not. What would be your suggestion? You have said, that maintaining isn't what you want, but are you then committing yourself to this: if I have 100 tanks build and I lose all my oil, nothing happens - except that I can't build any more? If something should happen, what? This should, IMO, be decided so that I could see your suggestion as a whole, not as parts. As parts it seems a good system, but I can't grasp the big picture. Perhaps you could shed some light on this matter?

Hey, this is more fun than working...

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I couldn't agree more

The difference from Shyrramar's suggestion, though, is that if you lost all oil tiles, you would be in serious trouble - unable to support you tanks.

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What would this mean exactly? The idea seems good, but this point should be stressed. This is a good point to explain my cost-idea a bit. (This will be perhaps tedious to read, feel free to skip)

The exact mathematical formulation should be a bit more complicated compared to what I suggested earlier, as it would blow in your face in the unhappy case that you had no oil at all. If you do the "Old and Crafty Mathematician Trick" things get easier: make limits. There are problems in the %-system. If I have one oil (oh joy!), my first tank would cost one gold as usual (one must remember, that some governments pay some of your upkeep - this is not considered here). Second would actually be 200% the limit, so it WOULD cost (if using 10% increments) 11 gpt, but I think it should cost you 2. If should work so that if in 10% increments you would be paying more than 1 more for each unit, it should be 1 instead. So if you had one oil, the costs of your tanks would be: 1,2,3,... and so on. So 10 tanks would cost you 55 gpt. 20 tanks would cost you 210 gpt and 30 tanks 465 gpt. Only a VERY wealthy nation can support 30+ tanks without severe consequences to its economy. However, with ten oils the situation would be like this:
tank# 1-10: 1gpt, #11: 2gpt, #12: 3gpt. So the numbers would be: 10 tanks: 10gpt, 20: 10 + 55 = 65gpt, 30: 220gpt. This might be seen as a good or as a bad thing: the difference between 1 and 10 oils is big at first, but gets smaller when you reach larger numbers. This is due to the fact, that 10 is the point where the %-change is exactly the minimum change, namely 1. After this the %-change will be smaller than 1, so with 20 oils the situation would look like this:
#1-20: 1gpt, #21-22: 2gpt, #23-24: 3gpt. And the numbers:
10 tanks: 10gpt, 20: 20gpt, 30: 60gpt, 40: 150gpt, 50: 290gpt (my head is beginning to hurt; I need a calculator! Arithmetic sum can only help so much... )
What we can (or can't) see from this is that as the oil gets above 10 the excess units become comparatively a bit less costly (per unit). With 100 oil the cost of supporting 200 units would be: 100 + 20 + ... + 110 = 100 + 650 = 750gpt. That's 3,75gpt per unit. Whereas with 20 oil the cost of supporting 120 units would be:
1370gpt! (That's 11,4gpt/unit).

The exact numbers could of course (and should) be modified. One problem remains here: how to deal with the situation that you have no oil? That should be clearly different from having one oil (or should it), so beginning with an upkeep of 2 is hardly a solution. Perhaps the climbing rate of the cost should be doubled? Well, this is something I have to think due time, I will not pursue this here any longer.

"If you don't have any oil, how does paying a lot of gold per turn magically make oil to fuel your tanks? That oil has to come from somewhere!"

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My thought is that by smuggling, not by paying enough gold to magicians . There are always those who would sell that stuff if the price was high enough. Bigger operations increase the possibility of getting caught and money needed. In addition, if you have some oil, this could simulate your nation's struggles to save oil by supervising and limiting its use, and to use more energy to pump it faster as well as getting it to the units faster.

but I also like the ability to deprive a rival of all oil so I don't have to worry about them fielding tanks against me.

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This would of course be fun, but is it realistic at all? Could you really do that in real world? And I simply hate the idea of great nations having no chance to defend against your cavalry because they happen to have no saltpeter. They should atleast be able to get SOME of it, which would not cause certain doom, but a terrible disadvantage - which is realistic and has happened in history repeatedly.

I think I will retire now. Hopefully this answered some questions (and even better, created more questions!). I should try to make a coherent presentation of my system soon, so that it could be easily defended or shot down or improved. Now I fear that it takes a lot of energy to concentrate on it...

Originally posted by Shyrramar
there are always black market smugglers available....
My thought is that by smuggling, not by paying enough gold to magicians . There are always those who would sell that stuff if the price was high enough. Bigger operations increase the possibility of getting caught and money needed. In addition, if you have some oil, this could simulate your nation's struggles to save oil by supervising and limiting its use, and to use more energy to pump it faster as well as getting it to the units faster...

(my comments about comletely depriving a nation of a resource)

This would of course be fun, but is it realistic at all? Could you really do that in real world? And I simply hate the idea of great nations having no chance to defend against your cavalry because they happen to have no saltpeter. They should atleast be able to get SOME of it, which would not cause certain doom, but a terrible disadvantage - which is realistic and has happened in history repeatedly.

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That's a valid point, I guess I have to agree.

I'm with you. There is one thing that I don't understand, though. There are (as far as I can see) two options: either implement maintaining or not. What would be your suggestion? You have said, that maintaining isn't what you want, but are you then committing yourself to this: if I have 100 tanks build and I lose all my oil, nothing happens - except that I can't build any more? If something should happen, what? This should, IMO, be decided so that I could see your suggestion as a whole, not as parts. As parts it seems a good system, but I can't grasp the big picture. Perhaps you could shed some light on this matter?

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My original suggestion was simply stockpiling - that is, instead of resources being infinite, as they are now, the resource tiles produce a certain amount of the resource per turn, which you can save up, trade, or use to produce things as you see fit. I'm not really excited about resource-upkeep, but since it was part of your suggestion, I tried to explore how it might fit into my suggestion as well. Without resource-upkeep, as you say, if I lose all my oil, I simply can't build any new tanks, nothing happens to the ones I have. I don't think that's too terrible, since its what happens in the current rules (I admit its not realistic, though).

Basically, there are two sets of choices: resource-upkeep or not, and stockpiling or not. Either one of those choices would involve making resources finite as opposed to Civ 3's as-much-as-you-want-from-a-single-tile approach. I think our discussion shows that either one would be a good idea, but that combining them might make things overly complicated.

What would this mean exactly? The idea seems good, but this point should be stressed. This is a good point to explain my cost-idea a bit. (This will be perhaps tedious to read, feel free to skip)

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The idea you're asking about here was completely seperate from the stockpiling idea - it was just a way to modify your resource-upkeep idea so that it was still possible to completely deprive a nation of a resource. Since I concede that your comments about the black market, smuggling, etc, are valid, perhaps you should consider my suggested modification withdrawn.

The exact numbers could of course (and should) be modified. One problem remains here: how to deal with the situation that you have no oil? That should be clearly different from having one oil (or should it), so beginning with an upkeep of 2 is hardly a solution. Perhaps the climbing rate of the cost should be doubled? Well, this is something I have to think due time, I will not pursue this here any longer.

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I'll think on it as well, but I must say that its complications like this that make me think it might be simpler to avoid resource-upkeep entirely.

Maybe the black-market cost should just be a simple function of how much of the resource you need, i.e., the first 10 cost 1 gold, the next 10 cost 2, etc. That way, If you have 100 tanks but only enough oil for 90, the extra maintanence cost is the same as if you have 10 tanks and no oil source at all. Supporting 20 tanks with no source would be much more expensive (more than twice as much - 3 times as much if you use my example numbers), and it would be the same as supporting 110 if you only had sources enough for 90. This would be nice and simple, and could all be summed up on some advisor screen with some text such as :
Oil supplies:90 Fuel requirements:100 Extra Cost:10gold.
There would of course need to be a similar line for any other upkeep-related resources like coal or saltpeter.

I think the most important thing is that there's general agreement that having access to more than one tile worth of a resource should somehow be better than only having one, even if you aren't selling any to another civ. And really big civs should really feel the need for multiple sources. As RoddyVR said, its dumb that one tile can supply a huge empire, but the same tile could supply a tiny, one-city civ and there wouldn't be anything left over.

Whatever idea they use to address this, lets just hope they address it somehow! And, naturally, something relatively simple and easy to understand and use.

I'd like to chime in on the discussion of a new resource/luxury system. Perhaps a single instance of a resource/luxury would be needed in order to supply the whole nation. However, additional instances of this same resource/luxury would have to be acquired before they can be traded. Suppose we are talking about sources of gems. A single source of gems would serve the whole nation. However, since this nation is sufficiently large (determined by # of cities relative to OCN), it must acquire at least n+1 sources of gems in order to trade, and when it does, it may not make a trade that would leave it with fewer than n gem resources.

As stated above, n would be determined by number of cities relative to OCN. Here is one possibility; n=(number_of_cities DIV OCN) +1.

From one city up to OCN-1, a single instance is required (n=1).
From OCN up to 2*OCN-1, two are required (n=2).
From (m-1)*OCN up to m*OCN-1, m are required (n=m).

Originally posted by ShiplordAtvar
A single source of gems would serve the whole nation. However, since this nation is sufficiently large (determined by # of cities relative to OCN), it must acquire at least n+1 sources of gems in order to trade, and when it does, it may not make a trade that would leave it with fewer than n gem resources.

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Well, that certainly would be simple, and avoid stockpiles and/or resource-upkeep altogether. But wouldn't it be weird that, in a situation in which you need three gems in order to trade, acquiring your second source gives you absolutely no benefit? This might be confusing for some. Also, what would happen if you were <OCN-1 and had two sources, so you traded one away, and the in the meantime, you grew to be >OCN. Would the trade continue? When the 20 turns were up, would you be allowed to renew the trade? If so, it would be silly that you could renew it but not cancel it and start a new trade with someone else, but if not, it would be confusing. "What do you mean I don't have any spare gems to trade? What have I been sending the Aztecs for the last 20 turns?" And keep in mind that a lot of less-than-fanatical players don't really know about OCN (its not in the civilopedia anywhere), so it would be extra confusing for them: the number of resources needed before trade was possible would seem arbitrary and random. Furthermore, I think its bad enough that the corruption calculation sets a specific number of cities which is "optimal" - I certainly don't like the idea of extending that concept into other parts of the game. I don't want to have to think to myself "should I conquer that city? No, if I do, I'll be over OCN, and I won't be able to trade my extra gems anymore." And logically, why would one additional city suddenly stop me from having enough extra gems to trade?

This is a tough topic: how to have a resource/luxury system thats easy to understand and use, but better than the current system. I don't mean to be too critical of anyone's ideas, my own certainly has its flaws. I'm just glad people are posting suggestions on this issue! Hopefully the developers will come up with something that we can all accept as an improvement over Civ 3 (which I think was, for the most part, a big improvement over Civ 2).

@ShiplordAtvar

I agree with judgement here to some extent. I think that your idea is good, although it can't be used as such (as it would actually make the resource/luxury-system more complicated than it is now and would not help in the real problem: one resource means you can have infinite units, none means no units at all). I thought of something similar with this when I proposed that the luxuries should be able to do only a number of citizens happy. I believe that the main point in your suggestion is to link the needed resources to the number of cities, but the OCN is not the solution IMO. I like the change to become gradual in resources and luxuries. If the luxuries affected only a certain number of cities, you could reach the point where you would need more luxuries to be able to keep your people happy AND trade them. This system would also allow trading in smaller scale: you don't have to trade one luxury at a time or you can trade more than one. I think that our idea is essentially the same, I would just personally avoid the sharp cutter based on some arbitrary OCN (the reasons being the same as judgement's).

Or did you have something else in mind? Good suggestion there, though

what if you could build a tank with out oil? this tank would be weaker and/or more expesive than normal tanks.