Yeah, the fact that bothers me is that they have extremely fun and awesome "secondary" systems without working "primary systems". Maybe during this year they will higher a good designer, this would speed up their work a lot. Ideas are great but they are not organized in a working manner.
Haha you didn't saw their early idea of having 150+ different resources with a per-city storage and semi-manual management of that. I said, come on, are you crazy? 150 resources * 10 cities = 1500. How do you want to make an UI to manage it? (I'm not even talking about the fact that noone will want to play that). But no, they made an official threads asking what kind of resouce system people want - manual or somewhat automatic... Of course, they dumped the idea, in like 3 months or so, when it really takes only one multiplication and half a brain to figure it out instantly.
After that, i decided that whatever their game designer is smoking or sniffing is a really good thing! And it's certainly much better than the game he will be able to make.
P.S. Prooflink
http://forums.elementalgame.com/352821
>>
We have the code in for handling a pretty sophisticated/complicated economic engine.
>>
Everything in Elemental
is a resource. Food, metal, swords, armor, horses, you name it.
>> Those swords can be directed to be shipped to various other places (
with sliders or other UI means to determine what ratio goes where).
Can't find where they said about 150 resources or so in the game, but it's more or less explained here.
http://forums.elementalgame.com/329473
Every sword type, armor type, mount type etc. is a different resource under their old system, in addition to all normal resources (like food, different metals etc.)