Greatly Improved Resource/City Management

[imperiex1]

I have heard that in Civ V there will be finite resources(e.g. 1 iron can make 5 swordsmen.) This is a great step toward realism and much better gameplay. However, I think that they need to make the resource management system much more than that. It should be much more realistic and force the player to make more difficult choices than before. Here are the details of my system.

Resource Types

Resources will now be organized into two groups; Renewable and Nonrenewable resources. Each will have its own different characteristics:

• Renewable resources, such as bananas and wheat, can be created again and again throughout the game. If you have a pasture and you use/trade 200 units of fish each turn while the fishery produces 250 head/turn, the amount of fish is going to increase. However, if you harvest 500 units of fish each turn, the amount of fish in that fishery will go down each turn, eventually with none left. This will make a particular impact in the late game, where there are advances that allow for an increase in the harvesting of resources.
  
  Because these resources are renewable and finite, all of them(except seafood types) can be planted/re-created. A worker unit can take a food crop such as Rice, animals such as Pigs, and renewable luxuries like Silk/Dye and "re-create" it somewhere else on the map. However, this will involve taking some units of resources and placing it in a suitable new location. The volume of production of these "new" resources will take some time before they reach the volume sustained by their neighbors. As with harvesting resources, technologies will make an impact on how many units of the renewable resource have to be taken with the worker, and how many turns it will take until resource production from that "new" resource becomes substantial.*
  
  
• Nonrenewable Resources are resources that are present in certain amounts at the beginning of the game, but do not get created over its course. For example, if you find 200 units of iron/turn in a particular mine, and you produce 150 iron units/turn, the amount of iron in your mine seems to "increase." Eventually, if the mine has a total of 7500 units of iron, you will exhaust the mine in 50 turns at your current rate of production. Of course, advances as you move on in the game will allow you to find more of the resource and make more of a particular commodity for fewer resource units. However, nothing can change that there is a finite amount of nonrenewable resources on the planet.** EDIT: For game balance, new reserves will appear when one is exhausted, but you will not get an alert. Also these new reserves will be smaller than the pervious one, and progressively overusing renewable resources will lead to their eventual exhaustion
  
  * The amount of resources that a renewable resource square produces can be used to adjust the difficulty level of the game.
  
  **The prevalence in the game and amount of nonrenewable resources/square can be changed when adjusting difficulty level.
  

Resource Management

With the concept of Finite Resources, there has to be a change to the whole way resource production is handled in Civ. For one, there will be no more city radius, but citizens will be able to work tiles anywhere in your empire. This new system will be handled through a special screen in the Domestic Advisor:

• There will be a link to a map in the Domestic Advisor screen. Once you click this link, you will see a full-screen map of your whole empire. On a side panel, you can see how many citizens are working in cities, how many are in the armed forces, and how many are "free." You can assign these free citizens to work tiles. The same can be done for workers that are already occupied, but you need the Slavery civic and doing this will cause unhappiness.
  
  For example, if you have 100 free population units, you can assign them to work 100 tiles. At the end of the turn, these tiles will be starting to produce output. When citizens migrate out to the countryside to do work on farms, etc., they move from the city closest to the particular tile that you want to work. For example, if City X is two tiles away and City Y is three tiles away from the one in question, City X will provide the workers for that tile.
  
  Of course, later advances will increase yields of resources, so then you can cut back on the amount of tiles that are being worked and move citizens back to the cities.
  

Trading and Using Resources

Okay, you've set up some mines and farms, produced a few thousand units of resources, now what? One of the simplest options is to trade the resource with another nation. However, trade as we know it will be changed greatly.

Instead of a "trade route" that merely generates commerce, there will be actual units that are assigned to carry resources. These will be available on land, sea, and air, and are not too expensive to make. However, they have very little combat strength, and should be accompanied by fighting units. These units can carry a limited amount of resources, but with advances in technology, these limits will go up.

To make having these units less tedious, you can assign them to carry resources from and to several cities via the Commerce Advisor, and to other empires via the diplomacy screen.

Using these units, blockades would become a much more interesting scenario. You have a few destroyers, and send them to blockade an enemy. On land, there are some infantrymen waiting. These units can collect resources from incoming and outgoing traffic on land and sea, thus reducing the amount of resources it can trade and reducing its income. If this is a major city of that empire, you may reduce the overall strength of it to a point where war becomes much easier.

Citizens in the countryside will NO LONGER PRODUCE HAMMERS OR COMMERCE. They will produce the resources needed to fuel your infrastructure. These resources will go to the cities, where they can either be traded or go to the production of finished products. But to understand how this works, we need to know about a new system for producing hammers and commerce. After this I will go more into detail about what we will do in the cities:

Those in the countryside will make the raw materials necessary for fueling your empire. Hammers in the countryside will be abolished outright; commerce can be made in rural areas with cottages, hamlets, etc.

However, your hammer and commerce production will be handled solely by city dwellers. For now I'll call them Specialists, in Civ4 terms. But these citizens will do much more than what they used to. The new citizen types will produce many more hammers than before, and the other, more "educated" specialists will also do much, much more.

City dwellers can be assigned to work in buildings such as Jewelers, Forges, Pottery Shop, and Refinery. Citizens working in these workshops will produce Finished Goods - Jewelry, Swords, Pottery, and Gasoline, to name a few. These buildings will also yield a bonus to city production, commerce, food, or culture - just like previous Civ games. However, their production of finished goods is much more important.

The amount of Finished Goods you produce is dependent on three factors:

1. The amount of resources entering the city,
2. The number of citizens working in that particular industry, and
3. How much an individual population unit working in that industry can harvest.

Just like Natural Resources, Finished Goods can be traded to other countries in the same fashion as is described for resources above. Just like natural Resources, they will be used in buildings, units, and wonders. However, they cost much more to make, so other civilizations that lack the infrastructure to make these goods may appeal to you for help, giving you a windfall in profits off of finished goods.

Please post your thoughts on my new resource management/economic system for Civilization V.

 

[Buncombe]

Interesting ideas, but it would only make sense if this system only comes into effect upon (1) discovery of economics (prior to modern economics, all wealth and productivity was seen as coming from the countryside) or even corporation and (2) adoption of free market or state property (the existing city-based economy is essentially mercantilism, after all).

The "buildings" you describe sound a lot like corporations. Prior to the implementation of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" (laissez-faire capitalism), many (most) finished goods actually came from the countryside; cities were merely the places these were traded. After all, this transition (to capitalism) was far more disruptive than we, today, often think. Peasants were forced off the lands they had worked for generations, forcing most of them into the cities to become the labor force of (industrial) capitalists, precipitating the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and even the American Civil War (though having an empty "frontier" greatly eased this transition, preventing a cohesive labor movement from forming).

 

[imperiex1]

Interesting ideas, but it would only make sense if this system only comes into effect upon (1) discovery of economics (prior to modern economics, all wealth and productivity was seen as coming from the countryside) or even corporation and (2) adoption of free market or state property (the existing city-based economy is essentially mercantilism, after all).

The "buildings" you describe sound a lot like corporations. Prior to the implementation of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" (laissez-faire capitalism), many (most) finished goods actually came from the countryside; cities were merely the places these were traded. After all, this transition (to capitalism) was far more disruptive than we, today, often think. Peasants were forced off the lands they had worked for generations, forcing most of them into the cities to become the labor force of (industrial) capitalists, precipitating the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and even the American Civil War (though having an empty "frontier" greatly eased this transition, preventing a cohesive labor movement from forming).

I agree with some, but I think that it's time that the city centers themselves got a little importance. Maybe there could be a few finished products from the countryside in the beginning of the game, but later on, it would become much more economical to just send them to the cities and work. I think that it combines the best of both worlds.

Even in the beginning of the game, there should be at least a vague idea of cities as centers for production. Some types of finished products(jewelry, metalwork, some other luxuries) were largely made in cities, as the countryside had no infrastructure to support production of such goods in high amounts. Even in ancient times, farmers went to the cities to buy certain products.

 

[Earthling]

I wouldn't even take the time to rethink this from scratch - overly complicated resource systems should not belong in a vanilla civ game, it's one of the places where abstraction and simplicity is good.

 

[CharcoalDioxide]

Resource Types

Resources will now be organized into two groups; Renewable and Nonrenewable resources. Each will have its own different characteristics:

• Renewable resources, such as bananas and wheat, can be created again and again throughout the game. If you have a pasture and you use/trade 200 units of fish each turn while the fishery produces 250 head/turn, the amount of fish is going to increase. However, if you harvest 500 units of fish each turn, the amount of fish in that fishery will go down each turn, eventually with none left. This will make a particular impact in the late game, where there are advances that allow for an increase in the harvesting of resources.
  
  Because these resources are renewable and finite, all of them(except seafood types) can be planted/re-created. A worker unit can take a food crop such as Rice, animals such as Pigs, and renewable luxuries like Silk/Dye and "re-create" it somewhere else on the map. However, this will involve taking some units of resources and placing it in a suitable new location. The volume of production of these "new" resources will take some time before they reach the volume sustained by their neighbors. As with harvesting resources, technologies will make an impact on how many units of the renewable resource have to be taken with the worker, and how many turns it will take until resource production from that "new" resource becomes substantial.*
  
  
• Nonrenewable Resources are resources that are present in certain amounts at the beginning of the game, but do not get created over its course. For example, if you find 200 units of iron/turn in a particular mine, and you produce 150 iron units/turn, the amount of iron in your mine seems to "increase." Eventually, if the mine has a total of 7500 units of iron, you will exhaust the mine in 50 turns at your current rate of production. Of course, advances as you move on in the game will allow you to find more of the resource and make more of a particular commodity for fewer resource units. However, nothing can change that there is a finite amount of nonrenewable resources on the planet.**
  
  * The amount of resources that a renewable resource square produces can be used to adjust the difficulty level of the game.
  
  **The prevalence in the game and amount of nonrenewable resources/square can be changed when adjusting difficulty level.

• 
  
  i'd suggest a change to the Nonrenewable Resources thing for exhausting. Every time a resource exhausts, a new resource should appear somewhere in the world.

 

[Buncombe]

I wouldn't even take the time to rethink this from scratch - overly complicated resource systems should not belong in a vanilla civ game, it's one of the places where abstraction and simplicity is good.

Perhaps, but this detracts from the realism of the game so much in games during the industrial/modern era, that it becomes almost ludicrous. Huge empires could theoretically exist with a single energy resource no matter what era it is in. Cities are virtually self-reliant, which was the principle aspect that industrial capitalism aimed to transcend. This precipitated the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and, ultimately, the US Civil War (real social reform would take another century in the South). Even corporations act more like state-run companies (regardless of civic choices) than independent entities.

If simplicity is what you want, then perhaps many of these aspects could be automated, like so many management components already are in the game, but let's face it, large cohesive empires were only made possible when individual cities no longer had to rely solely on local resources. The decline of the Ottoman Empire, for example, was largely due to its inability transcend Islamic economic jurisprudence despite administrative reforms made in the 19th century.

In the end, without a comprehensive reshaping of economic management systems in industrial and later eras, the game becomes more fantasy than reality when it should be aiming to strike a balance.

 

[imperiex1]

I'd suggest a change to the Nonrenewable Resources thing for exhausting. Every time a resource exhausts, a new resource should appear somewhere in the world.

Good Idea! But it should appear far, far away, and the amount in that new reserve could be adjusted for difficulty level. Like in Deity you will get far, far less resources in the new reserve than on Settler difficulty. Many people say that Civ 5 is railroading us to war with 1uPT(correct me if the case is otherwise,) and I would like to counteract that effect. Your suggestion is invaluable; I feel that nonrenewable resources, in the end, need to be in HUGE quantities but still finite. Many players, in the end, switch their strategy to just attacking other players and winning domination/conquest victory, and there needs to be a way that satisfies the players while reducing late-game over-expansion and giving us other routes to victory.

You have written out that way in two sentences. I am adding this to the OP.

Great Job!
imperiex1