@Sostratus: Reference to 'progressive' benefits from Resources/Food. I agree completely, and also agree that elaborate 'chains' of Improvements, Buildings, Districts, and resources have to be avoided. A Historical 4X game in which most of your time is devoted to economics might be satisfying to a fraction of a decimal point of players, but for most it would be a massive distraction.
Using the hoary old Civ tradition of a three-tier progress, I suggest that something like this might work as a compromise between Dynamics in resources and complexity in play:
1. Resource: Found on map, exploited with certain Technologies to provide basic Food, Amenity, or Strategic benefit
2. Technology or Improvement/Building from Technology, allowing a '2nd Tier' advantage from the Resource
3. Technology, usually with a major Building/District improvement, that replaces the resource's effects with an 'artificial' or manufactured Resource.
Examples:
Food Resource - which is never precisely Replaced by an artificial resource, at least until Future Tech provides us with Startrekian Replicators.
Wheat/Grain is a basic Food Resource, exploitable with
Agriculture, and more exploitable with Technological Improvements to agriculture, like Irrigation, improved plows, harnesses, mechanization, etc.
Grain can also be used to feed Horses, producing, with Pastures, the Warhorse, or larger mount for Heavy Cavalry. This, of course, is a trade-off:
Grain resource fed to horses takes away from the Food produced for people.
On the discovery of
Distilling Technology (Medieval Era) a Distillery Improvement can be built that converts Grain/Wheat into
Distilled Spirits, an Amenity-producing Good which is also a lucrative Trade Good.
Amenity Resource:
Diamonds, a basic Amenity Resource, exploitable with Mining Technology. That Technology is Improved by discovery of Deep Mining (late Medieval Era) and Open Pit Mines (Atomic Era) which allow new deposits to be discovered and exploited.
In the Industrial Era, with discovery of
Precision Machining, Diamonds become a Production enhancer as well, allowing more precise grinding and drilling of materials in manufacturing. Again, Diamonds allotted to manufacturing are not available to the population for Amenities.
With the discovery of
Synthetic Materials Technology, Diamonds no longer become a Production enhancer, because synthetic Diamonds and other materials can be manufactured for the same purpose. They still provide Amenity, either as themselves or as part of Jewelry, another 'manufactured' Amenity resource.
Strategic Resource:
Horses, one of the first 'Strategic' Resources, exploited with Animal Husbandry and Pastures.
By adding
Grain for special feed, a percentage of these can become Warhorses (14.5 hands high or larger) for Heavy Cavalry (including Heavy Chariots, which also required big, strong draft horses)
By building the Hippodrome, Race Track, or Derby Improvements, Horses become an Amenity and Gold producing resource from about the Classical (Hippodrome) to Industrial Eras (Race Track or Derby)
Field Artillery, and Artillery units (Not necessarily Bombards, which were frequently drawn by Oxen or even Elephants) both require Warhorses to haul them (from the Industrial Ea on, in fact, they required the heaviest of horses, more so than the 'heavy' cavalry).
With
Combustion or
Motorization technologies, the artillery units no longer require Warhorses, but will require Oil and become much more expensive: you pays yer money and takes yer choice (Notably, in the Real Historical World War Two of the Atomic Era, only the British and United State militaries motorized/mechanized all their artillery: Japan, Italy, Germany and the Soviet Union all had horse-drawn guns throughout the war, and therefore had to invest in Warhorses to pull them)
From the start, Resources should not be 'typecast' as one type or the other: it will depend on what they are being used for, which in turn will depend on Requirements and Technologies available. By developing 'chains' of Technology/Resource/Improvement-Buildings like the examples shown, we should be able to come up with relatively simple expansions of the resource-result chains to keep Resources dynamic and constantly requiring the gamer to develop his economy instead of, as now, slap down a Pasture, Mine or Plantation and forget about it.
You can take the route of humankind and have a system like "barbarian camps or city states can spring up on the map because there is usually someone living on any given tile" (i think this thread had that discussion several pages back) pulling from a list of names of minor factions. For example, a "settlement" appears and it's assigned the name "Zapotecs" on the map.
One of the previous Civ games, III or IV, did something similar: all Barbarians were named. On the other hand, all the Barbarians were also the same, so the names were just cosmetic.
In
Humankind they do not appear to have the mindlessly aggressive Barbarian Camps of Civ, but instead Minor Factions, which can apparently all build cities and 'occupy' regions, can be aggressive or passive in various degrees. Instead of the tiered system of non-Civ elements in Civ VI, where we have Tribal Huts, Barbarian Camps, and City States,
Humankind has 'artifacts' which can give bonuses similar (I suspect) to Tribal Huts, and Minor Factions which can play the part of either Civ's Barbarians or City States or both, a two-tier instead of three-tier system.
IF the names of the Minor Factions actually mean something, this is potentially a more flexible system than Civ, because the Minor Faction can play the part of your favorite Trading partner/bonus providing City State or be a Barbarian Pain in the Tookus depending on who they are. Potentially, they could also 'shade' into some of the playable Factions, because, as I understand it, the Huns and Mongols are playable 'pastoral' Factions who do not build cities, but instead have special Outposts that spawn military units and can hold territory to exploit resources. There's been some discussion of that over in the
Humankind portion of this Forum, and it looks promising. Now imagine a Minor Faction that could provide horse archers to hire as auxiliaries or a trade route extension to trade with a Faction on the far side of them, and you recreate neatly the interactions with most of the pastoral 'Civs' of Central Asia: Scythians, Pachinaks, Sarmatians, Sogdians, etc, which facilitated the Silk Road trade route across Asia while also raiding or fighting for the various 'settled' Empires - even Athens hired Scythian horse archers for a time, and large elements of both the Roman auxiliary forces and the Chinese armies were composed of hired 'barbarians'.
(knocking on wood)
