Linkage between resources and units

[mhIdA]

searcheagle
Let me explain better and you'll see how simple is that, I hopefully.
Suppose I've 5 cities and want to build 5 armies with 10 piks and 10 swords in each army. each unit costs 30 shields, so I'll need 3,000 shields of iron. If I choose build the armies in 3 turns then I'll need 1,000 miners per turn to produce 3,000 shields of iron. I'm supposing each miner produce 1 iron shield per turn. We don't send 1,000 miners to exploit iron deposit, this is automatically made and by only few popunits to simulate mining.
So each turn I produce 33 units divided by piks and swords and left 10 shield stored or not sell to artesans.
Another thing is that each turn miners sells their production to artesans and this generate trade wich under this model is no tile-based. So each turn we have 990 gold generated by commerce in 1 shield = 1 gold basis. And in 3rd turn the trade generated is 1,020 of gold. And of course this is also an automatic process.

This way we have a resource exploitation, production of shields and gold generated by commerce, given my needs. If well done, isn't mean many MM.
And the depletion is a factor of intensivity of deposit exploration (how many popunits/citizens mines a deposit per turn).
The unit upkeep also is simple. when we want upkeep swords to medieval infantry wich costs 40 shields and by example above we have 50 swords, we need 10 shields by swords to upgrade (40-30), so the process is similar. We said we want upgrade 50 swords to 50 med inf and then the process restart.

This is part of an economical model no tile-based as shields, food and commerce (gold) is now.

 

[rhialto]

But you must admit Rhialto that, especially with the new modding powers of Civ4, there will be a HELL of a lot more resources in the game-in each age-once the modders get their hands on it (plus, we don't know exactly how many resources civ4 will have in vanilla form). Its at this point that a storage system may well become untenable.

You're assuming that your system will allow players to manage a dozen resources easily. I don't think the issue with managing resources is to do with the method so much as the number of different resources. You say the biggest weakness with treating resources in the same way as money is that it doesn't scale up to having large numbers of resources, say a dozen or so. I don't think your model scales up either. This isn't a flaw in the models, but in normal human thinking.

 

[dh_epic]

I was converted in another thread away from quantified resources. I realize that's just going to add another micromanagement strategy, instead of a high level strategy. The best players will be those who play "accountant", instead of the players who play "visionary leader".

Whatever changes you make to resources and the economy, it needs to be with the overall goal of empowering decision makers with high level trade-offs, rather than a collection of minute decisions that come together to give someone a huge advantage.

 

[Commander Bello]

About storage and micromanagement:

I don't see any additional micro-management, if the user interface is adopted to this principle.
Let's say, you have the choice between the mentioned three different types of storage building as town improvement: small, average, large.
You go for the small storage building, as it requires not so much shields to be constructed.
Now, it provides "space" for let's say 100 items. "Average" would provide "space" for 500 items, "large" would be "space" for 1,000 items (all numbers are just for display purposes!)

You have resources A, B, C, D, E, F

They would all be stored in the same building. There would be just some bit-sized little "virtual men" who would care about where to store, in which condition and so on. So, this is nothing, what the player would have to care about.

Now, you get another resource G. At the next turn, your economic advisor would pop up telling you:
"Your Highness, our storage building in town XY has run out of space. This will make us loose any benefits from our A-mines and B-, C-, ...., G-resources.
Additionally, this limits our strategic options and endangers our on-going trades with our allies, the 'ABC'.
Would you like to build the next level of storage building at XY? It will cost you xxx shields and yyy gold.
Please click the appropriate selection: Y/N"

Quick, easy, understandable. Where is the micro-management?

 

[searcheagle]

searcheagle
Let me explain better and you'll see how simple is that, I hopefully.
Suppose I've 5 cities and want to build 5 armies with 10 piks and 10 swords in each army. each unit costs 30 shields, so I'll need 3,000 shields of iron. If I choose build the armies in 3 turns then I'll need 1,000 miners per turn to produce 3,000 shields of iron. I'm supposing each miner produce 1 iron shield per turn. We don't send 1,000 miners to exploit iron deposit, this is automatically made and by only few popunits to simulate mining.
So each turn I produce 33 units divided by piks and swords and left 10 shield stored or not sell to artesans.
Another thing is that each turn miners sells their production to artesans and this generate trade wich under this model is no tile-based. So each turn we have 990 gold generated by commerce in 1 shield = 1 gold basis. And in 3rd turn the trade generated is 1,020 of gold. And of course this is also an automatic process.

This way we have a resource exploitation, production of shields and gold generated by commerce, given my needs. If well done, isn't mean many MM.
And the depletion is a factor of intensivity of deposit exploration (how many popunits/citizens mines a deposit per turn).
The unit upkeep also is simple. when we want upkeep swords to medieval infantry wich costs 40 shields and by example above we have 50 swords, we need 10 shields by swords to upgrade (40-30), so the process is similar. We said we want upgrade 50 swords to 50 med inf and then the process restart.

This is part of an economical model no tile-based as shields, food and commerce (gold) is now.

I understand what you are proposing. (I'm in college and I'm taking a course called Operations Management, which deals with production principles. I just don't want the game to turn into a class. I just think that it will, as rhialto said, make the player more of an "accountant" then a player. While I feel quantififiable will not make the player an accountant, I feel that if mHIDa's Idea was implemented, it would make the player an employment manager.

 

[yoshi]

Problem with the second option Yoshi is that it runs afoul of the wee little fact that it is effectivey NOT effective at all until the industrial revolution, and then only with coal, uranium (kind of) and oil. Units which require iron, etc require it to BUILD the unit, not (much) to operate it afterward.

I've thought of this but really don't care much to argue it as I'm just proposing a solution to the mechanics, not the look of the epic game.

But since you mention it, I should have typed "supplies" insted of "fuel." My bad. Basically anything with heavy ammo or something needs continuous replacing (e.g. Cannon require Iron for Shot). The gold upkeep covers the rest.

(Although, I've read something about Firaxis re-thinking the unit upkeep mechanism to something more "fun"...I shudder at what they're going to cut out next--it's kind of like being under a neo-con government ).

To give an example that any scen player can relate to: Germans lose Balkan Oil, their vehicles are limited but German Infantry are as resilient as ever.

If it really bothers you, give really early units some bogus resource requirement like, 'Stone' or something. A non-issue really.

Simplistic in comparison to the other more thoughtful and complex models proposed but would do the job IMO.


JUST A GENERAL NOTE TO YOU ALL: I REALLY want resources to have some kind of effect on units once they're built.

Since it's highly unlikely that the guys at Firaxis will bother with anything more complex than a unit cap--and even that's pushing the limit--I would suggest that if you also want some kind of resource effect, you back this (or something similarly simple, if someone can think it up).

I'm not disdainful of the other propositions raised but I'd rather get something than nothing--it's a question of practicality.

(Just to be perfectly honest--and no offense is intended whatsoever--it's unlikely that anything more complex than a cap or something similarly simple will even be considered. That's just the way this industry operates, and Firaxis is on a "fun" high so anything that adds the slightest degree of MM beyond what is strictly necessary for decent gameplay will be frowned upon--you can be pretty sure of that.)

If someone can think up something simpler, by all means...

 

[rhialto]

@Bello
I'm not saying having storage buildings is MM. My beef with it is that it adds an extra concept beyond the one you are adding anyway, and a low-level one at that. And warehouses are actually remarkably cheap to build - cheap enough to be meaningless at a civ level game.

You don't build a structure to store your money in civ, and I can't see a reason to start now.

 

[mhIdA]

Commander Bello
You're right, isn't mean more MM.

searcheagle
By my example only you have to do is order to build an army or 5. Simple as that. The rest is to the game, the engine. If you think more deeper in my example, without a warehouse we loose 10 shields of iron if we don't sell it (waste).
Another thing is if you're civ A at war with civ B, your miners could be captured and become slaves of civ B. But you don't loose only miners or popunits, since the 4 or 5 popunits represents 1,000 miners, you loose their training and their know-how, in anothers words their skills and that is a breakdown in your economy, so in your civ.
To play civ in diplomacy you act as a diplomat, in trade you act as trader, in government you act as a ploticien, in economy you act as a manager, in war you act as a general, but above all you're a Civ player.

 

[yoshi]

Where is the micro-management?

Are you kidding?

 

[Commander Bello]

Are you kidding?

No, I'm not.

In principle, it wouldn't be more than the step from marketplace to bank. The only difference is that for that step, no adviser pops up telling you that you are about to run out of money.

I really can not acknowledge in what way this proposal would require micro-management - until somebody would already shifting the mouse from the right to the left call 'micro-managemen'

If additionally at the upper or lower line of the screen there would be a graphical indicator, how many resources you have and to what degree they are already consumed by your units/improvements, this would be just a matter of minutes to get accustomed to this feature.

 

[Commander Bello]

@Bello
I'm not saying having storage buildings is MM. My beef with it is that it adds an extra concept beyond the one you are adding anyway, and a low-level one at that. And warehouses are actually remarkably cheap to build - cheap enough to be meaningless at a civ level game.

You don't build a structure to store your money in civ, and I can't see a reason to start now.

Sure it would be an additional concept. But - as far as I see it - just a very easy one.
I have to admit, that I like the idea of units being dependant on resources - at least from a certain (early) level on. For sure it wouldn't be the warrior to start with, but at the latest it should be the first gunpowder-dependant unit. Until then, in principle they all could live 'off the land'. With gunpowder, logistics really started. About any unit based on combustion engines we don't need to talk, I'd guess.

And I am a strong supporter on handling this issue on a very high level. I wouldn't like it either to have to sent a supply train with clothes, a lorry with ammo, and three regiments of reinforcement soldiers over the map. Those ideas may be fun for half an hour, but after that they would become tedious and boring.
But, adding some economic component to peacetime and warfare - that could be fun. If it would stay on the mentioned high (in some kind abstract) level.

One last word to the storage buildings for money:
We already have them in! They are called marketplace and bank and stock exchange

 

[rhialto]

@Bello
I support your ideas on just about everything except the bit about needing specific buildings to store resources.

Yes, we have banks etc for money, but they don't have that game function, nor would I would them to.

 

[dh_epic]

Even if it isn't more micromanagement... I'm just not sure what you get out of allowing players to build storage facilities.

What's the player empowering choice? What's the big strategic decision?

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Look, I for one was opposed to the Random Disappearance of resources which occured in Civ3, but my opposition to it was that it was COMPLETELY RANDOM- i.e., the players actions had no impact on whether or not a resource became depleted or not.
My model MAKES player actions far more relevent to the chance of resource depletion, whilst still placing the ultimate depletion chance outside of the players control. This last point is VERY important as it makes micromanagement of resources largely pointless. i.e. though a player can implement broad 'policy' which can minimize-or almost eliminate-the chance of resource depletion, they cannot keep checking in on their resources-and resource use-every turn in order to ensure that their resources NEVER run out. This is something which micromanagers can exploit to great advantage.
Let me repeat, I am NOT talking about a random system here. It is no more random than the combat system-in fact, even LESS random than that-so players need never feel cheated by the system. As I also said, it is also more realistic because very few nations know-with certainty-how long their most critical resources are going to last, whilst still being able to give an estimate, and urging less use in order to preserve the resource for longer-something that my system replicates.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[dh_epic]

Yeah, Aussie's is a good system. There's no more micromanagement, and it's less random, and thus less frustrating. It is universally an improvement on what we have now -- resources that actually disappear according to how much you spend, as opposed to plain bad luck.

Whether that's the "killer economic feature" we're looking for, I'm not sure... but it doesn't hurt, and that's what makes it such a great suggestion.

 

[yoshi]

Yeah, Aussie's is a good system. There's no more micromanagement, and it's less random, and thus less frustrating.

It's an okay system for linking player actions to resources but there is MM: micromanagers will keep track of use of a resource, thus will be able to calculate the odds whereas the non-micromanagers won't know the odds.

Let me repeat, I am NOT talking about a random system here.

Yes you are. You're manipulating the randomizer's denominator (i.e. increaseing chances per use/requirement) but it's still random: if a resource starts with a 1/1000 chance at disappearance and use lowers it to a 1/500 chance, the disappearance can still trigger next turn in both cases. It's just a matter of "luck." You have twice the chances of it happening at 1/500 but you'll still get players cursing the screen when their resource disappears much earlier than expected--only it won't happen as often.

I offered a partial solution to this in another thread with the addition of a minimum time disappearance feature (i.e. a timer per resource, triggered when first connected), which delays the random effect for a while--so players can't say that they but finished connecting the resource and it bloody well disappeared before they could make proper use of it.

This solution was of course--as is the case with most of the stuff I post--completely and utterly ignored.

 

[Commander Bello]

Even if it isn't more micromanagement... I'm just not sure what you get out of allowing players to build storage facilities.

What's the player empowering choice? What's the big strategic decision?

I understood the original idea as giving a certain output per deposit.
In case of the iron deposit, let's assume an unmined deposit would give you 50 ea ore per turn. At the beginning, you only have 10 units and improvements consuming 1 ea ore each. So, you have a surplus per turn of 40 ea.

What are you going to do with these? I think it is just logical that natural resources have to be stored if harvested, but not immediately consumed.

This would be an additional feature, once again enhancing the economic component of the game. Many people here seem to agree upon the fact that currently the game is very much focused on the military aspects.
I would like to shift this focus a little bit more towards economy and social components.

One remark about the "money storing facilities": There is a first step into that direction by this (small?) wonder which permits you interest. As this interest is capped at 50 g, this wonder benefits you most if you have at least 1,000 g available each turn, an idea which I like very much.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

What are you going to do with these? I think it is just logical that natural resources have to be stored if harvested, but not immediately consumed.

And anything that is logical and natural should be done Automatically without any player involvement
The materials should either

1. be stored, but not with any cost.

2. Not be stored ever (ie aussie's model, you store it by keeping it in the dirt)

3. Not be stored Unless you Select a 'Strategic Storage' For that resource where you will pay (somehow) on an Imperial level to store the extra amount you have (in Aussie's model that would be any time your use was less than the free allowance of all sources of that resource)

I'd prefer Aussie's system with the Free of Charge because you can be informed of
1- chance of resource exhaustion
2- current limit of resource use
In the same way you are for the maintenance cost of your army in Civ3

Also it works well for trade, any resource supply you get by trade is 'free of charge'.. To build more than the 'Free of Charge' you need your own supply...which is what takes the risk.

A Resource Exporter could export as much resource as they wanted..that resource would be like 'free of charge' for their customers ie it wouldn't impact the chances of your local resources going dry... but for the exporter if they exported and used more than the size, it would count against their deposits 'expiring'

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Well, Yoshi, once again you do to others what you accuse others of doing to you-that is NOT reading the entirety of a post. If you had, you would notice that I suggested TWO models, one is an IMMEDIATE possibility of resource depletion, the other involved a risk of resource depletion only AFTER your combined # of cities/units passed a threshold determined by your resource size.
i.e., a size 5 resource could support a combined total of 5 units/cities without risk of disappearance, with each ADDITIONAL city, unit and improvements increasing the chance of disappearance. This, I have to say, is my preferred option, as it gives players at least a little bit of breathing space before they have to fear the chance of a resource being depleted-it also makes it even LESS random.
My second point is that NO, it is not TRULY random. Civ3's system WAS random, wheras I would describe my system as 'semi-random'-in that yes you have a randomizer, but the size of the randomizer is ultimately controlled by players actions (building more cities, building more units, implementing techs and civics settings which REDUCE resource use, obtaining more of a resource via trade and/or conquest). In this regard, it is really no more random than most other parts of the game-such as combat. Lets face it, if there wasn't SOME random element to the game, then the outcome would be a foregone conclusion, and that would NOT be fun.
Lastly, yes a micromanager COULD keep a close track on their resource use, but short of keeping their nation ridiculously small, there is ultimately little gain they would get from keeping such a close eye on such use, due to the randomizer-which is exactly the point of my system, reducing or eliminating the benefits of micromanaging over broad policy decisions like, 'I have I size 2 iron deposit. If I want to defend my nation with swords and pikes, then I will either have to conquer my neighbour or make REAL nice with him and seek to trade him several units of iron for about 5 units of my silks.'

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[dh_epic]

We ARE talking about a game where there are a lot of "dice rolls". Combat may involve a dice roll, but it is not random -- there's a general sense that one unit will beat another. If you want to take on the fundamentals of Civilization Combat Strategy, I welcome you to.

To me, there's everything to gain by calculating better odds on resource disappearance. It coincides with the system as it already exists, but makes it better -- no debate.

Whether it's the BEST model is something else. But any other model would require a distinct shift in the way resources work -- and that's not something I'm opposed to.

Of course, even if that fundamental shift DID involve stockpiles, I think "storage decisions" are not really decisions at all but just more micromanagement. Storage should be completely automated -- like gold storage.