Oil & countable resources

Woodreaux

Prince
Joined
Sep 18, 2007
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357
Location
So Cal
I was thinking about game resources and the oil situation in real life. The Civilizations series has done an awesome job modeling and abstracting the facets of production/commerce/economy and the resources which feed them. The special "have-or-don't-have" resources like gold, crabs, hit-movies and the countable/convertible ones like :hammers:, :gold: are brilliant uses of metrics.

I also realized that oil is a special beast in a class all its own. Based on actual history and current affairs, it is clear to me that oil deserves more than the Boolean treatment. At a minimum Oil needs the Civ4: Colonization treatment. It needs to be harvested like :hammers: or :food:, but should accumulate like guns, cloth or ore does in Colonization. I believe the quantification of oil resources would allow a game to mimic the effects of oil-richness that really do exist in real life. I'm thinking that the combustion tech should enable an oil slider that determines how much of the oil consumption or reliance the civilization has (helping industry & military, but causing :yuck: and global warming), the less you consume, the more you have to sell to other civs.

I'm thinking about modding BtS to make oil a more integral part of the late game. I'm not asking about how to implement any of these features, but I am asking for anyone's ideas what these changes should be. Any criticisms the ideas I listed above are welcome. Thanks in advance.
 
Ideally it would work as you described. You could harvest Oil just as you do hammers or food, but oil using units would consume that, the more units you have the more oil is consumed. It would be cool if you could stockpile it, and trade it on a per turn basis (not Boolean, but more as a given quantity, similar to how you do in Hearts of Iron 2, and also similar to how the gold per turn trading already works in civ.
 
There's a Fuel mod that deals with this. Its in the downloads.

Maybe theres another way. Count up all the things that use oil and each turn use that to determine if an oil source runs dry. In effect this is equivalent to counting stockpiles, but simpler. For example, if you have one tank moving and one jet patrolling, that's two chances in 10000. If you instead have 100 tanks, that's 100/10000. Maybe modern roads would also consume oil while increasing improvement yield. But also have an oil exploration worker build. There are additional sources of oil, but they are invisible and to see them you have to have a worker try this build on a square. After several turns you either build a well or confirm that the square has no oil.
 
One of the appeals of civ4 is infinite resources. To me at least.

Or rather, I'd love quantitative resources, but a deposit must never run empty. Say an oil well produces x oil/turn, which is added to the national stockpile. Then it is usable for tasks that consume oil. If you don't have enough in your stockpile, you cannot execute the said tasks.
 
Just a thought, but if you compare how much the military use of brutto oil production, even in big ass army countries like USA, i think it is not even 1/100000000 of all the oil, so to make it realistic you would have to subtract some of the total oil usage from population size, oil power plants, trade routes and so on, instead of just draining it from tanks, jets etc etc.
 
I thought about this as well, not just regarding to oil but other strategic resources as well.

I would like to connect how much you get each turn of a strategic resource to how much units/buildings you can produce each turn.

For example if you have an income of 2 oil each turn you can build oil needing units/buildings at full speed in 2 cities. If you are building oil needing units/buildings in 3 cities they would each build at 66,667% of full speed or if you are building oil needing units/buildings in 4 cities they would build at 50% of full speed etc. Could be any ratio... for example perhaps you could build at full speed in 2 cities for 1 oil or whatever.

I can't mod it anyhow so it won't happen... just my vision anyway. :)
 
I've refined my ideas a little bit. Here's what I've got at the moment.
Land tiles with oil would patches would be provide 1 to n oil resources each turn. There would be a national oil reserve into which each source would feed. As a national resource, there would be an oil slider. The value would be 0 to 100 for stockpile to usage.

The usage would provide each city and a :hammers: and :commerce: bonus. I'm not sure what the function would be: linear, logistics curve or what... that would need to be determined empirically. The bonus would be greater for higher populations and certain specialists. Also, buildings like factories, public transportation, industrial parks would increase it as well. A city with a population of 20 with a factory and 4 engineers would consume much more oil than a 4 population city with just a library and a granary. Naturally, the amount of oil consumption provides a percentage of :yuck: and accelerates the global warming.

Mechanized units, would each use a barrels per turn when they're within cultural/friendly borders, b barrels in neutral and c in hostile.

Oil accumulating in the national stockpile can then be sold x barrels at y :gold: per turn.

I could think of more detailed aspects of oil consumption for a mod, but then each one takes away from abstraction that increases the fun factor of the game. Question is, would these changes alone make for a mod that is more work to play than fun? :confused:
 
My instinct forces me to answer this : If u have steel you should be able to build anything in any quantity you want. But as long as you dont have oil...your units shouldn't move :D
 
That's an interesting idea; maybe you could make an oil counter of some sort, and have your oil reserves generate 'movement points' each turn. Then any oil-based unit would use points each time you moved it. Once you used all of your points in the turn, you wouldn't be able to move any more oil-based units.

I think this would be easier to code, especially when factoring in the AI, but then again I'm not a coding expert by any standards. :D
 
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