I definitely think a "maintenance" model might be better than a "stockpile" model. That said, there's overwhelming support for a stockpile model... until there are more people butting their head up against seemingly impossible obstacles, I want to help the majority realize their vision...
HOW TO KEEP THE NUMBER OF STOCKPILES DOWN
As dh_epic mentioned, it is very off putting to think that you have to manage every resource in a similar manner as the game turns into resource acounting rather than strategy.
I think we need to accept that this system would work perfectly in scenarios only and not on a grand 'whole' game scale as that would require all the resource system being quantiative as horses were strategic earlier but steel replace weaponry later and so on....
I'm glad you share my concern... but this need not be a choice between loads of complications or none at all. There's two ways to get around this problem:
One is to group the resources, as I suggested earlier. Instead of having iron, copper, and aluminum, you just have "metals". Iron is simulated by having it provide more metals than copper. Even regular hill mines provide some metals. This necessarily blurs the line between "quality" and "quantity", but it's worth it: I think quantity is a much more interesting strategic decision than quality. If we do enough of these types of groupings, we can really simplify stockpile system beyond the 40 resources in the current game, let alone 10 strategic resources.
Two is to rethink the idea of resource obsolescence. We don't think of horses as going obsolete -- at least not until the age of automobiles. But at a certain point, horses are so abundant that you no longer worry about them. Say horses become obsolete with Biology, or even sooner with Military Tradition. This isn't to say that horses don't exist beyond this point. Nor does it say that we discovered a secret to build horses out of thin air. Rather, this is to represent how horses become "infinitely" abundant once society becomes sufficiently organized. And if we can do something like this for horses, then we can definitely do it for other resources like Stone or Marble. The end result is that you're juggling fewer resources per age, even if those resources change from age to age. It helps us keep the complexity down, even as the world changes.
I frankly think we'll need to employ some combination of the two: group some resources together under a single quantity, and make other quantities irrelevant before / after a certain time.
Like I said earlier, I suspect that
Firaxis's magic number is 7: 7 basic types of terrain, 7 religions, 7 original UN resolutions... maybe 8 original traits. Everything else is even less: 5 great people, 5 X 5 civic columns, 3 different yields (food/commerce/production) with 3 different kinds of commerce (culture, research, gold).
Yes, there may be 40 different units in the epic game, but a player won't have to think about more than 7 different unit types on the map at a time. There might be 86 technologies, but your choices at any given moment are limited, and a technology that provides more than 3 effects is rare. More than 4 effects is even more rare.
Thinking in these terms increase our likelihood of success. It makes it easy to learn while preserving the majority of strategy. And it shows Firaxis that "improved resources" can be done in a clean and efficient way.
WHAT ABOUT FOOD?
I think there's an elephant in the room that nobody is talking about: That's the realism of food scarcity in itself.
Corn, Rice, even Cows aren't really considered hard to come by these days. How is it realistic that these things are on single tiles, and not everywhere? What the heck are they farming on those empty grassland tiles that lets them pump out 3 food?
WARNING: there be dragons here! Thinking about this raises a lot of complex issues.
We get tempted into wondering about food and realism. Axing the food resources would be acceptable: farms already produce more food. But it's more appealing to a mediocre designer to just pile on features: let's create a system where you can breed cows and put them on every tile! Allow workers to plant wheat and corn, depending on which they want more of!
As people start to dig through the game for realism, the entire economic model comes apart. You have to understand that some things aren't here for realism, but for gameplay. The reason why special tiles with special yields is an improvement on Civ 1 is "biggest isn't always the best": someone with a few high resource cities might do equally well as someone with more cities spread out along regular land. If food resources are everywhere/nowhere, then you lose that.
That's the reason we wouldn't want to get into quantifying who has more cows. Nobody really cares. At the end of the day we HAVE the key strategic quantity already in the game:
It's called "food". That distills 11 resources down to a single quantity right off the bat. I think this is the way to go.
We potentially lose two things doing this. What about the special ability of four buildings (Grocers, Granaries, Harbors and Supermarkets)? What about the health benefit of these resources?
One answer is that we don't have to lose this: we just don't quantify it. One cow gives you food and activates certain health/building bonuses. But two cows doesn't give you extra health/building bonuses. It only gives you extra food.
The other answer is that it might not be so bad to lose the health/building bonuses for food altogether. Losing some complexities would justify and balance the added complexity of this quantity system in the first place.
