I am currently playing the New Master of Orion video game and one overused mechanism in most civilization style game is the idea of having population on Planets or Cities, that yield resources according to their placement. Then you build a series of buildings that will increase your production output of various resources like: Gold, food, production, etc.
If I analyse the amount of decisions involved, it's actually:
- Where do you put your workers according to your current needs.
- In which priority order to you make the buildings.
There does not seem to be a lot of strategic decisions involved with this system.
- Population placement generally have an optimal positionning according to your needs. In some game, the AI could manage it for you or you could have presets.
- As for the buildings, well considering you are going to build every thing, the only decision that matters is in which order you build them.
So I was wondering if there could be a way to make the system more strategic and have fewer interesting decisions rather than lot of meaningless decisions.
The ideas I have so far:
1. Restrict the number of "Buildings" per city, it prevents the player from building everything, so he must make a choice. Buildings could be refited if player change their mind and want different objectives. Population growth could unlock new space for more buildings. But if terrain and other variables influence output, the choice could be obvious and always lead to specialised cities. "Endless space" had this issue where you simply took the choice with the most output.
2. Make all buildings give empire wide effect. So you build everything, but only once. The positionning of the building could depend of local resources but also strategic location to capture or destroy. That mechanic could make it easier to implement as a board game.
Any other ideas?
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a bit like in Medieval Total War where you can change a settlement from a castle to a city, but that change of development direction will mean you lose some of what you've built.
The only thing I fear is that there could be pre-optimal configurations. Especially in terrain is an important factor in the production output.
"Endless space" had that issue, I could chose 1 of 4 resource to produce. But if the output is 2, 3, 3, 5, then I'll take the resource that produce 5. Unless I am in dire need of the resource that produce 2, I have not reason to choose that resource.
I think it should be something organic. Having game elements that either allows you to upgrade those buildings because now you have more resource or population. Or have the situation change which incite you to refit those buildings for other purpose.
Maybe instead of using terrain as base production which is a fixed variable, I could use relationship with nearby civilization as a base production value because it could change constantly.
It should be for a video game, but I want to avoid that approach. I rather abstract the system managed by the governor, else the player will peek a the governor's job and complains its doing it wrong.
"Warlock" has that issue, most buildings are multipliers and have dependencies with each other. So you end up specializing cities in building a single resource.
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I try to get real life examples that could be used as a model for game. In the modern world, the capitalism gives the government more an intervention approach to address certain issues when they occur. Else the cities are developping themvelves alone, but the government can incite certain behavior through policies, or can invest in some project.
In medieval times, the "government" is more in control of it's production and is more likely to make choices. Policies and investments are still possible, but they will also supervise the development of their cities.
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Another approach in old KOEI style game is to only use a single percentage number to represent development of various aspect: Agriculture, disaster protection, economony, health, etc. Then that percentage is multiplied by the amount of population to know the real output.
In that case, there is no specific buildings, but players will try to max out all the development levels to it's maximum. So it's like if they were building everything.
So I think the idea would be how to give a special purpose to each city without having ultra specialised cities. In Koei style game, the terrain has little impact on production, it's more the population that makes certain areas more valuable.
Maybe combining development percentages with unique buildings through the empire could be an alternative. Unique buildings gives cities purpose, while development percentage determine the quality/condition of your city, like training and morale for a military unit.