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Original post by Telastyn And botman brings up a good point, Setllers 2 was a great game even though it had tons and tons of resources. Even though it was "real time" the pace of the game was much slower, so you could keep tabs on the resources. [that and it had fairly excellent AI so that units did many of the steps automatically once you commisioned the buildings]

The thing about The Settlers is that the emphasis was very much on the economic side of things. Combat was relatively simple, it was really just a case of marching some men over to a guard hut and whoever had the most/best troops won. The Settlers was all about resource management.

The later games made the combat a little more complex I seem to remember, but even then it was relatively simple, with only two or three different unit types. I'm not sure that it would work so well with more complex combat. In any case, you're certainly right about the pacing, Settlers was not a twitch game by any stretch of the imagination, whereas more generic RTS games often are.

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Original post by Brien Shrimp Admittedly, this is a blatant rip-off of Total Annihilation's resource scheme. However, I propose a more "pure" implementation. In TA, only firing the really BIG guns cost any meaningful amount of energy. Moving units never did (IIRC). Producing units was the only thing that really cost much energy. So, in the end, Energy was just Metal2.

Unless you play like me, which involves making forests of vulcan cannons for fun, just to see how long you can keep them all going at once. [smile]

Another possible changes to TA's system would be a supply chain system. Rather than having all metal and energy magically transported into some mysterious global supply center, perhaps it needs to be transmitted in some way? Also, perhaps units have different systems which require different levels of power, and only activate if they are within range of a certain number of transmitters. You could also have units/buildings capable of connecting to an enemy power grid and tapping that for power...

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Original post by catch Anyway, in my opinion, once you go beyond four or five different resource types, you'll be the game designer everyone will be annoyed with. Maybe I'm a "naysayer," but at that point the game would become a resource simulation, and not a real time strategy game.

Yah, I believe I’m thinking Real-Time Simulation or something. Heh heh. Seriously though, a RTS with more simulation type elements would be very cool IMHO.

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Original post by catch Age of Empires was pushing it. If I had to worry about steel, stone, food, gold, oil, silver, ..... etc, I would not play the game.

Well, remember there’re no global caches or anything, so it’s not like you’ve got all those listed at the top of your screen or something. It’s still just basically “Iron”, “Gold”, “Gems”, wood, stone, and food. You can just have varying qualities.

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Original post by catch Just being honest. If there were over five resource types I'd scoff and consider the designer an anal realism freak. Sorry.

ROTFL!

You just so accurately described my personality, it’s freaky. Heh. When it comes to games, at least. I’m a horrible GM when it comes to paper and pencil RPGs, ‘cause I have no problem spending hours creating characters and using a time point based combat system where a 1 minute combat scenario takes upwards of 10-20 minutes.

“Anal realism freak” indeed! Thanks for the complement! Hah! :)

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Original post by Telastyn Don't get caught into the "more options means more fun" thought. Only meaningful options create more fun, and only then if they don't detract time from funner things. If people will just set their factories to "auto/use best" I'm a little skeptical about the need for it.

More options means more POTENTIAL fun. Not detracting time means designing the game in layers. The players should be able to peel back as many layers as they want, or as few.

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Original post by Spoonster Agreed, if this is supposed to be anything like normal RTS games, then I'm afraid it would be really awful with this many resources. If you can just let it be managed automatically, then there's no point in implementing it in the first place.

My analogy would be something in Mad Doc’s upcoming Empire Earth 2. You can use the Citizen Manager (or whatever it’s called) to “automate” your harvesting operation(s), or you can use the good ol’ fashion band select and right click method. You can thus effectively either macro- or micromanage your harvesters.

Same kinda’ thing with my design. You can choose to not worry about different quality grades and simply harvest the nearest available needed resource, or you can explore the variations and capitalize on them.

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Original post by botman2 If resources are your thing, try the Settlers series (2 is the best IMO). There the game is about your economy in terms of resources. Eg/ Say you want a new soldier, the process would be something like so (working backwards here): (snip)

I never played past Settlers 1, I think, but yeah, that’s what I’m talking about! I mean, that’s the level of detail I think I would like. What turned me off about the Settlers series was the complete lack of meaningful combat options.

Can you imagine a game that marries the Settler’s economic model with AOK’s combat and plethora of troop types? It’d be awesome.

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Original post by Spoonster A Warcraft clone where you have to mine 30 different resources, and they even have varying qualities, won't leave any time for building units or attacking. It won't be fun either. :)

I know you were exaggerating to hammer home a point, and point taken. But again, if you don’t want to worry about it you’re really only dealing with 6 resources: Metal, Gold, Gems, Wood, Stone and Food. The design of the game should be such that everything will work fine by ignoring the varying qualities of the resources. It’s just that if you want to, you open up more gameplay options by paying attention to them. The big paradigm change, and I think I’ll go start a new topic concerning it, is the local versus global resource system.

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Original post by DarkHamster I'm working on an RTS right now, and I think I had a somewhat interesting twist on resources. There are two resources ….

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Original post by Brien Shrimp My ideal RTS resource scheme has 2 resources.

I start a thread about a game using 10+ resources and you guys respond how your games are only using TWO?! What were you thinking? Heh heh.

All kidding aside, both games do sound interesting. But as catch already pointed out, I’m an Anal Realism Freak, and two resource types are simply not enough. ARF! ARF! Heh.

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Original post by Sandman Another possible changes to TA's system would be a supply chain system. Rather than having all metal and energy magically transported into some mysterious global supply center, perhaps it needs to be transmitted in some way?

Something I want to try and implement. Where you’d have to manually transport your metal, gold, wood, food, etc. from where it was harvested to where it was needed. But let me go start that other thread….

Thanks again for all the comments!

Take care.