While pondering some of the elements for my current project I noticed I seem to be stuck a little in figuring out a good Strategic Resource system. Thinking about it, there's largely three versions of strategic resources in 4X games: 1- Bonus Resources. Such as planetary effects in Master of Orion 2 [hereafter Moo], or tile modifiers in Master of Magic [hereafter MoM], and the Civilization games. Build a city near them, or occupy the planet, and voila! Bonus. 2- PreRequisite Resources. Such as Iron/Oil in Civ 3 and 4. As long as your empire controls the resource and there's transport between the resource and the city, the pre-requisite is met. 3- Stockpiled Resources. Such as mana in MoM, and the resources of games like Imperialism, Heroes of Might and Magic. Each turn, an occupied resource provides some unit of 'stuff' to the empire's stockpile. And I'm largely stuck trying to combine the best of each and running into the weaknesses of all of them. Here's some of my thoughts on each. Bonus: Easy to implement, but I've always found them very... boring, and not very effective differentiating map regions or in acting as desirable capture points. PreRequisites: I like the concept, but in practical terms it has a number of downsides. In Civilization at least, you'd discover a technology which made new resources available, and more often than not the resource would appear under a road. Viola! The entire Oil transfer infrastructure for the entire nation, built in a day. Bothers me. This too does very little in differentiating map regions. Stockpile: Similar to the Oil problem, the fact that ore mined on the other side of the world is instantaneously available with no downside bothers me. Stockpile systems also lend themselves to tedious micromanagement... So I'm curious if I've perhaps overlooked a few, or what other people really like, or dislike in 4X strategic resources?

Something I would like to see is a few options.

Why not have all 3? Want bonus? set that as your option before you start the game.

Now, as for stockpile why not have city/planet based stockpiles? You can mine resources and then set up simple trade routes (Each city you could set a min stockpile, anytime a city drops below that min level stuff from cities with more get routed to that city. Cities closer to the source would get their stockpiles filled faster. 2+ cities lower? the one with the larger gap from current to min desired level gets more of the stuff from other cities. All cities have filled their min level? Surplus are divided up based on the min level you set. Higher the level, the higher the surplus they'll stock)


I've been playing Civilization 4 lately (just picked it up, I had a little extra money saved up and was bored) and I like how they did it, sort of. Such a simple way makes it a little more interesting to control resources. You get to the oil age, and suddenly you notice things of oil poping up in all the areas you don't control,... If you get lucky enough to get two or three sources under your firm control, and only a few outside of your control you can race to take those over as well. If you are the only alliance controling such an important resource the game might be yours. Then again, you might be the target of lots of attacks so if you can't use it fast enough to hold it, you lose anyway.

I really think food should be handled as a global or at least regional resource. If cities are all on the same continent, or connected by roads/trade routes, they should be able to share food. Something like this would allow the player to have more specialized cites without worrying as much about max population or food in the area: if the player has a well-developed city near some grain, he should have no problem building that city near all those resource bearing mountians. You could add in a civ-like "corruption based on distance" to the food supply as well.

I don't mind the "oil infrastructure built in a day" thing you mention. Even in MoM, wasn't a turn supposed to be a full year?

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Bonus: Easy to implement, but I've always found them very... boring, and not very effective differentiating map regions or in acting as desirable capture points.

Well, one way to make a feature more differentiating is to increase its power level. If the bonus reasources provide a strong enough, or even better, a unique bonus, then towns adjacent to them can become highly sought after.

Say that, instead of a marginal effect from adjacent terrain, like +10-15% production due to an adjacent iron mine, that individual reasources be rarer (such that many cities might not have any, or only one), but the power of each type of reasource could be scaled up to provide a strongly notable feature for that town. Maybe even double or triple the production value of that town (of course this depends on the number of cities one can expect to control in the game, with smaller bonuses for games with less total towns, since each one will contribute a greater proportion of your overall income)

An even more interesting extension of this, in my opinion, is for these reasources to provide a unique effect upon the town, not merely percentile bonuses to existing city stats. This could tie into prerequisite resources, as well. Say that only towns adjacent to a Mithril mine could produce powerful Mithril Golems, a unit powerful enough that the location could become highly strategic. To avoid the one-turn oil network issue you mention, you could have this bonus only apply to a single town nearest the resource in question.

Basically, I think that by having fewer resource nodes, but having each of them be far more powerful and distinct, serves as a great way to clearly differentiate cities, and have control of these resources actually mean something.

Of course, none of this relates to stockpiled resources, which I tend to consider quite a seperate category altogether.

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Why not have all 3? Want bonus? set that as your option before you start the game.

Because unit production balance depends highly on the pre-requisites' availability?

More practically because I'm not sure that I can make one well, let alone 3!

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Cities closer to the source would get their stockpiles filled faster.

That's a good idea. Nice and abstract while still maintaining locality.

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I really think food should be handled as a global or at least regional resource. If cities are all on the same continent, or connected by roads/trade routes, they should be able to share food. Something like this would allow the player to have more specialized cites without worrying as much about max population or food in the area: if the player has a well-developed city near some grain, he should have no problem building that city near all those resource bearing mountians. You could add in a civ-like "corruption based on distance" to the food supply as well.

*nod* I think they should still have to worry about max population and food, but like you say, not as much.

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Even in MoM, wasn't a turn supposed to be a full year?

Still, going from "what's this black stuff seeping out of the ground?" to thousands of miles of pipeline in a year? Still, good to know that others perhaps don't have gripes with it.

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Say that only towns adjacent to a Mithril mine could produce powerful Mithril Golems, a unit powerful enough that the location could become highly strategic.

Indeed. This is part of what I'm toying with that I'd like to keep the most. The hangups come more with the magnitude of "adjacent", or wether the mine should be able to produce infinite amounts of Golems?

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Of course, none of this relates to stockpiled resources, which I tend to consider quite a seperate category altogether.

Indeed.

well, another way to look at it is that all that time you were researching the science, you are developing the stuff for it. After all, you don't tell a group of people to go research this black stuff for 10 years, have them sit on their asses all that time and on the last day of the research grant have them magically come up with everything.

Also, if that bothers you add a new tile type. Pipeline. While you're at it, add in transmission lines and that to send power between cities. Build the big nuclear plant in one city, and use the power to double production in other cities.

IMO the city that most closely borders the resources should have the abundance of the resources, and they more slowly trickle out to other cities that are connected, not immediately be available as if those cities border it as well.

IMO it would be cool to calculate the amount of resources available to a city by the shipping cost of the resource.

I think the stockpiling should be limited to the controlling city, and the capacity of the stockpiling be based on city size, and whatever facilities are available that help in that area.

Depending on the traversal distance that the shipment would have to take, whether that be by road, ship, plane(if they have airports), or combinations(resource city to city a by truck, city a has an airport so flies to city b, then city b by truck to the destination city. A* could easily be set up to automatically take these things into account, and it could dynamically update when cities build different road types, airports, docks. The farther the city the less 'resource income' it gets from the city that controls the resource.

Using a Civilization style example, the city that controls the resource(has it in its boundaries), such as oil for example might get say +100 oil units per turn. Maybe after refinery processing or something it effectively inflates to 150 / turn. A nearby city connected by road might get a +50 oil per turn. This number isn't a stockpile resource, it represents a capacity to build stuff that uses that resource. A city way far away from the source might get +5 oil per turn, which would limit their production and make large vehicle types impractical to develop there. A battleship might take +10 oil "production points" per turn to create, if a town isn't getting a proper amout of oil production from its combined routes to resource cities then its production is limited to units with smaller production requirements. These production requirements could change with additional technology in a town, so a town that might otherwise not be capable of building a battleship might be able to start building them after construction of a dry dock or a better quality shipyard or something.

Using all these ideas, perhaps the controlling city gets a 150 oil 'production' per turn(a number based on the capability of the oil well). Based on shipping distance all other cities will get oil production points. The controlling city might default to stockpile 10%, so 15 of that oil would go into stockpile, which for example might have a capacity of 10000. So essentially the city produces 135 oil production available for use. When that capacity is maxed out, or the player is given the option to stop stockpiling, the production available for use goes back to 150, or whatever it is based on the player settings. So by default, allied cities get portions of this 150, distributed based on their relative travel distances. It could perhaps be an option on a city to disable its oil shipment from certain controlling cities, which would put more back into the pool, and therefor increase the production available to other cities that are still recieving. Perhaps any oil requiring projects that the controlling city makes are pulled from the stockpile, or there could be an additional production value that the controlling city has that isn't related to the distributed production.

It like the idea of resources flowing outward from their source and think it could be an interesting design element, rather than the civ method of everyone gaining the pre-req as soon as you control a resource of that type. I would even consider any land link between cities as capable of resource transporting, although at heavy penalty. I always thought it lame that my cities would not get a resource simply from no road between them.

Conquering the controlling cities would give the attacker control of the resource as well as the stockpile, which they could attempt to safely remove from the city by transport or destroy, like the burning oil wells in iraq. At the same time if someone fortified military units on someones resource tiles, the controlling player would not immediately be cut off from resources. Trade systems would be maintained until the resource stockpile is depleted. This could give interesting strategy options, allowing players to build stockpile locations in various cities to increase their capacity to stockpile resources. If a town isn't using the production available to it for a given resource, it can optionally be stockpiled in those cities, or redistributed to other cities. Then when resources are cut off for whatever reason, the civilization could still survive and produce, essentially living off their savings.

My 2c.

Heh, no it doesn't bother me enough to add pipelines/powerlines and the headache it entails. That's something that doesn't bother me enough to ignore users/players/customers that say it doesn't bother them...


Actually the 'locality' concerns is one of the things I'm mostly settled upon.

What I'd really like to do is to give each resource [or perhaps just any resource] a movement value. You've seen units in 4X or wargames, where you see the highlighted area that the unit can move?

That's the idea. Each resource has a similar highlighted area based on movement. As technology [cranes, wagons, barges] improves, and infrastructure [roads, rail, teleporters] are built, the influence of the harvested resource expands along with it. Projects within the highlighted area get that resource pre-requisite met. Areas of industry will naturally develop closer to their resources, and cities will develop near natural transport features [rivers and harbors].

The problems come a little with "What happens when they overlap? Which source is used?" "So stuff can only be built in those little radiuses? That sucks!" "How do you move resources to new continents to get a beachhead?" "Do the resources put out 1 resource per turn, or more, or infinite?" "Should food/wood follow the same system?"

The food concern is the sticking point, since using food or even wood via the same mechanism largely requires some magnitude to accomany the resource generation, rather than just a boolean highlighted area.

A few ideas I've narrowed down and am kicking about:

1. Have storage houses, like a Granary for food. Extracting a resource sends it to a specified storage house within range. The storage house keeps a priority queue of consumers for that resource, and divvies resources out to projects.

This would largely solve the overlapping resource problem, and could be used for food. It would still need some alternative method for expeditions, and would likely be a UI headache.

2. Have two methods of 'mining'. One that activates the resource over its area, and one that produces a unit of the resource instead. The unit can then be transported around and consumed to provide that resource over an area for a turn as if it were mined there.

This would largely solve the overlapping resource problem, since the boolean area could be maintained. It also solves expedition problems, and makes expeditions and projects that require 'units' of resources to be BIG undertakings [for better or worse]. It won't work for food, but the UI issues shouldn't be too bad.

With regards to stockpiles, you could have it so while the resource is potentially available everywhere, it is not without cost.

For each city, players can opt to import a number of units of a resource, albeit at a cost. For the harvesting city, it would be free. From there, the cost would be determined by distance, terrain, and appropriate technologies (want to carry some to the next island without breaking the bank? research better sea transportation).

Alternatively, if you dont have any currency, or you'd just rather do it a different way, you can assume each city can only spend a fixed amount, and thus, only recieves a certain number of units based on what it could afford. So in a year you would get oil across the globe, but only a barrel or two. You can play with this a bit to vary the effect, such as having a minimum amount to recieve imports (so the far away colony won't get any till the local ones have a decent supply).