Hi

Im wokring on an idea for a sort of Total War for the modern age. You fight for control of cities on a map with todays armies and develop your cities. The map may be semi-abstracted, allowing bases as well as "large cities", prefereably using the nearby map terrain to effect how cities produce resources.

All total war games uses (more or less) a single resource (money/coin/florins etc). I want to diverse it a bit for my game. Im thinking:

1. Cash/supply - used for army upkeep, recruiting and buildings - (from taxes, trade, mines, what else?)

2. Industry - used to produce most non-infantry units (from factories etc). Must be moved by trucks to where its spended.

So economy-focused cities will supply recruiting cities (military complexes) with the industry resource.

What are your thought? Any better/more fun way to divide it? It can also be three resources, introducing manpower for example.

What are your thought? Any better/more fun way to divide it? It can also be three resources, introducing manpower for example.

Diversity in resources should result in a diversity in game mechanism. The primary focus should be 'How to gain resource X ?', placing a resource price-tag at certain ingame items is just a matter of balance.

Example of RTS games of different resource systesm are:

1. passive resource generation: build passive structures to generate more resources, like energy stations

2. active resource generation: using some of your units to generate resources, like people worshipping in a temple to generate mana

3. regrowing resource gather: a resources, which can be gathered, but will regrow over time

4. unique resource gather: a unique resources, which can be only gathered once

5. looted resources: resources, which can be only looted by defeating enemies

Using different resources relying on the same resource system get boring quite quickly, therefor your should pick at least two different resource system if you want to support more than one resource.

I agree, but your input is more related to small-scale strategy games like starcraft or age of empires.

When you control entire cities or continents i prefer a more abstracted way of handling economy/resources.

Ideas on my suggestion? (first post)

Another version might be:

1. Cash (for many things)

2. Weapons (for units)

3. Materials (for buildings/infrastructure)

Here the problem is, how are they generated? Building factories in a city will produce both weapons and materials? Seems boring. And having

weapons factory

material factory

also seems boring. Somehow using the terrain (fields, forest, hills, water, mountains) would be nice.

Is your intent to improve the economy from a purely cosmetic standpoint by adding complexity, or do you want to create actual depth with a layered economy?

Even turn-based 4X strategy games implement resources rarity in an effort to funnel options in some meaningful ways (several simpler games as well, such as Knights of Honor).

Cosmetically, I can't really chime in, you could use pretty much any modern resource and make a more or less efficient breakdown of things you want to acquire based on what they'd require to make.

If the intent is to make a deep economy however, let's discuss more about your game mechanics first.

I'm already seeing a key difference between the two resources. The cash is a pretty standard resource, harvested and then spent like in any other RTS. The industry resource has to be moved around, which I haven't seen in many games. The key is to make this mechanic fun, with interesting strategic options, not just a logistical chore you have to go through to build certain units. The logistical chore feel to moving your industrial resources is probably more accurate, but not more fun.

I could see it being pretty fun though. Maybe you can only get this industrial resource from your home base, and have to send it to your expansions to keep them being fully productive, allowing your opponent to intercept the resources along the way. Maybe you can also get this industrial resource by destroying enemy units that were built with it, or by pirating the supply lines. I could see this working well if the industrial resource is some kind of alien technology, giving the feeling that it's very limited and valuable, worthy of being harvested and recycled. Or maybe as a colonization game, where resources are sent to other islands (or planets), and pirates attack the supply lines.

On a related note, one game comes to mind where you have to physically move supplies. Conquest: Frontier Wars. Your ships require supplies like ammo to fire weapons and use abilities. They can refill supplies by being near supply ships, and supply ships refill by being near a planet. It gives the challenge of moving supplies around, but the supplies that have to be moved around are the ones that keep an army running, not the ones that build a replacement army.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquest:_Frontier_Wars