There are planets, each planet can have 4 types of buildings (farms - make food, mines - make minerals for the factories, factories - produce goods, offices - provide services). The twist is the player don't have the direct control over what is built (the player's control lacks precision here), but that's less important.

Now the use of these:

- farms - simple, population consume the food, no problem here

- mines - divide mines output by number of factories and then you get if there is shortage of materials, it results in various degrees of penalty to factories, again, no problem here

- factories - these make consumer goods (affect population happiness) and industrial goods (detemine the cost of ships & building speed, max free ships maintenance, etc) PROBLEM HERE

- offices - these provide global services, if not sufficient all other buildings get a penalty PROBLEM HERE

The important thing is none of these is used by the player directly. The player uses money for everything (ordering ships, etc). So the factories do not limit how much you can build, there is no production queue or anything like that, from the player's point of view there is only one immediate resource: money (and I don't want to change it since it perfectly fits the game theme). Yet I want the player to worry about factories and farms and mines and services.

Now the question: I want to make the bonuses/penalties like "if not enough factories ships cost more", but how do I define "not enough"? Similarly I need to make some "enough/needed" point for services...

With food it's trivial, divide food by number of population but the factories and services is not so easy.

Note: as usual I prefer it simple if possible

Tip: Usable variables I could think of: number of planets, population, number of buildings total, number of buildings type X, output of buildings type X, number/tonnage of ships in service.

Some kind of simple graphing (logically as well as visually) that represents the formulas of production

Building Product A takes 1 of component X 2 of component Y and 5 of Component Z

unitize the current incoming raw materials to match the formula to show what can be produced

example

turns incoming resources are 20 X 15 Y 35 Z

applying the production formula thus 20/1 = 20 15/2=7.5 (round down?) 35/5 = 7

shows that 7 is the basic (optimal) 'A' production possible and simply showing the numbers makes obvious what the limiting factors are

I assume the decision for the player is wheter to push production beyond its optimal which introduces extra costs (and WHAT is the currency of THAT cost??? some universal currency the player has a supply of available for this purpose ...)

for that you need to show the player how non-optimal production costs how much extra

first for the formulas components to obtain additional counts to specially increase their availability for production (based on how far the source, etc...)

extra X cost 10 currency

extra Y cost 7 currency

extra Z cost 1 currency

and possibly an ovarall cost for difficulty of the non-standard operation of the non-optimal production (10 per produced Unit A)

Now the player has to decide by looking at what he controls and prioritizing where he needs thing built and then expending his currency to get the best result

Simplest system that I can think of, doing almost everything as one-to-one relationships.

• Every building that isn't a farm requires one farm.
• Every factory requires one mine.
• Leaving out offices for the time being, will get back to them in a moment.

Production is still possible if something's missing from the ideal supply chain -- but for each missing prerequisite you have to pay a one-credit penalty for each missing part of the chain. (Or 10 credit or 100 credit, etc., whatever is proportional to other costs in your game.)

Like say you want something and it takes 10 factories to build. You have 9 factories, 5 mines, and more than enough farms. You pay a penalty of 4 credits for the missing mines (to supply the missing minerals), plus 2 credits for the missing factory+mine (to supply both the production and the minerals), for 6 credits total.

Or, say you need to build a 4-factory thing, but you have 2 factories, 3 mines, and 4 farms. You pay a penalty of 7 credits (because your supply chain requires 4 factories, 4 mines, and 8 farms, and you're missing exactly 7 buildings in the supply chain).

This is easy to visualize if you do it as a directed graph of buildings. Like say your planetary production view is rows of buildings, with their prerequisites done as lines. Below, I represent an empty plot as [ ], a farm as [F], a mine as [M], and a factory as [S], and the thing the factories are producing as [SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP].

[F] [F] [F] [F] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

| [M] | [M] | [M] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ]

\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /

[S] [S] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

| | | | | | | |

[SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP]

So this way you can highlight the missing buildings, and the player can understand exactly where that 7-credit penalty comes from. (Maybe you don't go all the way up to farms to calculate penalties when lower buildings don't exist -- it's not like you have to feed workers in the mines you don't have -- but the general idea here is that whatever you penalize and however much you penalize it, you can highlight it visually by changing color, putting a big X or [-1] sticker on it, etc.)

For offices, maybe one administrative office or general store or something is required for each octet of buildings, like in the below. The player is missing eight buildings now.

_____[O]_____ _____[ ]_____ _____[ ]_____ _____[ ]_____

/ \ / \ / \ / \

[F] [F] [F] [F] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

| [M] | [M] | [M] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ]

\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /

[S] [S] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

| | | | | | | |

[SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP]

Maybe maintenance of things can take up a production slot, too. Like if you've got a ship garrisoned at the planet, it takes up one production automatically.

_____[O]_____ _____[ ]_____ _____[ ]_____ _____[ ]_____

/ \ / \ / \ / \

[F] [F] [F] [F] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

| [M] | [M] | [M] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ] | [ ]

\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /

[S] [S] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]

| | | | | | | |

[MAINT] [SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP]

The maintenance doesn't block the ship production, but you pay a 13-credit penalty now.

On the other hand, if you've got more complete production lines than you can use building/maintaining your own stuff, the factories automatically produce consumer goods or something else beneficial, represented here as [!].

_____[O]_____ _____[O]_____ _____[O]_____ _____[O]_____

/ \ / \ / \ / \

[F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [F] [ ]

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

| [M] | [M] | [M] | [M] | [M] | [M] | [M] | [ ]

\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ /

[S] [S] [S] [S] [S] [S] [S] [ ]

| | | | | | | |

[MAINT] [SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP] [!] [!]

Here you pay no penalty, and also you get two consumer goods.

Anyway, note that this isn't a map such that the player is placing buildings down on it. It's essentially just a bar graph going left to right of the buildings that exist on a planet, plus lines representing requirement relationships. But it gives an easy visualization of why the player is getting a penalty or why they're getting a bonus.

More abstract. Don't focus on a single planet, make it an empire wide mechanic. Planets here are merely a platform to hold these buildings, there is no production on planetary level, the planets just add to the empire wide production.

You know, let's drop the "if not enough it increases the cost of new ships", it distracts too much from the premise. Let's make instead "if not enough consumer goods happiness -X" and "if not enough industrial goods maintenance cost for ships increased by XX%".

I would make a slider (empire wide) to decide the factories production (consumer vs industrial goods). Now the consumers goods should be somehow connected to the population while industrtial goods connected to ships/military/etc.

But you know, here is the key problem, if I make that "happiness penalty = consumer goods / population" and "maintenance cost penalty = industrial goods / number of ships" I'm comparing apples to oranges... How I'm suppose to balance these? If you have 500 million population and 40 ships for example? How to scale the consumer to industrial goods need?

Sounds like you mainly need a formula for converting from consumer goods to industrial goods. Like a factory can produce One Industrial good, which can be used to maintain One Capital ship, or it can produce One Consumer good, which can keep Ten Million people supplied? (or if you want to keep Consumer goods 1:1 with the populate, just shift it to a choice of either 1 Industrial or 10 million Consumer goods -- though I prefer squishing it down to whatever your population units are. For example, games tend to show one person icon per X million people on the planet or whatever.)

It's basicly a balancing question... My biggest worry is that these run away, like consumer goods end up requiring 10,000 units of output to keep population happy while ships maintenance 20 units to keep everything perfectly operational, which would in practice reduce it to making consumer goods only since the industrial goods would be an insignificant problem.

Maybe something like "need = population + number of planets x 100 + number of buildings x 10" for consumer goods and "need = population / 3 + number of planets x 100 + number of buildings x 20" for industrial goods? Then if you have the output above the "need" it means abundance, if below it means shortage. And a very similar one for services.

Less logical but the formula is more similar, so all types of production stay more or less proportional... Especially since food use population as the base "need = population".