I am trying to figure this out but am drawing a blank. I am developing a Geopolitical Strategy Game that will have production and consumption. The Production part was easy for me but I am having some issues with the demand/consumption. Right now my mindset is a set number for each product produced with the more important products being higher and the less important having a lower base number and then putting in some other modifiers like economy, etc to determine demand but I am not 100% sure that is the best way. Any advice?

JaLue2002 said:
the more important products being higher and the less important having a lower base number

How do you determine how important a product is?

(Also, this is probably the wrong forum)

My first guess is to have “consumers" that need certain amount of products each time period or each turn. Then you have supply and demand, and can decide who will get what. From that you can compute how happy the consumers are, and evolve from that.

This doesn't include “geo political strategy” I think, so thinking how that influences the goods flow are next steps.

What kind of “geopolitical strategy” are you interested in? There's a marked difference between, say, a planned economy during a world war (e.g. our Army want a lot of tanks → we want steel → subsidize and expand foundry X and build another at Y) and trade competition (e.g. we have surplus apples → apple juice advertisements → increased apple demand).

@LorenzoGatti I'd say it's closer to the latter. War is part of the game but not a major part. focuses more on governing and trade. I have it set up now where the players can build factories to produce goods which then pay their workers an amount depending on the current economic strength of the country. Workers get paid per turn. Income tax comes out and whatever the percentage is set by the player. Then the basic necessities (Basic Food, Electricity, Basic Clothes, and Basic Furniture) are deducted from whats left of that with set percentages. After that, Luxury Food, Luxury Furniture, and Transportation comes out, and then entertainment and other things.

You should think from bottom to top. Start with some individuals, what do they need to survive and set that as a base. Now if they have more than their basic needs, they'll start to be happy and when being happy, they start to get a partner and children which determines how much they need. More goods, more children means more consumers.

This is how we designed our Banished like city building game back in 2014 - 2015. Our cope however, was much smaller, we had to balance a township rather than a country but thoughts should be similar.

It gets difficult when you start taking more information into account, personal health, kindof the job of an individual and how it is working (regular day basis, day to night or regular night basis) and a lot more possible influence. You could also start from real country statistics and calculate your economical situation from them

If your game is about competition between nations, you should focus on rules that allow a skilled player to identify opportunities and turn them into advantages.

Starting from the foundations, what contributes to the “score” of a country? Are you trying to measure prosperity, influence over other countries, wealth, or something else? What player-determined policies and initiatives can affect the score?

All features in the game need to affect the score to be meaningful, even if some unnecessary ones can carry their weight with intrinsic entertainment value (e.g. comparatively thrilling realtime decreasing-price auctions instead of sealed bids).

There is always a demand for strategy games, for example, according to the last Steam festival, Steam users have Strategy as the most attractive game type and on second place RPGs, all other game types come to a lot lower.

But here is the funny thing, most released games are Puzzles and Platformers, this is strange because these 2 game types come last on user preferences based on Steam data.

So what happens? Are developers blind to this?

No, but Strategy and RPG games are HARD to make so these game types niches are not very saturated.

Hope this info helps

16Bitnights said:

There is always a demand for strategy games, for example, according to the last Steam festival, Steam users have Strategy as the most attractive game type and on second place RPGs, all other game types come to a lot lower.

But here is the funny thing, most released games are Puzzles and Platformers, this is strange because these 2 game types come last on user preferences based on Steam data.

So what happens? Are developers blind to this?

No, but Strategy and RPG games are HARD to make so these game types niches are not very saturated.

Hope this info helps

Way to not read the OP, man! ?

AH yes sorry my bad, I understood it wrong.

I tend to agree with Shaarigan's answer.

Always start from the foundation when building the algorithms for balancing such a game.

Basic needs → and then evolve to more complex ones