Trade and resources....

[Blake]

I had something of a thought on technology, trade and resources, you can read through the following semi-coherent post or skip to the semi-coherent (but shorter!) summary below.

It would often be desirable, to give another faction some of the benefits of a technology, without actually giving them the technology, there are numerous reasons one would want to do this, from being stingy to not trusting the other party to being greedy and wanting to milk them off all their worth.

So the idea is to have resources you can build and sell, which are made available at certain tech/tech levels, these resources could be called "Tech Goods" as they are tied to certain technologies. As an example there might be:
ElecGoods lvl 1,2,3 (electronics, computers, software)
BioGoods lvl 1,2,3 (drugs, organisms etc)
WeaponGoods lvl 1,2,3 (blow stuff up, etc)

Tech goods would become available at certain technologies, or combination of technologies, as a rough guide, the lvl1 good would become available approximately 1/6 of the way up the tech tree, the lvl2 about 3/6 and the lvl3 at 5/6.

To construct the goods would require resources and metal, like to construct level1 goods might require 10 metal + 100 production, the 2nd lvl 25 metal + 400 production.

Things which can be built would have resource requirements:
Sludgegun: 2xWeaponGoods1, 1xBioGoods2, 50 metal, 400 production.

A race with the technology to build lvl1 WeaponGoods and lvl2 BioGoods would be able to build the Sludgegun normally, the citizens automatically construct the extra goods required, so the cost would also show as 95metal/1000 production.
A faction without the technology would only be able to build it if it has the required units of weapon and biogoods in it's stockpile, and it would not be able to build these goods, it would have to beg, buy or steal them.

Goods would serve two purposes, trading partial technology and resource stockpiling, like say you want to build some nuclear missiles but dont have the warheads, you could build the propulsion and materal components in advance, then "assemble" the nuclear missiles when you aquire the warheads.

The system of tradable goods would allow for some great strategies, like focusing entirely on one arm of the techtree and relying on trading your high teched goods for other factions goods, such a strategy incurs great risk because the other players might be able to resist the alure of the high tech goods, leaving you in a bad position, or another player might decide to simply blackmail you for the goods rather than buy them. The main advantage is it makes a tech lead a very valuable resource, which effectively can be traded without comprimising the tech lead.

It would allow for very lucrative alliances where each player takes half the tech tree and they trade the goods, such alliances should even flourish in highly competitive games (altough both players will probably research the weapons technology... for when the alliance is broken)

However note that the system also gives imperfect trade, not all components will be able to be built using goods, so an alliance each taking half the tech tree, wont be able to build as much stuff as a single faction that has the entire tech tree.

With respect to coding, I think the easiest way is to allow an effectively unlimited number of goods to be defined, the first few will be basic goods, like food, metal etc that can be produced or mined easily, a goods definition would go something like this:
Code: ANTI
Name: Antimatter
Tech Pre-req: Energy 21, Elec 18
Facility Pre-req: AM-PP
Cost: METAL 10, PROD 400, ELEC3 1

[Blake]

Summary:

Definition of Tech Good:
A good that can be constructed upon discovery of prerequisite technologies.

Buildable things can have goods as part of the cost of construction, if your faction possesses the knowledge of how to build the good then the required goods will automatically be constructed.

Goods would be stored per planet (any city on a planet can use goods on the same planet the same turn), goods can be moved between planets via several channels, like stargate transportation, freighter, open market....

Reason:
To make it possible to trade some benefits of a technological lead without comprimising the lead, and keeping the number of things that can be traded limited, there might be 100-200 buildable things, and only 20 tech goods, this makes things such as pricing much easier, also makes for easier balance, in particular reducing the effectivness of alliances by making it so that the most uber items require a full understanding of the technology to build, while more ordinary benefits can be traded.
Also allows for some stockpiling for quite natural "rush building" without unrealistic and unbalancing insta-builds.


Notes:
I used the "ELEC1,2,3" thing as an example, it might make more sense to have more specialized goods, for example "Optical Components" and "Advanced Optical Components" that allow construction of laser weapons, telescopes and targetting systems, so a basic pulse laser might cost 1x Optical Components + 1x Basic Capacitor +5 metal + 50 production, to assemble the laser might only require a rudimentary understanding of weapon technology, while the components might have more hefty energy requirements.

Notes on trade:
Ideally there will be two ways to trade goods, you can trade directely with another player, at an agreed upon price which may or may not be fair. Or you can open a good for sale on the market, allowing it to flow from your market to other players. Your empire will generally get a fair deal this way and it's hands off, micro free and non-fattening, ofcourse it would be foolish to allow sale of the latest weapons on the open market, because the profit orientated industrialist's will sell to anyone (as long as they are the highest bidder, and not your sworn enemy), however there would be little harm in allowing sale of slightly obsolete goods that are already in circulation.

[Michiel]

So there could be items/units/weapons that require the actual knowledge/technology. It will be neccesary for the most powerfull and advanced items/units/weapons or they'll be to easy to get.

And if there's gonna be money in the game, why not give the players the ability to take a loan from another player and pay a certain percentage of interest each timeperiod/turn.

[Blake]

Yes, stuff will have a technology requirement, in some cases the technology requirement will be higher than for the goods required to build it, and remember that the tech goods will have a technology requirement too, obviously a high level weapon will require high level tech goods, meaning that even if the weapon has no special tech requirement, it would still not be easy to get...

Re: Loans.
Some sort of barter board (like Civ3's) is almost a given, so a loan is just something like
1000 credits || 20 Credits/turn for 100 turns.

But sane players generally wont accept such an arrangment because it encourages a backstab, the three deals that make good sense are
lump sum for lump sum (no ongoing commitment)
per turn for per turn (neither side benefits more from breaking the deal)
something for nothing

any other deal just begs for a backstab

[Blake]

Natural Resource Good:

Heres another way the good model can work, lets say there is a natural resource, oil. A refinery can be built on oil.
The refinery produces a good, Plastic*

Plastic good definition is like this:

Code: PLASTC
Name: Plastics
Tech Pre-req: ENERGY 5
Cost: PROD 40

The refinery improvement is configured so as to produce N units of plastic each turn, which are added to the planets stockpile.

Next, something to make with plastic, the "Cheap'n'Nasty Fighter", which costs some units of plastic (in addition to other things)

Until Energy level 5, you absolutely must have units of plastic in your stockpile to build "C'n'N fighters", however after Energy 5, if there is no plastic available, the workers will automatically synthesize plastic (or prehaps they build fighters out of non-plastic materials)

What this means is strategic resources, that for a while remain the only way to build units, but at some point the unit may be built without the resource available; however the resource still acts to make the unit cheaper to build.

And these resources may be traded or anything.... and because they are extracted at a limited rate, having more resource patches helps, and you can also trade part of the output of a single resource patch. (ofcourse such limitations are usually not present in resource models... with the notable exception of Civ3)

[DeathByTheSword]

this is a great idea but first of all to have a bases produce a unit it will need several different factories so it will take a lot longer to have an effective unitbuilding base.....and if we make to much different kind of rescources the player will get confused.....3rd the problem of having to much plastic in one city and no metal and in another it is visa versa.....it we are going to do this...you would have to make a general pool of resources per world so that you dont have less of a problem with forgotten rescources....but great idea!

[Blake]

Yeah, resources would be pooled per world (or per faction per world), doing it per city would be micro hell. Any city will be able to extract from the world pool (there may be an exception for blockaded cities)

The notable exception would be production points (factory time) which would have to be immeditately "consumed" in the city it is created, the exception to this is it would be possible to "tax" production, which is then used for state purposes, such as building terrain improvements and anything that is built in orbit (like spacestations and starships)

[targon]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this concept seems to be some kind of revolution. Usualy, strategy games are tied to production/materials scheme, both RTS and turn-based alike. Tech goods scheme may improve this stuff a lot.
BTW, let's make StP _very_ different and interesting game!

[Blake]

I'm pleased you think that way. It is original and my idea In fact most of StP design is now original and does not compare easily with any existing game.


I'm going to code the economy model, which should also be fairly original (for a strategy game anyway, many Sim/Citybuilder/MMORPG feature something simialler), the addition of open markets and real economy like controls (taxes, tariffs etc) will free the player of the burden of resource micromanagment without resorting to "smart AI" helpers.

I'll give a more thorough writeup on the economy model later.

[targon]

Mmm... how you manage to nail open markets to ordered economy of Civ-like games? Promising idea, but even trade routes in Civs were created by player...
OK, I think, there may be "war" state for fighting planets so government may use resources and build effective war machine. Other worlds may be in fact "free" and pay taxes so government may buy gods or build things.
BTW, I'm wondering what organization or individual from Civs may buy things like city walls or barracs. Criminals?