[OT] Campaign detail and playability - was RE: [semi-VV] Multiple resources

I think it comes down to how much can be expected of a campaign player. 
Essentially, to make a game quick and fun, it should basically boil down
to about 3 major decisions per turn.  As you add detail you add
complexity and the number of decisions you have to make increases
rapidly, and trying to determine the ramifications of each decision
becomes harder and harder.

So for campaign games, there should be essentially only 3 major
decisions - A military decision, an economic decision, and a resource
decision. On the Resource side it should be fairly simple - you have a
set amount of resource production and the only question is to increase
or maintain your current level (i.e. investment in mines and factories).
 The Economic decision will be more complicated as it will involve trade
agreements and allocation of money for building factories, ships and
colonization.  The military decision will be the most complicated as you
will have to choose whether to take military action (an attack), move
strategically, build reserves and/or future fleets and capture or denial
of the opponent's resources.

When decision making, ideally it is cut and dried - a yes/no
proposition, the fewer choices the better.  So to that end, I would try
to make as many of the campaign decisions binary or maybe trinary, and
reduce the number of choices that have a sliding scale.

Throwing out a hypothetical scenario, postulate 3 resources, money and
ships.	The resources are FTL material (FTL), Weapons material (W) and
Hull material (H). Money is the nice generic Mega Credit (MCr) and ships
are FT ships.

A generic nation (Generica) might be:

3 star systems (A, B, C) connected by wormhole transits
Star System A produces/refines FTL - 2 units per turn
Star System B produces W and W at 2 units per turn
Star System C is the national capital with the shipyards

The treasury is 1000 MCr and the nation has a fleet of 12 military ships
and 6 cargo ships.

Since this nation produces 6 units of resources at locations different
than it's shipyards, it requires 6 units of cargo ships to "transport"
the materials, although in reality this would also encompass the
appropriate planetary and orbital dock facilities to handle such cargo.

The game system should track 2 possible bottlenecks - manufacturing and
transport.  A running log of the available resources (i.e. 2 FTL, 2 W
and 2 H) and transport available (6 cargo ships) would be required.
Therefore on any given turn, Generica can use up to 6 resources in
building ships.  If ships required more resources than were available on
hand, then resources could be stockpiled over multiple turns.  

Ship building - FTL for Escorts, 1 unit, Cruiser-sized, 2 units and for
Capital ships, 3 units.
For weapons, 1 unit per 3 dice of beams or equivalent.
For Hull, 1 unit per 10 boxes.

So to build a Dreadnaught might require 3 FTL, 8 W and 4 H.  Using
Generica's stats, it would require at least 4 turns to build a
Dreadnaught, the main limitation being the weapon requirements.  If the
rules allow, the "X-class Dreadnaught" could be launched with a partial
weapon load after two turns.

If, using the same example, but Generica only had 2 cargo ships
available, then the Dreadnaught would take 8 turns to complete.

If using the first example, but Generica only had 1 W production, it
would again take 8 turns to complete the Dreadnaught, the limit being
the W production.

If necessary, shipyards can be limited in the number of hulls or overall
mass that can be built per turn. (i.e. Shipyard Level 1 can work on a
single hull up to 25 mass, Shipyard Level 2 can work on up to 2 hulls of
50 mass total, Shipyard Level 3 can work on up to 3 hulls of total mass
of 75 and Shipyard 4 can work on up to 4 hull with total mass of 100.

Paperwork for Generica should then be relatively simple - a listing of
Systems, noting their resources (FTL, W, H, Shipyard, Capital) a listing
of resource production capability (5 main items, FTL, W,H, MCr, ships),
a list of resource stocks (4 main items, FTL, W,H,MCr) and a list of
ships (military,cargo and those building)

Paperwork will increase as nations get larger - a 10 system nation with
2 shipyards and half a dozen resource planets will require more
paperwork than Generica, but I don't see that there is any simple method
to deal with that.

--Binhan

  
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gzg-l@lists.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
[mailto:owner-gzg-l@lists.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU]On Behalf Of Oerjan Ohlson
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2005 12:30 PM
To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: [semi-VV] Multiple resources - a method to balancing
economic might

Binhan Lin wrote:

>The actual game mechanic should be diminishing returns - as you get
more 
>of something, the value of each unit decreases so that it becomes more 
>difficult to gain significant advantages as you increase in
number/power etc.

Directly diminishing returns, or a need to provide sizable garrisons to 
prevent your conquests from revolting (which gives essentially the same 
effect in a more indirect way), or something else entirely - as long as 
there is *something*..Exactly how you implement it depends entirely on
how 
detailed you want to make your campaign's economic rules; the concept
you 
describe looks even more complex than the old Imperial StarFire, which
were 
a fun read but a *pain* to use in actual games :-(

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry