[semi-VV] Multiple resources - a method to balancing economic might

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.

Many games artificially cap unit number or resources, which just means
everyone soon just hits the ceiling and you have parity without the
possibility of any one side gaining a significant advantage.

By using diminishing returns, you allow people incremental advantages
with increased cost but in general there will be parity.

So how to apply diminishing returns to a resource/economic system?

You can PSB sometype of overhead cost or bottleneck.  For instance, in
modern society, everyone uses oil, but not everyone wants an oil
refinery in their backyard - so although more oil has become available
over the years, the costs of processing and the availability of
processing facilities has actually gone up due to the difficulty of
building new refineries and cleaning up old-defunct ones.  

So perhaps you can designate Planet Z as the processing facility for raw
Unobtanium, able to process up to 10 units per game turn.  The reason
each planet doesn't have Unobtanium processing plants is that it's
extremely toxic/radio-active etc. etc.	So even you have access to 20
units of raw Unobtanium per turn, you can only process 10 until you
expand your facility on Planet Z.

Unfortunately, this makes Planet Z a key strategic target as the loss of
the facilities will cripple your FTL manufacturing capacity for many
turns, so you have to invest in a defense fleet and/or planetary
defenses to guard your resource.  This will effectively add over-head as
you have now invested in a fleet for defense that could have been used
elsewhere. 

Conversely, if you simply import your refined Unobtanium, you are not
directly constrained in having to defend your source (you may have
treaties or defensive pacts that may get you involved) so you don't have
that "overhead" cost of defense.

So resources could have different attribues - Hull material is cheap and
plentiful and requires little processing and no special facilities,
weapon resources are moderately expensive, somewhat limited, and,
requires moderate processing (any planet can house the facilites), and
FTL resource is rare, expensive and requires significant processing to
be usable.

Depending on how detailed you want to be, you can set up resource
convoys and have to assign escorts for each resource, or simply abstract
it to Y number of freighters are required to transport X amount of
resource and leave it at that.

This is somewhat self-limiting, as an empire grows in strength and
resources, a larger portion of it's strength will be applied to
infrastructure improvements and defense and can't necessarily be applied
to a war front.

--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: Sunday, February 06, 2005 2:19 AM
To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: [semi-VV] Multiple resources - was RE: Game balance

Binhan Lin wrote:

Eg., your example where A and B trade with one another and thus get a 
mutual benefit - *both* of them get cheap FTL drives and cheap beams -
has 
a direct parallell in GW's "Blood Royale", where Italy and Spain usually

set up a highly lucrative trade (Italian Luxuries and Food for Spanish
Iron 
and Semi-Luxuries) allowing them to cash in more money than the other 
kingdoms can... money with which they can buy armies to protect their 
resource-producing areas, and quite soon also go on the offensive. (OK, 
technically the other three kingdoms could get a total of 130 gold per
turn 
vs. Spain/Italy's 120, but the trade negotiations to pull that 130-gold 
deal off are so hairy that I've never actually seen it happen... and if
it 
*should* happen, either of Spain and Italy can stop it in its tracks by 
invading Provence.)

>I don't think the game system should be auto-balancing, otherwise why
play?

It shouldn't be *completely* auto-balancing - ie., an advantage gained 
shouldn't automatically be *completely* negated by the game mechanics -
but 
if there are *no* mechanics to rein in the leader, you usually end up
with 
a "campaign" which is decided by the first few battles. Such campaigns
tend 
to be very short, since non-leading players usually drop out soon after
it 
becomes obvious who'll win.

Regards,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com