Economics in games
I’ve been playing some Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance the last few days and it’s got me thinking about economies in games.
In SupCom you have three resources: Mass, Energy, and Your Last God-damned Nerve. You spend the entire game with a mess of power, but struggle constantly for Mass. It takes a brilliant game and dulls it. I realize that it can be made to work, and that it can add a good drama factor, but realistically this is only true on the fairly large maps. For a quick-ish game on a small or medium map it’s a pain in the ass.
In Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Arrakis you had two resources: Power (from windtraps for some reason) and spice. Spice converted to money over a small period of time. Power was not terribly insistent, so you just built some windtraps and had at it. From there you just had to manage your harvesters, but this largely automatic. All you had to really worry about was defending your harvesters. It worked brilliantly.
Rise of Legends was interesting. You had Wealth (or Energy for the Cuotl) and Timonium. The pacing and scale of the game worked with the map design in such a way that while your economy could be disrupted it wasn’t such a constant threat that it became the deciding factor of play. Also, I rocked with the Cuotl (at least amongst my loser friends).
Now for my favorite.
Metal Fatigue. You had two resources: Energy and Manpower. Manpower came simply from building units to thaw your crew, so it didn’t even feel like a resource. Energy could be extracted from lava pools or solar panels. Lava pools could run out, but replenished over time. It required no transport, power went directly to your base from the gathering unit. This model provided the edge of resource protection and expansion, but with absolutely no hassle.
Anyway. I was just woolgathering on the subject.