LOL.  Yeah, Frog is typically verbose.  But this space has been intentionally left blank. 

I wish he would pay a visit and tell us what he thinks of the place and to drop us some more crumbs.

I think most people know which "camp" I was in back in the day.  I liked the idea of managing resources -- turning something into another and working out the logistics.  But I'm in a tiny minority on that feeling.  But I do like the idea of letting modders eventually changing things a lot.

I'm of the same mindset it would seem, and in the same minority.

If the engine/mechanic was robust enough to handle a complex economy, yet implemented for WoM to be a more simple core economy system, it could then also be used as a good guide to work from (i.e. very concise, descriptive notations throughout the XML).  Modders could then introduce a complex economoy model into the game for those that want something more from their resource system.

It's a win/win, imho, and everyone is potentially happy.  I know that I would devour this like Chris Farley and John Candy at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Someone (who's post I can't currently find, I'm sorry!) suggested the idea of using caravans to move local resources, by building something at each end of the supply line in the city (depots, or some such).  I like this idea, and want to expand on it.

Suppose you have a kingdom with 3 ore in your control.  Suppose that, in order to build magical arms and armor, you had to have ore treated with crystals and some other resource (a total of 3 resources together in the same place).  Then you could (with the right research) produce magical steel arms or armor.

Why not use the current mechanism of limited caravans to control that?  If you need 3 resources all in one place, the chances of one town being close to all three of those resources is low; you'll have to move them.  So you burn your caravan lines getting the resources all to one town.  It would work this way.

Build a caravan in City Ore.  Send it to City MagicArms.  On the map, it generates a supply line as it moves, and after one trip, the caravan is consumed, an Ore Depot is built in both City Ore and City MagicArms.  Before you build the OreDepot in City MagicArms, however, you build your blacksmith, because you'll need to build your Ore Depot next to the blacksmith in order to get the bonus.

Same thing for City Crystals and City OtherResource.  Now, in your one town, City MagicArms, you have a Blacksmith surrounded on the map with an Ore Depot, a Crystal Depot, and a OtherResource Depot.  It can now make MagicalArms at a certain rate as a new resource.  You can ship those arms (through the Caravan of City MagicArms) to another city that is collecting for magic armor to make very high end units. 

The supply line, once created, appears on the map, and can be attacked by an attacker.  It's a moving dot that moves back and forth, and supplies a certain number of Ore to City MagicArms every turn.  If you kill it, City MagicArms loses the ability to create magic arms (no more supply line, you can't stockpile that resource, you can only redirect it).

You also are limited by the caravan mechanic, since you can only have so many caravans (one per city), so you have to decide how best to implement your trade web to get resources around your empire.  It can be reconfigured at the cost of the travel time for the first caravan move which lays the new supply line at whatever rate the caravan moves at.

You don't have to micromanage; you have to set up your trade web and reconfigure it over time (like research; pick a research target, and work on it until done, then reconfigure).  The fun would be in figuring out how to optimize raw resource layout of the map into the best production layout to build the strongest armies. 

If the mechanic works, then maybe you use it for things other than just ore for armies.  Maybe you move magic around through a "magical trade web" that accelerates your research, a "spy trade web" that helps diplomacy, or what have you.

Did you ever play Capitalism? With a couple of UI improvements that seems to be pretty similar to what you're describing. Here's how it worked:

You start with a retail store. It can do a couple of things: buy products from suppliers, and sell them to customers (or in Elemental's case, import equipment and give it to units). The "purchase" unit of the store can buy from anywhere, even another store. Usually it would come from a supplier of some sort.

If you wanted to sell beef? You could buy the beef from someone else, or build a farm and start raising cows. The farm has abilities to grow cattle, slaughter it, store inventory (like a warehouse), and then sell the result (to another building, only stores can sell retail in the game). Now, what if you wanted to make milk?

You raise cows. You milk the cows. You now have raw milk. You can't sell raw milk though. At this point you set up a factory which buys the milk and glass bottles, and manufactures bottled milk. You sell THAT to a store.

This can actually chain to fairly high complexity. You build a silica mine, which you send to a factory to make silicon. You send that back through the factory (or to another factory) to make CPUs. You build an oil well to get oil, which you use a factory to make into plastic. Along with some other components, you use a final factory to assemble PDAs, which you can then sell.

Each unit in a building has a certain capacity, so a manufacturing unit can produce X CPUs per unit of game time. The purchasing unit can buy Y silicon to supply the manufacturing, and the sales unit can sell and ship Z CPUs to whoever is buying them. Training can increase those numbers, as can setting up more of one type of unit (if stuff isn't buying fast enough, you can add a second purchasing unit for example).

Stuff winds up being shipped all over the map under a system like this, and there's quite a lot going on under the hood. It doesn't have to be exactly THIS complicated in Elemental, but the fundamental system is sound and quite a lot of fun. The main thing it needs is a UI improvement: where I can go and say I want to make "+2 Holy Avengers", and the game can hook up the necessary supply lines to make it happen. Having to manually tell 5 things to ship to one city so I can do it is tedious. (The biggest issue with Capitalism's UI is that I couldn't make a factory and say "make bottled milk". I had to set it up, then tell it to buy raw milk, and to buy glass. It'd then figure out "oh you want to make bottled milk." For stuff with a lot of inputs that just gets annoying.)

For a game like Elemental, this creates points of interest for wars or espionage:

1. Things like mines are a target, to slow down or cut off the supply chain.

2. Roads and ports are blockade targets, to cut off the supply chain.

3. Key manufacturing cities are obvious important targets, because if one city is capable of making those Holy Avengers 3x faster then any other due to specialization in enchanted item forging, you can cripple someone by taking that city.

4. Really big units are complex and hard to make, which boosts their relative value. It's not safe to try and create super units on a border city due to having to get everything to the far flung corners of the map, so you'll want to do it in your core cities most likely. The border cities can produce simpler units that don't require as much (or any) supply chain.

So if we are going to be looking at this type of system, I like one that works in that way.

I am not sure how one would gather that the forums have always supported a large resource system. Reading this thread, it is pretty clear that the community is fairly split on the idea. I think the vanilla game should have a fairly simple resources system, but should have moddable system which support larger resource chaining. This system should be capable of supporting "carting" systems as well as multiple upgrade/build path.

That's because you've either forgotten or never read the huge thread during beta.  It was a landslide in favor of the more complex version.  The simple version was leaps and bounds above the crap we have now.  The two alternative versions following the feedback were camp 1+.

Camp 1 was good as long as it had a decent UI and good automation for routes you'd set up.  Camp 3 was excellent regardless.  Camp 4 was a little moohoo with the global resources bullshit, but that too would have been a very nice foundation for the economy.

The shitty simplistic camp 2 that almost no one liked?  What I wouldn't give to even have that now...  Between that thread and the early one on combat where we were going to have continuous turn, Total War scale bloodbaths for late game tactical combat, my ass hurts.

Edit:

The key word is comparatively.

I think Stardock really need to know what sort of game they are making before this question even has any meaning.

If they are making a MoM style game then it becomes pretty obvious that the economic model is just one component of the game with magic, city building, troop selection, tactical combat, hero development being some other components.

If it is just one component then it is also self evident that it can't be 'too' complex because it is only a portion of the game and players will only want to spend a portion of their time managing it. The only way the economy can be very complex (ala Victoria or whatever) is if it is a core part of the gameplay experience, in which case we have a serious departure from the MoM, AoW, Fall of Heaven sort of game which I think many on this forum like.

The counter argument which Jharii and others have used is that it should just be automatable so that it doesn't take too much time. Fine in theory but:

A. AI is typically poor at doing this sort of thing, even if it is good at the automating it doesn't KNOW what the player is planning and therefore doesn't know what it should be working on improving production of. There might be solutions to this but I can't recall a good one.

B. Assuming A is solved then in order for a player to guide the automation well they probably need to understand how the economy works and what the limitations of the economy are... (eg you can't just ask for forged steel without having an iron ore mine, smelter, coal mine, forge, etc) The more complex the economy is the harder this knowledge is to come by and the more the economy is beginning to intrude upon all other aspects of the game again.

C. Assuming A and B are solved then what was the point in your really complex economy? You've just put a very complex economy in then had to spend all this time allowing the player to partially ignore it so they can play the MoM style game most people profess to want. Wouldn't it have been more efficient to put a more streamlined, simpler economy in instead?

Note that I'm not saying the economy doesn't matter. It does matter, a lot. But it doesn't need to be complex to matter, it just needs to be much better designed and integrated with the rest of the game.

That is one of the things that strategy games are all about.  Learning, tweaking, testing, perfecting.

Players have the option to use complex or simple, in game.  The choice is ultimately left up to them.  This parallels much of the game's design already in other areas.  Plus it adds the ability for the modding community to go nuts.

If you read those first economy threads, Kael was part of that discussion; he was a beta tester.  He's aware.  We do need to reopen that discussion, however, including his original post of "What is Elemental".  If it's a wargame first, simpler economies should be the rule.  Abstract it, shove it off into the sidelines, and abstract all the resources, like AOW.  Just make the resources gold and time, because the game is about moving your pieces around on the board for strategic advantage.

If Elemental is supposed to be a world simulator (which is what I think it is) and RPG (since you have to have a world to roleplay in), then the cities, their life, and their interactions become more important, and therefore their economy becomes more important, and you need more depth than just an abstraction.  Several (hundred) posts have been made on ways to streamline a complex economy, and these are all SMOPs.  It's now up to Paxton to decide if he believes Stardock resources are better used making those changes to the economic engine, or the magic engine, or the tactical combat system, or what have you.  There's a lot to do, and Stardock is still a finite resource. 

So, from my perspective, my priorities are:

1) Economy redux, with a lot more complexity, to make a world simulator that we can feel immersed in

2) Tactical combat, with special attacks and defenses.

3) Magic system rehaul.

WInni

Only if that's what the game actually IS. This was originally build as the spiritual successor to MoM, and a game aiming to do that needs none of this stuff (but it does need an awful lot more spells and stronger combat mechanics).

We definitely need a revisit of the "What is Elemental?" discussion, if only to find out what Stardock intends to build.

And if you're going to fix it in the next 3 years, you need to focus limited development resources on what matters. To the spiritual successor of MoM, magic and combat matter a lot more then an advanced economy does. It's not like Stardock has a 200 person team to work on things here.