[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

[quoted original message omitted]

> Binhan Lin wrote:

> The actual game mechanic should be diminishing returns - as you get

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,