Items
A big part of Cultura is about the consumption of goods: property, consumables, food. Then there are tools and military items. With many planned items with variants, how to turn this into something that's understandable for a player? So let's start from the beginning. What do you consume in Cultura? You've got people and every day that passes they eat consumable goods and food. At the same time they enjoy bonuses from property they own in their homes.
Excellent. Materialism is complete. Or is it? Let's say you got an item like pottery. This takes an item called "earth" to make. So far so good. You mine some earth. Put it in a workshop. Workers and slaves poop out some pottery. You put the pottery in a home. Then you enjoy that pottery. But, earth has several variants. Maybe you're getting feldspar, or maybe you're getting red ochre. Those are two planned types of "earth". Although, I will admit, using red ochre to make pottery is going to be tough. In any case, what if you used red ochre instead of feldspar? Then you have a red ochre pot. If you use feldspar then you have a feldspar pot. Are these different?
In Cultura, yes they are! You get bonus from every unique type of item. Pottery made from different materials are considered different. What happens if you have same pottery? If a person has two red ochre pottery then she only gets full bonus from the first. Any subsequent one only gives half the bonus. That's simple and encourages variety.
Okay what about tools and military weapons? That's a bit different from luxury goods. Sure it might be cool to have oak furniture and then also have pine furniture in another room. It completes that missing part in my soul where I yearn to have every kind of wood in my house. That is a thing. But when it comes to military weapons what you care about are RPG stats. How much DPS, eh?
In this case, they take a different approach. Tools and weapons instead can use any number of materials but have no "base material" after it is constructed. Whether you use flint or chert to make your stone chopper, it doesn't create a different item. Instead, the more types of material you use then the higher the level of the item produced. So if you use only flint, then you have a level one stone chopper. If you use flint AND chert, then you have a level two stone chopper. Pretty simple and works well with tools, armour and weapons.
The level of complexity here is somewhat inbetween Dwarf Fortress (any item can be made out of any material or in fact a bunch of alloys and that affects its quality) and Anno (all items can only be made in one way thus there is no way to differentiate them). This "variation" allows for trade between societies making the same item but it's not so significant that close neighbours might not be producing exactly the same good. In that case, they're more likely to trade completely different items (I give you oak furniture for deer leather clothing).
