Alpha Economy

Think about fields of giganticus stacks of gold bullion. Then remember that Cultura actually starts in the stone age so what you really have are stacks of polished gold rocks. So last time I talked about consolidating for Alpha, well this is about the actual economy.

Mmm.

Alright long story short there are 14 raw items: grain, fruit/vegetable, meat, stone, wood, earth, metal, bone, fur/skin, fibre, filler, herb, precious metal, precious stone.

Complicated enough? Of course not! This is an economy game. We expect flow charts that make your eyes bleed. The food type raw goods (grain, fruit/vegetable, meat) each lead to two consumable goods and one intermediate good. The others lead to one property good, one consumable good and one intermediate good. Precious metal and precious stone make one super property, one property and one intermediate. All of these goods are appropriately themed for stone age (although I haven't decided what exactly they will be quite yet).

What do I mean by those types? All goods provide health, happiness or production bonus. The type they are determines how they provide the benefit.

Consumable good is a good that someone will simply take and consume. As long as they are consuming it then they will receive its benefit. You can only consume type of an item. Higher quality consumable provides a better bonus.

Property good is a good you place inside your home and then gives you its benefit. However, over time they require upkeep which means it consumes one unit of intermediate good. In order to produce them they require the same intermediate good.

Super property is a good you place inside your home and then gives you its benefit. Then that's it. No upkeep and no repair.

There are 5 different residential buildings which consume all the property and super property.

Then there are 3 industrial buildings and 3 tools. This one is a bit more complicated, you might notice that I have been careful about production rates and ecological growth rates. What is important here is that I want a region of land to support 100 people continuously consuming all goods. So the base production rate is not capable of doing this; maxing out production rates is what will allows full consumption. A player needs to worry about ecological renewable resource growth rate (which can be improved via technology) and industrial bonuses (tools and industrial buildings and their associated technology). Essentially, a player has to balance how much they can take from the land without damaging it and how fast they can take from the land and turn it into goods.

For military, there are 3 weapons and 3 armour. This means 3 different damage types.

I've specifically not listed out the exact goods, bonuses and other numbers because they're likely to change quite often. However, this is what I plan to include for the Alpha. Most of the gameplay features now work so it's time to flesh them out with game data.