The economy of Cultura is serious business. It's also set in the paleolithic age. For the alpha, the technology and economy will span only the paleolithic age. The "full" game, first iteration, will span from paleolithic to neolithic (the three ages will be paleolithic, mesolithic and neolithic). So let's take a look at the various concerns by splitting the economy into its various stages.
- Sourcing Raw Resources
- Collecting Resources
- Producing Goods
- Consumption
Sourcing Raw Resources
The beginning starts with a small band of sentients (human, ogre or elf) exploring an unknown landscape. There's no fog of war but the map is large (think Anno 1701 size). There's plenty of space. There's trees, bushes, grassy patches and animals. At the start, trees and animals are plentiful. Bushes and grassy patches are scarce. Once you pick up the technology of planting, you get to shift the balance. You can plant new trees, bushes, grasses and whatnot to improve the growth rate of the land. You can replace what plants grow where (but climate penalties will be there). Animal population will depend on some plant in each land region, remove it and you lower their growth rate.
Renewable resources (anything falling under the tree, bush, grass and animal category) can grow faster at first by simply planting more of those plants. Once you start researching agriculture techs then you can improve the growth rate of plants in your land regions. A year is broken into four seasons. When a plant or animal hits its growing season it starts replenishing its resource. If it's already at max then it starts to spawn new versions of itself (trees grow new trees, animals give birth to new animals). Growth rate of plants depends on the number of plants. Animals births are limited by the plant they are dependent on.
Non-renewable resources have a "draw limit". You can only take so much from it before the site is "exhausted" and you must "find more". Why all in quotations? Because the game is meant to be played as long as a player feels like, if I were to put in actual numbers for the amount a non-renewable node held then there is also a limit on how long the game is played. I could always put in a really high number that is physically unreachable but psychologically speaking it's nicer to just be infinite. Another choice is to bug the player to do some more prospecting to magically find more resources every so often but meh it's pointless and adds nothing. Technological improvements increases the draw limit and is themed as increasing mining/quarrying technologies.
Balancing! This involves an excel sheet and lots of numbers. The question asked is "How many people do I want to be able to live in a particular land region at full goods consumption?". Also what is "full goods consumption"? That is, how many goods do I want people to be able to consume? Here's what I'm thinking:
- Paleolithic: 6-9 Goods per capita
- Mesolithic: 12-15 Goods per capita
- Neolithic: 18-21 Goods per capita
For balancing purposes, this means you need to be able to source enough materials per capita to supply 6-9 goods and have enough left over labour output to produce those three goods. When you first start, your labour output is capable of producing about 2-3 goods and collecting the materials for them. By the end of finishing the Paleolithic industry technologies, then you are able to hit that 6-9 range. The timeframe for a particular age I'm aiming for is 4-9 hours (plenty of time for building a city, enjoying it, getting into trouble, dealing with politics and other AI players and setting up complex trade routes for a multi-tier industry).
Collecting Resources
Having said a mouthful before hand I can be more brief here. Collecting resources is just about sending all your people out there and then stripping the earth of its bounty. Technology improves the rate at which you do it via your stone tool. The stone tool will be a magical repeat technology which you can pour tech points into and will give you bonuses and also when you hit milestones give you named bonuses (such as "biface" or "burin").
Like before, it is balanced such that 50% of a person's labour is used up for collecting enough materials for 6-9 goods at maximum technology. You start off at around 2-3 goods at 50% of labour.
The main concern about collecting resources is that the player must watch the ecological damage caused and ensure that they properly balance growth technologies. If you clear cut a forest, it is gone and the trees spend a very long time trying to recover (because growth is based on the number of plants or animals). You can help to plant more trees or bushes though through agriculture (bushes and grasses) or silvaculture (trees), animals have no technology. Those technologies aren't available until neolithic though.
Producing Goods
After your hard work growing stuff and collecting it, now you mash it with your hammerstone repeatedly until it becomes something awesome... like bread or beer. Because hammering wheat with a stone makes beer. Trust me.
Essentially, people will grab what resources you've collected and turn them into goods. These goods are then distributed as you see fit. There isn't much more to say... collect stuff and turn it into usable stuff. The target is 6-9 goods produced at maximum Paleolithic tech.
Consumption
The game revolves around consuming ever greater amounts of goods to improve your health and happiness to levels that support ever greater populations. With more people comes more problems (plagues and riots, your choice... or perhaps as the Swedish say "Choose between Cholera and Plague"). But with more people comes larger armies, larger cities, more complex industry chains and so on.
Each good when consumed provides health and/or happiness. A city (all the people in a single land region) have a graduated requirement. That is, the first 10 people require nothing. The next 20 require 5 happiness/5 health each. The next 70 need 15/15 and so on. A good is consumed in one minute, a year is one hundred minutes and thus 100 goods are consumed in a year to be continuously consumed.
Property lasts 1 minute and then becomes "damaged" and requires upkeep. This means a person buys an intermediate good and it instantly repairs property in her possession. Consumable goods lasts 1 minute and then disappear when finished, thus requiring the person to buy more (food is a consumable as an example). Super property lasts forever and requires no upkeep. It however costs 10x as much materials and labour to produce than a typical good.
Finally, I do intend to put in some "slack" labour output. This allows for labour wasted due to walking around and carrying goods to places. There are also other functions that soak up labour such as house construction, people used up in conducting trade, people used up in policing or military services and the production of military goods.
Yay
In a short description, the robust economic system is meant to intrigue you in sourcing new resources to set up new industries (higher tier cross-requirement goods), while the UI is streamlined to ease the maintenance/expansion of existing industries. The result is a setting where you have a constantly expanding empire where diplomacy, war, trade, cooperation, subterfuge and all the like revolve around one thing: consume more goods. Well actually, it revolves around one thing... giganticus stacks of gold bullion. Mmm piles of shit.
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