Industrial Design

There hasn't been an awful lot of work done on Cultura in the past few weeks due to other concerns (like my job :D ) but in any case, some progress was made. The calculation for placing down buildings was revamped and by revamped I mean it now works properly.

Industry

Other than that, some thought was put into how industry works. Right now it's pretty basic. You collect some resources and it becomes a good.

• Grains -> Beer
• Grains -> Flour -> Bread

But, what exact structure do I want out of Cultura? So I compiled my thoughts into a convenient list:

• Each land region only has a set of resources. Each land region has a type that determines how much of each type it contains (Dry areas have more grass and animals, wet areas have more trees).
• Each society will focus on making only a subset of the types of goods. This is determined by the Culture Tree they pursue. Someone rich in wood would choose more wood-based goods. Someone rich in earth would choose more earth-base goods.
• For each society to develop uniquely and have access to a balanced number of goods, each resource type leads to exactly three types of goods, one type of intermediate good and is assisted by one type of tool and one type of factory.

The point of this design is that each society can have 6-7 goods they produce, easily understood by a player and encourage trade to benefit both societies. Or raiding, up to you. This lets you focus a society to produce specific goods, have clear-cut industries you work on and have trade routes that are obvious (I produce Red Clay Pottery and I trade with Oglandia for Blue Flower Potpourri). For the lithic ages, this mimics the kind of trading that would mostly occur: goods for different goods. In later editions of Cultura, the concept of comparative advantage would be more well developed (that's not to say it doesn't already occur in this game but concepts such as labour specialization, labour skill, industrial infrastructure heavily affect comparative advantage and encourage trade of similar goods).

So the concept is meant to be simple. While it seems wordy here, the player is simply presented with a set of goods that are available from their land. Based on that they would choose to invest Culture points into "buying" goods that they can definitely produce. Then they build up those industries like in any other game (Anno, Caesar, Children of the Nile)... as in they would expand resource collection, make more tools, build up workshops all to increase productivity. After that they can choose to overproduce in order to trade the excess to other societies.

Tools and Factories

Now onto productivity. Okay, so there's another list of ideas:

• Tools
• Workshop/factory

After a lot of thought and debate in my head, I've settled on something as simple as possible. Tools boost productivity. There'll be a tool per super type of good. What do I mean by super type? A super type would be something like "pottery", which might start off as "clayware" which becomes "pottery" which becomes "glazed pottery" and then becomes "lacquerware" and so on. All of these can be improved by the same type of tool. Your tech level determines the level of tool you produce. In my opinion, the "confusion" that arises from having lots of different kinds of tools comes from the UI. In my planned UI (which has yet to occur) is to have the industry management group goods and their respective tool together when doing labour assignment. This way you can quickly balance the number of tool makers to goods makers and have the correct flow of tools immediately.

I use the term factory loosely. I just mean a building that helps produce a particular good faster. It does it in one big way: it skips steps. For the cost of fuel you can skip a bunch of steps. So normally a production chain is like "Grain -> Flour -> Bread". Then a second tier good would be "Grain -> Flour -> Bread -> Fruitbread" (look, you try to come up with more advanced bread). So, Grain is harvested from grain fields. Flour is made from Grain using labour. Bread is made from Flour using labour. Fruitbread is made from Bread using labour and Fruit. But, what if you had the awesome technology of... Fire Pit? Well then, now you can skip steps! Fruitbread can alternatively be made from Flour and Fruit and Labour and Lithic Fuel. So you've skipped the step of making Bread and instead directly make Fruitbread. Imagine the labour savings!

As the game designer this means I need to balance the cost of Lithic Fuel against the time saving you earn from not making bread (if it takes a really long time to make Lithic Fuel then I need to make the Fire Pit more productive to make up for it).

For the first iteration of Cultura this doesn't seem like much. But imagine later down the line when it is something like "Metal -> Metal Bar -> Bronze Bar -> Steel Bar -> Fine Steel Bar -> Perfect Steel Bar", then something like the "Fan-blown Blast Furnace" which gives you "Metal + Coal-Fuel -> Perfect Steel Bar" would mean that a single unit of coal-fuel just skipped four steps which could mean enormous labour savings (5x less assuming each step costs the same). It's really about game balance.

Ecosystem

How about the ecosystem? Most games are designed after "keep building forever". Cultura is designed a bit differently. This is meant to be a game where you play a society from ground up. And when I say from ground up, I mean eeeeeeeverything. The ecosystem matters. Forests grow. Animals give birth. If I were simulating water sources in the first iteration, there'd even be rainfall. I try to keep it simple though. The number of plants and animals determines their growth rate. In real life, their interaction determines the growth rate. But all I'm trying to simulate is a carrying capacity.

How many resources you draw from the ecosystem is limited by your land and your technology. Better land or better technology lets you draw more from the land. You can choose to underdraw to keep the ecosystem healthy or you could choose to overdraw for some purpose of prestige or fighting hostile societies, as a temporary measure. Or you might sacrifice the ecosystem of some land regions because you're not going to farm there anyway due to urbanization. It's up to the player to decide how to best utilize the land but the land will matter in this game.