There's currently two game cycles designed: food consumption and goods consumption. They're really the same thing except every person in your empire must eat at least one food per day, while they may go on without consuming any goods. The next game cycle to be designed is property items. There will eventually be a number of different kinds of property items but for now it'll just be goods.
In general everything in the Cultura economy is designed with these principles:
- Each person wants to consume exactly a single unit of it per cycle. Any additional consumption has reduced or no benefits.
- The optimal amount to produce/store of an item is your population size. For example if your population is 10 then you want to produce 10 items per cycle. This means family size or other factors mostly out of the control of the player do not affect the production amount.
- All goods are designed such that trade is encouraged.
- Make this as simple as possible for the player to calculate production requirements and bonuses.
So how does this work for the existing cycles?
Food Consumption
At the end of each day, a person tries to consume food that gets them the highest bonus. Each time a person consumes food the bonus stays with them for a cycle (this cycle is currently 7 days but that might change based on balancing). But, they MUST consume food every day. So even if the highest bonus for the food is zero they still will eat it.
Health and happiness bonuses are cumulative over a season. So at the start of each season every person starts at 0 health and 0 happiness. You have a goal to reach by the end of the season to avoid problems. This gives some leeway for having "bad" days and "good" days to catch up.
Good Consumption
Good consumption is similar to food consumption except that a person only consumes good if the bonus is more than zero.
Property
At the end of each day a family calculates the bonus it receives from the property it owns and adds up the cumulative health/happiness bonus for a season (which gets reset at the end of the season). The property also degrades over time and eventually requires repair.
During the bonus calculation, the family tries to maximize its score. The formula is intended to be simple. The property they own is added up. Each person's consumption of property is separate. So the first person consumes as many unique property as possible, then the next person and so on. In the end the formula would then be: You get full bonus for the first n of each property and half bonus beyond that. The number n is the size of the family.
So What is Property?
The current concept for Property goods increase health or happiness. Housing can only store a maximum amount of property; if a family wants to own more property then they must expand their housing. Housing can be expanded infinitely but requires land area.
There are some possible simplifications depending on game balancing and understanding difficulty:
- Will repairing property be necessary?
- Will there be storage limits of property?
Anyway, we will see!
