TL;DR
Ways of including tiers of resources. How production should work in strategus! Ways of introducing trade. Ways of including heirloom production. Ways of having more awesome gameplay. EDIT 1 and 2 important!
Writing about this whole gold sink of strat made me thinking about the economy. Some of the things in this thread is based on tidbits of information I have recieved from chadz through forum and irc.
I know that there has been talk of resources, and that crafting should be necessary to create items.
I also know that there has been talk of several tiers of resources hence my ideas are based on this.
I have tried to achieve and strike a balance that wouldn't make the system complicated yet fun to play.
And finally I have incorporated my idea that heirloom production is a good idea, which can be read in another of my threads.
The strategus economical system:
Villages produce resources.
Castles produce troops (tickets).
Cities manufacture items with resources.
Food may be needed for tickets produced at villages, but it is not a system that I will discuss, it can run on its own.
My primary suggestion is based on item crafting. Having a good crafting system will invite to trade and more interesting roles instead of just risk with tickets and gold.
I would suggest something along these lines:
A village produce a certain resource, maybe even several. For simplicity lets focus on a few basic overall resources like:
AshWood, OakWood, Leather, Stone and Metal.
I have split wood into two groups one for weapon production and one for equipment and building construction.
Per tick you have a player standing in the village he is producing what the village is able to produce. If the village can produce several resources he must choose among them.
Each resource type is split into tiers. The lowest tier is produced directly at the village and ready for use, like green ashwood or wrought Iron. With this tier resources you can create low tier weapons ANYWHERE.
To get the next tier, you need the resource refined at a city. This could be like seasoned ashwood and cast Iron. With these you can create high tier equipment.
I image two other tiers. Every time a player is extracting a resource, lets say wood, there is a change he recieve a "luxury" resource.
Mahogny, steel what ever (names we can always invent).
These luxury resources can be refined at cities in to higest tier resourcer (must be refined). These resources are key components of crafting heirloomed items, combined with gold and extra basic crafting materials.
Other resources that could add to game play:
Coal, used in order to keep you cities able to produce and refine items.
Food, used to keep your soldiers alive
Buildings, used to upgrade resource extraction and refining in cities, as well as quickening production.
Concerning production time:
I find it important that production and refining takes time. In no way should it be possible to convert 3 wood and 2 iron into a sword imidiately. Production runs where you refine hundred of resources over days combined with production lines of sword and armor will result in interesting game play.
why?
Because no one can then create everything and must trade and it adds to strategy and tactics of thinking ahead.
Apoligies for the long thread what do you think? what could be improved? what did I miss? What is our technical limitations?
Edit1:
I forgot to say that one of my main concerns is actually lack of availability of resources. It should NOT be that wood is only avaiable north and iron south. My point is, that low tier equipment is easy to acces and gain where as high tier equipment is harder and requires specialized work.
Edit 2:
It is also important that there is reason for transporting resources. If a city has all resources around it, then trade will suffer as well.
This could be fixed by having more different basic resources. Different kinds of Iron, different kinds of wood etc.
Each weapon need different kind of resources. This way you could make sure each city is able to produce some weapons, though maybe not any type the owner might want.
