Resourciv: Nothingburger Combo

What the hell happened to this, right?

I think I like to rotate my hobbies every couple of weeks, so I've been back on this. I'm just going to walk through what it all looks like right now. First, I made a nicer-looking main menu from which you can actually pick a culture, a world type, and a world size. Each one of the 32 cultures has its own icon, now, which I pulled mostly from CC art (thank you, Game-icons.net!) and some obscure national flags. My partner offered to make splash art, which I would super appreciate (💖) but don't want to hold her to. In the meantime or either way, I used a random render of a ziggurat from Google Images as a temporary background.

May add advanced settings for aridity, erosion, and geomass.

Here's the 32 cultures, give me a drum roll... Akkadian, Algonquian, Arabic, Bantu, Canaanite, Celtic, Chinese, Dravidian, Egyptian, Germanic, Hellenic, Hindi, Igbo, Iranian, Iroquoian, Japonic, Korean, Kushite, Latin, Mayan, Mongolian, Nahuan, Numic, Polynesian, Siouan, Slavic, Sumerian, Taino, Tibetan, Turkic, Vietic, Yoruba. I acknowledge that some groupings or distinctions are relatively arbitrary, which is unavoidable, but I wanted to pick these based on linguistic and cultural differentiation rather than nation-state claims. Just look at the pretty pictures.

Only 5 European cultures! Back to your caves, Yakubian apes.

You'll notice that, unfortunately, I've had to stop using Kenney's pixel GUI assets because Unity has really poor pixel-perfect scaling for GUI in particular. I'll admit that using semi-transparent rectangles makes it a little easier on me, but also I've started to get attached to the overall look. It's actually more legible!

I think the animals are cute :)

I've made good use of my spectator mode, which is fun in its own right to watch the little meeps run around like ants. Which made me realize: I love proverbial ant farms. I don't know if that's an aspect people usually talk about with games like these, which usually focus on minmaxing strategy or tactical combat. Oh, I almost forgot: borders now work sort of like in Civilization III–IV, expanding over time, except the radius is impacted by terrain difficulty so it looks more natural. You'll see that below.

Not obvious: I've fixed bugs related to toggling fog of war and world visibility, especially for spectator mode.
I just don't have buttons for those quite yet.

Not much has changed besides. You still hunt animals and gain discovery points as you explore your surroundings, eventually (potentially) deciding to send colonists to avoid crowding your initial settlement. I will say that this feels like a great introduction to the game. It feels simply fun to explore and go on tangents chasing animals and get rewarded with discoveries or population growth for doing so. Although I've procrastinated on actual game implementation by redoing the GUI, creating culture icons, and fixing bugs, I've got a better idea of the design now. I'll ramble about that, I guess.

Seeds of Destruction

I got over myself since the last time. Part of that was reframing the problem: these don't need to represent concrete states as much as abstract cultural groups. Even though historically people have conflicted within these groups, the same can be said about nation-states which are even more artificial and conceited. So, whatever. It's fine. Just don't think about it. Another part of that was thinking more in terms of what I wanted to accomplish thematically (or, maybe, dynamically). Civilization and most games of its genre are about indefinite expansion. Although you certainly have obstacles in your way, the game is about overcoming those obstacles to continue expanding. What if expansion was not for its own sake, but was motivated by instabilities internal of and intrinsic to civilization?

I've decoupled food from population growth. Each settlement instead has a habitat score representing how many peeps it can support (based on water, shelter, and health), and a population by itself will not exceed its habitat's carrying capacity. That is, unless a power emerges which forces a population to grow past its natural limits and stay in place for the benefit of a ruling class. Such early social technologies might include corvée, feudalism, patriarchy, or slavery. Below is a mockup: at any point, you'll get to have 3 social technologies or pillars. Swapping these triggers an anarchic revolutionary period. You can imagine the sorts of happenings. Imagine a sort of prisoner's dilemma: you don't have to form a state but, once a state does form, other populations have to compete with it to survive.

Those social technologies basically require coercion, if not force. The forceful part is represented by revolutionary periods (remember: not all revolutions are "good"!), but the coercive part requires long-term social planning. This is represented by the struggle between order and disorder. You already get some disorder by exceeding your habitat's carrying capacity, but this is compounded by oppressive social technologies in themselves. You'll want to build temples or monuments or other projects that reinforce the ruling ideology, and in doing so you'll increase your culture's influence on the world map. Unchecked disorder leads to revolt, but temples take forever to build, and you can't exactly build anything while your city is revolting. Sometimes, the best opium of the people is straight-up opium. Or luxuries. Same diff.

Those are the macro dynamics. Let's get in the weeds!

Resources & Yields

Resources, resources, resources. I have spent hours (?) brainstorming ways to have my cake and eat it too when it comes to modeling economic dynamics in interesting ways without it becoming a spreadsheet simulator. Of all the Civ games, my favorite system is the one in Civilization III–IV where you connect resources by road to cities, and cities between each other, to develop an abstract trade network of access to various commodities. In the latter game, luxury resources give you +1 happiness to all connected cities, while food resources give you +1 health to all connected cities. I like the geographical dimension of the system, that every resource comes from somewhere specific, which generates a pseudo-material relation. However, I don't really like how it infinitely scales. I'd rather like to think that although some city A originates a resource, it is being shipped to and used by some other city B.

A simplifying factor (thank God) is that I’m not sure stockpiles should exist in game or that they really do in (aggregate?) real life. In the short run, obviously you need places to store things while they sit and wait to be used or sold. However, in the long run, I can’t think of a situation where you’re just holding onto those things forever and ever without using them. As far as I know, that situation is considered an error of planning, no matter what economic mode you’re in. Besides, in economic games, stockpiles basically serve to regulate consumption—for example, in Kittens Game, you build stockpiles to contain greater quantities of resources to consume on projects with increasingly higher costs. That means in real time stockpiles accumulate progress, but in aggregate you’re really increasing the rate at which you can meaningfully act in the game (as you wait for stockpiles to accumulate enough of what you need). Since turns represent aggregate time and you’re already around on production, why not treat these things as a rate of surplus or deficiency? Simplifies things a tad!

There is a problem of connections between settlements, whether roads or trade routes. If 1 resource represents one non-fungible unit, how do they get from point A to point B? There's a spin-off of Civ called Colonization (unfortunate), where you build wagons and ships, and then either manually transport goods or schedule automatic shipments between colonies. It's enchanting (subject matter notwithstanding), and reinforces a material reality of the game-world, but it's also tedious. I've read about another game, Victoria III, where national markets are abstracted by each region's trade infrastructure to buy or sell goods. This is an intuitive solution, but it seems to obscure the material reality underlying trade (NB: the goal isn't realism per se, but to explore the material conditions generative of social history). Since we're looking at aggregate time, maybe the abstraction is apt, and it would work well with the non-stockpile approach. I'm just wary.

One more thing: I'm not sure how abstract resources themselves should be. Civilization is bare-bones, having yields like food, production, or happiness (etc.) with resources providing bonuses to those. Colonization, on the other hand, models specific resources like lumber or metal or tobacco which you stockpile and also turn into other goods like tools or cigars. The problem with concrete resources is that you either need to hard-code specific uses for each, or account for potential/variable/interchangeable uses of each (in which case, a set of resources might as well be considered one abstract resource). Neither is really satisfying, right? So, certain things should be bound together, but have many sources for verisimilitude's sake (e.g.: getting materials from woods, hills, rivers, and mountains—possibly made available by technology). My partner likes this approach and suggested it independently of my brainstorming, so I think I'll go this route! :)

So there's four yields I can think of: food, consumed by population; material, consumed by production; luxuries, consumed by disorder; and power, consumed by electricity. These yields are generated by resources, which are either raw (located on the map) or manufactured (transformed or combined by labor). It costs population to "clone" resources such as crops or livestock, by means of a meep you place on a hex. Yields are global, but resources are local. You can clone resources between settlements using meeps, or use caravans to transport (read: transfer) resources from one settlement to another. Urban buildings manufacture new resources out of raw ones, which may itself require population.

Discoveries

This and combat are going to be the most annoying aspects of developing this game. Technology is a generic mainstay, and the typical mechanic relies upon the view that technology is a conscious pursuit to advance one's civilization (and by extension there is an objective measure of technological progress by which civilizations can be compared). Blah blah blah Marxist bullshit blah blah blah. I want to do something different. I've been mostly focusing on social technics rather than technic-technics because the latter is just not interesting to me, and seems to derive from the former (Mumford moment). I wonder what approaches might actually explore this.

I've definitely been happy with the possibility of getting discoveries just from doing things in the game, like exploring or combat or whatever else. This has resulted in a really chill early game loop of exploring your surroundings while chasing animals, meanwhile leveling up (to be replaced with discoveries) and increasing your population. The problem is that I don't know what discoveries look like. My partner, while looking over my shoulder at the social pillars screen, asked if it was a three-slot thing or a three-choice thing. Although I meant for social pillars to be the former, I could see discoveries being the latter. Maybe you get to pick one of three discoveries from a random pool. Wouldn't be the first game to do that. But that's kind of a red herring, right? Besides the point of this conversation.

I explored a potential path through history here—importantly, this is not the only path every population could or should take, but one that has been taken by some populations and has since produced the current state of things. I'll make a mind map of that, expand it with specific technologies and alternate social formations, and call it a day? Idk.