I think its important to offer the player options. So you can choose whether to focus on crapping on enemy resources, or protecting your own, or on any other aspect of the game. If you are better at managing the economy, you can focus on that, and if you are better at managing the military, you can focus on that, and if you are better at picking optimal tech paths, you can do that, and if you are better at micro managing mages and heroes you can do that. And if you should need to change focuses you can do that.

Actually that brings me up to another topic, options:
How many options should players be provided? I'll use stockpile management as an example:

In Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom you had a warehouse unit to store excess stuff. Each warehouse could store any resource. You had a few options:
Store all
Store none
Other than that you could specify whether or not to specify a resource, and which resources you wanted to store the most. This was because the transport units were generated automagically by the structures.

It would have been nice to allow templates of storage so you could build a building, hit food storage and be done. That would have probably made the most effective system, while preserving player freedom given that you cannot control transport units.


In my system on creation of a transport unit at the transport unit structure, demo only has one, main game might have multiple types, you select its store and its producer and it brings raw materials to the producer and moves finished product to the store. Producer can also be a building that generates raw materials, like a mine.

In general you aren't going to spam buildings as much as Emperor, since you add workers to a structure or upgrade it, assuming you researched this, instead of building a whole new building each time you want to increase production. I think that said system gives you total control over the transport of resources, you don't have to manually do the settings for all resources a warehouse gets since you are deciding what units send their produce where.

I do have some things still to work out, if anyone has an opinion:

In some cases it may be that a given storage structure fills up. How should I handle overflow? Each production structure has its own small storage but that won't work long.

I have a couple options:
You could be allowed to manually assign an overflow storage area
A unit could automagically search for a viable storage unit if one is nearby if its designated store is full.
Similarly a unit could have a second designated storage unit to find raw materials if its normal source is empty, or it could find one by itself.
A unit could wait at either the storage or production area until new raw materials or new storage for products is created.

What idea do you guys like? Do you have any other suggestions?

Allow the player to "rent" storages.

If this is a multiplayer game, you can make it more interesting by having contracts between players to rent storage spaces. The potential for players' interactions will increase accordingly.