I really loved the resource system in The Settlers II and III. Combat wasn't that special, if I wanted war I played Age of Empires. However, I spent hours and hours on my economy in The Settlers II/III, and I adored it. I was 11 years old or something when I started to love the serie, but it was easy to learn, so there you have another good argument. I believe The Settlers II and III are some of the greatest strategy games ever made, even if it had its flaws, and that's mainly because of the fun resource system.

Quote:Original post by Ezbez

Quote:Original post by owl
Rise of Nations does it pretty well indeed.

Eh, really? I found that the resource system of RoN was one of it's weak points. Games seemed to be more about 'just' advancing the tech tree faster than your ally or rushing. There was no resource fighting. I'm a long time Warcraft II player, and so this irked me. I wanted to be limited by the resources out there, and have to marshal my use of units. The only time I had to do that in RoN was when the max unit cap was reached and very early on in the game. Sure, there was sometimes some difficulty getting metal or something, but since everything was totally unlimited, I had little pressure to go out and grab the biggest and bestest resources.

That was exactly my problem with RoN, though I still thought it was a great game. Age of Empires III uses a similar system, but it forces much more strategy since resources disappear after depleting them, and they were harder to get. RoN was just too easy.

There was an incredibly awesome indy game called Strifeshadow. It was made by a top Starcraft player (Zileas) who after designing Strifeshadow got a job working on World of Warcraft. I think that the other guys (including the owner/programmer) went back to their day jobs.

Anyway the main resource was called Aether. The map had pools of Aether on it. To get Aether you put a tower adjacent to a pool. Sometimes the pools were by themselves so you had to use one tower per pool, other places you might have 3+ pools per tower. So you might have a spot with two pools of 900 and one pool of 2000. So it would be pulling from the three pulls and so generate aether at a fast rate, but once the 900s were exhausted the tower would only be pulling from the pool that was originally 2000 (down to 1100 when the 900s exhaust).

Now the cool part is that towers transmitted the aether back to your town hall. You could see a ball of aether travel through the air from the top of one tower to the next in the chain. They could transmit maybe 3/4 of a screen worth before losing a percent of the aether. So if you wanted to get 100% transmission rate you needed more towers. If you settled for say 80% after two towers you would only get 64%. If towers were damaged they would transmit less too. You could knock out key towers damage a guy's aether network. If he made his network redundant the aether would reroute around the damaged/missing tower and always find the most efficient way to your townhall. There are so many subtle interactions, it is just beautiful.

The other two resources were also well done. There were spots that you could put mines on. Then the mine would start producing resources. You could set your mine to 100% ikon or 100% arikon or somewhere in between. There were five settings I think. Ikon was for technology (not high tech, you know advanced combat units) and arikon for magic. Since Ikon was generally more useful early game you got to start out with a little arikon. Your town hall had a special ability to make troops but in addition to the normal cost it took arikon. So if a barracks could make a guy for 100 aether maybe your townhall could make one for 100 aether and 50 arikon. This helped people stop rushes (you didn't have to make a barracks early to defend against one) and helped people conduct them (one extra place to make guys) so it really added a lot to the game.

Too bad it died off. I think only a few hundred copies got sold. (and a lot of those were to beta testers, we loved the game). Warcraft III was such a big letdown after player Strifeshadow.

Quote:First i take from TA's inexhaustible resource system because i think it much more fun system where the amount you have flowing in matters not the amount you have.

This unlimited resource system reduces the impact of defensive play. If you take a defensive strategy with an Unlimited resource system, one player (the one with the higher collection rate) will eventually be able to overwhelm their opponents (even if they just sit it out until they greatly out number them).

With limited resources, defensive strategy actually becomes much more viable (and preferred). By "Turtleing" and playing defensively, you can inflict more damage to your enemy's troops than you take. This means that with limited resources and a good enough defence, you can out last them (war of attrition) to the point where they can not defend against your attack. Even if they have more resources than you do, a good enough defence will be able to stop them.

This leads me to think about having more then 1 type of resource point on maps. Some of the resource points will be unlimited and others will be limited.

This might be with each type of resource (so some gold mines might have a limited amount of gold, but you might also have other gold mines that have unlimited amounts of gold.

Or they might be from different resource types, but you can just convert between them (Food might be unlimited from farms, and you can sell the food in a town market to buy any other type of resource).

Another twist might be that limited resource points might be fast to collect, which means that player will want to "rush" these locations, strip mine them and then retreat. Unlimited resource points might be much slower to gather, but being unlimited are very valuable for late game control. This would create interesting strategic play as the player shave to decide which resource types to go after. Also, if the limited and unlimited resources were of different resource types (but can be converted into one another) this could also make for more interesting strategies.