Listening to the audiobook of "Basic Economics".

So much of a city is not refineries and mines but apartments, houses, office buildings and skyscrapers. To make it visually realistic, most of the city has to consist of these buildings. This is the SimCity approach.

If I lean more towards RTS though, it's more about resource extraction and manufacturing. It's a caricature.

If I make it like SimCity, I have to do a lot of pathfinding optimizing to make it able to run in real-time. This is probably impossible.

What I want is fun gameplay, so it will be a caricature of a whole country. Maybe even planets.

I was thinking of calling it "States and Corporations". And "in Space" maybe?

Now I've hardly played simulation games myself--other than Roller Coaster Tycoon, which I have practically memorized--so I don't know if any of the concepts I could touch on here have already been done in earlier games, but here I go:

>The density of the population effects the way people react to various situations and the politics they support. The population in big cities will tend to think more collectively.
>The people also have an acute sense of whether or not they feel they're being taken advantage of. They will be hesitant if they feel they are losing their freedom. The player might have to find the right balance between ordering her citizens around to maximize productivity, and leaving the simulated people to their own devices to maximize morale.
>I know sim games have disasters that can have natural disasters that wipe out coastlines, and monsters that knock down buildings, but has there ever been a game where revolutions can pop up under the right circumstances? Occupy Wall Street comes down the streets and breaks stuff, or full-on rebels try to tear the city apart altogether.

That seems too marginal to simulate.

Yes I'm going to read them. Why not.

This guy has the spirit.

Don't know how much this helps, but I played a game called Capitalism II,

it features a pretty extensive economy system with corporations that compete for certain goals (highest market share in electronics, etc.). You can mine resources, build factories to craft the resources into goods, build retails to sell the goods (you can also sell your competitions goods if they allow it). You can set prices on pretty much everything, buy shares of company, take over companies, etc.

This is just if you need some more inspiration ;), cheers

Thanks.

I'm interested in how extensive control the players would have over physical topology, land ownership, construction, etc. These come with high potential for degenerate strategies.

Don't know what kind of degenerate strategies there could be.

Listening to Basic Economics over again to make sure I get all of it.

I had some ideas for how to do quick pathfinding on a street level. The hard part is the rules for how roads are formed. You should be able to place them in any orientation and be curved, like in SimCity 5.

Here is Google Earth.

I'm tempted to add the ability to go inside buildings and up/down stairs.

The paths between the different rooms could be precomputed in a building editor.

It could be a small city block. I can't create all the content so I'd leave it up to other people to use my tools.

The terrain might need to be represented by a mesh instead of a heightmap. That way, you can add detail where it's needed. I'd need to make an editor though cuz I only have MilkShape 3D.

[ed] You could then make mountains and ridges. But you'd need some fast way to determine heights/collisions for each unit without having to check for collisions with each map face.

If deformable, you could even dig bunkers and stuff.

Thoughts on Chapter 1 of Basic Economics: States should have control over which businesses are private and which state-run.

This is a looong book. Anyway. I'll finish the Applied Economics audiobook and don't think I'll post any more thoughts.

I think his plan is a little more indepth that resources with moddable data.