Hi everyone!

For a while now, I've been working on this economy sim heavily inspired by games like The Settlers 3/4 and the Anno series. The core gameplay is that you create buildings which either "create" some form of goods, or convert one or two goods into something different.

For example, in those games, you might have an iron mine and a coal mine, producing raw iron/coal from some map deposits, then you might have some iron smelting plant which produces some form of refined iron and/or iron ingots from those raw goods. So basically, there's a single building for each conversion, and each building will typically only support one conversion.

Then I played some modded Minecraft (Beyond Reality pack, based on GregTech) which also have resources and production chains, even if it's in a very different way. In that case, you have a small set of machines that are capable of different conversions depending on input. For example, there's the Furnace which takes some form of ore, and some form of fuel, and creates an ingot of that ore type. IIRC, the game Factorio works a bit like this as well.

To compare the styles, in Settlers or Anno, we'd have something like

Iron mine (iron ore) -> Iron smelter (iron ingot) -> Smith (tool)

Gold mine (gold ore) -> Gold smelter (gold ingot) -> Jeweler (jewelry)

Copper mine (copper ore) -> Copper smelter (copper ingot) -> Whatever

With a Minecraft / Factorio inspired style, we'd rather have

Mine (iron ore, gold ore, copper ore) -> Smelter (ingot dep. on input) -> Smith/Jeweler/Whatever

With the Minecraft / Factorio approach, one might instead have different tiers of each building, with different efficiency or similar, and a certain conversion process might require at least tier N of that building.

Which style do you prefer?

A great game that had a fantastic supply line system was "knights and merchants". I'd recommend researching that.

Supply lines/positioning costed everything from labor to resources. Each phase required a worker as well. Bread was (if I remember correctly)

worker flattens land > worker tills land > farmer plant seeds > farmer tends to wheat > wheat's harvested > wheat's delivered to mill > miller grinds the wheat > flour's delivered to stockpile > baker gets flour from stockpile > baker gets water from well > baker bakes bread.

For the root question, I prefer the Settlers style generally. Lots of little specialists means lots of player control.

Various games of the style have upgrade quirks. Townsmen, for example, upgrading the building increases the capacity and also increases the number of citizens that can work there. Each building has three upgrades. A base sawmill consumes 1 tree to make 3 lumber, upgraded produces 5 lumber, upgraded again produces 7 lumber. There were various guides when it was released giving optimal paths for what resources to sell to the traveling merchant, maximizing the cash productivity per worker.

Although some people consider it drawn out and slow -- which it is compared to the run-and-shoot-whatever-moves games -- I love the slow buildup for this type of economic and civil planning games.

Economic games aren't about a rapid pace, it isn't about building a Zerg rush where milliseconds during clicking make a difference. I see economic games similar to the turn-based tactical games. Allow the player all the time they want to make their optimal choices.

These aren't RTS games and there is no rush. Let the player savor, let the player think and study and build the best economy they can.

I think the settler model works better when economic growth is accumulative: you're building a pyramid of resource consumption, but at no point do you stop needing coal or swords or whatever.

If I have to decrease economic output (in the mid-stage I needed 10 copper ingots/hour, at the late stage I need 2) I much prefer being able to change production of a building rather than razing it and building a new one.

At some level you're also trading flexibility (changing ratio of production on the fly) for complexity (an increase in one supply chain edges out another one, instead of both being separate). I found settlers very meditative, a game where you're rebuilding your economy on the fly to deal with external changes is arguably more exciting.

Having a small number of production buildings also makes more sense in a game like Minecraft where constructing an economy isn't the end-all-be-all of the game.

I should probably have mentioned that I'm not going for realism or historic accuracy at all in this game, so that's not a factor in any way. I'm looking solely at what makes for fun gameplay. I should also note that it's in some form of sci-fi setting, so pretty much anything is possible.

Our current design/tech demo has units carrying resources between buildings, and single-purpose buildings, very much like the Settlers games. It's currently automatic, there's an AI which orders units around to work on construction projects or carry resources between buildings etc (again, like the Settlers). We want to add support for defining explicit paths, so that we can force the output from one building to go to a specific other building and similar.

In Factorio (I've only played it for an hour or so, years ago), there are conveyor belts everywhere, responsible for transfering most goods between machines. One of the major challenges there indeed seemed to be the transport logistics. IIRC, resouces were typically "pushed" into the next step of processing, until one reached the end of the line.

In modded MC, one can do it like in Factorio, but the more likely/common approach would be to use an ME system, which is pretty much a centralized storage solution. From there, you can "request" items. If they don't exist, it can recursively create those items using user-defined recipes. A recipe can either be a crafting recipe, which just combines a set of items internally, or it can be an external process recipe in which you basically say "To create N items of type A, export M items of type B to "port" P. The "port" must be connected to some kind of inventory, such as a machine, chest, transport pipe/belt or something else. It's up to the user to make sure the process actually works as advertised, and if it doesn't, the system gets stuck until the user manually fixes it. The challenges typically come from creating and optimizing recipes.

What I really like about the MC approach (aka the request approach) is that you can have multiple ways to process a single item/goods type, without having to wastefully preprocess rare goods into something you might not need right now.

I mentioned tiered buildings before, and I think I wasn't too clear. An example, a furnace can smelt iron or gold ore into their respective ingots, but to smelt titanium, you'll need a tier 2 furnace aka a high-temperature furnace (or something). The tier 2 version could still handle anything the previous one could in that case, but might be more or less fuel effient or whatever.

In GregTech (MC mod), there are multiple paths you can take to process a particular ore. The first one is to just smelt it right away for a single ingot. The second is to "crush" it into 2x crushed ores, each of which can be smelted into an ingot (doubling the efficiency!). Instead of smeling that crushed ore, you might send it to a washing plant, a centrifuge, a chemical bath, an electrolyzer or whatever, each with potential to create different side products or ease another step (ie make smelting faster).

In Factorio (I've only played it for an hour or so, years ago), there are conveyor belts everywhere, responsible for transfering most goods between machines. One of the major challenges there indeed seemed to be the transport logistics. IIRC, resouces were typically "pushed" into the next step of processing, until one reached the end of the line.

The science-fiction theme opens up a lot of neat avenues for you, logistically. If you already have an interface for ballistics in the game (like if there's artillery and you can aim them), overloading that to perform ballistic delivery would be a neat alternative to conveyor belts or minions. Buildings wrap their end-units in giant bubble wrap and parachutes and launch them with a coilgun to their next processing step or final destination.

Or maybe mobile buildings that produce according to their current position and neighbors. So if you want copper, you can move your extractor over the copper source, then move your smelter next to the extractor, and they hook up. (Or vertically, like skyscrapers.)

Do you have factions, or the sort of tech tree that encourages specialization? It would be really interesting if different factions were differentiated by their logistical strategies (minions, conveyors, ballistics, mobile buildings, etc.).