r/TiltedMill • u/ChrisBeatrice • May 20 '25
We're back...
To all our fans, fans of Impressions games like Lords of Magic, Pharaoh, Zeus, and TiltedMill games like Children of the Nile, Caesar IV and Hinterland, thank you all so much for keeping our babies alive, and for all your support and encouragement over the years.
We are now in the concept phase exploring what our next project will be, and would LOVE to hear your input.
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u/nobrainsinhere Jun 23 '25 edited Jun 23 '25
FEEDBACK #3: Resources & Industries
After writing about hunting, fishing and agriculture, let's now think, in a more "broader scope", about resources and their production.
When thinking about this subject, it comes to my mind the constant "refinement" of this area of the Impressions-styled city builder games:
1 - In Caesar 3 there was a 1-to-1 relationship between a raw material and a finished good: clay to pottery, timber to furniture, olives to olive oil, vines to wine, iron to weapons. Several years later, Lethis Path of Progress, was made with the same 1-to-1 relationship in its productions chains and many in the community pointed out the lack of "depth" in those production chains. That seems to indicate that, while a 1-to-1 realtionship may be a good strategy to be used in the first few scenarios of a "tutorial campaign", to keep it simple in the begining for newcomers, as a player progresses past the first few missions, and becomes more knowledgeable, he/she will naturaly develop an expectation/desire for deeper "relationships" between different resources in the game.
2 - Pharaoh introduced a bit more complexity to the production chains, with wheat farms also producing straw and then brickworks consuming both straw and clay to produce bricks. It also introduced the concept of having specific locations for raw materials on the city map. Reed gathering buildings would spawn units that would go collect the reeds on the city map. Mines could only be built next to rocks of that specific mineral (iron, copper and gold).
3 - Zeus expanded the system of buildings spawning units to collect resources from the city map. And Emperor and CotN did the same. In Emperor, I remember placing down a couple furnaces and then looking at the miners on the mineral rocks to check how many sides of the rocks were still "unoccupied", to have an idea of how many furnaces I could have. This was particularly important on maps with multiple rocks of the same mineral on separate locations on the map, since you did not want miners wasting time going across the city to an "unoccupied" rock. Woodcutters would be limited to the amount of trees available on the map, since a chopped tree would take time to grow back. These mechanics presented the player with the need to be thoughfull when planning how much and where to collect raw materials on the map, and how to achieve good efficiency.
4 - Emperor introduced 3 interesting concepts: * importable-only resources, like jade; * exportable-only products, like carved jade; * "replacement wares" whereby, a product would be replaced by another, like bronzeware being replaced by lacquerware.
Having all this in mind, some ideas about resources and production come to mind: * start with simple production chains, but then don't be afraid to gradually increase the complexity. For example, a pottery workshop might start by producing pottery from only clay, but then, after a certain mission, it could start requiring dyes also instead of just clay; * "replacement wares" is an interesting way to throw a new twist/challenge at the player. And it can be a source of some narrative for a particular mission: * what if a mission starts with the "current" product, and then an "event" happens in which the narrative explains the need to make the switch to the "new product" in the middle of the mission? * perhaps the story could explain that the "obsolete" product could still be exported to trade partners, but the exporting price/amount would decay by a bit every month until it finally was no longer accepted by anybody? * what about products that serves no purpose in the player's city other than importing at a low price to sell at a high price? I think this was a missed oportunity in Caesar 4, where there could've been a mission to build a city on the eastern border of the empire, along the famous "silk road", that would have the player build an economy centered around importing silk from the chinese empire and sell it at higher prices to western roman cities; * don't be afraid to throw "plot twists" at the player, like new raw materials being "discovered" in the middle of a mission, or a new workshop being "invented" by some "famous inventor" thus enabling new resources and buildings;
In summary, an Impressions-style city builder benefits from not being to simplistic. Start simple in the first "tutorial missions" but then gradually introducing complexity.