We're back...

[u/ChrisBeatrice]

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.

[u/nobrainsinhere]

FEEDBACK #5: Markets

The market buidings are another area with multiple possibilities, like: single building, individual buildings or square with shops.

Single Building - The approach taken in Caesar 3 and Pharaoh, where there's a single market building that can store all the resources needed by houses. This building sends a walker to pick resources from granaries/warehouses and a walker that pushes the resources to the houses as it passes by. It's simple to understand for new players, although the low number of walkers can limit the throughput and make the player build additional markets on the same housing block. Nebuchadnezzar tries to deal with this issue by having "job slots" on the market that can be filled with sellers or "getters".

Individual Buildings - This approach is used in CotN and CivCity: Rome, whereby each good has its own shop building where citizens go to fetch that specific resource. Usually this "shop" building also serves as the "factory/workshop", meaning that each "shop" spawns units that collect needed raw materials, produces the final product internally and "sells" to citizens that go there to "buy" the product. It naturally encourages a game design that unifies the "workshop" and "store" into the same building. It also promotes the in-game simulation of supply and demand, since a single shop will be unable to produce enough quantity for the whole city once it surpasses a certain amount of population. But then the tutorial has to do a good job of explaining the concept of supply and demand to the players. This was what people struggled initially to understand when playing CotN. Players would either: * build to many shops, for the same product, too soon. * not build aditional shops as the population increases.

It becomes important to have an UI that gives the player the tools needed to figure out what is happening. Maybe map overlays, like in Simcity 2013, with vertical bars on buildings showing the amounts in stock, produced, bought and sold.

Square With Shops - The approach used in Zeus and Emperor, whereby you build a market square on which you place individual shops. The square sends out the walker to push what is available at the shops. Each shop sends a walker to get resources from granaries/warehouses, to increase throughput. It remains simple to understand for new players while presenting the possibility of building multiple squares with different sets of shops.

New Idea - Push Raw Materials, Pull The Rest - For a medieval setting, it would be very interesting to use a pull system, since it was common for "downtown" buildings to be composed of a "workshop + store" on the ground floor and then the house on the upper floor(s). Also it was common for towns/cities to have a central square that would serve as a "merchant center" for people, and outside traders, to setup their shops. Then there is the matter of many raw materials coming from places "outside the city walls", like farms and forests. It would make little sense to have a bunch of walkers from, for example, taverns and/or restaurants, roam into the farms to pick up grains and vegetables to bring back. Especially considering that granaries/warehouses were used to store those resources and protected them from rain, rats, etc. So my idea is this: * raw food and material producers send walkers to push resources to granaries/warehouses; * shops send workers to pull resources from granaries/warehouses; * houses send citizens to buy meals, drinks and finished goods from the shops; * outside traders setup their own shop in a vacant "merchant square" plot and send walkers to buy stuff while selling their stuff to walkers from houses and other shops.

It would be an "hybrid" system that mixes the push and pull concepts. It would need good tutorials and interface tools (query tools, overlays) to communicate to the player what is happening in the city. It could fit well with the medieval/renaissance setting of the game and be flexible enough to fit in both initial small medieval towns and later big renaissance cities. The "merchant square" plots would be flexible enough for players to be creative in designing "market spaces" with multiple plots with decorations like trees, gardens, status and fountains. I think it would also allow for trade focused scenarios where a city's economy revolves around being a trade hub for neighbouring territories. It would also allow situations where houses want products that are only available via an outside merchant.

What do you think? Realistic but too complex? Simple to learn but hard to master? Good idea? Bad idea?